Transcript of #170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers

Mike Benz. Sean. Welcome back. It's good to be back. Man, I feel like we just saw each other. It was a couple of months ago, wasn't it?

Yeah, but the before and after picture is quite different.

I know, man. Wow. I mean, the stuff that's being unveiled all the corruption that's being exposed. We chatted about this a little bit downstairs, but this stuff is rolling out fast. I mean, like lightning speed here. Did you expect that to happen?

I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think, the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it. And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment, from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens. Operations, but actually, our even dirtier operations abroad, our dirtier apparatus, our blob, foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just It's a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.

Yeah. It seems like Doge started with USAID. How involved are you with Doge?

Not. I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish.

I think so, too.

But there's interaction Connection simply through X and whatnot. But they have an incredible job. And one of the things we're confronted by right now in this moment is it's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a socialist movement from 2016 on Make America great again. America First, these sorts of things. People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud, and abuse at the White House or DC level, they didn't think about, in large part, international affairs, foreign relations. They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but the MAGA movement did not really have, and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for over half a century and that the Democratic Party has had. And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to form that North Star.

And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought leadership soup.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask this at the end, but I don't want to just pop to my head, so I don't want to forget it. But I mean, you've really doven into the USA the AID stuff. And so once we get through all of the USAID stuff, which is what we're going to interview about today, what are you going to go at next?

What are you going to start looking at? Well, it's all related. This is one of the reasons when I do my and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for US National Interest, Defense Department for US National Security, CIA as a covert player to covertly help the State Department or covertly helped DOD. These things are all connected. The DOD picture is a perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of bringing that up. I mean, by the sheer size of it, USAID is about a $44 billion budget. The Pentagon is $900 billion. And depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to 35 trillion. But the reason that I'm so overjoyed that it's starting with the USAID side is because it connects to all those points. And this is another thing that defenders of the establishment are now uncomfortably trying to find the right way to defend themselves, which is that if USAID is supposed to be humanitarian assistance and build the the American people as a international charity, Why are they working with the US Defense Department?

Why are they working with Special Forces? Why is there even a civil military coordinating branch for USAID and DOD? They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes there or for how dark many of the operations they thought USAID was involved in. I think that this is part of what the blockade being set up right now to stop DOGE from finding out is about. They don't want them to have USAID It's books. They don't want them to have the internal records. They don't want them to have the emails and communications. They definitely don't want them to have the transfer of money flows. This was the thing that even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees USAID, could not get access to until the present moment. Senator Joni Hearst had an ex-base with Elon Musk, where she said when she tried to do oversight, she was threatened by USAID. When USAID ran the Zuzineo up in Cuba in 2014, and the scandal popped off, who approved this? And it turned out it was all in-house at USAID. What Senate staffers said was when they tried to get oversight of this operation along the way, they were told that if Senate staffers found out what USAID was doing, people could die.

So they had to shield it from there. So we're opening up a Pandora's box, and that's the threshold question is, how much access to this is DOGE ultimately going to get?

Yeah. Well, Mike, before we get two in the weeds here, I have a Patreon account. We got a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff on there. We got behind-the-scenes interviews like what we just did with you. But one of the other things that I offer them is each and every guest that comes on, they get to ask a question. This is from Jimmy W. What warning sign should we look out for now that USAID has been shut down? What are the chances the Republicans will work against Donald Trump with Democrats to just start a new slush fund under a different name?

So a few things on that. One is it's true that almost 14,000 employees were laid off at USAID. It's true that the name has been covered up at the building. It's true that all the foreign operations folks have been recalled. I don't know, still, as of the time that we're speaking right now, that it's appropriate to say that USAID as a function has been shut down, given that I believe that the grants are still ongoing. There's been a funding pause, but USAID is funded through Q1, and there's going to be a dog fight in the budget about what to preserve. And the plan is to fold it understate. But to my knowledge, an executive order has not been passed, formally abolishing it. And even if it did, there'd be the legal challenge. The bills to abolish USAID are still just born babies in the House and the Senate. And even assuming the closure and abolition of USAID, it is going to be inherited by the State Department. So that function will will continue, but under the direct oversight of state. But the warning signs to look for, I think there's no better description of what those warning signs are than what was said by US Ambassador turned legal hatchet man, Norm Eisen, I believe in an MSNBC appearance this week, where he called the Trump administration an autocratic regime, and we have tools to displace crack regimes around the world in people-powered revolutions.

This was the man who basically spearheaded nearly every lawful push against Trump world for the past eight years, everything from the Trump impeachment to the J6 impeachment, to all of the Ukraine affairs, to running a group called Crew, which sued the Trump administration hundreds of times. He was the former US ambassador to the Czech Republic for President Obama, and even wrote a playbook, basically, on how to orchestrate color revolutions against populace movements that were rising in Europe while he was at the Brooklyn's Institution just a few years ago. And he's openly calling on live television to take that same playbook for overthrowing foreign governments and to find a way to implement it here. And the first two things that he said off the top were that this needs to be a legal fight and it needs to be a media fight. So taking it to the courts and taking it to the media for hearts and minds. But what you've seen, one of the warning signs that I'm very concerned about is that a fundamental part of these people-powered revolutions, these so-called color revolutions, is on the street action to destabilize destabilized countries, which also provides a patina, a predicate to the rest of the world, that this is the genuine reflection of the democratic people being underserved by an autocratic government.

But it has the benefit of shutting down the country and destabilizing the government because they're between a rock and a hard place. They'll shut down the highways. The union workers will all walk out and shut down industry by going on a mass strike. There'll be violent confrontations in dozens of cities, attacking police, as we saw with the BLM riots, even burning down police precincts. And then the only way to really respond to that in order to stop that is through an almost quasi-military scale deployment to physically remove those people from the highways they're blocking, the infrastructure that they're terrorizing. But when you do that, you get hit by the second round of the Color Revolution playbook, is cries of humanitarian rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns. See, now we prove they're authoritarian because they've done this. And that's where the international community comes into the picture with joint sanctions, economic pressure. Now they can hold up this crackdown as the reason to do it. And this gets back to the fundamental position we're in at this unique moment in American history, where the foreign policy establishment is really, for the first time in a very serious way, having to respond to the will of the people who pay for it, which is that you have this out-of-power network here in the US that is grasping to try to find allies on the Republican side in Congress.

But they are now being counter-pressured by folks like Elon and others who are threatening to primary them if they defect. Their strongest allies are a handful of folks on the Republican side in Congress, but most potently the in-power governments abroad that have a similar ax to grind against Trump and Trump world, and Trump's foreign policy vision that will be happy to assist in this project any way they can. What I predict you're going to see is a transatlantic flank attack where you have the out of power, foreign policy establishment here teaming up with in power, foreign governments, like in the UK, in the UK Labor Party, like across the EU, with in power EU governments, like in places like Brazil with Lula, like in certain governments in Central Asia. And to use... I believe right now they're in the consensus building process of this, which is very similar to what happened when Trump won the first time. I cover internet censorship. It's my primary reason that I crusade on all these other elements. But this played out in the first few months of Trump 1. 0. Internet censorship didn't really hit the American people in a very serious way until late 2017, early 2018.

What were they doing in the interim time? They were having these consensus building meetings. All the major think tanks were having these. How do we build the coalition? What exactly is going to be our civil society strategy, our legal strategy? Who are friends in the chamber of commerce who can put economic pressure on this? How do we build a predicate for this? Whether it's counterintelligence through Russiagate or whether it's a democracy promotion predicate that Trump is an attack on democracy? And that process is the process of seducing people from different fractal coalitions into one cohesive network that can do this together. Right now, they're fractured. I'm sorry if I'm taking a while for saying this, but just to complete this point, because it's going to hang over the rest of this conversation. We can't forget that the Democrats elected Joe Biden as President, and he was removed by another faction of the Democrats. There was effectively a West wing Democrat Party Civil War. Joe Biden put on the Trump hat while Kamalit was running against Trump with a big smile. He even asked for the hat to put it on. I've never seen Joe Biden happier than the day after the election when he walked out and made the press statement that Donald Trump had won the election.

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It's difficult right now for them to form that cohesive network and unified action plan when you have folks from the Joe Biden side of the foreign policy establishment still extremely upset and feeling betrayed by the Kamala Harris side of it. But those wounds will heal, and time, I believe, does heal all wounds in that way as their economic interests are threatened potentially by the drastic reforms the Trump administration is pursuing.

Yeah. You know, nothing forms an alliance like a common enemy. Mike, second time you're on the show, and we're going We're going to talk all about USAID here coming up. Here's just some stats that we pulled up. Budget of over $44 billion, employed more than 14,000 people, two-thirds of whom worked overseas. Now we're down to 294 to 611 people after the Doge discoveries. Operated in over 100 countries, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. I mean, list goes on. One of the things that caught my eye is, I mean, like I said, there's just been so much that's getting unveiled. But I recently did an interview with Kaleen Giorgescu, who's running for President in Romania. The Romanian Supreme Court annulled the election and basically froze it due to Russian interference. And I got a lot of flak for that interview, but I wanted to give that guy a voice because I thought this really mirrors very similarly to what we saw with Trump, not in the last election, but the election before. And, you know, George Eskew called the tens of millions that were sent by USAID, a bride wrapped as social aid and an attack on their sovereignty.

So how does So it sounds like this was funded, this campaign against him and shutting him down was funded and instigated by USAID. Now, the Russian interference was never proven. It was all just speculation. But the USAID stuff is proven. And so it's interesting. We just did that a couple of weeks ago, and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this.

Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find the US-funded blob NGO sworn descending on a right-wing populace party in Europe. No, of course. I mean, this is the most predictable thing of all time. I mean, George IQ has been a thorn in the side of the US and UK and NATO foreign policy establishment for a number of reasons. The central linchpin of world geopolitics right is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Romania occupies a critical strategic point in that war, not just because of the transport of arms from Pakistan to Romania into Ukraine, which has been a long time route to be able to run guns and arms and munitions in. But also because Romania shares the Black Sea Coast with Ukraine, and NATO is presently in the process of building the single largest NATO base in Europe in all of NATO history, 100% bigger than the Ramstein base in Germany. And in fact, NATO is, as we speak, moving arms supplies, jets, and drones to that base because it points straight out at Crimea and will be the place of force projection. This is the military hard power play on Crimea, which is absolutely essential to Russia in their view.

This is what kicked off this conflict to begin with, really. There was the effective secession of Eastern Ukraine, but it was Russia's warm water port access in Crimea, and obviously, their military base there. It was the Crimea referendum to join the Russian Federation that kicked off all of this, including the rattles snake nest that Trump walked into with Ukraine and Russia and whatnot. And so, George Askew has effectively campaigned on being friends with both sides, enemies of neither, new Neutrality does not want to antagonize Russia by building the NATO's largest lethal warfighting capability right on Romania's Coast. It makes Romania a target. Obviously, from NATO's perspective, the moment Russia bombs Romania and extends the fight beyond Ukraine, that would be a major international incident. But the attempt to remove GeorgeQ. It's the same thing that happened with Imran Khan. The Intercept published League Cables.

Who is that?

Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And again, there's this deep relationship between Pakistan and Romania here because Pakistan was essentially how we trained and funded the Mujdatideen in the 1970s and '80s against the Soviets. There's a lot of military capacities that we warehouse there. There's a lot of money laundering through those. There's the famous BCCI Bank, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, CIA proprietary bank that went down in a web of scandals around Pakistan. Great Britain, the UK, which has massive interest in Eurasia, just built an airbridge between Pakistan and Romania for this exact purpose. But Pakistan also, Imran Khan, the Prime Minister, did not want to This is shortly after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine military fiasco kicked off. The US and UK foreign policy folks thought that in their own words, when they were effectively bribing the political class of Pakistan, and this is all in the intercept, everyone can look this up, these leaked cables, it showed that carrots and sticks were offered by the Biden foreign policy establishment to parliamentarians in Pakistan in order to oust Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote, an impeachment that would take him from power. And then he was arrested shortly thereafter.

He's currently in prison, even though he was the wildly popular elected head of state. The reason cited by the State Department for carrying out this coup operation was that Imran Khan had taken, quote, an aggressively neutral position because Khan had said that he will continue to have Pakistan do trade with Russia. He does not want to allow weapons to go to killing Russians. And given how central that Pakistan is in this Pakistan-Romania corridor, George Sku, I see, is the same way, aggressively neutral. But that's all it takes. That was all it took for the State Department there. And Can I continue just on this point? Absolutely. Going after the courts in order to nullify elections or influence the activities of the elections is the beating heart of what USAID and to a related extent, the State Department, CIA, and civil military folks at DOD do. Usaid is in their charter to pursue so-called judicial reform, which allows them to effectively bribe and try to rig the decisions of judges and the judiciary and the rise and fall of laws in foreign countries. Usaid made a special project targeting what they call EMBs, election management bodies, which are the bodies in countries that adjudicate elections.

For example, it's our Supreme Court that decided the Bush versus Gore hanging Chad's election in the US 20 years ago. In Brazil, the EMB, the election management body, is what's called the TSE. It's basically a subcomponent of their STF Supreme Court. That is the Demarias Voldemort judge who banned X, seized assets from Starlink, and is basically criminalized, pro-Bolsonaro, support on Brazilian social media. And they were sought after by USAID. Usaid, I have their internal documents where they've... In just a few meetings alone, they'll gather together representatives from 12 different EMBs across the world and have USAID basically convince them, train them on what ways to structure the court or what task force is to set up in the disinformation space in order to allow those courts to have a to not just adjudicate the elections, but to be able to effectively criminalize questioning the elections or speech during the election cycle. This is part of how the power in Brazil of that court expanded to such a huge size. Usaid was pumping money into that whole network around that court, pumping up the academic thought leadership, pumping up the legal advocates who were making pitches to the prosecutors and to the disinformation task force itself.

If they're going after every EMB, election management body in the world, effectively, to get those courts to criminalize populist speech. You can bet your bottom dollar, they're doing that to criminalize populist election results. In those same CEPs documents, this is the Political Process strengthening Center USAID. In that program, they define the enemy as populism. They say that part of the purpose is to prevent the evolution of populist thought leadership because they define right-wing populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines the efficacy of democratic institutions, US-backed NGOs and civil society institutions in the area. Well, guess what George's view is? He's a right-wing populist, or he's a populist, at least, however you want to define it. He is, in their view, the virus that the white blood cells of USAID are custom-built to take out. I just have to stress this point. This was attempted against Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election. When the Russiagate predicate came out about social media interference, Everyone can trace the timeline of this and look up the contemporaneous news reporting. When the CIA came out and said there was Russian interference on US social media, and there were Russian bots and trolls, and RT and Sputnik were supporting Trump, they tried to get Congress to not certify the election result on the basis of Russian interference in the election.

To my recollection, they got, I believe, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen or a dozen US congressmen to agree not to certify that vote. Now, it's not nearly enough. You need... There's over 500 people in the House and 100 in the Senate. But if you can get that ball rolling and poach sitting members of Congress here in the US eight years ago before they even built up this apparatus to be juiced and as powerful as it's become, think of how much easier that task is and how far a little bit of money goes a long way in order to juice those networks in Romania.

Yeah, that's what caught my attention was it seemed almost identical with the Russian interference. And what actually blew him up was a TikTok smear campaign. And the TikTok smear campaign actually resonated with a large portion of the population in Romania, which boosted him up. The guy spent next to nothing on his campaign and had a tremendous lead. And one One of the things that I spoke with him about in detail is how he does not want that NATO base there. I did ask him, Will you be able to stop that? He couldn't answer that, which means maybe he can't. I don't know. But it seemed like the reason they went after him is because he does not want that base built, the biggest ever NATO base ever to be built in Europe, to include World War II. It obviously would be a detriment to the Ukrainian side of the war. He expressed many times he just wants peace. He doesn't want Romania involved in that. That's not their problem. I think that's the way a lot of Americans feel, too. I think you hit it. Basically, what USAID is doing is they're influencing their politicians to sway a certain way.

Are they also paying off their media? Because they wouldn't platform him. He was not heard other than on TikTok. The day after I announced the interview that was going out with him, they had 250,000 people start protesting in front of their parliament.

Yeah. No, absolutely. That's what USAID does. They create the surround sound. This is part of the reason I call it the USAID Truman Show. Usaid goes every single category of institution in the country they're targeting. The media, control over social media speech, the unions, the workers groups, the judiciaries, the parliamentarians, the arts and music and culture, the universities and the academic institutions, everything. Even folks in the commercial for-profit sector side. What USA does is it does what it calls capacity building. It does a baseline assessment or strategic assessment of all the assets they have in the region, and then they look at the gap between what they have and what they need in order to accomplish a particular State Department foreign policy goal or a inter-agency approved foreign policy goal. And then they close that gap by funding everything they need. So For example, if Georgia Skew is overwhelmingly popular with unions, they will fund the NED's Solidarity Center or other CIA back channels or NED is this Squishy in between between state and CIA. They're a nonprofit NGO that gets its funding from the US government. It was created by the US government. It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983, William Casey, for it to be born.

Its founders even say that their job was to do what the CIA used to do. That's basically delegated them. They have something called the Solidarity Center, which is their Union arm, and they'll often work with the AFL-CIOs international branches. So they say, Okay, he's overwhelmingly popular there. Are those the people who are on board with our operational plan in the for example, those people have more disproportionate perception of political legitimacy for that, they will pump those up. If they say, Okay, well, George's Q is popular in the media here or in these demographics, they'll do a demographic assessment by ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and they will close those gaps. They'll do art and activism. You'll see musicians, you'll see performers, you'll see cultural figures. They will all be approached by USAID founded NGOs and interlocutors to do that. That's effective enough in a country with counterintelligence antibodies because it's a first-world economy or a second-world economy. In a place like Romania, the task of trying to stop the reach of those octopus arms is impossible. Georgia right now has been in the news all year because they've been trying to pass our equivalent of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is a rule here that criminalizes any US person or institution who is lobbying the American government to change policies or lobbying Congress or the executive branch, but is getting funds from a foreign country to do that and is not disclosing it because we consider that to be a totally existential counterintelligence risk.

If you don't have a FARA law to know which NGOs or which universities or which for-profit entities or whatnot are getting money from Pick your foreign country X, China, Saudi Arabia, UK, you name it, to do it, then that's an obvious counterintelligence threat. That's an intelligence operation, effectively, being run. When Georgia tried to pass that law, which is just US Fara, what happened? Well, there were the same street riots that were deployed that USAID was flat, busted, caught doing in every place from the Arab Spring to virtually every color revolution, street protest movement the US has done, at least since the 1980s. And so they're trying to stop Eastern European countries from even knowing the extent of the USAID Truman show there and potentially even deploying their own rent a riot muscle to stop disclosure of that. I don't know the extent in Romania, but I have to imagine if the truth is revealed, it would shock the world.

I mean, how much of the world is influenced by USAID?

Every plot of dirt on God's green earth is influenced by USAID. I believe you said at the beginning of this that it was about 100 countries, and you mentioned Africa, Asia, Western hemisphere, South America, and Eastern Europe. It's every country on Earth. For example, why is USAID paying tens of millions of dollars to British censorship NGOs and British censorship firms? Why are they funding places like the Center for Information Resilience? Why are they funding all these British institutions if it has no impact there? Well, you're juicing the skids of these London civil society institutions when you do that, Institute for Strategic Dialog and whatnot. What are those groups doing? What is Institute for Strategic Dialog doing? It is doing advocacy and high pressure campaigns and liaising with the tech companies to censor Americans. Americans are targeted. Usaid is attacking Americans. When USAID paid the OCCRP, this is the corruption reporting project that's under the public limelight right now because of massive scandals that have broken out in the past several months. This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world. This is the group that broke the Panama papers and other major world stories.

Turns out half of their budget comes from USAID and the State Department. I believe in the beginning, it was all of it or virtually all of it. They were effectively spawned out of USAID and the State Department. Usaid and the State Department have approval over what staff they can hire. They closely coordinate on the kinds of stories or category of stories or workload that they can carry out. On USAID. Gov, right now, everyone can see this in the wayback machine with USAID. Gov currently under maintenance, shall we say. There's an incredible document at USAID bragging about the accomplishments that this investigative reporting group has done. Now, these are hit piece journalists that are carried out to capacity-built independent media, not independent from government. It's our government. It's independent from you, or what we say independent from other governments, but they use this this lie phrase independent media for all their sponsored media assets. And so under the banner of supporting free and independent media in Central Europe because they operate in Ukraine, in about nine or 10 or seven or eight Eastern European countries. It's jointly to do independent media, sustainability funding, and anti-corruption because we want to root out corruption in Eastern Ukraine.

And root out corruption in Eastern Europe, root out corruption in Romania and anywhere. Basically, what they is they effectively function to write hit pieces and dig up dirt on the political enemies of the US and UK legacy foreign policy establishment, and then provide a predicate for prosecutors to arrest them or seize their assets or to induce policy changes in the country. In fact, on USA. Gov, and everyone can find this in the Wayback machine, they have a document that says funding for OCCRP in Eastern Europe, $20 million. Function, capacity building independent media, anticorruption. Accomplishments, over $1 billion worth of assets seized. I believe it's several hundred policy changes induced in government or civil society organizations in the region. I believe they have six or seven government officials fired or sacked because of this group's reporting, including a President and a Prime Minister. So they're claiming in criminal for regime change. And then the final one is 456 arrests and indictments. So this is mercenary media for the state paid for... These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs, and to arrest, criminally take, use the criminal justice system create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors in order to arrest the political enemies of the US government in these target countries.

You know this relationship with prosecutors in USAID runs very deep. For example, it was the It was USAID funding, which was implicated in that Joe Biden speech threat to Viktor Shoken around the removal of Viktor Shoken in Ukraine. That famous Council on Foreign Relations, threat, and by golly, he did it. Son of a bee, he did it. This was the famous clip where basically said, If you don't fire the prosecutor, you're not going to get your billion. Well, USAID. Usaid paid $27 million in just two grants alone to the Tide Center here in the US. The Tide Center is not just the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Foundation, but they are also the fiscal sponsor of a group called FJP, it's Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the group that manages the Soros prosecutors and tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, has them sign pledges like Alvin Bragg and LaTisha James, gives them talking points, gives them social media posts. This is all according to the Media Research Center, I should note. Meet on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. These are US prosecutors where the fiscal sponsor of that group, 30% of Americans live under these Soros prosecutors now.

They're working with this group, Fair and Just Prosecutions, and they get their fiscal sponsorship through a mega grantee of USAID. Usaid, they do this everywhere, and they can get away with it because judicial reform and anticorruption is part of our humanitarian aid work. We're trying to strengthen their democracy. But when you read that accomplishment section, you don't know what crimes these people have committed. You don't know if they're guilty or innocent. Usa doesn't even brag about that in the document. It's the raw number. 456 of our enemies got arrested because of the incredible return on investment for paying our own mercenary media assets $20 million. And think of the return on investment. We paid them $20 million and we seized a billion dollars. You don't know what the crimes are when you read that document as a US citizen. That scale of prosecutions, it's hard to imagine that every single person there was guilty of those crimes or that there wasn't some relationship with the prosecutors in the background that politicized those cases in the same way we have in the DC court here with the January sixth cases. So this plays out everywhere. This is also why USAID-funded SPOX and NGOs had their own personnel making speeches to the prosecutors in Brazil when they ran the against Bolsonaro.

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There's this USAID Truman show, and it touches everything. You think USAID is not having a massive impact on the government of France and the government of Germany and the government of the UK? Usaid pays the Atlantic Council in 2018 in the Atlantic Council's Democratic Defense Against Disinformation white papers. The Atlantic Council was seven CIA directors on their board, I should mention, funded by the Pentagon and the State Department as well, and had a formal partnership with Burisma, but they're funded by USAID. In 2018, the front cover of their Democratic Defense Against Disinformation, one of their series in this, which was an internet censorship propaganda document and consensus building document so that the Atlantic Council's muscle as NATO's think tank could go out to all their different grantees and partner networks about who to censor, how to sell it, how to do it, what connections to establish with the tech companies in these governments. The front cover of this, and everyone can look this up, was the so-called Macron leaks in France and the distribution web of basically news stories that were damaging to Emmanuel Macron in the middle of his presidential run against Marine Le Pen, who USAID and the USAID Department, this is Western Europe.

This is where USAID ain't supposed to be, we're told. The front cover that's funded by USAID has wikileaks at the center of this, Jack Pasoviak, as the other main highlighted note, a US citizen, and the whole rest of the network map are all the different distributions of stories about these Macron leaks that helped Marine Le Pen, but hurt their preferred winner of that election, Emmanuel Macron. What they were suggesting with that is that we need to stop Jack Soviet and Wicoliques from publishing news stories that might help Marine Le Pen in Western Europe win that election. And that's USAID-sponsored, baby. They're touching every plot of dirt on God's green earth.

Jeez. Where does the directive come from?

Well, this is why it's useful to think of it as a blob. It can come from several directions, and then it gets consensus built to build the appropriate operations that were to carry it out. For example, US foreign policy is supposed to be set by the White House through the inter-agency process at the National Security Council. It's the State Department who's supposed to be the agency general to steward the execution of those foreign policy and national interest goals. It's the Department of Defense that is supposed to steward that on the national security and military side. Depending on what you are trying to do, for example, let's take the George Askew Romania example. This could come from any number of directions in terms of how the idea first gets pitched, and also a couple of different tracks in terms of how it gets approved. Sometimes it can be done in a way that's totally rogue. This is one of the unique capacities of USAID in this story and why I believe it's important for the Trump White House to shut it down to abolish it. Executive order, Congressional Act, however, store it under state, and then after passing a series of reforms that we can maybe talk about at the end, if necessary, to spin out a new agency again.

But the The typical way this will happen is the White House wants to do something, or the Secretary of State, or some thought leadership node within that, or within the National Security Council, pitch the idea, all the different equities that would be involved in it, whether that's the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, supporting functions like FBI counterintelligence or DHS, or or other Justice Department and other people who would need to know in on that up, would all provide their comment and input. It would finally get approved, and then it would be green-lit in the appropriate grants to support that would all flow. The Pentagon would get the money, the State Department would issue grants about this, and then places like USAID would do the relevant humanitarian aid work in the region that would provide the cover to juice this, whether that's doing civil society activity that has a civil military dual-use purpose or doing civil society work in the area that has a CIA, State Department, National Interest, Political Warfare element to it. Then that process would be midwifed by the National Security Council. But USAID is really unique in this process.

One of the reasons that it's gone so rogue is because USAID has always been this switch player. It was created in 1961 by JFK. And a point that I've stressed continually is that a lot of people are talking about this presently as if JFK was purely thinking of creating USAID as a magnanimous charity because of his a moral fiber, and then it got corrupted through these money laundering and payoff networks that are being publicized. But two weeks before JFK created USAID by executive order, he awarded the Green Beret to the US Special Forces and is singularly responsible for the massive upscaling of US psychological operations, civil military affairs, and unconventional warfare. Jfk was bogged down in Vietnam and Laos and all these counterinsurgency debacles where the US had interests in the region. World War II had ended quite recently. The world-based international order made it a big no-no to declare conventional war and bring in 1950 North Korea-style tanks and planes and napalm. We moved into this small wars, political war modality. And JFK believed in that very, very strongly. This is how you have places like the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare that trains our Special Operations folks and the whole Fort Bragg, JFKJFK special relationship during his presidency.

But just two weeks after that historic October 21, 1961, Green Beret Special Forces event, JFK They created USAID, and just one month later, launched Operation Pin Cushion, which sent the Green Beret, sent our Special Forces to Laos, where USAID was... It would later turn out USAID very quickly played this function of supporting these very same CIA-back mercenary groups that Operation Pinkush was recruiting. They were sent to Laos by JFK to train and recruit the these hillside guerrillas in Laos as part of our Southeast Asia, Vietnam connected, subwar, unconventional warfare effort. We set the Special Forces there to recruit them. The CIA managed that CIA mercenary army. It was USAID who paid the head of that mercenary army to acquire two US aircraft from two CIA proprietary airlines, Air America and Continental Air Services. Everyone can look this up. In order to buy the planes that they used to traffic—it's unseemly—but illegal narcotics to fund that war effort, as well as humanitarian relief supplies and personnel. Usaid has played this swing role between state CIA and DOD and Special Forces work, practically from the day it was born. But what's unique here is it's get out of White House approval free card.

Can I flush this out for a second? Most of the major CIA scandals of the past two decades have not actually been the CIA directly themselves. In 1993, USAID created this new office to help wage the post-Cold War political warfare, initially in Eastern Europe, after we were trying to create political vassal states out of the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. This was called the Office of Transition Initiative, OTI, USAID OTI. It was designed to be a fast, flexible, rapid response capacity for USAID to do regime change work, to do political stabilization, to basically do a civilian special forces for civil, military, and political warfare work that would not have to run the traditional traps of approval. It It wouldn't be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. It would effectively function under cover of humanitarian work as being a CIA, but without having the limitations that the CIA has on needing White House approval through what's called a presidential finding. All these CIA scandals popped off in the 1960s and '70s. The CIA went through a bunch of reforms. This was the famous Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings of 1975 and 1976. First time the US ever created a House Intelligence Committee to permanently oversee the CIA to stop what it had been doing, domestic political targeting at that time of left-wing Democrats.

From ever happening again. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election because of these scandals. Immediately, his first year in office carried out the famous Halloween Massacre that laid off 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night and crippled their budget. By the way, tell me if that sounds familiar to what's happening right now, the first month of the Trump admin. One, the office because of political scandals from intelligence agency oversight, it hits them right away. But then Carter ran into the Iran hostage situation. The national security state, the media, Ronald Reagan blamed that for... Blamed Jimmy Carter, neutering the CIA for having caused that. If we had had the CIA that we had before, the Iran hostage situation would have never happened. There was still a black eye at CIA to get those old powers back, but the Reagan administration wanted those powers, so they couldn't get it through Congress. What they did is they basically created new structures to do what used to be done by the CIA, to be done by places like USAID, and they're newly created in '83 National Endowment for Democracy, who is effectively the operations arm of much of USAID work.

I say all this to say that USAID, the reason so much of the worst scandals that you find are USAID, and why I always say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID, is because the CIA needs to get presidential approval for every covert action they do. They need to submit a There needs to be a presidential finding that they need to do it. Usaid does not, which means if a rogue sell at CIA or Special Forces or some wing of the State Department wants to do a dirty deed and they know the President won't approve or, in fact, targets directly or indirectly the President or his international allies, they know they can't get the presidential finding, but it has to be a covert action to run. The world can't find out they're doing it or what these grantees are actually doing, all they need to do is walk next door or place a phone call or meet in a secure location and tell their friends at USAID, and USAID can make the whole thing happen, basically behind the President's back. I can go through a bunch of examples of that, but that's how Trump got hoodwinked in term 1.

0 by his own USAID.

Basically USAID is a proxy arm for CIA, Department of State, the Bureau, DHS, all these type intelligence organizations. Yeah.

It's the great flexible swing man for any of their needs.

How do they keep from having any oversight?

Well, this is the magic of being an independent agency.

Is it an NGO?

No, it's a former US government agency, but they make grants and subgrants and contracting work out to the NGO class. But it's an independent agency. There's a great US Army War College book/extended white paper that I've been publishing receipts from for the past six months. It's from 2014, and it's called the DOD and USAID Analysis and recommendations for development, defense, cooperation going forward. It looks at this relationship between DOD state and USAID, and it compiles DOD senior leadership thoughts on how best to synchronize what they call defense, diplomacy, development, the three Ds all working together, the military, the State Department, and USAID. Because DOD has national security interests in the region, state has national interest or economic interest in the region. They need assets to play with, assets to liaise with, assets to build up, and development creates those assets, paying to create these institutions, paying to co-op these institutions. So these things all go together, these three Ds, defense, diplomacy, development. This is 2014. This is over a decade ago. In that US Army War College, remember, there's quotes from US generals that say that they prefer working with USAID over state, even though USAID is independent, but it's always supposed to be guided by state, because even our humanitarian assistance has to serve US interests, and state represents those stated But you have DOD people over a decade ago saying they prefer to work with USAID over state for several reasons.

That USAID is not bogged down by bureaucratic red tape of the, quote, interagency knife fight that happens in the National Security Council. But that USAID, quote, actually does stuff, whereas state is hamstrung by what they can actually do. It's a diplomatic incident if the formal diplomatic arm of the US State Department does something versus an independent aid agency that is there on humanitarian purpose, and, oh, they were using it for this for this wrong purpose. Because there's much more oversight on state State runs the inter-agency gauntlet every day of its existence. It has to persuade the White House National Security Council and all the interagency partners to do something. But really, the only oversight there is at USAID is what's happened is at the Office of Inspector General level, their own in-house accountability mechanism. There's some great examples of how this has gone so haywire. I don't need to...

Can I go in?

Okay. There's a massive scandal for USAID, and everyone can look this up. It was the Zunzineo scandal. Let me make clear out the gate that I do not like, and I'm not a fan of the Cuban government. I don't believe in socialism, I don't believe in communism. I'm not saying what I'm about say because I believe that the Cuban government should remain or whatnot. I leave aside the moral question about whether or not this was the right or wrong thing to do. But here is what was done. In 2014, a very massive scandal popped off that I think few people today remember. This was during the Biden White House, where USAID took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan and used them, we are told, unilaterally create a social media website in Cuba at a time when Cuba had banned US social media, considering Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the like to be arms of US statecraft. The Obama administration was riding high at this moment from the Arab Spring and the Facebook revolutions and the Twitter revolutions that USAID and NED played such a critical role in, funding money to these networks, training them, teaching them how to use Twitter hashtags, teaching them how to coordinate Facebook posts to tell people where to protest.

$1. 2 billion, pumped in by the State Department in Egypt during that time, for example. What USAID in their own internal documents showed is that they saw the success of the Arab Spring, and they wanted to create a Cuban Spring. They wanted street protests, riots, what they called smart mobs in Cuba on the basis of US social media that they could instrumentalize. The problem was they didn't have the asset in the region. They couldn't get their social media in. What they did is they used a byzantine labyrinth of money laundering flows from these humanitarian aids earmarked for Pakistan. Again, back to Pakistan, and used that to go through a subcontractor called Creative Associates International, who's a frequent USAID contractor for this dirty work. They were involved in all sorts of other ones, but it's CAI, not CIA, Creative Associates International, who then basically contacted two Cuban businessmen to create a identical version of Twitter, except but for Cubans. And it was Zunzenio is Cuban for humming Bird. It's basically even simulated the bird. It had the like button, the retweet button. And USA documents showed that their plan was to get about 100,000, recruit people onto this platform, in their own words, with algorithms and feeds promotion of that this was the site to share sports, music, and hurricane updates.

That's their direct phrase in their own internal documents. But that once they had gotten a critical mass of users on the site between 60,000, 100,000, they would shift the algorithms. They would use the data that they Hoovered up from Cubans signing up, taking note of their political proclivities, the network clusters they'd formed, in order to get them to take to the streets in a violent revolution protest against the Cuban government to form what they called smart mobs. Basically, at the appropriate moment, once they got them in to get them to overthrow their government. Now, this is a classic CIA covert action. This has massive diplomatic implications for the United States government if this thing is revealed. That's why the CIA is in charge of this stuff, because the CIA is the political warfare of the State Department. The State Department maintains our diplomatic relations and posture with the foreign world. The reason USAID is not supposed to be doing covert action, the CIA is because if there's diplomatic blowback, it should be diplomatic organs who are doing it. But what USAID said, so evidently there was no presidential finding for that. They ran it. So without President Obama's approval, that's the official story.

When Senate staffers during the oversight could not get access. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they were duped. The Interagency of the White House said they were duped. The official story, and they had public hearings on this, by the way, I believe in 2014. The official story is that USAID did this whole thing in-house. They did it because it was so-called discrete rather than covert, that it was not a formal covert action. It was simply discrete democracy promotion work to bring democracy to Cuba. But if they ran that in the Obama administration, imagine what was done. Trump wanted to knock out ISIS. Isis, according to the previous White House. We have wikileaks emails of Jake Sullivan saying to Hillary Clinton, Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria, and that effectively, ISIS was a useful friend against Pashar al-Assad. Trump wants to knock out ISIS. Hey, how do you fund money to ISIS if the President wants to eradicate ISIS, if you still want to use them as assets in the region? Well, you're not going to get inter-agency approval if the CIA does it a covert action. What if USAID does it? That's how you see all this USAID money flowing to crisis and Al Qaeda and Taliban groups.

I think they just found 122 million from USAID to them just this week. I guarantee that number is a lot higher than that. In fact, Trump's OIG, who just took over USAID before this recent action, just published a memo where he said, this is unbeknownst to the entire American public until now, that actually there's a big fat loophole at USAID where their contractors evidently don't need to There may be a technical... Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon, Just the News, published all of this. But effectively USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on their contractors in terms of their OFACT and counterterrorism money flow-throughs, or at least there's giant loopholes in them. Usaid can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other US government agency can.

Wow. I know we're meddling in a lot of elections and media and all that stuff. I don't necessarily... Audience is probably going to kill me for this, but we do have to do that in in certain situations. Would you not agree?

This is where it gets really dicey, and this is where I'm in a really difficult position. Because fundamentally, there are two simultaneous tasks that appear to people who are new to this cinematic universe that are in massive conflict with each other. One is, given that this thing broke its sworn oath that it would never be used against the American people, and given the sheer depth and scale of what was weaponized, the American people need to know about it, and massive action has to be taken in order to not just knock it out, but salt the Earth and stop it from ever rising again. You need to go extremely hard in terms of showing the extent of it. On the other hand, this has been... You can make a very compelling argument, the reason that Americans have the standard of life that they do and have the advantages and privileges of the world's most powerful nation that it does. You can make a very, very compelling argument that the rise of America to the preeminent world power in the 20th century would not have been remotely possible without this blob apparatus. I come back to this concept of no blob, no pencils.

You can't even make a pencil in this country unless you have a mechanism to be able to influence foreign governments if they nationalize their graphite mines or the export of their gum trees in Malaysia, or the ability to potentially make inroads or liaise with or change the minds of unions that go on strike that impact US national interest This is the reason that our corporations are so powerful. They rely on the battering ram of the blob. In the early 1970s, in Chile, when there was an attempt to nationalize the bottling industry, before we ran that coup, that coup was jointly coordinated, not just between the head of the CIA, but between the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola Company. Pepsi met with the head of the CIA, Don Kendall, met with Helms, and this is all declassified. You can read a great Guardian report, read up, write up on this or any of the major national security think tanks. Basically, Pepsi's bottling operations in South America were being threatened. The chairman of a Pepsi, Don Kendall, arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger and said, Hey, we need to stop this from happening. Kissinger then put him in touch with the head of the CIA.

Pepsi, the head of the CIA, and the State Department's media mogul in Chile, all met to jointly coordinate the best way to take down the government, and take it down indeed, we did.

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You see this happen time and again. How many governments have been overthrown in the interests of ExxonMobil and Chevron and other Western major oil companies. But, hey, that's how we have cheap oil. You can make an argument that this is how we have energy dominance. And you can make the same argument about media, right? Many people just this week are finding out that 90% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by the US government. If you're totally new this space, and you are rightly and righteously livid at finding out the extent of your own media ecosystem and diet has been puppeteered, co-opted, and financially sponsored by the government that is supposed to stay out of that domestically. You see these statistics and you go burn it down, salt the Earth. We've been told from elementary school to our own media outlets here that we have a free and independent press and that there's no role for the government in the media. Media is independent from government. That's the difference between us and the Soviet Union in China is we have free and independent media. They have state-run media. That's what distinguishes a democracy of an autocracy.

I totally understand the impulse, and I believe as much as possible Reforms need to be implemented. Criminal penalties need to be attached for violating it. Treble damages for civil suits, even be able to sue the agencies if they don't do oversight of the NGOs who operate domestically. But people who have not gone through their five stages of depression about the true extent of the USAID Truman Show. Before you proceed to the final evolution of these reforms, imagine a world where there's zero of that. Imagine a world where zero % of media outlets or soft power, hearts and minds work is sponsored by the US government in Latin America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia, Eurasia. Imagine a world where there is zero influence whatsoever, and other countries are not going to stop doing that work. We won elections doing this, and in doing so, we won favors for US corporations, who in turn had sky and ever expanding corporate profits, which in turn created the ability to hire Americans for jobs and to buy houses and to be able to buy health insurance and to be able to have a 401k of savings and to be able to pass down inherited wealth.

But another problem is the MAGA movement, again, has not really had to deal with this dirty work abroad because the primary concern has been what's six inches in front of your face? My school I have this woke curricula. My infrastructure is crumbling. My kids can't afford to buy a home until they're 45 years old. But the other part is that this mission statement of the blob to do this got corrupted as globalization destroyed the predicate for doing this dirty work in the first place. Okay, we overthrow the government of Chile for Pepsi. We overthrow the government of Iran for oil and gas. We overthrow the government of some central African country to get the lithium and the cobalt. Nominally, this is all supposed to help American corporations and American citizens. But what happens when those corporations outsource all their jobs to to farters. What happens when they're not hiring American labor? What happens when they're not even building their manufacturing plants here? Who are we doing these favors for when you have globalist corporations and you have globalist corporate boards and they've got no skin in the game. These are multinational corporations in most of their export markets are to foreign customers.

At this point, most of their labor pools are our foreign citizens. Most of their infrastructure, the facilities that they're building. This is how we had the heartland turned into the rust belt. It's because when you have these steel companies and you have these manufacturing places, build their facilities somewhere else. It's not just the citizens, it's the entire regional development that goes away. So this whole concept of Reaganite trickle-down economics, that's what's good for the private sector, is good for the private citizen, has become completely completely divorced, and this is how you have this rogue blob that is stealing US taxpayer money, you're sighting a Reaganite economic principle for doing this, trickle down to the American citizens. But when you have this globalist conceit, there's no trickle down. All you're doing is helping the Wall Street in London, private equity firms and financial firms and equity holders and huge salaries for the C-suite, the directors and officers and shareholders of this college of corporations that don't even represent the citizens anymore. There's ways to put firewalls, by the way, and this is what I'm trying to educate the American people about. For example, You shouldn't even be able to...

We're going to make the reforms, let's assume, to the worst of this dirty work. Just like we did in the '70s. We used to assassinate people, the CIA did. The CIA had whole assassination guides. Scandals in the '60s and '70s come out. We said, Okay, no more assassinations. We can still do regime change or it work, but we can't authorize the killing of people, of a political figure outside terrorism in a covert action. Okay, You can do these for these other road activities. But in addition to that, any stakeholder in a State Department operation or a USAID, or that's assisted by US Special Forces for great power competition has to meet some threshold of how much investment they're doing on the American soil, how many Americans they're employing on US soil, how many contributions they've made to Americans and the American economy You can't have this helping... You can't have American taxpayers funding this globalist gut. If this is done for nationalist reasons to help Americans, Americans have to be the beneficiaries of that. So this is all part of this.

So That's so that's that was my next question is how do we I mean, it is important that we are involved when we need to be in media, in politics, in these companies. And so what I was going to ask is how do we effectively do that now that USAIDs pretty much shut down? And so is that what you're saying? They would have to work deals with the company, with the international companies to employ? There has to be oversight over the companies that are being funded by USAID.

I'm saying that's part of the reforms because people need to keep this in mind as a nascent Trump world foreign policy establishment. There was a Republican foreign policy establishment for the past six years, but they've all been the neocon faction that represented the McCain, the Romney, the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley types. And I'm not even trying to draw a personal beef when I say that. You can make the argument that this is the foreign policy school that Marco Rubio was substantially supported by and that drew that distinction in 2016 between Rubio and Trump at the time. But I think Rubio, like JD Vance, JD Vance was not a Trump ally in the beginning either. But I think that Rubio is doing, frankly, an incredible job so far. But the whole of Trump world is going to need to synchronize what their North Star is for these foreign policy visions. And I'm trying to say that it's a package deal. The thing about USAID was, because of how flexible it was and because of how dirty it It could be, again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID, and it's been this way for 20, 30 years, at least.

It was a shortcut. It was a shortcut that could close gaps quickly. It's also a shortcut, for example, if you're not going to do regime change work, and the highest ROI to be able to secure the petroleum, to be able to secure the lithium, the cobalt, the aluminum, the copper, the zinc, the timber, the import-export markets, the military bases, well, you're going to need to find other ways to offset the power you've lost by doing this. For example, Trump in the oil and gas space, Trump You can see a creative way of trying to offset this. For example, let's just say a country who we depend on for petroleum access, goes rogue, shakes off the yoke of US soft power in the region, say, Azerbaijan or something, and you lose the petroleum because you lost your ability to influence those elections. Well, now you need to offset that. Well, in Trump's case, he's saying, drill, baby, drill domestically. So there's ways that you can maybe offset that, or maybe you can find other levers for carrots and sticks that don't rely on tapping into this dark arts, sorcery work. For example, I believe one of those things that just like with banning the CIA's ability to do assassinations after the '70s, is banning social media censorship, diplomacy.

Usaid's huge role in social media censorship. That's one of those assassinations-level things that has to be completely banned by law in whatever continuing function USAID has. Any USAID administrator or someone who's caught doing that, there should be criminal There should be civil penalties with triple damages for every US citizen who's impacted by that. Because this is impacting US taxpayers paying to have this cloak and dagger work target them. There has to be recourse for that. But I'd say you can create those categories, but it also has to touch the corporate side for the stakeholder group, because otherwise, who are you doing this for? What are our American national interests?

So do you think now that USAID is pretty much, we've cut off at the knees and we've established that it's pretty much gone rogue. Do you think we're going to see any... What does it look like without them? Because they did play an important role in history and a lot of different things. And so what are the ramifications going to be now that they've had their legs chopped off? What do you think some implications might be?

I hesitate to concede that they've fully had their legs chopped off because of a number of reasons. One is, even assuming so, they're moving over to the State Department. Now, what I've been telling, I do all these private live streams for my ex-subscribers, and for 14 months, I've been telling every lecture I've done, I've said, X-ray through every time you see USAID and look, and You have to see the State Department everywhere. They are not USAID. They're State Department. They've always been State Department. There's never been an inch of daylight. Now, let's start with that because when you get to, there actually is in the sense that it's a switch player between these other agencies, and they have more flexibility to do this rogue work than state. But they are fundamentally supposed to be a State Department function. They are independent, but they are supposed to be guided by state. They only exist to advance the foreign policy stipulated goals set by state. But what difference does it make? Leave aside the flexible, covert action under discrete democracy promotions? Leave aside the accountability, get out of White House approval free card aspect of it. What difference does it make to shut down USAID if you move everything over to the State Department?

It's a State Department role anyway. There was intense debate debate about whether even to make it an independent agency because it's fundamentally the State Department. It's the same debate that George Kennen had with his peers in 1948 when they created the function for covert action in the first place for the CIA. George Kennen was the guy who authored NSC 10-2, the National Security Memo, that established the plausible deniability doctrine for the Central Intelligence Agency to do covert action, political warfare, economic sabotage, propaganda, and information, black ops, the whole gamut of everything that the CIA is authorized to lie about so that our government can deny to us and to the world that they're actually doing it. Two months before George Kennen authored NSE 10-2 and gave us the national security structure that we currently live under. He wrote this memo that I talk about frequently called The Inauguration of Organized Political affair. This is on April 30th, 1948. This was two weeks after the CIA's first, mostly unauthorized, covert action to rig and influence the course of and ultimately win the Italian election in Italy, which was the first election in Italy after World War II that pitted a US-backed, pro-western candidate against a Communist, Soviet-backed candidate.

The CIA did all sorts of dirty work in there. They had their assets stuffing ballot boxes, using Mafia muscle to shut down opposition meetings. We bought the media in the region. We worked with all the religious groups and the charities. The people involved in that operation publicly wrote in the memoirs that we would have lost that election if not for the CIA. James Wolsey even defended that regime change operation on Fox News in 2017 when he was asked, just the CIA still... Russia's meddling in our elections. We don't meddle in foreign elections. And he said, Well, we used to do that thing in Italy and in Greece. And he's referring to this event that I'm talking about. And then he said, And then she says, Well, we don't do that anymore, though, right? And he goes, Well, Only in the interests of democracy, basically. But at that point, there was no authorized CIA covert action to do it. They were a spy agency. They were on the ground. They took the reins and run. And ex post fact, fact Joe, George Kennen, 12 days later, says, Hey, this thing was gangbusters. We just swung the entire course of the Italian election doing this.

We need to do this everywhere. And in fact, we need to create the capacity to do this everywhere, even if we don't intend to use it, because this was a real last minute effort last time. We need this capacity in place. Our assets in the organized labor, our assets in the judiciary, our assets in the media, our assets in the movies and culture, Even if we don't intend to, just in case we ever need to. He called this the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. Something like 15 to 20 times in this memo, he presupposes that it's going to be parked at what he wanted to set up inside the State Department called the Bureau of Political Warfare, and that it would be a formal... That what we now call CIA Covert Activity would simply be another office at the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC, in Foggy Bottom, not in Langley, Virginia. It It would be called the Bureau of Political Warfare. But he goes over the reason why we might not want to structure it that way. We might want to put it another agency, which would come to be the CIA. He talks about how the funding for it may not be able to be disguised on the State Department's books.

It may raise too many questions. For this covert activity, it may be best because it's political warfare and it's really dirty and it's huge to black blowback, and State Department has to report its finances very publicly. We created the State Department, the very first meeting of Congress of the United States of America in 1789. It was the first agency we created. It's ancient. Everything runs through it. So he said it might be best, actually, to have this done, but it should still work constantly with the State Department. It's fundamentally a State Department function, but perhaps it should be parked somewhere else. And then two months later, boom, CIA, NSC 10 was tasked to, was tasked to do the thing that was originally anticipated for the State Department Office of Political Warfare. The same thing is happening right now with USAID. That's all this is. They're just going to create, and in fact, everyone can read Max Boot, the Arch Council on Foreign Relations, Never Trump, Neocon, constant voice on the think tank space against all things Trump world. He panned a article, I believe it was during the Trump administration, where he called for this exact same structure to be set up, that we should not shy away from this work or hide the fact that we do them.

We should create a formal track at USAID called a Career Track for Political Warfare. It should be called a Bureau of Political Warfare inside of USAID. People should be trained specifically for this function of USAID early in their careers. It It should not be something that's a big scandal. And so we have a limited personnel pool because nobody wants to say that's what they do. They should be celebrated. We need to turn the culture around so that when USAID can do this, they've got a much bigger and better network to do this. We're now running into that. So I don't actually see USAID going away when you move it at state.

Okay.

You are inheriting, and this is an uncouth phrase, but I think the visceral imagery is intended to make this stick. Closing the Ronald Reagan building and moving all those funds, if it's a billion in overhead, moving just... If you keep all the grants and move that 43 billion into the State Department, the State Department just inherits a USAID her Cee's infection. It's the same problems. It's this tumor, this growth, this permanent flareup that now it's just there's no difference between other than the structural that allows you get away from oversight, which is what I'm saying. But frankly, there'd be no difference if you shut down Langley headquarters and you created a Office of Political Warfare at State to do that. If you shut down USAID headquarters and created an office for international development at State. Now, you're making Marco Rubio at that point, the most powerful Secretary of State in American history when you do that. But fundamentally, the problem was there was not oversight or repercussions for for wrongdoing and rogue activity at USAID. And so it's coming back to the place it was intended to be spawned out of.

Yeah. I just see the pulse of America right now hate USAID. And While they are rogue, they do play an important role. It is stuff that we need to be involved in. Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China. Just to name a couple, we need to be involved in that stuff and to to do what we're talking about to influence. At the meantime, they've done a lot of corrupt shit. You had mentioned an organization, The Atlantic, something with seven former CIA directors. What is that?

The Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank, effectively. They The easiest way to think of them is the civil military, semi-clandestine, even though it's public-facing, coordinating arm for NATO priorities. Nato is obviously the Western World's military alliance, and so they're concerned with the military activity of US, France, the all the NATO countries, and it's their consensus military activity. People are finding this out, who are mostly concerned with domestic policy. They're finding this out more and more with this USAID story, which is that a huge, and sometimes the most important and dispositive element in military work is actually the civil affairs, is actually the political and civil society topography of the target country and its regional partners, allies, and adversaries. Then oftentimes, it's the political which determines the military result much more so than the military activity itself. We're seeing this, for example, with Georgia's Q. Nato wants to build the military base right there and just point like a gun out at Crimea. This will obviously put the people of Romania, put a big fat kick me on their back from Russia the moment this goes operational. Okay? Well, NATO doesn't want that to happen.

Nato... Could NATO roll into Romania right now and run a Yugoslavia run back, like 1995 and 1999. And Georgia Skou gets elected, gets elected head of state, decides to cancel the NATO Air Base, kick everyone out, It's a diplomatic incident if they roll in and napalm raid from fighter jets and drones, the sitting government of Romania, just because that party won the election and decided to cancel a military base. The military can't do that directly. What they need is the civil military. They need the civil side of military operations to make that election result not happen. You see the same thing. It's It's not just always about tilting elections. Sometimes it's about the passage of a law. For example, Ukraine. There was a lot of tense debates about the post-2014 Maidan Revolution government in Ukraine's stance towards the Russian half of the country, the Russian ethnics, the Russian-speaking portion part of the country, the representation of the Russian side of the story on Ukrainian TV or social media or culture or the religious issues around the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, every bit of pro-Russia institutional affinity link that's cleaved out of Ukrainian politics or civil society helps further achieve the NATO goal of folding Ukraine into NATO and of helping Ukraine, at that point, militarily achieve reconquest of the breakaway Donbas and Crimea region.

But the problem is, is if Zelenskyy didn't want to do that, for example, in May 2019, when he took office or April 2019, if he didn't want to do that, it would It's going to be a diplomatic incident for NATO if they ran strafing air raids over Kyiv until he promised to kick the Russian language off of Ukrainian TV, effectively ban or place extreme limits on the Russian Orthodox Church influence. If he defied the IMF and its privatization plan for Ukraine's energy assets, NATO wants that done, but NATO can't be the one to do it. They can't have their fingerprints on the gun. What they need is a sprawling civil military, whole of society capacity to have that political result achieved, but have it come from the civil institutions in and around that. That's how you have the scandal of things like the Ukraine of the Red Lines memo. 70 US government-funded NGOs, all signatory to the USAID-funded as well as NATO-funded and US State Department-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, Crisis Management. This is the US and NATO-funded umbrella arm. We talk about this 90% of Ukrainian media. Well, a lot of this is run out of these centralized US umbrella groups that coordinate the media surround sound of all these different NGOs and media organizations.

One of the major ones is called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Well, I've talked about this before. One month, Zelensky takes office, April 2019. In May 2019, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center issues Zelensky a red lines memo saying that Zelensky will suffer political instability if he crosses any of the 25 listed below red lines that touched Zelenskyy's ability to negotiate with Russia about energy affairs, negotiate with Russia about security affairs, block the privatization efforts of major Ukrainian industries, deviate in any way from the path to accession into the NATO and surrounding EU bodies. It had a section for their education, for for their culture, for their language, for their media, for their energy policies, for their security policies. It's not just the USAID Truman show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions, but are, in fact, USAID proxies. It's the policies of sitting governments. Zelenski only became the head of state for Ukraine because of the political instability this very same USAID network inflicted on Viktor Yana Kovitch, however you feel about him. I'm not even opining an opinion, but the The fact is, he was run out of office in a rental riot operation where all of the major groups involved were USAID funded.

So easy come, easy go. What they're saying is twice in that memo, the top line of it says, these are red lines, cross them, instability. They say it right again in bold in the memo right before the 70 signatories. Message received, but NATO can't say that directly because, hey, that's an attack on democracy. If NATO says it, we're supposed to have a around government. So you need a civilian front for the military consensus. That's why the US Department of Defense pays over a million dollars a year to the Atlantic Council, and why they have seven CIA directors on their board to juice the capacity to create this civilian front for a military monster.

Interesting. Let's move into some domestic stuff with USAID. What is the relationship with USAID in our universities like Harvard?

Yeah, Well, USAID does grant funding. Usaid builds thought leadership. Academic universities function as a super turbo-charged NGO. They are 501(C)(3), they are nonprofits, just like the NGOs are. They are not for profit. You can give them a lot more money without the unseemly blowback of looking like USAID is picking winners and losers in private sector, private sector partnerships. And so USAID funds research grants. Usaid funds departments and centers and institutions in order to make all these things happen. So for example, with the Wuhan lab, how did USAID end up paying $15 million effectively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create It bat-born, jumped from animal to human, gain of function, SARS-CoV-2, Frankensteinian freak monster viruses? How did Why are there USAID fingerprints on that work? Well, it's because it's run through universities who then put the pastoral funding in order to do that. That money initially went to, for example, I believe it was UC Davis, the University of California. Then it went through to ECHO Health Alliance, which is this famous... Echo Health Alliance was famous for its, I believe, NIH and HHS grants. This was the famous case of it being barred after the revelations of the past few years.

I believe ECHO Health Alliance is now barred from being able to get future grants. But they got his pass-through money, and then that money flowed to the Wuhai Institute. And so through this nonprofit sphere, you can create ever more layers of plausible liability that the US government was behind this, that the US government wanted to do this for whatever reason. You can make the argument that we created that gain of function is not actually to be deployed as a biological warfare weapon, or it's not actually to be leaked to destabilize a a popular government like the Trump administration. But actually, we do this gain of research function in order to build vaccines, in order to if somebody else builds something like this, we have a way to counter somebody else's biological warfare. This is the same argument you can think of the Mockingbird media apparatus, the USAID Truman show in the media space. You can make the same argument that, listen, we fund this Truman show. We find 90 % of countries, media complex while either lying about it or trying to hide people from knowing about it, like protesting these Foreign Agent Registration Act type things.

Because if we don't do it, somebody else, Russia could do it, China could do it. And so we need to be in the game. This thing's dual use. We're not necessarily just doing this to blare propaganda, but it's to counter foreign countries' propaganda. Same thing with why the justification for gain a function and building freak, mutant viruses and jumping them from animals to human. We create these viruses that never existed in a lab in order to create vaccines against hypothetical future viruses and to build the knowledge base of academic researchers and medical researchers in the field. So even if we aren't able to have the vaccines, we're able to quickly close the gap in the future to do that. We're learning more about the sciences by expanding beyond the current set of virus suites that we've seen. That's a policy debate that I'm not even entering into, but the fact is, this is what we do. We do this at every major university. And universities, in turn, often function as arms of the state. For example, when the US State Department and the CIA and USAID, USAID created the Office of Transition Initiative, OTI, in 1993, that was when we were privatizing Russia.

Well, who functioned, in many respects, was the long arm of the State Department during that time, often representing State Department in diplomatic, is effectively a diplomatic interlocutor, was the Harvard University. Harvard Endowment was working hand in glove. In fact, everyone can read about this, published in mainstream media, the Harvard Boys Do Russia, or read Casino Moscow, or any number of write-ups. This is all openly acknowledged that Harvard was effectively a A shadow diplomacy arm, and it was able to put a massive favor in the favor bank to the US because they led the shock therapy. They led the privatization of a trillion dollars in state-owned assets of the Soviet Empire to be bought up at fire cell prices by Wall Street and London stakeholders. They loved what they were doing. Now, I should note, this is the same relationship that happens at the NGOs. Take, for example, the Tide Center. We talked about this before. The Tide Center is known by many Conservatives as this notorious left wing Soros Network, because I believe Soros gave at least 14 million or something to the Tide Center. And the Tide Center is the Dark Money Network hub that is a 501(C)(3), but you can't see what money flows to any of its projects that are not 501(C)(3), but that get their 501(C)(3) through the Tide Center.

And so Black Lives Matter Foundation gets his 501(C)(3) through the Tide Center. Usaid gave them $27 million. Fjp, Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the effective puppeteer of, at least according to the Media Research Center report and the Daily Wire reports on this, which broke all these insider internal documents. They give their marching orders to LaTisha James and Alvin Bragg and the people prosecuting our presidents while effectively pressuring them to do so while representing the donor network that makes up their re-election campaigns. This is a massive conflict of interest. Where did they get the 501(C)(3) from? The $27 million USAID grantee recipient. But what do those grants look like? Well, the Tide Center has, I think one of these is about a $25 million grant from USAID to the Tide Center. For the Tide Center to, and And everyone can look this up, I believe I'm stating this accurately, to secure concrete commitments from foreign countries for certain foreign policy goals that are hinted at in the grant. Of course, this is another issue because of the secret see around USAID, these grant descriptions are very, very nominal. Instead of the 10 paragraphs, it's just oftentimes it's 50-word descriptions for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants.

And in this In this case, the Tide Center is being formally deputized to negotiate with secure commitments from... Secure commitments for the United States government from foreign governments. They're being deputized. And I forget, this may This may be the Tides Foundation rather than Tide Center, which is its sister entity, but this is the Tides Network. But that's what Harvard did, and that's what all these universities who get USAID funding do when they are involved in that GUI free line between domestic university researchers or domestic centers, but they have cultural exchange events with the people in Pakistan and the energy engineers there, like the Arizona State University, for example, or Harvard, or Stanford or MIT. These at international touchpoints, and every one of those touchpoints can double as an instrument of statecraft. What's a big fat, juicy incentive to go out and do that statecraft to achieve US State Department ends? Big fat grant funding from the US State Department, USAID, and frequently, Tarpa and the US Defense Department.

How are they manipulating immigration?

Usaid, together with the US State Department's Bureau Refugee Population and Migration. Last year alone, according to, I believe, the Center for Immigration Studies, gave 1. 6 It was 1. 4 or 1. 6 billion dollars to the migrant groups who formed the illegal migrant trail from South America and Latin America up into the Southern border, paying for their food, their transport, their shelter, giving them often cash debit cards. So this is a billion a half dollars that USAID in conjunction, because again, USAID always X-ray through. Usaid is the mask, State Department is mask off. So it's no wonder that they jointly coordinate this, but it's the specific immigration wing of the State Department for Refugee Population Migration, together with USAID, a billion and a half dollars, I believe it was a single year alone, it may be the whole Biden administration, to a web of over 200 NGOs who, every step of the way, capacity build illegal immigrants to make the voyage safely and comfortably and can pay their whole way through in order to violate US immigration law and to illegally enter and make their new lives here in this country. And some of this gets really, really ugly.

I'll give you an example of this. Usaid is doing that, and it was administered for the whole of the Biden administration by Samantha Power. Samantha Power's husband, and I don't normally feel it's appropriate to mention family members, but they are both political and in the Biden administration's government doing a one, two punch on this issue. So So this is not about the personal. This is just because these two things are connected. At this hour, I'm Christina Ohio in Dallas, and here are your top stories.

The ex-chief of the USAID, Samantha Power, reportedly experienced a spike in her net worth during during the time she served as the chief of USAID, the organization that oversees hundreds of billions of dollars in global funding, and is now under intense scrutiny from DOGE audits being conducted by Elon Musk and his team.

According to Inside Biden's Basement and financial records, Power made $180,000 a year as Joe Biden's appointee. In those three years, her wealth jumped from $6. 7 million to a whopping $30 million, leaving many on social media questioning how her networth made such a significant jump such a short amount of time. Cass Sunstein was a very infamous figure in conservative world for a long time because he was the author, I believe in 2007, 2008, of a famous white paper called Conspiracy Theories, which made the argument that the US federal government needs to infiltrate the online space and infiltrate the cognitive intelligentsia of alternative movements. At the time, it was He was concerned about things like 9/11 conspiracy theories on YouTube, undermining the diplomatic posture and standing of the United States and our military posture. If these theories gained steam, it would massively degrade the ability to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and build an international coalition. And so he made the argument, and I'm not weighing in on this, by the way, substantively. But this is simply what he said, and everyone can look This is Samantha Power's husband, who then joined Samantha Power on the other end of this.

Actually, maybe I'll start with that side of the story. He moved over while Samantha Power was head of USAID, running this program, spending a billion and a half dollars to fund illegal immigrants to make their way from foreign countries into our country illegally. Dhs is responsible for managing that and stopping that and catching them. Cass Sunstein moved over to DHS in order to help run the immigration policy, where he was basically a senior advisor on immigration policy around the open border that left the whole thing open. So you have the one, two punch, Samantha Power is funding the machine so that they all get here. Her husband is a DHS creating and popularizing and implementing the policies that make sure there's catch and release and the whole thing's open and we can't do anything to stop them once they get here. So, interagency approval, you might say, but it's all in-house right there. But the other part of this is this gets back to the role of USAID and psychological operations and why USAID needs to lie about what it does abroad and why it needs to lie about what it does to our own oversight organs and the people, the US citizens who vote for it.

So Sunstein writes this conspiracy theories thing, and he argues whether you agree with it or not, a lot of people never even think about that when they're considering the merits of such a thing that these things, if they gain steam, have massive diplomatic implications. You're going to convince France to contribute to the war effort. You're going to convince Germany and the UK, or while they see things on YouTube that make their own parliamentarians or prime minister question the for it. You can understand the national security impulse to want to do this work. I'm not saying that's the thing to do, by the way, believe me. It was called Conspiracy theories, this initial paper, and it made the argument that the US federal government needs to develop a new capacity to infiltrate these movements and develop methods to either neutralize them or reroute their cognitive thought leadership in order to avoid the outcome that results in free and unfettered alternative media popularizing ideas that could undermine the workings of the State Department or the US military. Then quickly thereafter, he writes a book called Nudge. Nudge is basically the Holy Bible for the censorship industry. It's basically required reading for anyone who wants to have a career in countering disinformation, or disinformation studies, if you will, or information integrity, or digital resilience, or media literacy.

This is the It lays out the gospel. It's called Nudge because it's a book about how to get people to do things without top-down coercion, the appearance of autocratic coercive control, and But getting them to do it anyway. How do you... Steph, shove people to do it because that's what Russia and China do. Nudge them. Find a way to get them to do it without your fingerprints being on it, without it drawing the same critiques that would have if the Russian or Chinese government decide to do this. It's about creating this whole of society surround sound. The State Department wants to do it, DOD wants to do it, CIA wants to do it, USAID wants to do it. We don't need to make it formal government policy. We don't need to throw people in jail for they do it. If they do it, we need to create... And Nudge itself was primarily about the behavioral role of this, but also the behavioral psychology behind this, but also about the role of institutions in making this happen. But what you do is, instead of doing top down, you astroterf a bottom up and you create a middle out in a whole society Society.

You want people to feel like their lives will be over if they challenge it, but you can't criminalize it. We have a First Amendment. Well, what if you raise the costs of that behavior? It's incentives, it's carrots and sticks. How do we heighten the cost of doing that? What assets do we need in civil society in order to achieve this? Well, if they lose their... If they're deplatformed, they can't access their wedding photos and baby photos because they're kicked off Facebook or they see a friend of theirs was and can no longer DM with grandma because they posted about, hey, these vaccines may have come from the Wuhan lab, or these vaccines may have been funded by the US government, or they might not work, or we shouldn't go through with a mandate, We don't want to throw people in jail for that yet, maybe, because a lot of these same folks have now started to talk about, well, maybe the fundamental problem is the First Amendment itself, and that's why they are all working with the EU and the UK and foreign governments, like Brazil, to make this That's what happened. But okay, so get the social media companies to demonetize them, de-platform them through algorithmic suspension.

Okay, that's one thing we can do. What's another thing we can do? Well, we can do defamations and lawsuit. We can use law fair. We can There were high-profile cases of this. There were examples of this in documents of the affirmative planning of finding a sympathetic plaintiff to make an example out of these media companies to do this. These were published before things like Dominion and some of these other lawsuits around these cases. How can you create vocational penalties for doing this? For example, you don't need to arrest him, but have Bill De Blasio, the mayor of New work implement policies that he goes on live television and proudly says, no jab, no job. It's going to... You can't earn a living if you believe these things or spread information around that. Tony Fauci himself, and the eternal shame of it is it took four years after COVID, three years after COVID for these emails to come out, said that one of the best ways to actually get people to To get citizen buy-in for the vaccine rollout and stop these vaccine conspiracy theories is to raise the cost of people saying them and that you need to make it hurt.

And that will... He said that in so many words, and everyone can look up this receipt. I've reposted this 20 times in my extra account. It's been played on Fox News. I believe there's an audio file with it as well. But that was not the criminal justice system. This was not the attorney general of the United States, but it was the key administrator of the entire public health system during the COVID response, saying the fundamental guiding tenet of it is make it hurt. Make it hurt. Change the incentive so that if people question what we're doing, it costs them their livelihoods. It costs them their social media accounts, it costs them their standing, it costs them their medical licenses. Make it worse than prison, because at least you spend a year in prison, you come out, you still got your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, you still got your business license. You can serve your time and come back to society. When you lose all these things, you often lose them forever, at least until Elon acquired X and set that free.

Samantha Power's. Samantha Power's networth increased from 21 to 24 from an estimated 6. 7 million to 16. 5 million to around 30 million. How did that happen?

Well, I haven't seen the source documents. I've seen this be reported. I haven't double, triple, checked that. I've seen that as headlines. And so I'm not affirmatively weighing into that until I see the source of those numbers myself. But so I don't know her particular case, but what frequently happens in other high-level scenarios like this is you have You have stakeholders who... Now, first of all, so there's a few things, right? There's always the potential. Let me remove it from the Samantha Power thing because I just want to be respectful and note that I just don't know that for a fact. But let's just call this Cynthia P-word. Cynthia P-word. We'll call her Cynthia instead of Samantha. Okay? Random example, not her. There are many ways that this radical jump in wealth can be acquired. Now, first of all, I also don't know if that's a cumulative household income that includes the networth of her husband. This is also a frequent thing. I know in reporting disclosures, oftentimes you don't need to just report your own income. You need to report the combined income of family members because that's often how money is laundered. You saw this with the Biden family, for example.

When you apply for a security clearance, they need to know if you're holding your assets. You declare this much income, but actually the house is owned in the name of your wife. And so it looks like you have a $5 million dollar home, but it's your home, you live in it. Any moment, you could change the deed back to your thing. So oftentimes there are equity interests or large asset interests that are combined. So again, I don't know in this case, but there are a few things. First of all, you have insider knowledge in cases. So talking generally about this, because this is the famous Nancy Pelosi tracker about how she does this. And I talk about this frequently. This is why there is a pipeline from blob to banker. The people who administer US foreign policy and are insiders and have national security clearances and know everyone in the business and know everyone in the network and know everything they're up to next and their whole inside thought process, and they have access to the classified documents and they know like Sure, staring into a magic eight ball or maybe a fortune teller, they know they can see the swirling purple clouds inside the glass of what the CIA is going to do, what the DOD is going to do, what the State Department is going to do, what the USAID is going to do in Ukraine next, in Congo next, in Venezuela next.

They know or have a really good insider trader's advantage knowledge of whether there's going to be a coup, for example, in that country that opens up that country's natural resources to privatization. Is oil and gas going to be privatized in Turkmenistan? You are a part of a Goldman Sachs fund? This is how you get these things. Like, Jared Cohen from the State Department's Policy Planning staff, then creating Google Jigsaw, which played the tip of the spearhead role in Internet Censorship AI super weapons and works closely with the US State Department and DHS CISA for censorship work, as well as foreign academic institutions like the Cambridge University, Social Decision Lab, which is partnered with all these groups that does psychological inoculation work funded by the US taxpayer in part or partnered in part. Well, where did Jared Cohen do right after going to Jigsaw? What did Goldman Sacks, and he's doing macroeconomic and global policy there. Well, what does he bring to the table? Let's see, the State Department's policy planning staff and that whole network where it was basically the CIA branch of Google that he was interliaising with that whole time. He brings the whole network.

How is he able to help Goldman Sachs make investment predictions so that they're one step ahead of the market? Well, it's not technically insider trading in the sense that it's directly at the portfolio company with advanced knowledge of their business line and some 10 B5 securities violation. It is the great unstated insider trading reason that there is this blob to banker pipeline. Mark Milley, for example, I believe, is at J. P. Morgan or another one of those banks. Another great example of this is the Joe Biden Whitehouse Blobber to Banker Pipeline. Joe Biden's closest political adviser in the White House, and has been since the 1980s, was a guy named Mike Donalan. Mike Donalan was this shadow advisor figure who, according to media reports, basically sits over Biden's shoulder with everything he does and helps advise on political and other strategy. Mike Donalan's brother is a guy named Tom Donalan. Tom Donalan was basically hit the hat trick of everything you possibly do as an apex predator of the US National Security State. National Security advisor, State Department coordinated the military, the intelligence, in the statecraft world for years and years, decades. Apex predator of the National Security State at the highest level of military intelligence and statecraft.

What was he doing during the entirety of the Biden State Department, Biden Whitehouse? He was the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. This is basically overseeing, administrating the investment arm of BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management. I know a lot of those are donor-advised funds and pass-throughs, but this is, at the end of the day, a $10 trillion juggernaut of portfolio investments. And his brother is the closest adviser to the President of the United States who commands the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department. All that would need to be done... I mean, you can imagine why BlackRock might want to pick up someone like Tom Donalan, who even if he had zero experience whatsoever as a banker or as a finance It's a finance mogul. Who knows if Mark Millie can even read a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or can even have a conversation with any of the quants who crunch the numbers. They don't care about that. They want to They want to know whether or not they can be the first mover and capture the entire market, for example, of the potential for lithium to open up in the golden triangle.

Because what's the Biden administration going to do? Are Are they going to send in the Marines? Are they going to send in the boys? Are they going to do that in Iran? What's going to happen with Russia and the $75 trillion worth of natural resources that Russia sits on? What parts of that? What regions? How about Africa? How about all the cobalt and lithium in the Congo or the copper companies that are their portfolio companies or the zinc or the timber, the copper, the aluminum, the gold, the silver, everything. And so in theory, all that would need to happen was a conversation from Mike to his brother Tom. Then suddenly, Black Rock has a first mover advantage of knowing exactly where the Wayne Gretsky quote, right? How are you so How are you so good? You're not even that fast. How are you so good at hockey? And he says, I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going. That's how it looks like I'm so fast. Well, speed of investment is everything.

Let's move into, I want to move into legacy media. How's USAID influencing US legacy media?

It does it in several ways. So there's the direct... Now, all of this has moral hazard involved. All of this corrupts the domestic process. And in some respect, jeopardizes that Smith Munt style, protecting domestic people from foreign-facing operations type stuff whenever those media outlets pick winners and losers in domestic politics. But there are two variations of this that... One of them, you know is... Well, let me explain them. So the first is a lot of people are just now seeing a lot of these very damning-looking USAID outflows to mainstream media outlets like Politico or to Reuters, for example. I mentioned that there's $300 million in grants that were given by the Biden administration from various government agencies to Reuters, while Reuters won a Pulitzer for... Reuters was the tip of the spear for all anti-Trump reporting, and they won a Pulitzer in the year 2024 for their series on Elon Musk and malfeasance by Elon Musk and his companies at all of his different portfolio companies, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, X. At the same time that Biden from the White House had asked the US government had replied to reporters that regulators should look into Elon Musk and that 11 different US government regulatory agencies, regulatory bodies and agencies were pursuing adverse action against all four of those very agencies that Reuters was one it's Pulitzer for writing hit pieces about.

This is, by the way, a little bit of a... There's the same moral hazard here that you have with USAID sponsoring the OCCRP. You're hit piece journalists that only have the capacity to do that because their revenues and their profits are being buffered by the American taxpayer. And even though the grants are not explicitly to the US to do that. There's no grant from a Biden government agency of the 300 million that says, write hit pieces on Donald Trump or Trump allies. Just like the money to OCCRP, the corruption reporting probe, is supposed to be for politicians and oligarchs and significant cultural figures in Eastern Europe. But in the process of doing that, OCCRP turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine, and that formed part of the basis to impeach Donald Trump as President in the Ukraine impeachment in 2019. So American citizens who voted for Donald Trump effectively funded through Donald Trump's USAID, the impeachment of Donald Trump. They also dug up dirt on Paul Manifort and other US citizens. But in that case, it was, you can argue, dirty than the Reuters case because the grants were to dig up dirt.

In the Reuters case, it's complicated. You see this with much, just a huge quantity of US media. So Let me start from the bottom here. Premium subscriptions are part of news agencies' business models. Paywalls. Almost every major media outlet has paywalls for their news content. And part of the justification for the US government paying US media companies sounds benign on its face. We want our government officials, our hired employees who are representing you to be as best equipped and to be as knowledgeable as possible about their line of business representing you as possible. And so they need to have as much information as possible. And so we pay premium subscriptions for foreign-facing activity to US media companies who are the best in business or sometimes the only or some of the only people who provide that needed proprietary service. So a great example, this is with the Reuters case, because when I talked about the Reuters case, a lot of people There's still a scandal there and a moral hazard in the system that needs to be reformed. But a lot of people ran away with it and presupposed when they read this, that meant that it was like a direct pay to play.

We don't know if there was or wasn't, if there was back channel conversations, if there was an informal phone call. I'm not suggesting there was. Or if it's simply the incentives aligned. You know these are the people giving you the money, You know they're targeting Trump. You know... Because this was the other thing is all 11 agencies targeting Elon Musk were paying to the non-news agency side of Reuters who was digging up the dirt that the regulatory agencies could use to go after Elon Musk. The same thing for OCCRP. Usaid funds the hit piece journalist. The hit piece journalist dig up dirt. The prosecutors then use that dirt as the basis to arrest them. Then you have a USAID big fat bow on top of it with an accomplishment section saying, ta-da, 456 arrests that we sponsored. But in this case, for example, the Justice Department under the Biden administration paid tens of millions of dollars. It was something like $60 million to Reuters for Westlaw because Thomson Reuters has properties. They have their news agency side. They have a tool for legal folks, for legal research. Lexus, Nexus, and Westlaw dominate in that space.

So Justice Department is paying for Westlaw, and they're tens of millions of dollars padding the profits of a portfolio company of Thomson Reuters. But that's every one of those million is less that they need to make in their news Line because their profits are still being pumped up for the network, and they are still picking heavy winners and losers in domestic politics. For example, what if they were paying Raytheon? What if the Defense Department was paying Raytheon continually, as it does, billions of dollars in defense contracts, and Raytheon opens up a new line of business called Raytheon Media, LLC. And Raytheon Media LLC has a basically explicit media purpose to target Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Republicans like Bill Kristol. I mean, just straight up, just like the Washington Post, just like Reuters, just like no objectivity. In fact, they even just like the Washington Post and all the different journalistic things said, we're going to end what about Objectivity is no longer an underpinning credo of our reporting because we believe both sides makes misinformation spread. We do need to pick winners and losers in this. Trump doubled Raytheon's Trump doubled Raytheon's Pentagon contracts to Raytheon.

So the contracts aren't going directly to Raytheon Media. They're going to Raytheon Military, LLC. But now, Raytheon Media doesn't have to make a dime because their margins, their revenues are padded up the wazoo by a huge cash infusion to a sister line of business. You see this everywhere. Newsguard, for example, one of the most notorious private sector for-profit censorship mercenary firms with former head of NATO on his board, the former head of DHS on his board, the former head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center on his board, you name it. Mark Millie, the former head of the CIA, NSA. I'm sorry, not Mark Millie. General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA, NSA, four-star general on his board. They got a $750,000 Pentagon contract. Nominally, for the purpose of helping the Pentagon scan the internet to help scan and ban Chinese and Russian propaganda online. Now, as this new MAGA foreign policy coalition and base has to navigate the tension between foreign ops and domestic interests. We have to navigate what the role is of countering foreign influence, encountering foreign propaganda, squaring that with the fact that that was the exact predicate used to take out hundreds of thousands and arguably millions of Trump supporters at home when Trump was called a Russian asset and And Trump was just like Putin, Trump equals Putin.

The FBI is saying it, the CIA is saying it, and you had tens of thousands of American citizens who are rolled up in these very groups who were supposed to be focused on Russia, making It's the argument that, well, these Americans are being an unwitting or unwitting vassal of talking points from Russia, so now we get to put them in these blacklist database. That's a tension that has to be navigated. But the point is, however you navigated, that 750,000 Pentagon grant to Newsgard was not explicitly for Newsgard to create advertiser blacklist to target Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Prager University and Fox News hosts, and virtually every populist right wing media conduit for the man who is now the sitting democratically elected President of the United States. But it's the same Raytheon military, Raytheon media thing. So we need to create firewalls so there's no domestic bleed. If you volunteer to accept a US government contract for foreign-facing work from any foreign-facing agency, whether that's state, whether that's aid, whether that's DOD, whether that's a confidential CIA service. It's another thing. Reuters does CIA services. They have a whole intelligence assistance wing. So they're getting paid by the CIA and the DOD.

Again, this is not the Reuters media line, but it's the strategic intelligence and whatnot. But this This problem pops up everywhere with all these news. But then you do have another problem. So you have that USAID Truman show that comes up from that. But then you also have the other one, which is that we actually do fund a lot of these US media outlets to operate in foreign countries. Then they also operate at home. They are being a direct arm of the State Department for what the grant is doing, and then they're coming back and using that. For example, A great example is our fact checkers, independent fact checkers. My asthma. There's no such thing as an independent fact checker. This entire field was created by the US State Department. And I would say with a set spike relationship, a Kobe Bryant-Shakeel O'Neill relationship with the UK Foreign Office, because this was a transatlantic thing. So the UK Foreign Office funds a ton of these as well. But it's one foreign policy blob there. But why do places like the Pointer Institute, and almost every one of the credentialed fact checkers for Facebook and Reddit and Twitter 1.

0 and TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, why are almost every single one of these groups are either directly or I partnered with a US State Department. It's because we use this international fact-checking network, which is Housing of the Pointer Institute, as the way to get foreign countries to censor their internet, to stop the rise of politicians, whether they be right-wing populist or left-wing socialist, sometimes, to stop them, to censor their internet. We pump up these American fact-checker groups, and then they get sent to Myanmar, and they get sent to the Philippines, and they get sent to Brazil, and they get sent to Latvia, and Lithuania, and Estonia. For example, in this story about Bangladesh that I've been talking about a lot lately, where you have a lot of this USAID and International Republican Institute, NED funds, which is places like transgender dance festivals and rap groups there and picking sides in the political thing there. The guy who is now the top foreign adviser was the former Bangladesh Foreign Secretary. During this period, before he retook power here recently in 2024, he was brought in by USAID. Usaid ran a countering misinformation workshop hosted at the US Embassy in Bangladesh.

Who did they have as the featured speakers to teach Bangladeshy journalists about how to counter misinformation. It was the guy who would get catapulted into the top foreign advisor position with the new government and the guy who became the head of it is a Clinton Global Fellow Initiative, I should note. He's basically a pro-US government now. Who was the other person that was the co-leader of this? It was the executive director of PoliteFact, the US-based PoliteFact, flagging you here for misinformation and disinformation, pressuring the social media companies, and always having that latent threat of advertiser boycott and potential legal non-compliance, I should note, with the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, because it is in July effectively going to be illegal to spread this information in Europe under this EU Digital Services Act. And if I can stress this to any people presently in charge of White House or State Department policy on this, the EU Digital Censorship Act, technically called the Digital Services Act, has to be stopped through whatever diplomatic means necessary to stop it, because it will absolutely destroy freedom of speech in this country as we know it, as Americans will not be allowed to talk to Americans about topics that a foreign regulatory body calls in its sole discretion, disinformation, unless you stop it.

Every US ambassador in Europe has to apply carrot and stick pressure. The US ambassador to the EU has to apply this pressure. The US ambassador to NATO has to apply adjacent pressure. The White House has to. This thing is one of the craziest assaults on free speech in America our country will ever experience. And I should note USAID and our foreign policy blob may made this happen. In fact, my foundation is publishing this report, 19 US government-funded entities are signatories, and nine of them are helping implement this very EU code of practice doing this. That's a full 20 % of the signatories are from the US government, and most of the major ones that have a lot more clout. But the critical node is coming from inside the House, because the Biden White House actually had a formal policy goal. It's Information Integrity Working Group, which is something that I've now published. It's on our foundation's website to get Europe and help Europe pass this thing and tighten the disinformation regs. Usaid had a formal program through SEPs to get to help the EU and other countries pass disinformation laws because the First Amendment wouldn't allow it.

So they're working with the international partners.

Well, that makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Wow.

Well, Mike, I was going to cover terrorism, but we did that earlier. To wrap this thing up, I just want to ask, what would you like to see happen with USAID?

I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally, and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID alone sends a chilling message to not do this dirty work in the future. If you ever begin to look like the former, disgraced, folded USAID. You can imagine whatever form USAID takes in the future, whether they call it US Oud or whether it's the Bureau of International Development at State, people are going to be tempted to do this. This is like God and the devil. There's an eternal struggle here. Sometimes the moral area can look great. Sometimes different elected governments are going to have different defined national interests about what governments to to deploy US soft power in. It's going to look to one side like it's freedom fighting, one side of the American electorate, like freedom fighting or liberation. It's going to look to another side like regime change, coup mongering, and black ops, dirty tricks. That will always be there, as well as the potential for profiteering or for doing that index finger trick in the domestic thumby war of a fair fight of Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, whatever it is, whoever can weaponize the blob can take out their domestic political opponent.

What I would like to see happen is during this education process, while everyone is learning about the sheer extent of it, and we have just begun to peel the onion on this, is that in whatever stage the aid function continues to... The critical thing is putting in a Smith Munt style protection for funding and operations. Smith Munt was supposed to protect us from farm Foreign propaganda distributed in inward. And even that was destroyed by Barack Obama's presidency with the NDA modernization that removed that protection. So we are now completely Smith-Muntless, and we have been for 12 years. But there's something even worse going on with USAID, which is the Smithmont problem of foreign propaganda rigging the domestic information ecosystem. But this is for funding and operations. Usaid's function can fund US organizations for their international work, and now they are pumped up on steroids with their capitalization for their domestic work. Also, their foreign operations can target US citizens, like we mentioned with the OCCRPA example. How are there no criminal penalties passed by Congress? How is there no civilian right of action with trouble damages in civil court against either the recipient of the when Rudy Giuliani is paying his tax dollars for the State Department to hand it over to the group that writes hit pieces on him to get him not only humiliated, but to help all the adjacent reputational destruction that makes it easier to indict him on related charges.

We need a Smithmont for financing and operations for USAID, also for the adjacent It's the ones DOD should be subject to this law, state, CIA. But aid is the most obvious one because these are public grants, and this is supposed to be humanitarian work. It's the last place you'd see coming to get socked in your own eyeball by the government you voted for. So that civil penalty can take the form of suing the guarantee, but maybe you should also be able to sue the agency itself. You can sue the FBI for wrongful death if something they do is through gross negligence or otherwise results in the death of your family member or something. This is something that the famous Jesse Trinidadou case of the Oklahoma City bombing. That can be done. What if USAID had to worry for its own budget if it failed in oversight to catch one of its grantees? And you could sue USAID if one of USAID's grantees broke that firewall. Well, USAID has to fight for its life in the budget every year, just like everybody else does. If they had their own budgets mortally threatened, and they need to decide whether or not to plan the overthrow of a government in Central Asia because it wouldn't have enough capital to pull it off because they're targeting a US citizen in Tanzania, the whole thing gets chilled.

But you need these reforms at every layer. Do you understand?

I do. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. I actually, I hope that happens.

Me too.

But Mike, thank you for being here. It's an overwhelming amount of information, and hope to get you back again.

Good to be back. All right. Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Riddlen. It's raw.

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