 His recent memoir, Psy portrays his outsider status at the New York Times and the New Yorker. And he came, independence required him to publish offshore. Confronting official narratives, he would feel, said his memoirs, stories behind the stories, as he chases the leads, cultivates sources, and grapples with the weight. Psy heard, predictably, who else but Psy would break the. We're honored to give Psy a platform which the compromised mainstream media has denied. With his new go-to substack, Psy Leapfrog, the censors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times. After Psy completes his presentation this talk, our Vice-Chairman Bruce Spine, who's the director, will present his post. I don't want to do a speech because I'll get in trouble if I do, but so I'll do something. We'll just do questions. This is still in the stage where whatever I did is, I think I'll tell you, I was thinking about how to do this without getting into too much trouble. I'm going to read you a couple of things. You can draw your own conclusions about what I'm saying about either the first or the second one. And we can go from there. It's about journalism in a way, I guess. I don't know. The first thing is one of the favorite paragraphs and books that I read in my 800 years of reading. It's from a book called Johnny We Hardly Know You. It's about Jack Kennedy. It was a memoir that was published in 1976. It became a great bestseller. It was about two guys who were, I guess you could call them, they were friends of Jack Kennedy. They were also wingmen. And if you don't know what that means, just think Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan. Then you'll know what I mean. But so here's my favorite passage in the book about Jack Kennedy. These are two guys that were insiders that he could always count on. And so this is the section in which Dave Powers is describing a night at the White House with the president. Dave was accustomed to being summoned for night duty at the White House when Jackie was around, or absent rather. He called himself John's other wife. The president hated to be alone in the evening. It was understood that Dave would be available to keep him company. Dave stayed with him and immediately went to bed. The nightly routine was always the same. The White House kitchen staff would prepare a dinner boiled chicken or lamb chops that was left to the second, that was left in the second floor apartment. That's the, the Secret Service calls it the mansion. It's quite an apartment. Anyway, be left in the second story apartment on a hot plate appliance so they could eat late in the evening, he and Dave, the president and Dave without keeping the kitchen staff waiting to serve them, very considerate. They then would watch television or sit outside on the Truman balcony or the president would read a book or smoke a cigar while David drank several bottles of Heineken beers. They joke a little bit and around 11 o'clock the president would get undressed, slip into the short length book, Brooks Brothers sleeping jacket that he worn preference to pajamas. They would watch him get in the bed. I can't, I already, even I, this is astonishing. Just they would watch him get in the bed and say his prayers. And then he would say to David, goodnight pal, would you please turn out the light. And David would say goodnight to the Secret Service agents on duty in the hallway and drive himself home to McLean. I mean, there you have it. Sort of like classic American journalism about the president. I wrote a book about him in 1989 or 1997, Dark Side, for which I still get letters. So the other thing I'm gonna read is from an interview that the New York Times did with one of the three reporters who wrote a story the other week about a yacht that would ended up somewhere in Central Europe and deserted with traces of blood and some TNT on a table and indications that there had been a diver aboard that became sort of the alternative story at least in the New York Times. So one of the three guys, again, I don't know, I'm Julian Barnes. I have no idea if he could be, I'm just gonna tell you what, he went on radio that they have something called the New York Times, a daily podcast. You know what, the Daily, that's apparently very popular. So I didn't hear this, but somebody sent me the transcript. So it's about a couple of days after the story. This is a story that said that it couldn't have been done. It wasn't done by America, but it was done actually according to the New York Times's reporting by a group, a very possible group that were Ukrainians, Ukrainian dissidents. And of course, Zelensky didn't know and neither did, of course, anybody in America. But anyway, and so it was a story to that effect that was all over the front page. And so there's a guy named Michael Barber, or apparently who narrates this podcast. I haven't listened, I'm not in the podcast, so though my children told me I'm crazy not to be, but I'm not. So Julian says to the reporter, this is a couple of days later, it's a morning, I've listened to it, I've heard it. It's on regular radio or something, I don't know. So Julian, who exactly was responsible for this attack? And how did you and your colleagues go about figuring that out? And so the reporter then chats away. Well, I think what happened was for much of the investigation we weren't asking exactly the right questions. And so the narrator says, hmm, and what were the right questions? Barnes says, well, we logically have been focused on countries, Barber says again, hmm. And Julian then says, all those states we just went through, did Russia do it? Did the Ukraine state do it? And that was just hitting a dead end after dead end. We weren't finding officials who were telling us that there was credible evidence pointing at a government. So my colleagues, Adam Entrose, Adam Goldman, and I started asking a different question. Could this have been done by non-state actors? And Barber said again, hmm, a lot of homes. And could this have been done by a group of individuals who was not working for a government? And Barber, at this point, said kind of like freelance saboteurs. So where did you take this new question, said Barnes? Well, we started asking who might be these saboteurs be? Or if we couldn't answer that, who might they be aligned with? Could they be pro-Russian saboteurs? Could they be other saboteurs? And the more we talked to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction. Another hmm, so Barnes goes on. And my initial thought was that this could be pro-Russian saboteurs turned out to be, my initial thought that this could be pro-Russian saboteurs turned out to be wrong. And we learned that it was most likely a pro-Ukrainian group. Hmm, said Barber, but he asked the question. So in other words, a group of people who did this on behalf of Ukraine, what did you learn that makes you think this is what happened? And Barnes said, Michael, I should be very clear that we know really very little, right? This is what he's saying. I'm just, you know, you take a choice of which one is the most partial, but the two I read. This group remains mysterious, and it remains mysterious not just to us, but also to the US government officials that we have spoken to. That could be my phone. I'm sorry, I didn't turn it off. It goes all the time. How terrible, just throw it out. Turn it off, throw it away, I hate it. I do hate it. I hate it like a teenager would hate his mother knowing where he is all the time. Okay, so he says, I should be really very clear that we know very, very, really very little, right? This group remains mysterious, and it remains mysterious not just to us, but also to the US government officials that we have spoken to. They know that the people involved were either Ukrainian or Russian or a mix. They know that they are not affiliated with the Ukrainian government, but they know they are also anti-Putin and pro-Ukraine. So Barbara now says, so after all this investigative reporting, what did you find, what did you find is that the, what you find is that the culprit here is a group of people who want the same thing as Ukraine but aren't officially tied to the government of Ukraine. I'm curious how certain you are that these, I'm curious how certain you are that these individuals are not connected to the Ukrainian government. The reporter goes on, Julian Barnes, again, who I do not know. He says, this is the last line, well, the intelligence right now says they're not. And while officials are telling us that the president of Ukraine and his key advisors did not know, we can't be certain that's that true or somebody else did not know. Well, I'm telling you. I don't know. It could have been written by, I guess by Dave Powers. I mean, what? This is the standard. We talk to officials, not, you know, there you go. So that's what I'm up against on this story. And it doesn't matter that, and every reporter I meet asked me the first question, who are your sources? And why don't you name them? And why don't you do that? And my answer to that, I don't say it publicly. I don't say it to anybody. I don't say it to them. I'll just say it to you. Nobody's gone to jail for talking to me. Nobody's been outed in 50 years. That's why I don't do it. Because I don't think they don't understand in the community. I'm talking about the serious community, not just officials who get to with intelligence. So we really have a really scandalous mess here in a funny way because the, I don't know what's going on. I worked at the New York Times for seven or eight years, and I would say, I wrote an awful lot of stories, as you heard domestic spying and about all the chili and the yende. And I would say, if I wrote 1,000 stories in eight years, and that's not that many, or 800 stories, I would say that all but about five were cited with unnamed sources. How else can you get really good information from people that actually are in intelligence or actually do have access to intelligence or might even be players in intelligence? Who knows? And so I don't quite know what's going on. I think this is another bit of the phenomenon, Trump phenomenon, I really do. Because we've gone into a situation where if you like Fox News, you don't like CNN and MSNBC or the all. You can't get it. I can't imagine an hour's worth of television in which you don't actually learn everything night after night. You learn about the guy, there's some guy in Congress that doesn't pay, whatever, a liar. We learn about him for days and hours. We learn everything about whatever's going on with Trump and Jan 6th in both sides, whether you're for it or against it. But we don't ever get news anymore. And the newspapers cover what they want. They cover Biden. And I think we're, me, the reason I jumped on, I've been doing something else for a couple of years since COVID struck, some other project. One of those, it's sort of interesting to me, but it'll be interesting to nobody else about lying. I've discovered an awful lot that I didn't know about for 50 years about me lie. You're hard to think you can know so much about. You think you know so much about something. I would say when I wrote my me lie stuff and won all these prizes, I was at maybe 5% of what really was going on then in the war and what was going on inside the White House and in the government. I'm now getting the 50 and higher, but that's still way below what we need to know about how, what an institution we can be, even when you're doing an unjust war. And the trick for me is that the people I deal with, and I have, I do have people I deal with that are very interesting and have an awful lot of direct hands-on stuff, not like people who know people or people who are in the government. I do know that we are in a real crisis here with the leadership we have on foreign policy. They have really turned a lot of the world against us. From the day they got in, this is visceral sort of, I went back and looked at anti-communism. I just did, I do write for Sub-Sac, not because I couldn't publish it anywhere, but because I knew nothing about it. I live my own cocoon, but I'm friendly with the guy named Matt Taibi, whether you agree or disagree with him talking to Musk. He's developed in Sub-Sac a very interesting, and I will tell you that there's the basic thesis that the intelligence community did realize the incredible power they had to manipulate on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter particularly, and there's a lot more to come, and it's not pleasant. It's not pleasant that the government would, in its desperation, to prove that Russia was behind the 2016 election with the Hillary loss. I will tell you right now, I'm not in the business then, but I did look at it, and I do have friends, and I have friends that I haven't trusted for 40 years. There's not a shade, not a shred, we can argue it if you want, not a shred of real intelligence, and in fact, our NSA actually, warned some people early on, you're getting in real trouble with this. That'll come out one of these days. I don't like to write about NSA stuff, but they were picking up stuff. It's really a mess. That story is a mess, and what the White House, the Obama White House, I gave up on Obama after he lied so much about both the bin Laden raid and other issues, I sort of gave up on him. Not that he didn't do it, but everything else. He's just another guy running for president, I'm sorry. He was better, he was prettier, smarter, but he didn't change the world, as he could have, as we thought he might. He didn't change the paradigm, and one of the first things he did, and this story I'm writing tomorrow, comes off a long conversation with Richard Obi, who was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee for many years, and very powerful man in terms, very discreet and modest, but very important in terms of the intelligence community. He was on a small group that was involved in getting briefed. Very small group of people in the House and Senate actually had access to what they call the findings, what the CIA told them, and it's just very interesting. He had a lot, he quit after one term of Obama because, well, anyway, one of those people that 30 years in Congress, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, very little publicity, wasn't interested, just did his job right, and was an insider and was troubled. And so I don't know where we are. We've got these lunatics. I don't care whether they're, I'm sure they're high IQ and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Nula and I call them Lincoln and Nod, out of those stories that are just doing insane things. The number two guy in China ripped us off, just ripped away about three or four days, and nobody, it wasn't much in the paper. China's giving up us, we're pushing some buttons that we may not be able to stop, and we have, and we've moved, the whole Chinese move to Saudi Arabia. It's not just incidental. And the whole move with Iran, going, working with, it's just, we're putting ourselves in a real bind, and it's not being reported enough. And the papers aren't critical. They're just too worried about another wacko Republican getting, and as they should be, the bank stuff, you know, the Biden can talk all he wants, and he hasn't improved in the last couple of days. He hasn't improved confidence. And he's now up to, they acknowledge $113 billion going into Ukraine, and I'll tell you what my, and I do talk to people about this. I think what he's gonna want, the real kicker for him, and I'm just, this isn't, I'm not, I'm telling you about stuff I won't write because I'm not that much. I haven't followed it that closely, but I do ask about what Putin, you could, it's very easy, I mean, we're big haters. We always, we learned to hate in the World War II, and we've had, you know, we, everybody's on our hit list, Saddam, Bashar Assad, we had, we had most of the Russian leaders, certainly everybody and all of the Homeini, all the people and around are on our hit list. We always have that big hit list, and of course, and Putin's way up there, but I will tell you, I read his speeches carefully. He doesn't have cancer, all those stories you read about him dying, and he is very smart, and he knows his facts, and he spits them out, and he knows things, and he eats certain things, he allowed the ships to go because he was promised that 30% of them would carry grain to the poor in the world. I remember him saying it, the last statistic he gave out was about three months ago, something like 4% of the ships are actually carrying grain to the undeveloped world where they really need it. They're all going, they're all feeding the money people. I mean, he was even, you know, he wasn't conned on it because he accepted what would happen, and he certainly, you could always, you can never get off this snide for being the first leader to put us in the bloodiest war in Western Europe since World War II. You have to, I guess, Balkans come in there, but it wasn't as bad as what we have now, and certainly Chestnut was nothing like it, although it was a lot of damage. My guess is, like any rational person, he's not, he is rational at a certain point, he's gonna want to, he doesn't, you know, he's gonna want Sousa and T is the word I'm hearing. It's the word in the community. He's gonna want Sousa and T for the dumb, the dumb-blast reasons. Crimea says you can't take it away, but the big deal is, he'll cut a deal with the government, and the deal is demilitarize, and it's gonna be a no-go for us. The deal is, I'll cut a deal, I'll stop. You know, he's got, he hasn't put his main force in yet, and it's just a question of how many people he can kill, and whether you believe the press or not, I think the coverage of the war has been astonishingly stupid and just awful, because we're not looking at it from any objective way in terms of what really is going on, and the people I talk to are some Europeans, most of the Americans all have many of spilled blood in the field, in themselves, but went on an intelligence business, and many are senior anyway. The bottom line is we just may be kidding ourselves about what's going on there and what the result's gonna be, and when he wants to call for demilitarization, which I think he will. That's just my guess. That's what the, there's some readings in the community, that's a way out. I don't know if we'll take it. You know, we've put the hundred, you know, we have the 82nd in there in Poland. We've put the 101st in there in Romania. We're talking about brigades. Now, we're not talking about battalions, we're talking about brigades. We've had ship after ship in the last couple of weeks, loaded with armaments coming in the European ports. It's all designed for sure. I'm sure the president would ever be asked about it, but then the questions in the White House press conference are just off the wall, not useless. I'm sure that you would hear that there is concern not about our military leadership, which is as usual. You know, the last one we had with the brain was Dempsey, the other two guys since then, I'm just, you know, sort of what they are, caricatures, and Norm Dempsey, who retired in 19 with 2015. And you ought to look at a retirement ceremony. He was an Army general, always interesting to me. He was one of the few given permission after what's going, getting out of West Point to get a two-year graduate degree in fine arts. He studied, he was interested in poetry and basically, and also fanatic about Irish music. And he went to Duke, got a two-year master's degree, and then became a combat guy, got made a division. But when he retired in August of the 215, the last day, four years as chief, and everybody's there, all the poobos, even Obama. And at the end, instead of giving the usual fight to the end, he sang an Irish ballad about, it's so sad to see you. And on cue, I don't know how he did it, is a good Catholic. He had a lot of children and a lot of grandchildren. His children let the kids go. And the last scene is, this was viewed on YouTube, maybe me and times, a couple of me and times. They all came running and jumped into his arms, which has never happened in a retirement ceremony before for a chairman of the joint chiefs. But we all missed that one. And he didn't go on a board, he went back to Duke as an honest, he had a chair in Duke on ethics and Irish poetry. And so, always interesting to me that what the press doesn't cover, something like that, so interesting, so different. And so, I don't know where we are. The press is, this kind of coverage that we just heard about, is just crazy. Which is crazy, you're talking about going on, you're talking about using C4, undersea, the blow up pipelines and that are covered by, they're covered, the pipelines are sealed, but they're protected by concrete, large barriers surrounding them because protecting them from the salt water, even though the Baltic Sea isn't nearly as salty as the Atlantic, much less, still the salt water and salinity over years. And so, they have to blow up a pipeline and they have to blow up the concrete first and also get to the pipeline and they have to do it quickly. And I will tell you the trick of an operation like that, despite all you read about all these singles and sign, it's few people, very few people, very, very few people. That's how you get away with doing it, very where you keep it down to the very minimum. And all these stories I read, I get them every day, guys talking about this ship and that ship and it's as if nobody understands, you do understand when the president went to Air Force One, went to Poland recently, he flew to Poland on his way to see Zolenski, Obama did just a couple of weeks ago. It was in, I read it either in the times of the post, that when the plane got into Polish territory, he turned off his IFF, his transponder, which made him invisible. So, then you have all these stories that people who are experts in open source intelligence called OSINT, you always have them every, they're very competent. Most of them are very, there's a purpose in them, but they're not seeing anything. They're reading signals, radio signals. And so, the way OSINT works is the first thing, the people that would run an operation, if assuming I'm right, there was an operation under Norway and as you probably, if you read any more of us, I wrote a story a couple of weeks later about how Norway was working in North Korea with us. Even before we declared war, North Korea began bombing, working and taking American seals in, who were hitting radar sites in the north, all before the war, all before the Gulf of Tonkin. If you remember, when the United States falsified a North Vietnamese PT boat attack on one of our destroyers, there were two signals. A guy manning the radar on a destroyer was windy day and they were running top secret off the record, CIA, covert ops against North Vietnam, trying to provoke North Vietnam to do something in 64. So, Johnson could do what he did, got a provocation and killed them and the bombed away and then got an authorization from Congress, two senators, Morrison Groening, saying no and nobody in the house saying no, giving them authority to put what came the 500 people, 500,000 people and kill what? Two or three million, we usually say Vietnamese, as if there's no distinction and 58,000 of our guys, plus who knows how many of me? I deal with a lot of vets, Vietnam vets and boy, that's a war by 06, 05 and 06. If you watch the footage of the war, the guys are pretty straight, I was in the army, you had to be straight, you had to be squared away. As I was a grud with a rifle in 50 man and this is in 61, 62, by 67, 68, nobody shaved, nobody's hair was long, nobody's wearing the right thing, no helmets, they're walking around, you can just see it. They knew this was just a question of living and getting through it, there's so much to say about all that because we did stupid things then and I think I'm worried that we're gonna start and do something else. I don't know what happens if it goes bad for the Ukrainians and you have all this manpower, they're exercising, 80 seconds even rotated troops back are already, they've been there so long. Hundred and firsts, there are a lot of weapons and arms are coming, I'm told that the game's gonna be that this is NATO, we're supporting NATO in offensive operations against the Russians, which isn't gonna fool the world or fool much of us, I hope. It's us fighting Russia and why we wanna do that. I don't think many of our generals have read history. The last three or four days of Stalingrad, the death and kill rate was 2,400 for the Russians every four hours and they didn't lose that battle. I mean, come on, we really wanna mix it up with those guys, I don't think so. We have an army that hasn't fought anywhere. I did it, well, documentary years ago about Grenada. It's a left riot. It's always a left riot when we, it seems like we're not prepared, but I don't know. Anyway, so I'm in a war with the Biden and I'll tell you what I wish the press would do at one of these news conference. I wish the press would say, hey guys, you know, four days after the September, the 26th last year, after the bombing, the, after the mines, they were mines. The mines went off and three of the four pipelines were destroyed. Four days later, there was a Sullivan, Jake Sullivan, who was Hillary's guy on email too and then worked for Strobe Talbot when Strobe was at Brookings and Strobe was the guy that convinced Biden, Obama, Clinton rather, more than anybody else to start adding more countries to NATO, squeeze the Russians. He was a big player in squeezing the Russians. Perfectly nice guy. I liked him, but his policy was just crazy. Anyway, the question asked, four days afterwards, Jake Sullivan at a news conference and took 11 minutes before somebody, one of the reporters asked him about the pipelines that had been blown up. And he said, well, the Swedes and the Danes are doing a study of it. Let's see the fall on that. And I think it was, that was the 2030th. And I think around the 16th or the 18th of the next month, November, they came out with a report that showed, damn it, there was an explosion and it was probably sabotage. That was their report. So here's the question asked the White House if you wanna be barred from getting any briefings or any access anymore. This is the question to ask. So, Ms. Press Secretary, or if you ever get Sullivan or Blinken or Newlin in your crosshairs say, so the president has the right to task, that's a formal word, the intelligence community to do an investigation. He can do it, the office of O and I, its director is this woman, Ms. Haynes, who just gave a speech about how we're gonna have to go to war with China. They show him who's top dog. I mean, just down the line, White House stuff. So I don't know how far you would go with the O and I, she's the head of intelligence there, the chief intelligence officer, testimony was really scary. All about China, I don't know. Have to close, we're worrying now, probably made in China, not more, not longer. But anyway, nothing good's gonna come out of what we're doing in China, just nothing. It's nothing, help somebody else. Anyway, the question is he could have asked them if he didn't think that was gonna be very good. The CIA has a great directorate of intelligence, most of you, some of you know, they have an operations division, they have a technical division, scientific divisions, and the intelligence, there's a lot of very bright people there and could have asked the intelligence to give a study. And if you're in the field, like some people were in Norway, there's a special group that deal with special operations, that special intelligence group, it used to be called the C group, they probably changed the name all the time. They're the guys that if you're in the field somewhere, they're monitoring everything around you, all the local phone calls to see if anybody's suspicious about what's going on. They're the hot shit guys in terms of protecting, the job is to protect people in the field. And if they see neighbors or people, they're operating, they're meeting, and they're meeting somewhere near Oslo, even though it's an inconvenient place, people live there and they see people coming, and who knows, you could get suspicious, although Norwegians don't seem to be very curious. They're probably, we probably put close to a billion dollars worth of electronic and military equipment there in the last year. They go 1,400 miles a month all the way to the Oskar Circle where they meet Russia, and we have a brand new synthetic aperture radar we've put there, which is very expensive, you can't, and it's monitoring a big Soviet missile base on the other side of the mountains in the Kola Peninsula. And we find missions over there. We've trained the, we've given the Norwegians some of our best patrol planes out of Boeing, sold five of them. Anyway, so ask them, why doesn't he wanna ask them? Why does anybody ask if he's done in a report? Well, he hasn't done a report. He hasn't asked them for anything because he knows the answer. I mean, I don't know what's in the water here in this town, but he did it. He did it. I'm telling you, he did it. And I'm not taking a flyer on this. I spent a lot of time on this. He did it. And did he know all the facts that were needed? Does he read the president's daily brief, PDP? I don't think many people think he do not. He does not. He's not the only president to. When Powell was chief of national security advisor to Reagan, it couldn't get Reagan. It's only a three page paper. And Bill Casey was head of the CIA then. On the three pages, there were one or two things that were important, he'd mark them in yellow and turn them over for the White House, for the president's copy. And he wasn't reading that. So, Powell, he is dead, yes. He would kill me if I wrote this. He used to go and read it to a tape recording and then play the tape for the guy. And he'd watch that. You got the president to see the PDP. I mean, that's at least for some time. No, don't shake your head. I'm not saying he happened all the time because Reagan had his moments, too, of lucidity. A lot of them, but not at the end. All right, there we go. So, I'll answer questions. This is my answer, I won't talk about sourcing because, so I was at a restaurant yesterday and somebody came up and said, who's the source? That's not gonna happen. So, go ahead, yeah. Go ahead, just speak. Was not destroyed, do you think the demolition charges still, there are presumably our demolition charges from the one pipeline that was not destroyed. Would not those obviously lead back to the perpetrators? If we went and did it, if we went and got the C4 or whatever it was. No, whoever may have them. Here's the problem. Secondarily, just briefly, so you may answer both questions. Well, let me just add to the first one first. You always plan for everything. For example, about Osint, they could have, if they wanted to, the people running this to take care of the Osint people, they could have had the Japanese fleet in 1941 coming down to Bomb Pearl Harbor. They could have done anything they wanted. They could have painted any scene for the people that monitor it, which is, it's hard for people in Osint to accept that, but they're part of the cover. And so, they would have thought, if you remember the story about, it was supposed to happen in June. He said, no, he bailed out. He was afraid he'd be named then. And they had three more months. And the problem they worried about was, it's low frequency. As you know, high frequency and water burns out. Low frequency is really like this. Like when kids, remember, knock, knock, knock, knock. That's what it is. And there's always a chance, there's so much traffic and so much low frequency noise of popping it. And also there was a worry about just being there that long and still being viable. I don't know what happened with one of it, but I assure you the people involved thought of every option, which in other words, there was nothing there that would be traceable. It was all standard stuff. They used the sonar devices they used were off the shelf, made by Raytheon. The one they dropped in the trigger, it was all off the shelf. They had to know what you're doing. And the miners involved, I'll tell you how many there were. Two. And it's from the mine command. And the mining command in the Navy is not a high-end command, but those guys are amazing. They're assigned to almost every task force around the world. As I wrote, they do good things. They clear harbors, they get rid of damage. You know, where the bombs took place was off an island in World War II that the Nazis controlled. And there was tremendous stuff on the bottom all over. That's one question. So I haven't asked anybody specifically your question, but I know they had a list of all the things could go wrong. So, and that would be it, leaving stuff there that would be traceable. And this is very briefly a follow-up to a question I asked at your last committee for the Republic event. I was a secondary 9-11 responder as a US customs agent, specifically sifting the rubble of World Trade Center 7, an anomaly which refutes the official narrative of 9-11. Tucker Carlson just appeared on the show, redacted, and he spoke about World Trade Center 7. I asked, why is it we can't talk about the way that building came down that it doesn't fit any official narrative? And I would ask you to please follow up on that. Thank you. Well, half to me, all I get is about 9-11 again. And the other half is about the DFK assassination. So, you know, it's just, I mean, I don't know where do you begin? So, building 7 is a big hot wire for a lot of people. I can't, you know, I'm happy with my little conspiracy now that I'm into. Wouldn't you, wouldn't you get, I just, there you go. I'll take it, I promise I'll read it. Excuse me, I promise I'll read it, I'll read all that stuff. I will tell you, no problem. I will tell you that this is you or he. Yes, sir. I will tell you that there is stuff, I'm gonna write about something. There is stuff that has not been released by the Reward Commission. And it's really scary what they, some of the stuff they've withheld. It's a great story. I'm not ready to write it yet. I'm too busy with this other one. I'm gonna stick with this one. I'm gonna stick with this one because the Biden game is to wait it out. I never say yes. Not only because there's down the road incredible, there is, I did a lot of reading about law. Law of the sea and there is no statute now that specifically deals with destruction of a pipeline. There's a lot of statutes going back to 1884 and there was a treaty we signed that was augmented in 1898. We signed it about if you inadvertently or inadvertently cut a telegraph line. And then there's a lot of stuff that was done after we started putting coaxial cables and all these, all the stuff we do, all the communications we now have, there's law about that. And there's a movement among some committee about our association committee to get some law written that's accepted on actually destroying a pipeline. But there's certainly an awful lot of law about responsibility for breaking something. So I think that's one issue. But you've got enough, you can grab me later. No, I don't. Bless me, are you kidding? I want more than blessing. I want police protection. Go ahead. Thank you, sir. John Gizzi, White House correspondent for Newsmax. And I want to say I read the dark side of Camelot as soon as it came out. And I'd love to know what happened to that closet full of suitcases of cash JFK collected from the ambassador to Ireland that spoke to you. But my question, more au courant is this. Talking to several people from Germany and in German politics and journalism, they've always been suspect of Chancellor Schultz, who has not even finished half his mandate at this point. He's pretty close. How much did Schultz know about the destruction and did people within his cabinet, were they given a heads up on it all? Well, this is not a first time I've been asked that question. There was a news column, here's one of the things that makes the White House's, the press corps is actually essence on this, but he ought to read transcripts of the White House press corps. They always thought off a jolly stuff about, one I read when Schultz was here, it was an amazing dog. He was here just the other week, as you know. It was an amazing dog and pony show. He flew in on a Thursday, I think, with no press corps. He's a chancellor with no German press corps with him, which is really interesting. I don't know what he does Thursday, Friday. I would gather he had a meeting, but the first official, no dinner for him. We're talking about the chancellor of Germany, no dinner for him. And on Saturday, they had a little thing with he and the president sat down before the press corps. They were invited in, and they both, from reading from notes, praised each other and, you know, loud like it was in the 15th century in England, loyalty to the crown, being Biden. And there's a lot of talk about that. And then when it was over, the press started yelling and the press secretary, you could hear, on the way I found this, it was on C-SPAN. You know, you go watch C-SPAN. Remember, people forget it's just goes and goes. And so after it was over, the reporters are trying to talk and the press secretary is screaming at him. No, he said, no, no questions. No, and they're shoving him out. And Biden's watching it, eventually he starts laughing. He enjoys it, which is okay, I don't blame him. It's not easy, it's very easy not to like the press corps. But not when you don't ask him about, what you're talking about is, let's make an assumption. Let's make an assumption, you're a bunch of guys in the community that know how to do things. And you really know how to do things. And you're competent and you don't make noise. You got a new CIA director, Burns, who probably took the job because, you know, CIA director, last time he was around, he was running, he was so bored, he was running one of the big foundations, which one was it, Carnegie, I think, right? And he was running, he must've been so bored going to cocktail parties. When he was a deputy secretary of state, he was a pretty nice, he was a very pleasant man. And then he went to Russia. And as you know, in his memoir, he said, do not expand NATO to the East, or you'll end up with a war. And we still keep on writing that Biden attacked without provocation, plenty of provocation. Not enough to justify what he did. You can't cross that line. You know, he started a war. But having said, there was a lot of provocation. And we did park missiles a couple of clicks away from the border in Poland that we called defensive, that everybody in the business knows overnight could be turned and could turn, just a couple of those bombs could turn Moscow into a pit that had that much power. So that we pushed the button on him pretty hard. It's still okay. So in the process of trying to stop him, the White House, I wrote about this in that first story. They had a meeting. They convened Jake Sullivan, a meeting of some of the wise people from the CIA, NSA, State Department, Treasury, JCS. And of course, and I actually deliberately use word of art language. The question was, we want options for the president to stop, to convince Putin not to do it. And the question was, the question actually was raised, was the question that the group came back with, do you want stuff that's reversible or irreversible? I thought about using that language. And I decided, however, they might as well know, and I also described where the meeting was. It was across the street from the White House in the EOB in a very special place. And so I didn't quite give the room number, but so I just wanted them to know I did know something and they do read that stuff, they know. And of course, it turned out they wanted stuff that was irreversible. Sanctions, who needs sanctions? Ask the Cubans about sanctions. Ask Russia about sanctions. You know, there was all this bragging in the days afterwards that the rubles down the one cent. Uh-uh, you know, he's surviving. And he's selling a lot of oil to other places. And not as much a bigger discount, initially there was, but he's still turning a pretty penny on his oil. Got a lot of gas too. And there's been, since Kennedy days, there's been an incredible chronic anxiety about Russia using its large volumes of gas and oil as a weapon, as a weaponization, to get main inroads with Germany, particularly and Western Europe, where there is no natural gas or oil. They depend on us. We've always had Western Europe's and Germany's, even Germany, you know, don't forget, Willie Brent came up with the great notion of us politic, which was simply a way of saying to the people in Europe that his soldiers have been murdering, raping, and mutilating and destroying for 10, 12 years, that I'm gonna be your buddy. I'm gonna be a big trading partner. Us politics gonna be, we're gonna be a fortress using Russian gas, cheap Russian. We're gonna build up our economy. We're gonna be great trading partners. We want in. It took the French a long time, but they did get in the NATO. And then East Germany got in the NATO with a commitment that we wouldn't expand NATO, but we know all that. So anyway, to get to your question, so the group that finally got together, the mission was, come up with something that could maybe make Putin back off. By this time, we're talking about the end of 2011. And he's already putting forces up. And by early 2012, I'm told that we saw the first signs of some medical vans, which always, you know, vans that return to operating rooms. And that's another big sign. So by January, they were able to say, we think we can do it. We think we can blow the mines. They knew what he wanted. I don't know how they knew. There's something that I don't know, but they quickly came after a lot of back and forth about sanctions and what else. The group finally came to, let's see if we can find a way to blow the mines, blow the pipelines, and put them back in the dark ages, presumably. The goal was to convince Putin that the cost of going in is high. It already shut down one of the pipelines, North Stream One, which had been running since 2011. And putting so much gas into Germany that the Germans were retailing some of it downstream, selling it downstream to other providers and making profits on it that the Russians just didn't bother them with. It was just minor stuff. But there was that much gas. The BASF is the largest chemical company in the world that right now, as we're talking to China about maybe moving some of their assets there, what he did with the bombing is he told Europe, he told Schultz too. Read whether you keep on putting money into Ukraine even though you're getting more and more skeptical. This is even by the fall of last year, more and more skeptical at the worst standoff, a very expensive standoff. And West Germany and Germany, they weren't as interested in the game as Biden was. I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket to ride. Historically, Jack Kennedy is a classic example. Presidents always did well politically in wars. And Kennedy used to talk about how the great presidents were Lincoln and FDR Roosevelt because they won the war. So we have all that history behind us. I don't know what, nobody knows what was in his mind, but I assume he does. And I think this is good politics for him. It's turning. If you ask the right question of Americans now it's $113 billion too much, more than 62% in the last poll I saw and said, yes, enough of this money. We've got other things to do with it. And ironically in the Vietnam War, it was always the Democrats and a few moderate Republicans actually were the leaders. Now the critics are reversed. The Democrats are dead on this one. They want this war and they want to push with China. And we've got, we do have a considerable body of Republicans who are against it, but they're not the majority. It's a very strange position. As you know, I always thought the Democratic Party was more anti-war, but they're into this one big time. They all do each other and saying terrible things about Russia, some of which are valid. On the other hand, Russia until this war was a big trading partner with Western Europe. Economy was booming, tourism was booming. They were really enjoying it. I went there four or five years ago to see somebody do some work, but I was struck by the willingness of the businessmen I was talking to. I was to piss all over Biden. There was no fear of talking about him, rather not Biden, but Putin. They were very, they didn't like Putin at all there, but the country was making money. Everything was going, we had McDonald's, we had a lot of them, and people would say America, they liked Americans. They liked our food, they liked our stuff. As the world does generally, you know, we don't, we go around the world and we're, we talk to people. We want to know, yeah, you know, tell me about your mom and you know, we do that. We don't treat, we have a history of being very open and friendly, which we are by nature than most of the Europeans anyway. So I think, but so to get back to your question, so they told the White House by mid-January of last year, we can do it, we think we can do it. They didn't know they could do it, but they know they had, there's a group of divers. I started writing about Panama City in Florida. It's the best diving, probably the best, one of the best diving schools, certainly in America, but in the world, they train really good divers. And the divers always like to say, we're not, the seals are swimmers who do a mission then go on television right away and talk about it and write books about it and fight each other to who's the first to get out with the story. I'm thinking about the killing of Bin Laden. And the divers from Panama City who were trained there just don't talk. Two were used to set forebounds, very small operation. And there was a decompression chamber for them. They didn't have to take a lot. They had to go down every 80, 90 feet and stop. They're breathing what, helium, oxygen, and nitrogen. And they had to go down slowly, but they could pop up fast. There was in the pickup ship, there was a Norwegian minesweeper. They had enough room to put a recovery chamber so they could pop up. You didn't have to be on station long. And they're not beeping, they're not seen by the ocean. Anyway, I go through that all the time because it's still a chronix. I hear it every day. So there I am with all this stuff. And so they tell the White House that this is, you have options and they're meeting with, and Biden in a meeting with Schultz in February, about three weeks after getting his information, says if Russia goes, we're gonna take out Nord Stream 2, the new one. The second pipeline had been built and it was completed by the end of 2021. And it was filled with gas, actually, 750 miles worth of it. It's that long of a pipeline. One straight shot from basically from Leningrad or St. Peter's work all the way down to a corner of, I read maps badly because I was in the Army and learned how to read maps. So that's why I read them badly, I guess, I don't know. I don't know which part of Germany, but it went straight to a dock in Germany. And it was sealed, Schultz had sealed it. So in front of Schultz, he says, I know how to stop it. And he's asked by, do you actually know how to do it? He said, I know what, and I will do it. He said, I don't know why nobody pays attention to that language. He actually laid out the charge. And I think when the bombs finally were run, when he finally authorized it, I think a lot, my guess is a lot of people involved, there weren't that many in the operation who really thought it was a crazy thing to do. Because at that point, he's telling Europe, I'm worried about you. The war is not going well. It's gonna cost a lot of money. Germany's always been hesitant to re-arm since World War II, obviously. They don't want to commit as much as he wants. He's putting up more. The money is going up, the pressure is growing because Congress is gonna give him a hard time now about the budget, spending all that money in Ukraine. So what he did is he cut off Schultz's opportunity. If he chose, we're talking about September, October, November. It turned out to be a mild winter, but nobody knew that. He's cutting off Schultz's ability to keep his people warm and his businesses prosperous. Because there's no question. It's getting worse every week. The indicators are the prices of, in France right now, a lot of the turbines that produce energy are gas run because natural gas is so cheap. In France now, the price of electricity is going up four and five times percent. Natural gas is up three to four times in Italy. It's hard to get a good reading in Germany because they subsidize 20 to 25% of the gas all during the winter. But they're running out of money and they don't have the reserves they had last year. So if it's a bad winter, it's gonna be a bad winter for Joe. He's gonna be in real political trouble. So look, why don't we do more questions? Why am I yapping so much? What time, is it midnight? What time is it? Midnight. What time is it? Bill Thomas, you mentioned Jake Sullivan's talking group. One person you quoted said, if we do this, it's an act of war. Is the United States trying to lure Russia into a direct confrontation? And you also mentioned that Biden doesn't seem to know what he's doing from one day to the next when he's talking about this. Who is running the show? Who is running Joe Biden? My mother was my old Jewish immigrant mother would say, they is me. Well, who knows? Who knows? I don't know who's running. I do know that a status of such, he could talk all the smack. He wants to know about how safe the banks are and they're still diving. He doesn't have enough standing to even convince, you know, even though this was a lot of cybercurrency stuff that always was suspect. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, ma'am. Well, about who knows? And I said, I don't know. I don't know what's going on in the White House. You speak up though, okay? Thank you. Why don't the Europeans and then the Germans see this as an act of war against them because we're de-industrializing Europe. And you mentioned BASIF, and BASIF having to go to China. I mean, everything's shut down there. They're just talking about it, but they're talking about moving stuff. You can't make a plan, an industrial plan, without knowing what your fuel base is gonna be and the cost. But if Europe is suffering so badly. Well, there's a lot more going on. I don't, I've got a man, not a man, I talk to a lot of people in Europe and particularly in Germany, want me to talk and they want me to go there and I don't talk to politicians. Right, but this is like an act of war against Europe. What? This is like an act of war against NATO. Well, that's not illogical. The lodge is gonna be, don't forget, even though I'm told this may be overbearing, over-drawn, but if it's a hot summer, you need energy to drive the air conditioners. And the French are gonna maybe put two nuclear sites back on. But I gotta tell you, somebody, where's some phone is on? It says so, just so because I can't hear over that. And so, the problem with that is we shut down nuclear reactors for a reason. So, and there's a lot of worry about putting them back online but they're gonna do it, put them back online. And they're already scrambling to try and produce some LNG facilities. They haven't yet to do it. But there is some scramble. LNG is more expensive. It's liquefied natural gas. And it's an actual process. And we, as you know, we sold a lot of LNG when the crisis, after the crisis began, the Europe had two and three times the price, of course. The difference between, we went to war with a guy, NATO went to war with a guy in Moscow who owns the industrial base of weapons. He can turn a factory on. If you remember the famous story about all the moms and grandmothers who went to work for Ford and turn out a ship a day when they were, they were, Roosevelt, he commandeered. He basically took over the assembly lines of the Ford and all those things. But we can't do that. If we wanna build more weapons, we gotta go to a weapons company, we gotta sign a contract, we gotta have all these lawyers work on it, all these conditions for returning. We don't have the capability. And so all these stories about shortfalls and mess in weapons that were in the paper were just crazy because he can turn the button on. And I don't know what to tell you. I don't know, I'm just, now I'm spreading gloom and I don't want to because there is no upside. As long as you don't have people that listen in the bureaucracy, I mean, you know who Nolan's husband is, David Kagan. And you know, this is one, the study of war is their site that every newspaper when he cites, it's a very conservative site. It's the least reliable site on what's going on in Ukraine because there's, you know, it's just not. Yeah, somehow, why am I doing this? Why isn't, where are you? Okay, you do this. So I thank you. I just wanna get your comments on this cover story from the intelligence agencies in America and maybe in Germany that you got four guys at a gal, maybe from the Odessa Diving Club, rent a yacht in Gdansk and then sail out into the most, I guess, surveilled part of the world undetected. How could, and so the New York Times and the Washington Post print this? That's what I was reading about earlier. Yeah, don't print anything about you and your theory? No, I'm not. What's going on? What's going on is they don't like what I'm writing. And so they're entitled not to like it. And particularly since I work there and particularly I'm pretty snarky about them. Although I must, a lot of good reporters, what I've said, even when I was at the Times it became, I saw who got promoted. I came away working seven, eight years just thinking if we got rid of 90% of the editors we'd be in such good shape. Because if you had two choice between a guy that's gonna yip at you and go at you and a guy that's gonna go along, they always pick the go along guy. I guess that happens in the corporate world too. I don't know. So that story, I know more about it than I can say. Okay, I know a lot more about it than I can say. I just can't talk about it. But it's, I sometimes think this president's lost his intelligence community. I mean, they're, why not stick it to him with this crazy story? I mean, that's, I'm just, I sometimes think that because it's so, it's such a bad story. You have to know something. You can't have a false, you can have a Ukrainian passport with a false ID. Try and rent a really 100 foot yacht. You have to be credentialed. You have to have a bank account. You can't come with two names that don't exist on a Ukraine passport. The diver has to be certified. The doctor that's on the board for the diver, there's a special group of divers that are qualified for underwater recovery. I'm serious. There are, you can't just put it and you have to have a crew that understands what's going on when you, everything wasn't, all of the basics weren't in that story to the point where if anybody asked anybody a question about it, there was something wrong with the story. And so why did a story so bad get out? I mean, that's what I think about. Yeah, well, is it midnight? I don't want to get out of here. What time is it? It's 8.30? What time is it? Okay, oh my God. This is, you know, I don't want to do this. Yes, I wanted to ask first, you know, George Washington said we need to stay out of Europe because it's just give us entangling alliances and get us in a mess. And John Quincy Adams repeated that we don't go abroad and monsters to destroy. You've described a huge mess in Europe, even though it's not perfect. I think we just aggravate and make it worse. The second is the framers stated when they were debating the constitution that a president who lied about or concealed information that was important to international affairs, it would be an impeachable offense. According to your narrative is what President Biden has concealed an impeachable offense. And the last is, I'm surprised there's not a single member of Congress here because they actually have power over impeachment and power of investigation. You suggested that President Biden could have tasked some unit in the executive branch to go investigate who blew up gas pipelines. But you've been reporting a long time and Congress used to have some real oversight. You remember something called Watergate and actually had stories they ran that were anonymous like deep throat for Woodward and Bernstein. Have any member of Congress contacted you and why do you think they're so indifferent to the information that you've reduced? Nothing, I don't want to misrepresent it. I pick up the phone at home and somebody did call me but I said I can't talk to you. They certainly tried to contact me, one member. But I'll just give you a scenario. Chuck Schumer, who votes plurality in the Senate takes the floor and says I demand my Democratic president come up and tell the truth about this. There's enough questions, just give me that scenario. Just give it to me, it's not there, it's not there. I thought, I once, for reasons having to do with something I was looking at involving banking overseas, there was a very interesting hearing in the House about five years ago with a couple of former DEA guys that had some, they were retired but they discovered something interesting. And it was Jim Jordan's committee, he was chairman of a subcommittee. And I went to the hearing, just sat in the back row and I actually was amazed because Jordan did something most people in Congress didn't do, he actually knew, he studied it. I thought, well, here's a smart guy. And so I wonder what's he doing playing around with Hunter Biden's thing? I can tell you as a reporter, I've had two times where I once with the major, the head of a major oil company whose son was doing something terrible. And I've learned the hard way, don't do that story because fathers will do things for their son. That's all, let somebody else do it. And so Joe Biden on that, he's got a horrible problem. The kids, you know, it's 650 page document that book, the Mac. And somebody sent me the, somebody actually paid to have it printed out every page and with annotated going footnotes for every allegation in it where the police said this and their crimes were reported. Amazing work done, cost must have taken a half a year. And I didn't want anything to do with it because fathers and sons, you know, and daughters and mothers and daughters, it's just not a story to go. So I was, I don't know, I know he's very caustic and he's very out there. He's also really smart unlike the other guys. And I would tell him if you want to be president, cool off and start getting into the mainstream, but I, you know, he doesn't want to hear me say that. Yeah, back there. So somebody hasn't, oh, he's got some. I'm not in charge, I'm sorry. No, I'm not in charge. He is. I'll give it to you after. No, you can't do what you guys, take it outside. Take it outside, come on, we'll hold your coats. Go ahead. Yeah, Sam Hussaini. So people may not, or some people may not be aware that you wrote a rather important book about biological and chemical warfare back in 1968. It may have helped lead to the U.S. eventually signing the Bioweapons Convention in 1972. And you also appear- Are you my brother-in-law? I wanna- You keep saying that to me. Yes. I asked you to help me find a publisher and you're like, what are you, my brother-in-law? Go ahead. What do you want, Sam? So I want you to weigh in on pandemic origins and gain a function of work. And you are also in Wormwood. I'm here- Which has a tie-in to- But you'll talk about a little bit about Building 7, but you won't talk about pandemic origins? I'm not talking about 7 and I'm not talking about pandemic. I'm here to talk about something else, Sam. I'm just here. It's not fair. Oh. It's not fair. That doesn't mean I don't have some information, maybe, but not enough to worry about. Okay. All right. I mean, I guess my concern that I have is how the independent and progressive media really sort of blew this story. And it's become owned by the right wing. Isn't that a big problem there? It's another question. I can't do this. And I'm not here to pour out everything I know, Sam. I'm not. Gareth, you're still- Sam, don't run away just because you don't like my answer. No, I was sitting up there and it was full on me. Yeah, Gary. Si, there's nobody in this country who is better qualified to give us an analysis of how the press in this country has changed over the years, over the decades. And presumably, I presume you think that it's gotten worse, although I'm not sure. But for sure we know that it was not doing precisely what it was supposed to be doing even in the 50s and 60s during the Cold War. And so I'd be interested in your analysis of how it's changed and why, if you can talk about that. I actually worked at the high end. I worked at New York Times and I worked at the New Yorker. And I was a kid. I learned about the war covering the war in 65 and 66 from the Pentagon. I learned about how bad the war was. But Gary, that's a hell of a question. We all can see how it's changed. I did sub-stack because Matt Taibi told me about it. I'm an innocent about stuff. And the response I had to that first story that was just flowing out was like a million hits in 20 hours, you know? And so the New York Times now, when I joined the New York Times, it had a circulation of 1.7 million a day. And you couldn't get an ad in there. It was so crowded you had to wait for display ads, mostly on a lot of display for how the world's changed. And now it's circulation, it's 320 or 330 print, and they just can't wait to get people like me gone. They don't like us anymore. They want it all going online. And it's become a moneymaker because it has 12, it does podcasts, it does a sports thing, it buys all this stuff. So it's not really, it's sort of like an entertainment. They still have very good reporters. I hate the coverage of the White House I always have because it's, when I was at the Times, I was a little star boy and I delivered a lot, I was doing Vietnam and they signed me to Watergate because Wilbur and Bernstein were killing the Times. And so I did a lot of work on it. My reward was in late 73, I was told, you could have the best job in America, the White House correspondent for the New York Times. Because that leads to a column and then to be executive editor or something like that, a poobah in the business. So I went there and Ron Siegel was the press secretary and I was there the first day, all the reporters did was yell at him. And the second day, and I said, what is this? And the second day, that's all they did was yell at him. And I told the editor, I can't do this. And he said, what do you mean? I said, I'm not doing this. I demand to be, put me on any desk you want or do something you want. And he said, you do not leave that job. I said, I quit. He said, okay, you can do what you want. So I went back, but I was gonna quit. So I have a horror about the White House press corps. I think they're so tied to the beat. I think the whole problem with the beat business is awful because you're tied to who you're reporting to. And you have to read some of the transcripts of the daily briefings now where they're getting nothing but problem. I say, oh, I'm not questioning the new, she's competent, she's perfectly competent. They're all competent. But their job is to produce problem and reduce everything to problem. And that's not challenged by anybody. After that meeting with that unbelievably shoddy, embarrassing meeting with Schultz, who went home, you know, slunk his way back. I hope they put him at least in the Blair House and not in a motel sick somewhere. But, you know, it was really unbelievable. It was so depressing to see this man coming like a lapdog and having five minutes in the sun. And then they put him on with, it doesn't matter with somebody who wasn't, they knew when I'd ask a tough question. He did have an interview with somebody and he was gone. And none of the reporters, when they got back after being kicked out, I read the transcript. There's a transcript you can find. Yeah, it is, it's not a transcript. You can pick up the conversation. You can, there's a place to get the daily briefing. It began with a lot of jokes about everybody in the first row was a woman. They went back and forth to that. Instead of coming out and saying, how dare you not talk to the chancellor? He was there when the president said, you know, nine months ago or a year ago. And nobody's even asked a question about the president, what the president said. And when Jake, Jake, whatever his name is, Sullivan, that little conference I mentioned four days after the bombing where he said, let the Norwegian Denmark do it. Nobody asked about what the president had said. We can do it and I will do it, he said. Nobody asked about it. And I guess that's because you lose points if you do. And that's where we're at with coverage right now. Wasn't that way? You know, there was, I don't know, I don't know. I know somebody, somebody very famous who was teaching at MIT in 1960 when Kennedy won the election in inauguration day. And here come the boys from Harvard, McGeorge Bundy and the whole gaggle. And when Swarney, when it was all over and Kennedy was the president, this person who's a very liberal person, and now the terror begins, he said. You've got the smart boys from Harvard there in the business and look what'll happen. Didn't take long. He went to see, he went with his field good doctor giving him a shot before he went to the, in Venice, he went to the Vienna summit with Khrushchev and he tried to talk dialectic with Khrushchev and got smashed. He didn't know what he was talking about because he got in a five minute course while he was high on a drug. I'm telling you, and the press doesn't write all, I wrote about that stuff and boy did I catch Alfred. You know, he took that doctor and the doctor was on the manifold of the White House One. The doctor that was shooting up everybody in New York would feel good stuff. You know, what was it? It was just the drugs that you get, not steroids, you get stimulated by. What's the category of the drugs? What is it? Yeah, amphetamines, you got it. You got amphetamines. Are we done? Don't we have a- I have a question here. Don't you guys have a life? Go back, yeah. When, no, I've got the mic, please. Yes, go ahead. A question with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainian war is tremendously draining on Russia. Now only in terms of manpower being lost, but material. Well, they're down 45 billion in their economy, yes. Right, so how much longer can they keep that up? Oh, are you kidding? Ask the Germans who were in the last week in Stalingrad. That was- He hasn't put the big boys in. He's still got the Wagner group going on one side. On the other side, he has a bunch of reservists, really, I mean, he weaned out those guys who were doctors and lawyers, but he's got a lot of reservists with minimal training on the other side. He has not put the, he's got 350,000 in reserve. But can he, how much longer can he keep going at this level and maintain sufficient support within Russia, particularly among the oligarchs? It's, you're missing the boat. The problem isn't the oligarch. It's the right wing. That's the real problem. In Russia. Every reporter's missing something. The real problem are the rightists. Okay, so- Listen to me. How was this gonna play out? I'm missing over something. I'm telling you, that's very important. Oh, fine. There's a lot of fear of, a lot of people keep their mouth shut about it because it's the rightists that want to keep going. So they keep, there's a lot of prominent people that want to say more, but there's a big right movement. He's got a problem with the rightists in Russia, the extreme rightists. So how might that play out then? Ah, not, you know, presumably not well. Thank you. Hi, Mr. Hirsch. Kelly Vlahos with the Responsible Statecraft at the Quincy Institute. I'm an early subscriber to your new sub-stack and thank you so much for it. I know you. You don't think I read you? Well, thank you very much. You've got that. You know, what's his name? The West Pointer. What's his name? Andy Bacevich. Andy Bacevich is the only person I've ever read from that war that has described in print the daytime bombing we did of Germany as one of the great war crimes of the year, of history. We were bombing civilians and we all know from the bombing survey that with each daytime raid, resistance to a surrender grew. The support for the war, support for the Hitler regime went up the more and more we bombed civilians. And so he actually wrote it in an article in a Marathon, wonderful magazine about five, six years ago. And I said to myself, wow. I had my wife's uncle was the darling of the family because he was a beautiful young man at 19. He went and did 44 missions, B-17s flying north of, I want to say the Midlands, but that was too far up of the base north of London in which he learned I got a really drunk one night and he wouldn't talk about it. All those guys, my father was in South Pacific for four years on a destroyer or a cruiser on a battleship. And once, years later, I asked him, so what did you do in the war? And he looked at me and he said, sort of male. So you have that attitude. And for Andy, go ahead, do us a question. That's you, do you want me to solo agree? Sorry. Andy is the best, I totally agree. I have a quick question. Can we expect any follow up to your North Stream sabotage story, whether it be a- For me? From you? No. Not at all. No. You seem to hint that in your- No, no, I wrote today about just what came up earlier. I wrote today about the visceral response America has to Russian gas and oil. And it's very interesting. You could find some interesting history about it. As somebody said to me, one of my friends, it could be a PDP, he said, was a great compliment, President Saley Brief, which I'm sure nobody in the White House reads anymore. They sort of know it. They don't pay attention to it. But no, because I said casually, but I meant it. I've never put anybody in jail. I've never done any damage. And in that story, the reason there was such a strange construct, if you read it carefully, I have nobody ever in a meeting talking to me. Because it's, as I'm saying here, it's a small group. Nobody in a meeting talking to me, which means I have to say, somebody who knows whatever construct I use, I use, I worked for years at the New Yorker and during Cheney Bush, I was obviously writing a lot of stuff from inside Cheney's Bush's office that drove a lot of people crazy. And I had a great time with both the ambassadors to France, Germany, and the Brits, because they weren't getting in. So they used to meet once every two weeks with the ambassadors. And I used to get up sometimes to a cold room because I was telling them stuff they couldn't report because Cheney wouldn't have anybody see any of the ambassadors who talked to them. So at that point, I will tell you that I learned a lot about how they watch and what could be said and what couldn't be said. And so I just can't, you know, and I actually, I was very resistant to coming, you know that, but I said I would, I would. You caught me at a gas station a month ago when I was, so I had 350 emails of an hour. And I said, I'll do what you want, but then another month. And it turned out I learned Friday, this was it, Tuesday. I yelled at him about it, but he won because I said I would. So it's just down to protecting people. You have to do, that's the priority. Even if it means I can't tell everything I know. Like somebody asked me about that crazy story that showed up with the yacht. And you know, if you asked me if I still think he had some of the people in the business with him, I'd say no, I think he's lost some of the people. That's a big loss. But I don't know that. I just sense he's lost some of it. There was, if you read that story carefully, there were a couple of people that said this is a war crime. And the last line said it was a great thing. We did it beautifully. The only flaw was the idea of doing the mission. He said that was, that was a quote, but that's a blind quote. He's not in a meeting, or she, not in a meeting. And so, but that was the attitude that he's, does he not know what he's gonna do with the Western Europe? We've always had Western Europe's back. The one thing we did, look at the terrible stuff we did in Italy, supporting the mafia and the Christian Democrats. You know, and yeah, the Christian Democrats over the Fanfanis, and look what we did in Greece. The worst thing in Greece, the political group that supported the Nazis resupported because they were anti-communists. I mean, just amazing what we did. But in Western Europe, we had the touch of gold. They all became strong economies, strong enough, successful enough that they could let Germany, hate is Germany in. I mean, can you imagine what the French thought about Germany? And you know how dumb we all are. And you go back to history, when Mao was running around in the Geneva Convention of two, I've done a lot of work on this. I'm just, I'm gonna use it for one reason or another, but here, I'll just tell you, there was a 1954 Geneva Convention that everybody writes off as a waste of time. But in the convention, it turned out that a very powerful American, not known to anybody, somebody had a good war, a lot of CIA credentials, made a trip there and convinced the Chinese to convince Ho Chi Minh, who had just driven the French out of being being fooled. They just marched the French out of North Vietnam, not to go south, because the Chinese never wanted us there. And at the same time, the Brits, who are with us theoretically, was already trading with China. So we, you know, you can answer how to, the last thing China wanted was us there on that peninsula. And I'll tell you something else about containment that always amuses me. Saigon fell in 75, what was it, what was it, May, June, what was it? I don't remember, I should remember. Gary, you can remember. Late May, late April. And so May, whatever, early. I know it was that time. So take a look what happened in Cambodia within a few weeks, the Khmer Rouge turned around. Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge. And Path of Leo took over, Path of Laos took over in Vention. So within a month, the whole notion of containing China and North Vietnam and whatever the end of the world in South Asia, we had to fight that fight. That's what the chief said all the time in Johnson. And every president said that. We had the three countries that we were looking at in Southeast Asia all fell. And then the question, somebody very smart said to me, and what happened? Long pause, nothing. And now the biggest trading partner China has is with us. I mean, a Vietnam has with us. What happened? Is it maybe that containment may have been a wrong pass to take as much as Stalin was a creep, which he was, and very paranoid, which he was. I don't know. It's just interesting to look at stuff differently. So I don't know where we are in history now. And I'm afraid that we're starting fights that we won't be able to finish. There's one more question here. This lady has been. No, go. Absolutely, let's go. You take it. Go ahead. Yes, ma'am. Hi, Esther Varen from On the Ground on Pacifica Radio. In all of your research and reporting and talking to people, did any of the people who were in on the planning of this ever consider the environmental impact, the environmental devastation from this act or if you want to give any of your own thoughts on that? You know, without due respect, I wasn't sharing beers with guys and kicking them around. I was on one issue only. I was one issue. I don't think, no, I don't think the environmental impact. I don't think there was a side study about the environmental impact. I don't think so. I just don't. I don't mean necessarily this one. And you're asking, the impact was enormous, you know, of all that gas bubbling up. Remember Danny Schechter from, Danny Schechter from what was the, what was the name of the, WBAI? Danny Schechter was on Pacifica a long time ago. So must be, I'm thinking about when would it be? I'm driving back with my wife and two kids, listening to, I'm crossing a bridge going to New York. I'm here in Cape Cod. I'm driving back to New York. I guess, was I working in New York? It would have been, I would have been early in the Vietnam War, maybe in the 66, 65, 64. And I go, I like Danny Schechter. And his news for that day, I knew what time it came out in the morning. And on WBAI in, in WBA in New York, right? In, yeah. And so Danny Schechter started off doing some stuff. And now for the news of the day from South Asia, South Vietnam, the war, American troops continued the rape, mutilate and kill today. And then he went on to the next subject. That was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. I always think about it. Pretty good way to say it. You know, I'm out of here. Okay. Thank you. Sorry. I got this. Okay. Thank you. Great job. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. Hello. I wanted you to ask me a question. I need to ask you a question.