Julian Dorey Podcast - #245 - Harvard Lawyer EXPOSES Most Disturbing 1960s & 70s Conspiracies | Danny Sheehan

Starting point is 00:00:00 Richard Nixon confronted him as the head of the 5412 Committee and said, look, January 59, you've overthrown Batista, you're in power now. We want to set up a deal that you just don't have any relations at all with Russia or China. Don't have any kind of diplomatic relations with them because this is the Monroe Doctrine. We're in charge of the whole Western Hemisphere. We're to have no foreign influences in here. You can have no foreign relations with these people. And Castro tells them to piss off. You know, he'll have relations with whoever he chooses. And Richard Nixon says, if you do that, you know, we're going to end up basically mounting covert operations against you,

Starting point is 00:00:34 which they did, and try to destabilize their government, burning their sugar fields, blowing up bridges. Now Nikita Khrushchev knows that he was lied to. And so by October of 1962, they've discovered that Russian missiles are being put up down in Cuba. It's an extraordinarily important point in history that we came within two minutes. The doomsday clock. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please take a second to hit that button and leave a five star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. You can also follow me on Instagram and on X by using the links in my description. Thank you. Danny, baby, how are we doing? I'm doing fine. I've been really excited to talk with you. A couple of my best friends had you

Starting point is 00:01:16 on the podcast or Danny Jones is one of my best friends. And then Jesse Michaels is a guy who's a new friend. Yeah. Both awesome episodes, by the way. And your career has spanned almost like a Forrest Gump type ability to get across every possible crazy nook and cranny secret story there is. It's truly amazing stuff. Well, it's been interesting on our end too. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever like sit back and think about like the ride you've been on or you still just so in the middle of it you can't? Just still in the middle of it. You know, you don't have time to – we don't even get to watch the news most of the time while we're making it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:54 So we just keep on going straight forward. Yeah. Now, one of the cases you were talking with me right before we were on camera about is the Karen Silkwood case. Yeah. Because apparently that's coming up on – The 50th anniversary of her murder on November 13th, 1974. So that ABC and a lot of the other major networks are gathering around asking questions about it because we know who murdered her.

Starting point is 00:02:19 We tried to get it put into the trial back in 1979. We won the $10.5 million judgment against the Kermagee Corporation, shut down the entire nuclear fuel reprocessing facility there. But they wouldn't do anything about who murdered her because it was going to unlock the secret that they were smuggling 98% pure bomb-grade plutonium out of the facility to go to Israel to make nuclear weapon for Israel and Iran, as it turns out, under the Shah. So the source of the nuclear materials for both those countries came out of the Kermagee facility. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:02:57 So – and what was Karen's role over there again? She was a health and safety organizer for the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. She was trying to organize a chapter of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers at the Kermagee Nuclear Facility, the reprocessing plant outside of Oklahoma City. And she was trying to organize everybody during the lunch hours and coffee breaks and stuff. So they assigned her to the midnight shift so that she was only there from midnight until eight o'clock in the morning so they could get rid of her. And so that since she was the only one running around in the plant, she kept going around to the offices, looking in the files, and she ended up finding a set of files that showed that they were missing

Starting point is 00:03:39 over 40 pounds of 98% pure bomb grade plutonium. And she got on the telephone and called the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers headquarters in Washington, D.C., and told them that she'd found these documents. And unfortunately, her phones were wiretapped by the security department. Of course they were. And they realized that she was revealing this. And the New York Times sent a reporter out, David Burnham, to get copies of the documents themselves, and she was murdered on her way to deliver the documents to him. And the documents were all taken out of the car, and we ended up doing the trial that resulted

Starting point is 00:04:18 from that, and caught the people who murdered her, and tried to get it put into evidence. But the court ruled that the count one of our complaint filed under the Federal Civil Rights Act for violating her rights to privacy because they contaminated her home. They broke into her home and put 400,000 disintegrations per minute of radioactive plutonium on the food in her refrigerator. Who's they? This is the security department of the Kerr-McGee Corporation. James Reading was the head guy for that. And he had previous to his being hired by the Kerr-McGee Corporation to be their chief of security, had headed up a special intelligence unit in the Oklahoma City Police Department,

Starting point is 00:05:01 which was like their red squad that was like, you know, surveilling local political people, ACLU people, you know, NAACP, you know, the National Organization for Women, all the kind of suspects. And he had headed up that group, and they hired him to be the chief of security for their nuclear reprocessing plant. And he hired that group group the same group that was in the unit the special intelligence unit he retained them to do the surveillance on so foot and so they're the ones that wiretapped her phone they're the ones that he gave lot number 29 to to contaminate her home and they're the ones that chased her down on the highway that night and rammed her car ran her into the concrete culvert killed her they tried to say at the beginning that that was just a car crash.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Yeah, right. Which obviously it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't. And then when did you, so that's like 1974? 74, November 13th, 74. Okay. So when did you learn about the case and get involved with it? Well, I saw the report. Shoemaker, ABC did a special bulletin about the fact that she'd been killed. It was so incredibly suspicious what had happened to her.

Starting point is 00:06:13 I saw the bulletin come in. I was out actually at Wounded Knee at the time. I was legal counsel for ACLU during the occupation earlier in 73. So I was out there doing a mop-up in 1974, and I saw the bulletin come in on the television. And I was with Russell Means and Dennis Banks and the guys, and I was saying, holy shit. I said, look, somebody's got their ass in a ringer on that one.

Starting point is 00:06:41 They're not going to get away with that. Little did I know that I was going to end up being the one that ran the case. So we got brought in very soon after that. The National Organization for Women had been organizing to try to get women to be much more active in the male-dominated unions. And Karen Silkwood had been a very active member of that oil, chemical, and atomic worker organizing operation. So when she ended up getting murdered and nobody was going to do anything about it, the local police weren't going to do anything about it, the FBI wouldn't do anything about it. So the National Organization for Women started a major campaign around the country to mobilize people to come forward. And they reached out to me. I was chief counsel at the United States Jesuit

Starting point is 00:07:25 headquarters in Washington, D.C. in their national policy office we had there, the social ministry office. And I had done a number of big trials by that time, so they knew about me. So they contacted me to see if I would be willing to run the investigation in the litigation, which I did. You were also still young at this point. As as far as like being an attorney who hadn't been around for like 40 years or something, but you're in the middle of all these insanely huge cases like this. Turned out, yeah. Well, what happened is in 1968 at Harvard Law School that I had co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Law Review, along with Mark

Starting point is 00:08:06 Green out of New York, and that I was in charge of soliciting cases from around the country from different people that had major constitutional questions that they might want us to work on from the law review. And so I ended up representing the NBC television journalists during the the April 1968 riots around the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. And the bottom line is we asserted for the first time the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources against a grand jury up in New Bedford that was trying to get at the the sources for the NBC television journalist, Pappas his name was.

Starting point is 00:08:47 And so we asserted the First Amendment right of the journalists to protect their confidential news sources, and it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. So I had a case that was in the United States Supreme Court, but I was only a second-year law student at Harvard at the time. So I ended up getting recruited by the number one corporate litigation law firm in the country down on Wall Street that represents NBC. So they brought me in to do that. Cahill, Gordon, Sonnet, Reindell, and all was the name of it. So that's Floyd Abrams' firm down there. And so I ended up being there to do the litigation on the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources.

Starting point is 00:09:27 So needless to say, that gave me a good standing with a lot of the investigative journalists right from the very beginning, but I also did the amicus briefs for ABC and CBS and for the New York Times and the Washington Post at the Supreme Court level. So I got to know Jim Goodell, who was general counsel for the New York Times. So when they got the Pentagon papers later that next year, I was the one that got the call from Jim Goodell. And he came over to our firm to see whether we would represent them to protect their right to publish the papers, because their law firm, Lord Day & Lord, threatened to turn them into the FBI if they didn't give the papers back. So I took the call from Jim Goodell. We agreed to do the Pentagon Papers case. We did that. I was one of the principal attorneys for the New York Times in that case. We won the case, got to publish all 47 volumes.

Starting point is 00:10:33 And then I got recruited by Attorney F. Lee Bailey, who was the number one criminal defense attorney in the country, when the Watergate burglary took place in June of 1972. And he recruited me to come over to their firm to work on the Watergate burglary case. And so I ended up running the investigation to find out, you know, why three Traficante gunmen were in the Watergate hotel as part of that burglary team. Santo Traficante. Santo Traficante. That's how I found out. So that's how I got involved in doing the field investigation.

Starting point is 00:11:09 And much to my surprise, it turned out that F. Lee Bailey turned out to be the attorney for Santos Traficante. Of course he did. So we were able to sit down and have that interview with Traficante who explained to us the entire thing about the Watergate burglary and what his connection was to the Kennedy assassination, that that was the key to the Watergate burglary. But anyway, that's a long story. Yeah, we'll come back to all this. I'm letting you go right now.

Starting point is 00:11:34 But anyway, that was how I got involved in all of those cases handful of cases that I did coming directly out of Harvard Law School, I realized that what was going on behind the scenes with our government was dramatically different than what they told us about. And so I ended up going back to Harvard to do a PhD in comparative social ethics, trying to ascertain what the kind of sources were for the normative principles that guided different people in making their ethical decisions. And that was where I got recruited for the Jesuit order, that one of my professors, Professor Roger Couture, who taught the course on the theological underpinnings of human rights, came to me and said, look, the Jesuits are looking for a general

Starting point is 00:12:26 council in their new national headquarters in Washington, D.C., in their public policy office, and they want to come and interview you. So I did and ended up taking a leave of absence from doing my Ph.D. work at Harvard. I'd already gotten my undergraduate degree from the college and studied with Henry Kissinger, foreign policy, studied economics with John Kenneth Galbraith and did sociology with David Reisman. All those folks were there at the time. Those were those kind of halcyon days. Yeah, I'll say. I said that, look, what I found out in my first two years out here doing these cases is that there's this whole criminal background going on of government activities. And I wanted to get an analysis of how to swim in that particular sea.

Starting point is 00:13:15 So that's why I ended up going back. I went over to have an interview with John Rawls, who is the head of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, to discuss this with him. And he's the one that suggested I come back and do the PhD on comparative social ethics. So that's where I was when I got recruited by the Jesuits. And that's where I was when I got contacted in right after President Carter got elected in November of 1976, when he came on board and demanded to be briefed in on the UFO issue. So that's your first introduction to UFOs in your law career. Yeah. Now, were you someone who as a kid thought about that stuff, thought about life beyond?

Starting point is 00:13:57 Sure, sure. Oh, yeah. No, there wasn't any doubt about it. And when I was like seven years old, when I first discovered what stars are, I said, wait a second, these are like suns for other whole planetary systems. I said, look at it. So you'd sit and look up into the stars at night and you'd say, look at that, all of those billions of planets going around all those stars. And just think of all those different people and beings that are there. And it started to become more and more bizarre to me how we acted toward each other down here. I started finding out about things when I got to be seven, eight, nine years old.

Starting point is 00:14:34 The war was going on in Korea. They had all these weird things happening all the time. And I kept saying, look, this doesn't make any sense why we would be acting like this in light of, you know, where we really are in the galaxy here. And so it all seemed rather strange to me. And so I decided that I was going to originally going to become an astronomer so I could figure out what was going on. And then I realized, wait a second, that's doing a lot of math and sitting looking at old, long, you know, photographs, you know, these time exposure photographs of stars. I didn't think that was fun. So I decided I was going to be an astronaut.

Starting point is 00:15:15 And that was prior to the launching of Sputnik and stuff. So, but I was going to be an astronaut. And I'd heard that they had just created this new United States Air Force Academy out in Colorado. And so I was going to go there and, and I had heard that they had just created this new United States Air Force Academy out in Colorado. And so I was going to go there, and that's what I planned to do. And so I ended up in New York State, where I grew up, way up in northern New York. I was one of the top nominees for the senatorial appointment to the Air Force Academy back in 1963. So what changed?

Starting point is 00:15:42 Well, when I was being interviewed by Jacob Javits, Senator Javits asked me why I wanted to be an astronaut. And I said, well, I want to be an astronaut because this is an extraordinary time in our whole human history. We're getting set to go out to the stars. We're going to get to meet all these extraordinary other civilizations. And he looked at me and said, you actually believe that there's other beings out there? And I said, well, sure.

Starting point is 00:16:04 I said, you're a United States senator. I said, you know that too. I said, you know believe that there's other beings out there? And I said, well, sure. I said, you're a United States senator. I said, you know that too. I said, you know, you've got to know that. And he was kind of totally flabbergasted that I said that to him. And he said, look, I need to be candid. I need to admit to you that I've already given the appointment, the senatorial appointment, to the son of my principal financial contributor. There you go. He said, look, this is the way this world really works, Danny.

Starting point is 00:16:27 He said, but I'll give you the nomination to the Naval Academy. I said, well, I'm not into boats. You're like, fuck that. I said, I'm not into boats. I'm into planes. He said, no, no. He said, you can become an astronaut from there. I said, no, look it.

Starting point is 00:16:40 He said, well, you just go down. You take the congressional appointment. You can get it from the local congressman. And he said, who's your congressman? I said, actually, I told him who it was. He said, oh, I know him. He said, I'll give him a call and have him get you that appointment. But it turns out that he gave the appointment to the son of the mayor of Glens Falls, who was number seven in our congressional district. And so I said to myself, wait a second, this isn't working right. You know, there's something wrong here with the way this stuff is functioning. I'd better go to law school. So I went to Harvard College instead

Starting point is 00:17:14 in Harvard Law School and decided that I would come out into the world and spend some time helping to kind of retune the government a little bit, you know, working as a lawyer. And then I realized that the government wasn't just a little bit out of tune. It was playing an entirely different song, you know, than we've been taught. And so I ended up sort of getting trapped, as it were, spending time trying to figure out how to solve this problem. So I've been at this now for 50 years,

Starting point is 00:17:46 and it's led to most recently my being retained to represent Lou Elizondo down in the Pentagon. Who we just had in here as well. So I know we'll get to him for sure and all the different things around disclosure. There's just so much on the bone to talk about, and you were on a roll there at the beginning going through the resume. I didn't want to stop you.

Starting point is 00:18:08 Those are just some of the early cases that I got involved in. But some of the early cases you got involved in were ground shakers. I mean, these were earthquakes of cases. And the first one you mentioned is the Pentagon Papers, which I feel like is something that sometimes gets a little lost in the recounting of history, but it involved Daniel Ellsberg, who just recently passed in the past couple years. And can you just go through exactly what happened there for people out there who are unfamiliar? Yeah. Well, what happened is, back up, and I studied about this at Harvard College, the history of it, that the French, back during the Imperial Age, when the United States in the 1890s had decided that it was going to become a world power,

Starting point is 00:18:54 they refer to this in high school history courses as the Age of American Imperialism. This is when we went out and took over the Hawaiian Islands and Guam and Philippines. We moved and took over huge sections of southwestern United States from Mexico. We ended up initiating the Spanish-American War against Cuba, et cetera. There was this whole era of the American Age of Imperialism. And during that period, various nation states were vying for, you know, colonies in different parts of the world to develop their economic resources. And France actually sent a gunboat into Vietnam and came into the harbor in what later became Saigon and ended up, their French sailors got off the boat and went into town and they were milling around and ended up getting in a fight in the marketplace and fired upon the people there. And they went out and got in the boat and the ship and fired on the town and took it and didn't know what to do with it.

Starting point is 00:19:56 And so they ended up deciding France was going to keep this Indochina, this colony there. And they stayed there trying to figure out how to make an economic go of it. You know, rubber trees and different pineapple plants, everything they were trying to figure out what to do. And then when the second world war came, the Japanese swept in and took it over. And at the end of World War II, when the Japanese were being pushed out of there, the French wanted to have the United States support them in going back in, in reasserting their colonial power in Indochina. And the United States ended up eventually doing that. And so until 1954. And in 1954, the people in Vietnam had risen up against the French colonialists

Starting point is 00:20:49 and basically mounted a war against them and drove them out and surrounded them at Dien Bien Phu back in 1954. General Giap, you know, disassembled all the artillery and carried it on back all the way up the mountains and surrounded the Dien Bien Phu, and then rained down death on the French troops there, and then had them surrender. They set up a treaty in 1954 in Geneva to agree to allow the French to withdraw below a certain line, the 42nd parallel, with the understanding that they would then remove all their troops. In the United States, under the Eisenhower-Nixon administration

Starting point is 00:21:31 at the time, thought that that was a bad idea, that we ought to maintain Western influence in Indochina. And so that we moved in and set up a complete public, a under Ngo Dinh Diem, took him out of Columbia University as a graduate student actually. This is the CIA doing this? This is the CIA. Yeah, and that they brought in Ngo Dinh Diem, they installed him and said, oh, there's a South Vietnamese Democratic Republic here, which had never existed. He's wearing an I love new york shirt that's right

Starting point is 00:22:05 right new york yankees baseball cap you know and so so they ended up uh starting to provide massive military funding to him and political support and uh and also covert operations of the cia being able to identify uh city local citizen groups who didn't support this endeavor, and that they were being kidnapped and tortured and disappeared by a secret political police force in South Vietnam, which was all supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. And then one administration after another. It started out with the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, then it went to the Kennedy administration, you know, then it went to the Johnson administration, and all the way to the Nixon administration.

Starting point is 00:22:50 All of those administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike, were just lying to the American public, trying to pretend that there was this budding democracy that was attempting to flourish in the southern tip of Vietnam. You know, it was total horseshit, and it was just a total fascist regime there trying to take over. And so all of a sudden, the Johnson administration fabricated, completely fabricated a story that our United States warships innocently patrolling the international waters around Vietnam were fired upon by Vietnamese naval forces, you know, at the Bay of Tonkin.

Starting point is 00:23:32 And it was an absolute fabrication. And then on the basis of that, ordered 500,000 United States military troops into Vietnam. And the Vietnam War was on in earnest. We were all going into college in 1963. I was one of the senior class of the baby boomers. We came out, and I ended up, because I didn't get to go to the Air Force Academy, you had to spend two years in military service at that time. It's a little strange for all of our men and women now that don't realize.

Starting point is 00:24:08 You come out of high school and immediately you were raw meat to be sent into wherever they wanted you to go. And in that particular case, it was Southeast Asia. Bottom line is I studied about it at Harvard College and came to understand all the details of how that thing came to pass and what was going on there. In the 60s. In the 60s, that's right. So I did part of my junior essay on Vietnam and ended up becoming the chief research assistant for Professor Jerome Cohen, who was the head of the International Law Department at Harvard, writing a major book against the war in Vietnam. So I knew all about this. And so when I came out of law school and ended up finding myself being one of the legal counsel for the New York Times

Starting point is 00:24:54 to get to publish all 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, I was one of the few people alive that actually read them. And so we were having to make determinations as to what portions were going to be published in what order in the New York Times so that we were involved in that at our law office. And who was Ellsberg again? Like, what was his role? Dan was actually a gung-ho Vietnam military advisor in the United States Marine Corps.

Starting point is 00:25:23 And then he had gotten secluded to the Rand Corporation, the Rand Corporation down in, was it, where are they? Down on the beach down there, down in L.A. Anyway, Malibu, their base down there. And so he became- Nice location. Yeah, right, good territory. So he ended up being a consultant for them, and he helped work on the Pentagon Papers,

Starting point is 00:25:48 drafting them all up, doing a deep, dark review of the history of the Vietnam War and what was really going on. And he became totally disenchanted with the cause, and he realized that more and more tens of thousands of people were going to be dying on both sides of this. And so he ended up deciding he was going to Xerox a whole set of all 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers that were top secret classified papers. And he brought them to the New York Times, to Neil Sheehan, actually. He relation no relation but uh brought him to him and then uh they they brought them to lord day and lord their law firm to get their agreement that

Starting point is 00:26:31 they would protect them in publishing them and lord day and lord threatened to turn them into the fbi actually if they didn't turn the documents back over immediately so jim goodell called me uh at the cahill firm where i was because I mentioned I'd known him from doing the briefs for the New York Times and the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources case. So the bottom line is we agreed to represent him. I was in the meeting with Jim Goodell and Floyd Abrams and myself and Eugene Scheinman. We sat in Floyd Abrams' office and Jim Goodell pulled the chair and started telling us what they had in the gym asked what what we

Starting point is 00:27:10 should do with these papers and I said publish them yeah you know I said the only I said the only decision you need to decide is the size of the font on the front page and he said well what's going to happen he said I said oh, given Mitchell, Meathead Mitchell, who's the attorney general, who's a fucking bond lawyer, I said, who thinks the Constitution is a ship that sits in the harbor in Boston? I said, he'll probably try to threaten you and punch Sulzberger and the rest of the folks on the board of editors. And he said, with what? What would they charge us with? And I said, well, if we're lucky, espionage. And he said, lucky? Espionage? I said, yeah, yeah. I said, USV Gorin. There's an old case, USV Gorin. In order to

Starting point is 00:27:56 prosecute you for espionage, they have to prove scienter, have to prove an evil intent that you're actually intending to damage the national security of the United States. They're never going to be able to establish that. So I said, let's print these things. And Floyd Abrams, the partner, kept saying, wait a second, wait a second. This is just a first-year associate here. He's just brand new. This isn't the opinion of the firm, you know.

Starting point is 00:28:17 But Jim Goodell was very happy with the proposal. So we went forward and started publishing. It went for 13 days from start to finish. We published for three days. And then I get a telephone call from Whitney North Seymour, who was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He calls me on the phone. He says, hello, Mr. Sheehan? I said, yes.

Starting point is 00:28:38 He says, this is Whitney North Seymour. And I said, Whitney North Seymour. Whitney North Seymour. He said, am I supposed to know who you are? It'll come to me. He said, I'm the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. I said, oh, right, right, right North Seymour. Whitney North Seymour. He said, am I supposed to know who you are? It'll come to me. He said, I'm the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. I said, oh, right, right, right, right, right. And he said, look, he said, I'm calling you up.

Starting point is 00:28:51 He said, because, you know, I'm calling you as a courtesy to ask you to advise your client to stop publishing these papers. And I said, well, thank you very much. I said, you know, but I'm not going to do that. He said, well, but you're obliged to tell them that this is an offer to avoid litigation. I said, I don't care. I said, that's what we do over here. We do litigation. That's what the Cahill firm is, you know.

Starting point is 00:29:16 And he said, well, it's a matter of courtesy. I'm trying to ask you to ask them to stop publishing voluntarily. I said, no, I'm not going to do that. He said, but you're obliged to do that. I said, no, I'm not. I said, so don't kid me. And he said, well, then I need to instruct you that we're going to be going over to Judge Marie Gerfind tomorrow at one o'clock in the afternoon and to be seeking a temporary restraining order against the New York Times if you don't voluntarily agree to cease publishing. And I said, you're talking about a prior restraint.

Starting point is 00:29:47 A prior restraint against the New York Times? He said, well, I'm not here to quibble with you about language. In English with that. What do you mean? It's a violation of the First Amendment. It's a flat-out prohibition, you know, under the First Amendment. And so I said, well, you're talking about a prior restraint against the New York Times in order to prohibit us from publishing something. And he said, I'm just not going to argue with you about semantics. He

Starting point is 00:30:08 said, I'm just, as a courtesy, I'm letting you know we're going to be going there. And I said, well, you know, I said, we're awfully busy over here right now, as you might imagine. I said, you know, we've got a lot of things to do here, you know. I said, so I'll let Floyd know, you know, that you're going to be there. And I don't know whether we'll be there or not. So then he hung up on me. I was going to say, I felt like you were going to hang up on him. Thanks. See you.

Starting point is 00:30:31 No. So the bottom line is I wouldn't tell Floyd. And so we end up going over to Marie Gerfein's chambers the next day. And we're in chambers. And he's all robed up in chambers. And so we're sitting there. And the Wooden North Seymour is there. And Floyd is there.

Starting point is 00:30:46 Floyd Abrams, myself, Gene Scheinman. We had – actually, we had Larry McKay there, who was the senior partner at Cahill. And we also had the First Amendment constitutional law guy, Alex Bickle, from Yale Law School, who was Floyd Abrams' con law professor. So we had him in there because we were doing the briefs on the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources. A Harvard man letting himself be seen with a Yale man? Well, I wasn't being seen.

Starting point is 00:31:19 It was kind of private. Okay. So the bottom line is that we were all there in chambers. And so we come in, and I said, okay, so look, I said, it's your motion. I said, you're the ones that are here with a motion to get a prior restraint against the New York Times. So what's your argument? So Whitney North Seymour says, well, Your Honor, he said, there's information in these papers that if it were publicly revealed, would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. So I said, like what? And he said, well, I can't tell you. I can't tell you because it's classified. And I said, well, you

Starting point is 00:31:57 know, if you're here to try to get a motion to get an injunction against the New York Times predicated on that assertion, you know, you have to be able to provide some evidence to it. So Judge Griffin says, well, what about me? He said, if you're going to ask me to get an injunction against the New York Times, you ought to at least share the information with me. And the Attorney General says, no, I'm sorry, Your Honor, we can't share it with you either because you don't have the adequate security clearances. So I said, good, are we done here?

Starting point is 00:32:24 You've got the burden of proof here. You aren't going to offer any evidence whatsoever to support your assertion. And I said, moreover, let me make it clear that even if your assertion is true, the court doesn't have any jurisdiction to enter an injunction against the New York Times. And the judge looked at me and said, what? He said, we don't have any jurisdiction. I said, there's no law. Well, what's the statutory authority?

Starting point is 00:32:47 Where's your jurisdictional authority? You know, you're arguing as the Justice Department to the court that they have jurisdictional authority to enter this order against us. And he said, well, it's kind of like an inherent authority that the government of the United States must have the authority to be able to stop the publication of top secret classified documents. And I said, no, no. I said, and you know why you have no statutory authority? And he said, why? I said, First Amendment. He says, you know, the Constitution, you got to understand the Constitution, the First Amendment of the Constitution doesn't just say, oh, the government of the United States can't violate your First Amendment rights. What it says is the United States government, as constituted by this document, has no authority whatsoever to interfere in the exercise of free press.

Starting point is 00:33:36 So the government, the very government that you're soliciting here, the court, it doesn't have any authority to do that, you know? And the judge said, well, I don't know about that. He said, and I said, well, we do. We do. It's the New York Times. And he said, well, look, he said, let me ask this. He said, since Wooden or Seymour isn't going to be providing counsel here to the court, Mr. Abrams, he said, I'm assuming that your firm is in possession of a set of these 47 volumes. I said, excuse me, Your Honor. I said,

Starting point is 00:34:06 you can assume anything you want. I said, but we're not acknowledging that we have a copy of these files at all. Never seen it in my life. And he said, yes, Mr. Sheehan. He said, but Mr. Abrams, what I want to do is I want to ask as a courtesy to the court, would you please provide a copy of these 47 volumes to the court so that I and my law clerks, untutored by Mr. Seymour, can at least look through the papers, and unless there's anything in there that strikes us as clearly irrevocably damaging the national security of the United States, then I would not have any authority to really impose an injunction. And I said, absolutely not. I said, we're not going to.

Starting point is 00:34:49 And Floyd Abrams said, excuse me. He said, yes, as a courtesy to the court, we'll do that. I was totally flabbergasted that he was going to do that because they didn't have a leg to stand on. They didn't have a single piece of information or evidence to support their case. But Floyd said he would agree to do that. And so then Judge Marie Griffine says, you know, okay, in further spirit of cooperation, he said, could you please voluntarily agree to stop publishing the papers while my law clerks and I have a chance to review these? It'll only be a matter of a few days. I said, absolutely not. I said, that's not going to happen. We're not going

Starting point is 00:35:23 to do that. And here I am, first year, just coming into the firm. I'm here saying this, and here's Floyd going, well, I, you know. And so the judge said, well, then in any case, I'm going to enter an injunction against the New York Times, prohibiting you from continuing to publish until I have an opportunity to review this with my clerks, right? So he ended up issuing the injunction. And in your opinion against the First Amendment. Totally, totally. So I said, well, we're going to be appealing immediately. And he said, well, look, it's only going to take a couple of days for me to go through this. He said,

Starting point is 00:36:00 if you just hold up on your appeal, just give me a couple of days. And so we back to the office, and we had to have the discussion as to whether we'd file an immediate appeal or we were going to let Murray Gerfein and his guys go looking into the documents for a couple days. But we knew that we had extraordinary pressure on him to have to do this as rapidly as possible because there had never been anything like this, an injunction against the New York Times prohibiting us from publishing something. So they decided that given the exigencies of the circumstances, we'd leave that pressure on him. So he buzzed through these things. Within two days, he calls back and invites us back over. We come back over, and he said, look, given the pressure of time, he said, and without any counsel from the government, we haven't been able to discern anything here in the documents that we think would irrevocably damage the national security of the United

Starting point is 00:36:47 States. So I'm lifting the injunction." And William N. Seymour says, Your Honor, we'd like to have you put a stay on that so we can go upstairs and potentially get a ruling from the Circuit Court of Appeals on this. And the judge said, No, I'm not going to reimpose this thing. He said, you can go try to get an injunction if you can. So he runs upstairs. We follow him upstairs. And he goes upstairs in the federal courthouse. And we're following him up the stairs. And we get up and they go into the chambers. And it was, who was it? It was the, who was it the judge

Starting point is 00:37:26 anyway the judge that was there they make the motion to have the injunction reinstated right and Kaplan his name was Judge Kaplan not Louis Kaplan yeah Louis Kaplan he's

Starting point is 00:37:40 oh my god he's still around so he says they go into Kaplan he says we'd like to have this injunction put back on. Kaplan, yeah, for sure it was. He says, you know, he said 25 years ago to the day, he said. I'll tell you, we can figure out who the judge was here because he said, 25 years ago to the day, I was asked by the government to issue an injunction. And I declined the injunction at that point. He said, and I've often wondered about whether that was the right thing to do. So I'm going to give this injunction.

Starting point is 00:38:19 I'm going to say he was talking about the Rosenberg case. Yeah. 53. Yeah. It was the Rosenberg case. Yeah, 53. Yeah, it was the Rosenberg case. And he refused to stay of execution against the Rosenbergs. And they were executed. They were allegedly Russian Soviet spies.

Starting point is 00:38:33 Yeah, yeah. And so the bottom line is we go, they didn't have a three-judge panel. It went right to the full panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. We were there in days, and we were arrayed out in front of all 13 judges of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. They had reserved seats in the federal courthouse just for federal judges from throughout the country, all flooded into Washington, D.C., to come into New York City to come to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and they brought their

Starting point is 00:39:05 law clerks with them. It looked like a reunion of our Harvard Law School classes. Not Yale. No, there were a couple of them in there. So we were sitting there, and so we made the argument, and they lifted the thing, and they allowed us to print all 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers. So we went from start to finish in 13 days, from the day they put the injunction on to getting the... And it's the only case in the entire history of the United States Supreme Court where, with only nine judges on the court, there are 10 written opinions in the Pentagon Papers case. There's the one per curiam, the one page that says, whatever the burden is that the United

Starting point is 00:39:45 States government might need to make, if any, to be able to get an injunction against the New York Times, they haven't met that test in this case. And so therefore, we're refusing the injunction. And then every single one of the other nine judges wrote a major opinion in that case, because it was one of the most important decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. When you were talking at the very beginning of our conversation, running through all these cases in sequence, and you mentioned that one of them also involved setting the precedent that the government cannot ask for confidential sources to be revealed.

Starting point is 00:40:30 Was that the Pentagon paper? No, no, no. This was Pappas. That was the Pappas case. It was decided under the case of USV Bransburg was the Supreme Court case that decided this. But we argued it on behalf of Paul Pappas, who was an NBC television journalist in New Bedford. And that case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. So that case was actually literally in front of the United States Supreme Court when this case came up, because that's why Alex Bickle was in the office. We were still consulting with him about the briefs that we were filing in that case. So when the Pentagon Papers case came in,

Starting point is 00:41:09 we did that case all in 13 days and then later decided the case that established the right of journalists to protect their sources. God, just as a quick aside, and then we'll come back to Pentagon Papers, but I hope I'm remembering the case right, but there was some sort of case in the late 2000s, I want to say 07, 08, it may have been the Plame Affair, where there was a journalist who kept on being held in jail for not revealing, it was a New York Times journalist for not revealing her source. Wouldn't that have been taken care of by the precedent of the secret of the Supreme Court ruling? It's interesting. It's interesting that it should have. What they did, however, is they passed a statute in New York at that particular time.

Starting point is 00:41:53 What they did is they put in a statute saying that the Justice Department, both in federal and state, before they can, in fact fact issue a subpoena to a journalist, what they have to do is they have to meet a certain burden. They have to prove that the information that they're seeking is of utmost importance, not just a normal investigative piece of information, that they've exhausted all other means of trying to secure this, etc., and that this person is in possession of the knowledge, the source that they've exhausted all other means of trying to secure this, etc., and that this person is in possession of the knowledge, the source that they have is in possession of the knowledge that is indispensable to the case. So they had established a statute that had this caveat in it

Starting point is 00:42:41 that allowed them to put the person in jail. And as you recall, they ended up releasing her because they realized that she wasn't going to tell. So, there didn't serve any purpose. It's crazy that they could put her in jail, though. Yes. Like, that's wild to me. Yeah, I don't know. That particular statue, it was interesting because Floyd Abrams was involved in that case, our partner. In fact, they did a television dramatic series about that case, and Floyd Abrams played the judge, actually, in that drama.

Starting point is 00:43:19 You know, talking about the kind of burden that the court was under to release the person, and that he played the judge who released her, saying that it was clear that she wasn't going to give up the source, and so there's no reason to continue to keep her in jail. Yeah, and you're talking about like with that kind of case or with the Pentagon Papers case where it's a national security issue, this is where the government actually gets involved in a litigious manner and is trying to block it. That's right. But on a day to day as well, I think about this often. It's the difficult dance you play with the intelligence community who's never incentivized to actually tell you the truth. Yeah. You know, a friend of mine, Joby Warwick, who's won a couple Pulitzers, he's been on the show a couple times. He has been a

Starting point is 00:44:04 national security reporter forever at the Washington Post. And he talks about this openly about how difficult this is. But literally, any time that he and his other guys are working on some sort of like pretty big story vis-a-vis, you know, national security, if you will, if you you will it happens every time they get a phone call from their contacts at cia or nsa or you name the agency that says all right you guys can't run this story because people are gonna die oh yeah and they never give proof no but then joe b's like the really difficult thing is every time we have to hang up the phone and go into the conference room and meet and try to play you know whack-a-mole guest game of like, are they actually telling the truth?

Starting point is 00:44:50 Or are they just trying to obfuscate so that we don't report this? And then you put it out there and you hope that they weren't telling the truth. Yeah. It's a tough dance. Well, it isn't really. You don't think so? Because it's bullshit. I mean, really.

Starting point is 00:45:05 I need to clip that to watch your piece. That's like the fraternity brother who's got a $500 bet that he can go to bed with ahead of Tridel. And then he tells her that he really loves her. He says, you know, no, I really do. She says, what about the bet you've got? Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean anything. These guys are just a lying sack of shit. I mean, that's their job.

Starting point is 00:45:30 What we're looking at here is a national security state, you know, this is a classic national security state, and we've all been tutored on it. You know, we know what it looked like in the Third Reich, we knew what it looked like under Berea and Stalin, you know, in Russia, you know, we know what it looked like under the Shah of Iran, we know what it looked like under Somoza, you know, under Noriega, we know what all looked like under the Shah of Iran. We know what it looked like under Somoza, you know, under Noriega. We know what all those. And the bizarre part of it is that half of them we support, you know, and the other half Russia supports, you know, or China. You know, and so they've all got the same game. And they're always trying to assert that some poor, helpless spy who happens to be over in their country, you know, doing exactly what we would execute someone for

Starting point is 00:46:05 doing here against us, you know, is in danger if you publish this story, which just happens to turn out to be mortifyingly embarrassing to us, you know, so it just isn't true, you know, and I know it isn't true. I would imagine a lot of the times it's not true. I just do wonder sometimes about the times it is, and maybe when it's not like just a spy or something like that, but there's actually, you know, there could be diplomats or things like that. But you're right, it goes to that whole, that 1% kind of theory of like, well, if there's a 1%, someone's going to die. You wouldn't want to do this, right? That's Dick Cheney's theory. Exactly. The 1% theory. The 1% doctrine. Yeah. If there's

Starting point is 00:46:46 a 1% chance, we have to just conduct ourselves. That's the absolute authoritarian masterpiece. Yeah. You know? If there's one chance in a million that you've got a nuclear bomb hidden in your basement, we have to go find it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:02 And you say, well, how about getting a warrant? We don't have time for a warrant. You know? We don't have time for a warrant you know yeah we don't have time for go to go any magistrate will give you a warrant you know no we don't have time we're going to come into your house right now and if we happen to find something else while we're looking for the nuclear bomb you know like yeah like a whole a whole ounce of marijuana in your dresser marijuana it just you're interested you just it just happens to be we're just going to bring that right in. You know, so there's no doubt about what is this going on. And so right from the very beginning, my constitutional law professor is Lawrence Tribe.

Starting point is 00:47:35 You know, and they say, you know, that right from the very beginning, you have to understand that the government of the United States, as constituted, is without authority to do those things. They don't have the authority to do it. They think that they're like kings and queens that are endowed with kind of sovereign authority that they get from the infinite and eternal, you know, that authorizes them to do whatever it is they think they need to do at any given point in time. But that just isn't true. The entire theory of our government is exactly 180 degrees the opposite of that. You know, if they run into trouble and not being able to, for example, secure their continued privileged access to the strategic raw materials of another country, you know, which they view to be of a national security interest themselves, you know, that's too bad.

Starting point is 00:48:25 You know, that we had made an agreement at the very beginning that they're going to have to forego some of those privileges, you know, of the sovereign. They're just not going to get to do it. They aren't going to just go into your house. They aren't going to get to, you know, tell you what to do. They aren't going to get to tell you what to think. They aren't going to get to tell you what to read. You know, even though they always want to.

Starting point is 00:48:43 Right. Always want to is part of the bureaucratic imperative of any national security state, you know, and so that's what you face all the time. And so all you have to do is say to them, prove it, you know, and they never will. And that's exactly what we're dealing with now. We're dealing with the whole UFO thing. Oh, we can't reveal to you the secrets, you know, because it would be catastrophic. You know, catastrophic disclosure. That's the big, you know, the trigger word now. We can't allow the information that we know about UFOs to be revealed to the public

Starting point is 00:49:15 because it would be catastrophic. And you say, like what? I'm sorry, we can't tell you because that's really national security, you know. And I say to them, you're making a big mistake here because i will find out dan she hands i said i will find out you know that's our job we've done that historically you've said that we can't find out we can find out you know we will you know what part of the problem is though like because we'll get into it today with some of the other cases as well as we go along here but But you have found out things, allegedly, of some of the wildest secrets that have happened in this country. And you shot it from the rooftops.

Starting point is 00:49:52 But there's so much noise around these events because that's what the people who don't want anything, anyone to know about it do. They create noise with it. That like your what may be truce in some case get lost in that noise and people continue on with their lives yeah you you do what you can do you know you you try to share with people that you we believe in the principles of the first amendment uh and that you know that the the cure for lying is telling the truth you know and you tell the truth when you have an opportunity to do so you try to make opportunities for you to do so, you know, that will fly all the way here into New Jersey and come on shows to talk to people and say, oh, look at, you know, that you need to listen. There's information that you don't know.

Starting point is 00:50:38 And now what's happened, of course, is we have like probably two entire generations younger than the boomers now who disbelieve almost everything that the government tells them. And I must say we've contributed to that particular state of mind considerably down through the 50 years that I've been working on these cases, because I think that's a healthier disposition than just believing blindly in what they say, because they have abused that so many times. And it's been demonstrated that they've abused this over and over again, that they lie to us, they lie to Congress. Congress knows they're lying to them, and they let them get away with it.

Starting point is 00:51:14 You know, we have examples. Don Frazier was the congressman from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't remember this. And he's sitting in a budget committee hearing in the House Appropriations Committee, and they're reviewing the CIA budget, and he says, what's this item here about miscellaneous interrogation equipment? And the CIA person says, well, that's like lamps know, like lamps and tables and chairs and stuff like this. And he says, well, what's this item here about thumb screws? Bingo. It was over. His whole political career was over.

Starting point is 00:51:55 Millions of dollars comes pouring in mysteriously into his congressional campaign in the next term, and he's ousted. You know? Frank Church, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, very next election, people are like, out he goes. Very next election, after he chaired the church committee, because all of a sudden, millions of dollars comes flowing into his campaign up in Idaho for the United States Senate seat, which he'd had two full terms with a 70% election. All of a sudden millions of dollars comes in publicizing the fact that he supports the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and that he supports

Starting point is 00:52:31 background checks on handguns. And so he was out. And we tracked that money that came out of the Nugent Hand Bank in Australia. It was money that was put in there from the Nugent Hand from the purchase of heroin in Southeast Asia by the Southeast Asian station chief, a CIA station chief, Theodore G. Shackley, the station chief in Saigon. You know, had a partnership with Vang Pao of the heroin smuggling. And a share of that money was put into the Nugent Hand Bank. That money came out of the Nugent Hand Bank, went through two South African banks, into the campaign against Senator Church up in Idaho. Same thing happened to Dick Clark in Iowa, Senator Dick Clark in Iowa, who opposed the covert operations of the CIA in Africa. All of a sudden, millions of dollars shows up in the campaign against him, and he loses his Senate seat.

Starting point is 00:53:25 Okay? I mean, people know this. This is as dark as you can imagine. The Central Intelligence Agency's operations directorate, the guy that ran that, handpicked, Theodore Shackley, the same guy who had the contract with the heroin smuggling in Southeast Asia, handpicked by George Bush, Sr. to be the director of covert operations worldwide for the Central Intelligence Agency under George Bush, when he was the director of the CIA under Gerald Ford. We know these things, you know, we tell people

Starting point is 00:53:56 these things. People don't pay a lot of attention to it because they're very busy. I mean, there are football games to be monitored, you know, and, you know, elections to be monitored and other things, getting and spending, laying waste their power. And these things go on under the radar. Our job is to try to make it public. And what we do is we think of different ways of communicating this to people, along with the evidence to prove that it's true so that if they're interested, they can watch. Now one of the challenges is that the public school system that we have trains people from the time you're in preschool, basically, to believe whatever the people in positions of

Starting point is 00:54:40 authority tell you. Yes. Here's your school teacher. You have to do whatever it is they say. They're here to help you. Here's Mr. Policeman, we're going to have him come in and give you a lecture about how he's going to help show you across the street to be safe. And you're supposed to respect, here's Mr. Fireman who's going to, blah, blah. And these people in positions of authority that you're supposed to believe what they say. Now, there was a whole period in time in our history

Starting point is 00:55:02 when we all thought, well, that's cool. We can depend upon these people. They're trustworthy people. You know, I was sort of the last full generation of kids who were raised to believe that. You know, and then all of a sudden they started drafting us by the tens of thousands, you know, to go into Southeast Asia to be, you know, assaulting people, you know, and killing women and children and stuff and and burying them with your chute, you know, things like that. And, you know, they used up their goodwill with us, and it became clear to us that the blind trust that we had placed in the government institutions was misplaced. And it turns out, lo and behold, you're taught that, at least subversively. You're taught, well, there's the Constitution, and you're not supposed to just

Starting point is 00:55:50 blindly believe your government. We're different than kings and queens. They don't have the right just to do whatever it is they want to do. Here's all your rights and all that. And so we have this opportunity here in the country still to lift up that element of our knowledge about free rights and independent liberties, et cetera. So our job is to try to help get people to understand that and to reify those things and to do it under duress, not just when it's comfortable or it's the cool thing to do, but to really resist the narrative of the government. And so that's why we have such strange bedfellows. We have people all across the political

Starting point is 00:56:34 spectrum now, from the right to the left, all the way across the political spectrum, who say, Sheehan will tell you the truth. And whether you're on the right or whether you're on the left, or you're in the middle of wishy-washy people, listen and he'll tell you what the story is. And then we'll also give you an analysis of what your options are. In light of this historical record, here's what we think it tells you, and here's what the options are you have. You don't want to jump out of a first story window or set your own hair on fire. You know, what you want to do is do something that is meaningful and not useless stuff. You know, just, you know, pick up a pick a sign and walk around in front of the White House, something all by yourself. You know, what you need to do is

Starting point is 00:57:19 organize, mobilize, educate people, you know, get people to respect the rights that they have and know that they should exercise those and be willing to take some flack, you know, be willing to get resistance from your family, you know, from your friends. You know, you've got to be willing to stand up for what you believe. And you need to be careful about not believing just any Tom, Dick and Harry, you know, that comes down the path. You know, do you get you get all these QAnon stuff and I mean, kind of really bizarro stuff, you know. about not believing just any Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes down the path. You get all these QAnon stuff and really bizarro stuff. Oh, they've got hundreds and hundreds of children under the streets of New York City being kept in tiger cages and tortured and extracting. I feel like that's an op. I feel like that's an op just to get people to not talk about these things

Starting point is 00:58:02 because it's like, oh, yeah, the crazy people were talking about that and then the things that might actually be really ignored. They love to raise up and identify bogus conspiracy theories so that they suggest that anything that's a conspiracy theory is untrue. And that's what they do. And we know that the operations director of the Central Intelligence Agency has an entire project that they call citizen diplomacy. And what they do is public diplomacy, and they actually engage in propaganda narratives that they plant in the newspapers and in media. Do you have examples of that?

Starting point is 00:58:40 Yeah, that, for example, the Bay of Tonkin resolution. Oh, we were attacked on the high seas, and here's all the stuff. That Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, and he's going to be – they're going to bomb the United States. That they, one time after another, that they just come up with these narratives. And the thing is that you have to push back against them. And the problem is that they're extremely sophisticated. What they've done is they've developed these techniques to engage allegedly in international warfare against allegedly the communists that are trying to take over the world. And so therefore they've developed all these skill sets, and what they do is they turn around and they deliver them against us, the citizens here. You've got Project Mockingbird.

Starting point is 00:59:31 They've got 42. We identified 42 specific national security reporters who all come from a national security background as a rule. They've all been in one of the agencies or another. And that's why they're there at the news media because they they've got good contacts with the people. But Danny, they would never do this today. They would never do this today. I'm glad they've stopped. We've never done this, besides we don't do this anymore, you know? So it's just a peculiar practice that I've developed over the years because of the happenstance of the early cases that I did that people tend to think of calling us, you know, and I've made sure to have an

Starting point is 01:00:11 institute that has got a standalone capacity that just gets, you know, $25 contributions from people across the country. This is the Romero Institute now. It was Christic to start with. But, of course, George Bush Sr. ordered the revocation of our 501c3 tax-exempt charter for the Christic Institute. Why would he do that? Because we're the ones that did the Iran-Contra case against them. Oh, you did? Tearing Act charges against Oliver North and all of the people working with him in the off-the-shelf enterprise. And Reagan and Bush kept insisting that there was no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that they were providing weapons to the Contras, you know, in violation of the Bole Amendment.

Starting point is 01:00:56 And we said, oh, really? Okay, we take a look at this. So what we did is we began to assemble all the information. We ended up having, you know, the tail numbers on the airplanes they. We ended up having the tail numbers on the airplanes they were flying. We had the serial numbers on the weapons. We had the code words that they would use to land. We had the landing strips where they were landing them. We had photographs of them unloading the weapons and stuff and loading the cocaine onto the same airplanes at Ilopongo. And we had gotten the photographs from the head of the DEA,

Starting point is 01:01:26 the Drug Enforcement Administration, right at Ilipango. We had these things completely dead to rights. And I had the whole memo, for example, with the place where they were bringing the cocaine in a particular shipment with this thing called the, this refrigerator to shrimp boats, they were bringing the cocaine in. We knew the house where shipment with this thing called the Refrigero de Puntarenas, this shrimp, refrigerated shrimp boats. They were bringing the cocaine in. We knew the house where they were delivering it. We had the address of the house. We had the unlisted telephone number of the house. We had the code words you used to call to be able to get access to the house. We knew that it was Gambino's daughter that was running the particular facility. You know, I go to the head of the DEA strike force in the

Starting point is 01:02:06 Drug Enforcement Administration of Washington, D.C., sit in the office with him with one of his best friends sitting right next to me, you know, as our additional source. And I push the memo across the desk to him, and he reads through the thing, and he pushes it back to me, and he said, look, Danny, you know what this is, and so do I. I plan to live to see my retirement. That's what this is about. That's how deep this stuff goes. I mean, the national security state views themselves as being authorized to terminate anyone who crosses them if they believe that it's a deep and dark enough secret that they want to keep secret. And they believe they're authorized to do that because they believe they've been authorized to terminate people outside of the country.

Starting point is 01:02:53 And once you do that, once you loose that beast, you know, that beast will come home to roost, historically, always. You know, and it's a tragic mistake that was made you know in the with the national security act of 1947 to to invest this uh airswile simple intelligence community you know with the authorization to engage in covert operations or what they call kinetic activities all right question there though because i i i agree that our three-letter agencies have gotten out of control i agree that we can point to the beginning of their history to see it happen right away it actually happened before they existed as well we'll get to that later as well so as far as

Starting point is 01:03:38 like shitting on the bad things they do we have to do that we've done that on the show we'll continue to do that aren't wouldn't if they didn't exist though and they didn't have to do that we've done that on this show we'll continue to do that aren't wouldn't if they didn't exist though and they didn't have the ability to do some level of covert operations wouldn't we be in an enormous disadvantage to the world that's also ruled by places that literally are dictatorships and things like that that have no rules well that that uh that you'll find that any of those that constitute any kind of a threat to us at all have been usually generated by us. You know, I mean, we're the ones that is, I mean, the fact that people now, right now, I'll guarantee you, you know, if there's 750,000 people listening to this particular broadcast, you know, that there probably aren't, you can count on one hand, probably the number of them that realize that our United States Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, in 1917, early 1918, actually mounted a foreign military expeditionary force to go into Russia to knock out the government of Russia, the Bolshevik

Starting point is 01:04:46 Revolution that overthrew Tsar Alexander, Tsar Nicholas II. Tsar Nicholas II was an out-and-out authoritarian, you know, royalist king in Russia who was an ally in World War I. And when the Bolshevik Revolution rose up in October of 1917 and overthrew him and established the Bolshevik government, the United States Secretary of Defense, excuse me, Secretary of State, mounted a foreign military expeditionary force and sent them into Russia to try to kill that administration in the cradle. Period. You know? How were they going to do that? This is like 1918. They're taking like a boat with Viking ships there? Full military expeditionary

Starting point is 01:05:32 force. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and the fact is that virtually nobody will tell you about that. Nobody will train you to know about that in high school. Nobody will train you in college. You can take all the history courses basically you want, but unless you specialize in Russian history, you'll never find that out. And so then you say, well, why did the Russian Bolshevik government adopt the attitude that it did toward the United States government right off the start? That's the answer to it. And when you say, okay, Robert Lansing, who's Robert Lansing? The Secretary of State under Wilson, right? Turns out he was the son-in-law of John W. Foster. John W. Foster was the grandfather of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles. John W. Foster was the guy that was in charge of the... He was the Secretary of State in 1893 when we invaded the Philippine Islands and started to instigate the Spanish-American War, the whole age of American imperialism.

Starting point is 01:06:31 That was John W. Foster, okay? And he's the father-in-law of Robert Lansing, who was the guy who sent the expeditionary force into Russia. It's nice of them to keep it in the family. And if you keep track of all of this, if you actually look at it historically, you start to discover, you know, what the background of this is. And you discover, for example, that in 1918, at the end of World War I,

Starting point is 01:06:59 right, the Versailles Treaty is set up, and it turns out that the two grandchildren of John W. Foster, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, both young lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell, are brought with their uncle, Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, brings them to the Versailles Treaty agreements in Paris. They draft into the Versailles Treaty the reparations requirements, imposing upon Germany a burden to repay the corporations for the damage they had inflicted on any of their corporate properties during the war, right? And since they didn't have the funds

Starting point is 01:07:37 to actually pay those reparations, what they did is Brown Brothers Harriman, the legal counsel for whom was Allen Dulles, they agreed to give loans to the German government to be able to pay the reparations in an exchange for which they took stock in their major war industries. The Krupp ball bearing factory, the IG Farben pharmaceutical and explosives companies, all those major industries. And then the investors in Brown Brothers Harriman actually invested money in their war industry, okay, to rebuild their war machine at the end of World War I. They're the ones that rebuilt the entire German juggernaut under Hitler. And the CEO of Brown Brothers Harriman, who had forwarded all these loans, the CEO of Brown Brothers Harriman is George Herbert Walker.

Starting point is 01:08:32 Oh, my God. You don't have to call him that, but it was close. George Herbert Walker is the CEO of Brown Brothers Harriman. His son-in-law is Prescott Bush. Yep, who becomes Hitler's financier. And what happens is George Herbert Walker steps out in 1924 from the CEO position at Brown Brothers Harriman, creates the Union Bank of New York, and it's all capitalized by investors from Brown Brothers Harriman, who are all the major robber barons,

Starting point is 01:09:05 you know, all those guys that owned, you know, the Carnegie and Rockefeller and in the Harriman, the rail lines, they own the agricultural lines, they own the steel mills, they owned all the, they have monopolized basically the top 15, 20 areas of the American economy. And they had all the funds. And what they did is they capitalized the Union Bank of New York. The Union Bank of New York sets up a subsidiary up in the Netherlands called the Bank of Shipping and Commerce. This guy, Fritz Theisen, runs the bank for them, and they finance the construction of the international headquarters of the Third Reich. Okay? And they set up the entire Third Reich to become the bulwark against Bolshevism

Starting point is 01:09:47 in Europe. That's their whole job. And they financed the whole rise of Hitler. In fact, in the meeting on January 3, 1933, when Adolf Hitler is made the Chancellor of Germany, sitting in the meeting is Allen Dulles, legal counsel for Brown Brothers Harriman, and insisting that he sign an agreement being willing to accept the burden of paying the reparations agreement, if he's going to be made the chancellor, to protect those loans that they have given to them. That he created. So there they are, okay? And so what I'm saying is that nobody's going to tell you that. Nobody's going to tell you that in high school civics, because it'll undermine your blind faith in the legitimacy of the activities of the United States

Starting point is 01:10:30 government, because they discover that the behind the scenes in the United States government is this elite, you know, less than 1%, you know, one-tenth of 1% of the population who own massive amounts of stocks and securities in the major corporations are the ones that are calling the shots on these things. Okay? And the problem is that when people start to find out a little bit about this, they throw up their hands in despair. They say, oh, this is absolutely atrocious. This is as bad as I've ever heard it is. You know, there's no use in voting. There's no use in trying to do anything. Let's just relax. You know, let as I've ever heard it is. There's no use in voting. There's no use in

Starting point is 01:11:05 trying to do anything. Let's just relax. Let's smoke some dope, get laid, listen to good music, dance and play, go to raves, and despair, basically. And you don't have to do that. You just have to pay more attention. It's a burden to have to figure this stuff out, to keep track of it. But there are people who will help you, like this, like your radio station, you heard this thing. You'll just keep people informed about things. And there's this great movement going on now with all the podcasts and stuff like that, where people can come on and tell you the details. We're not just throwing general smoke at you here. We're saying, here are particular names, times, places, dates. You can check these things out. And fortunately, still, may not be permanent, but still, access to the internet,

Starting point is 01:11:57 you can start looking up these facts and you can find these facts. Oh, you're saying that may not be permanent. Well, they're definitely working against it. You know, the internet is definitely not in the interests of the authoritarians, you know, that want to run the government. Unless they created it. Well, they did create it to some serious extent, and what it's done now is it's given them this extraordinary means by which to indoctrinate everybody, you know, and they can set up a whole censorship operation now, you know, and they pass Public Law 230, which, you know, exempts all the major platforms from legal liability, reliable and slander. But in Part B of Public Law 230, they've got this whole provision to say, okay, in light of the fact that we've given you this special exemption from liability under

Starting point is 01:12:49 libel and slander, here are the things that you are authorized to censor if you choose to. Number one, any child, they always love to lead with that one, because that's like, oh, they're going to kill spies if you reveal the secret. So number one is child pornography. Number two is pornography of any kind. Third is gratuitous violence. Number four is anything you as the platform owner decide personally you don't want to publish. Which is anything.

Starting point is 01:13:22 Is anything. And worse yet, number five is anything you feel like censoring, even if it is otherwise protected under the First Amendment. And this is section B of 230. That's section B of Public Law 230, and it says that precisely, because it's true, a private operation is not bound by the First Amendment restrictions. In fact, I did the case for the New York Times against the Jewish Defense League. What was this? Meir Kahane. Meir Kahane was head of this thing called the Jewish Defense League.

Starting point is 01:13:51 It was this hardcore right-wing Zionist, you know, fascist shithead, you know. And his lawyer was Roy Cohen, if that means anything to you. Oh, I know, yeah. And so Roy Cohen was their attorney. Nice guy. Cohen, if that means anything to you. Oh, I know, yeah. So Roy Cohen was their attorney, and they sent a full-page ad to the New York Times when I was at the Cahill firm still, representing the New York, because we took the account. We took the account of the New York Times when we did the Pentagon Papers for them, and Lord Day and Lord, you know, lost the account to us. So that the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane,

Starting point is 01:14:25 sends in this full-page ad pissing on, what's his head, Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein, who was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Oh, yeah. Because he had given a contribution to the Black Panther defense for the Panther 21. I was actually one of the attorneys for the Panther 21. I was actually one of the attorneys for the Panther 21. Is there any way, can we just go through the cases you weren't on in the 20th century? There weren't a lot of people that came off the Harvard Law Review as the founder of the Law Review who were willing to do any of those cases. So it looks better than it is. So the

Starting point is 01:15:03 bottom line is that Leonard Bernstein had given a contribution to the Panther 21 defense, you know, because the New York City police arrested the whole top 21 leaders of the Black Panther Party in 1970, 1971. And we're putting them on trial, 157 separate criminal charges, you know, planning to blow up the Statue of Liberty on the 4th of July, planning to bomb Macy's and Gimbel's on Thanksgiving Day, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think Tupac's mom was actually a part of those arrests. Joan Byrd. Joan Byrd. Yeah. You know, so the bottom line is that Leonard Bernstein had given a contribution to the Black Panther defense for the Panther 21.

Starting point is 01:15:45 And so the Meir Kahane, you know, took out a full-page ad pissing on him for that and accusing him of being anti-Semitic and blah, blah, blah. And the New York Times contacted us and said, look, they don't want to publish this. And we said, you don't have to publish it. You have a right to publish anything you want. You don't have to publish anything you don't want, period. And so Meir Kahane sued them, sued the New York Times. And so I ended up being the attorney for the New York Times in the lawsuit against Meir Kahane. ABC, or NBC radio interview where I pissed on Roy Cohen from a mighty high place, telling

Starting point is 01:16:28 everybody what a complete douchebag this guy was, you know, and I said, you don't know who this guy is sitting across the table, let me tell you about this guy, you know, and I just engaged in this kind of total ad hominem destruction of both of these guys. I'll bet he loved that. Yes. They were just kind of bleeding from the ears. They didn't quite, they didn't think anybody was going to violate the normal standards of decorum on a show like that, but I did. And so we get all done flattening them out, and I got a call from Floyd Abrams, the partner at the law firm, to come to see him at his home.

Starting point is 01:17:00 So I go to his home, and there's this huge celebration going on at his home. We're completely pissed on these guys. You know? And he takes me out into the kitchen and introduces me to Moshi Dayan. Oh, shit. Who's sitting there. Yeah, the Israeli. With a patch on the eye.

Starting point is 01:17:18 He's sitting in the kitchen, and they were all celebrating how we had completely pissed on Meir Kahane and these guys. Only that none of the Jewish attorneys wanted to do the case at the Cahill firm. But anyway, it was another one of those cases in the past that I got to do. But the bottom line, my point is, is that I had done the case in the Southern District of New York that established the constitutional principle that the New York Times, as a news outlet, has a right to make any decision it wants to make as to what it'll publish as a letter to the editor or not. They don't have to do that at all.

Starting point is 01:17:54 So the Part B of Section of Public Law 230 is completely unnecessary. That whole provision that says, oh, here in Part A, we've exonerated the platforms, the Internet platforms of any liability for libel or slander. But on the other hand, you know, here are the things that you can censor. That wasn't necessary at all because there was a whole case that established the independent right under the First Amendment to decide what you want to publish and what you don't want. So what they were clearly doing is they were pointing out to you what the areas are that you are to censor. Oh, I understand. What they've done now is they've moved in under that auspices and started telling them what it is they ought to censor. Like a wink-wink.

Starting point is 01:18:42 So what they've done now, you've seen the cases, the Missouri case and the other case now. The Missouri case? The one where the Facebook, Bobby Kennedy and the other people have pointed out that the administration, in this case the Biden administration, was contacting the websites and ordering them to shut down anybody who was asserting that somehow getting the, quote, vaccine didn't, in fact, keep you from contracting the disease. It didn't keep you from communicating the disease to others. they were trying to say, and anybody who wanted to raise a question about whether or not the COVID vaccine or the COVID virus started at the wet meat market, you know, and you wanted to assert

Starting point is 01:19:32 that it came from the Wunan factory, you know, anybody who said that, you wanted to cancel them. And so that was all a narrative that was being promulgated out of the administration, flat out, complete with Nancy Pelosi publicly stating that if you didn't censor these particular people, we're going to revoke your 230 immunity. I don't disagree with that. My only question is, did it actually go deeper than that? Do you think, like the politicians, they're paid mouthpieces, right? They're going to do what, basically where the money's flowing that says they're supposed to say X, Y, or Z, that's what they're going to say. Do you think some of that's coming from like the

Starting point is 01:20:11 quote unquote deep state? Well, no, it's coming, you don't have to go that deep. You look at the big pharma, I mean, the pharmaceutical corporations that own the vaccines, you know, and look at, you know, Fauci, you know, who owns the patent on the container that they put the little microchips into. You know, I mean, it's perfectly, you can figure these things out. You know, if you take the time to do, now, the advantage that I've got is that we've set up a 501c3 public interest law firm that has lawyers and has researchers and investigators and stuff like that. And the fact is that we have decided we want to make a profession of taking the time to look at these questions. And most people don't have the time. They don't take the time, actually.

Starting point is 01:20:58 They're doing other usually useless things, you know, watching football games and, you know, who's in the playoffs and baseball. And, you know, I mean, just, it's exciting and interesting adrenaline, you know, and all that, you know, but the bottom line is they don't have time, they think, to pay attention to some of these other things, unless, of course, it's in some sort of really entertaining platform. Yeah. Okay. And so that what we do is do that for people. And we say, look, here we are, we're going to do the digging in, we're going to point out these things to you. And it doesn't, it doesn't fall necessarily on the left or the right, you know, that there are different

Starting point is 01:21:34 positions that we take on different issues to reveal what the facts of these things are. And so that's why we get, we get support from people all across the political spectrum now, you know, and, and both sides, whenever they find out that somebody from the other side, And so that's why we get support from people all across the political spectrum now. And both sides, whenever they find out that somebody from the other side likes something that we said, they begin to get suspicious of us. So we get people that are suspicious of us from both extremes. But the fact of the matter is we've got people like Lou Elizondo on the one hand, championing us, and Carl Nell and others.

Starting point is 01:22:05 You know, Tim Burchette, you know, and Luna and all the other people in the Congress. And we've got people like, you know, Dan Ellsberg, you know, and, you know, Dick Gregory and Ben Spock, you know, and all the other people that are cheering for us on the other end of the spectrum. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to put you in a box other than constantly being a guy who is checking the authority of power, which is what, when you look at the law itself and what lawyers are supposed to do, unless you're a lawyer for the government, your job is to put the government's case to the test. So you are just doing that not only through the many cases you've literally argued in court all the way up to the supreme court but you're doing that also in public that's right for the court of public opinion that's right as as a litigator to say hey

Starting point is 01:22:54 let's look at this more and you know i i keep thinking about what you said two things you said first the the conversation you had with the senator who was telling you he was actually going to give- Jacob Javits. Yeah, he was going to give the commission to his biggest donor and you're like, oh, I understand how this works now. You're like 18 and you realize it's churning already like, oh, this is kind of fucked up. And then you get into, when you're at Harvard, you started there while still in school, researching while it's happening, while it's breaking out the whole Vietnam War and being able to get access to at least some of the

Starting point is 01:23:32 information we were somewhat able to get access to at that point, to already prove that there was some kind of like, you know, turd in the punch bowl here. Well, I had the additional advantage in having Henry Kissinger for foreign policy in Gov 182. And the very first day, he comes into the classroom and he says, gentlemen, he says, if there's anyone in this class who believes that we do not have the right as a nation state to lie, cheat, steal, and even kill for the advantage of our own nation state. You should not remain in this course. Yeah, that's true. And you're like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. No, no, no.

Starting point is 01:24:14 I'm saying I'm fucking staying. I'm staying because I'm going to find out what you guys are up to. I'm looking around all these guys from all these prep schools and stuff that obviously a blue-collar kid out of a public school right you're not a winthrop the fourth that's right so i'm saying i'm here to see what these guys are up to and that's what i found out i have found out what they're up to i've monitored what they're up to i've been offered to come on in on being what they're involved in you know i've been brought into the number one offer to come in yeah to the litigation law firm you know that i that I've been brought in. You know, when I come into

Starting point is 01:24:47 Cahill, for example, and they say, here, Cahill represents the Arkansas-Missouri Power Company, you know, and that they have just, they've made an offer to purchase the stock of an all-black-owned power company in Louisiana. And the people from the local electric power grid area are opposing it, saying that, oh, they just want to come in and raise all the rates. They're not going to improve any services. And so they filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission to try to oppose that.

Starting point is 01:25:20 So I get a call from Dan James, one of the senior partners, and asked me to come into the office. He says, Dan, he said, look, he said, we've got a case here where we represent the Arkansas-Missouri Power Company, and, you know, that there's been an opposition in the Federal Trade Commission against our being able to purchase all the stock in this one company. And I said, well, what's the problem? He said, well, there are people asserting that, you know, we're just going to raise all the rates and not really improve anything. And I said, what's the problem? He said, well, there are people asserting that we're just going to raise all the rates and not really improve anything. And I said, is it true?

Starting point is 01:25:51 And he looked at me kind of like surprised. And he said, oh, they told me you might ask that. And he gets up and he goes around and closes the door and he comes back and he says, that's the problem. He says, there's an actual letter in the files that says that that's exactly all that we're going to be doing. And, you know, unless we can get the case dismissed entirely, you know, that letter is going to become made

Starting point is 01:26:14 public. And, you know, and I said, okay, well, I'm not going to do that. And he said, what do you mean you're not going to do that? He said, are you trying to tell me you don't have time to do that? And I said, okay, you don't have time to do that? And I said, okay, I don't have time to do that. And he said, well, no, it's not a big rush. There's time to get this thing done. I said, no, I said, what I'm telling you is I'm never going to have time to do that. And so he ends up going to the executive committee and howling and screaming about how,

Starting point is 01:26:49 you know, I'm willing to take the money of the firm to to represent the New York Times and NBC and stuff that I'm doing you know and that if I can take the money from the firm I need to do the firm's cases you know and then I get contacted later that they also represent A&P you know the big A&P grocery chain you know uh the great Atlantic and Pacific uh tea company they call it's a grocery chain you know and Pacific Tea Company, they call it. It's a grocery chain. And it turns out that they were engaging in discriminatory pricing in the ghetto areas all around New York City. This is the big Cahill firm on Wall Street, right? Yeah, what were they doing? They were charging 25% more for everything because they knew that the people didn't do comparative shopping because they didn't have any transportation. They couldn't go somewhere else and shop, so they only had to shop in this one place. And so Jesse Jackson calls up the national headquarters of the A&P in Washington, D.C. He's in New York

Starting point is 01:27:35 City, and he's running a thing called Operation Breadbasket. This is in 1972. And he calls him up. He calls up the president's office, and the secretary answers, and she says, oh, Reverend Jackson. And he says, yes, he said, you know, that I'd like to come, you know, some of our people from Operation Breadbasket from Chicago here would like to come and meet with the president. And she says, oh, what is it about? And he said, it's about this discriminatory pricing that A&P is engaging. And she said, oh, well, let me see here. She says, he's got an opening here like next Thursday. Next Thursday, he's got an opening at 2 o'clock. He said, good. Well, then look, just keep that open, dear. Will you please? And our people will come there to see him. She said, well, look, let me just go check

Starting point is 01:28:20 to make sure he doesn't have anything. She gets up and she leaves. And she comes back to the phone. She says, oh, Reverend Jackson, I'm so sorry. She said, he says he won't meet with your people. And Jackson says, listen, just keep that spot open, okay? For him, just in case. And so then he hangs up. So the next Thursday comes, right? And so into the office, they come up the big elevator, they come into the office, in comes like two black ministers and a black Catholic priest and a white Catholic priest and two nuns, you know, and they come in and they sit down in the office, and at two o'clock, they come over to the reception, say, we're here to meet with the president, and she says, oh, I don't have anything down here, let me check with his

Starting point is 01:29:01 secretary, and they check with the secretary, and she comes back out, and she says, oh, I'm sorry, she said, but he told Reverend Jackson that they aren't going to, he won't meet with your people. And they said, that's all right, we'll just sit here and wait until he's gone. So they just sit there waiting, right? And it goes all the way through to the end of the day. And at five o'clock, the president comes out and announces, okay, it's five o'clock, the office is closed, everybody's leaving now. Okay, everybody pack up, it's time to go. And they refuse to leave. And so he calls the police, right?

Starting point is 01:29:34 So the police come, and they come in, and here's the Catholic priests and the nuns and stuff like that. So he's going, sorry, Father, you know, and they pick them up, and they put them in the elevator. They bring them downstairs and set them down on the sidewalk and walk away and leave them, you know, and the next morning they come back, you know, nine o'clock, bang, they come right back to the office, they come in and they come in and sit down in the room. So the guy gets on the telephone and he says, he comes back out, he comes out and says, get them n-words. I've gotten in trouble for this in the past, so I'll just say, get them n-words out of my office. That's what he says right in front of them, right? Out loud. Yes, out loud in front of them, and they're just mortified by this, right?

Starting point is 01:30:17 At least he tells you who he is. He goes back in and gets on the telephone and calls the Cahill firm, calls Larry McKay, our senior partner, and asks to have the Cahill firm come over and get an injunction against them coming back to their office, right? And so the word goes out like wildfire around the office that they've been asked to do this thing, right? So I'm just ignoring it, kind of smiling. And I get a call in the middle of the morning, and one of the senior associates calls me in, and he says, Dan, he said, I suppose you heard that, you know, that A&P, the president's called us and asked us to get this injunction against the Operation Breadbasket. I said, yeah,

Starting point is 01:30:55 I saw that. I said, who are you guys going to get to do something like that? And he said, well, you know, they've been meeting all morning in the executive committee, and they sort of thought it would be a good idea to have you do that. He said, you know people like that. That's what he said, because I'd done the Panther thing, right? He says, you know people like that. And I said, look, I said, who are you really going to get to do that? I thought he was bullshitting me, right? I said, who are you really going to get to do that? He said, no, no, no, serious. They want you to do this. I said, look, the most that you could possibly have asked of me is not to question your own personal moral

Starting point is 01:31:29 integrity for having anything to do with a case like that, okay? But I wouldn't touch pencil to paper to do that, so I get up and leave, right? So that was another one that goes in, and all of a sudden the executive committee throws this big shit fit, you know, over the fact that I won't do their cases. That you have principles. Yeah, right. So I was there, you know, I was there. I saw those kind of overtures that they make to you, you know, to come on in, be part of this whole thing, you know, figure out who the senior partner's daughters are and, you know, go to the pavilions with them and, you know, come on in, you know.

Starting point is 01:32:02 So you can actually get invited in to that group. It's not all just interbreeding. It's not all just family stuff, but you can join their family. And so I saw that thing go down, and I just didn't pay any attention to it. And so when they notified me that they thought I'd be happier elsewhere, I said, no, I'm fine. You know, this is fine. You know, I get to spend half of my time doing public interest stuff. It was the deal I cut as a condition to come there because it turns out PAPAs wouldn't allow them to represent him in the right of journalists to protect their confidential

Starting point is 01:32:38 news sources because they didn't even believe that the right existed, right? And so he wanted those kids from Harvard who'd done it for him, you know, so that's how I got recruited. So I had cut this deal, so I got to spend half of my time doing public interest cases. That's how I was on the Panther case, right? Because I volunteered to be one of the attorneys for the Panthers, you know, and, you know, I got to be the lawyer for all the inmates in the Manhattan House of Correction, you know, the tombs, you know, we got an inmates council set up and we got a, you know, newspaper for the, you know, we did things like that.

Starting point is 01:33:08 That's why I was at Attica Prison the night everybody got killed there that night. You know, the... Attica! Attica! Yeah, I was there that night when everybody got killed. You were there. Yeah, I was there. Wait, all right, let's take that tangent real quick. Yeah, I was there.

Starting point is 01:33:21 What were you doing? So what were you doing there? I got called by Bill Kunstler. Bill called me. That's another name I know. William Kunstler called me. He was one of the Lawyers Guild people that was lawyering for the inmates. And they'd had a riot at the Attica Prison up in northern New York.

Starting point is 01:33:38 Was he the Chicago 7 attorney? Yes, he was. And so he called me, and they wanted a non-Lawyers Guild lawyer to come in to argue the case in front of Judge Curtin to get an injunction to stop them from attacking the prison. So I went in to argue in front of Judge Curtin, and Judge Curtin said he was going to take the argument under advisement for the evening. And then at about six o'clock or so, we got word that the police were all moving, the state police were moving on the prison. So we called Judge Curtin and went out to his house later that evening. He was actually in his bathrobe and we were in the kitchen, you know,

Starting point is 01:34:35 arguing the case to try to get him to issue the injunction. And then we got the bulletin, came in over the radio. We were listening to the radio in the kitchen, you know, that the attack started against the prison. So we went out and he changed the order to order doctors in with six lawyers of us to come in. So we had this big caravan of about four big Volkswagen buses with doctors in them and a lawyer in each one of them. And we went on out onto the New York State Thruway and ended up, had a federal court order. So, but they shut down the highway. They shut down the Thruway out around Attica Prison.

Starting point is 01:35:13 And so we ended up getting allowed through the turnstiles there. So we ended up going along the highway and all of a sudden this big caravan of about 10 New York State police cars come rolling up with sirens and lights going and kind of forced us off the highway and all of a sudden this big caravan of about 10 New York State police cars come rolling up with sirens and lights going and kind of forced us off the highway. It was kind of this rain falling on everything and they jumped out, you know, with these big phosphorescent rain jackets on and shotguns and started measuring the depths of the tire treads on our vehicles to see

Starting point is 01:35:41 if they could figure out how to get us off the highway. So I ended up, we'd have put into the court order a provision ordering anybody who tried to interfere with us on the highways, they would be in violation of a federal court order in criminal contempt of court. So I held it down in front of them and showed them when they had the flashlights on our tires. And I said, this means you guys, you know, you guys got to step back now and let us through here. And so I turned and I said, you know, where's your barracks commander? It turns out, I just happened to know what a barracks commander was for the New York

Starting point is 01:36:14 State Police, because my dad was a prison guard. Oh, really? Great Meadows Prison. So I knew, I knew the troopers and stuff. So I said, you know, where's your barracks commander? And the minute they heard that I knew what that was, they all just froze. And we turned and looked and here's one of the New York State troopers getting set to pull the door open on one of the Volkswagen buses. And so we rushed over there and stopped him from going in. We then got back in the buses and we went on into the prison and we pulled into the prison and the helicopter there's still tear gas everywhere they'd already struck and hit the hit the uh the grounds and shot all 41 of the hostages and killed them you know and the the tear gas was all over everything the helicopter was laying on

Starting point is 01:36:55 its side where it dropped the tear gas and then it stopped on the side of the hill and fell over and you know there was chaos raining everywhere and I ended up going up onto the front steps of Attica Prison with the federal court order in hand and put it through the door, you know, knocked the door and it was directed to Mancuso, who was the warden. And these two great big state troopers, you know, in these phosphorescent rain jackets over these shotguns standing there. And I put the thing through the door. And about three or four minutes later, they hand it back out. And they said, you know, court order or no court order, no one's coming in here. You know, we have a state of emergency here.

Starting point is 01:37:36 And one of the cops turned around me and he says, you heard him, asshole. And ends up just hammering me with the butt of his shotgun. Like that hits me right across. Oh, he hit you? Yeah, hit me right across the back of the shoulders and knocked me down. So I jumped back up and I said, you know, you guys are in defiance of a federal court order. I turned to Herman Schwartz. Herman Schwartz was the head of ACLU, Western New York ACLU, went on to become the chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Starting point is 01:38:02 But anyway, I turned to Herman Schwartz. I said, okay, Herman, you go back to Judge Curtin right now and get a federal court order nationalizing the state police. And we're going to take back this prison. And Herman Schwartz said, holy shit. He said, and I said, it wasn't my best line. I said, Herman, you're in the big time now. So I just said, it wasn't my good line. So I sit down on the steps in the rain waiting for them to come back. Judge Curtin ordered them into a hearing at 8 a.m. the next morning, right? But this is like midnight now. And so we sat there. We staked out the entire prison with the lawyers and doctors that we had and put them in front of every one of the gates of the prisons so they couldn't get the bodies out. And they had already issued, the New York State coroner

Starting point is 01:38:49 had issued an official coroner's report that all 41 of the hostages had been killed by having their throats cut by the inmates. Throats cut. Yeah, total lie. They'd all been killed with double buckshot, all of them. But we sealed down the prison so they couldn't get the bodies out because we were all guarding each of the doors. And so when the the prison so they couldn't get the bodies out because we were all guarding each of the doors. And so when the sun rose, they had to have a special press conference and the New York State coroner came and officially reversed his position and acknowledged that they'd all been killed by double-op buckshot. So they held him in at eight o'clock and ordered an autopsy of all the bodies. So the firm was not comfortable with these kind of

Starting point is 01:39:28 things that I was doing, that I had gotten this agreement that I could do half-time on public interest cases. And they thought it was going to be like representing some fly-by-night furniture company that forecloses on some poor sap's couch when he's got only one payment left to go or something. But I had ended up doing the Attica prison case. We did the Panther bombing conspiracy case. The Panther bombing conspiracy case was 18. Yeah, what happened there? That was, well, what happened was that the New York City police,

Starting point is 01:40:00 they had a thing called the Red Squad that they would use to – it was like when COINTELPRO got revealed. The FBI had this counterintelligence program going. CIA had Shamrock, Project Shamrock. The FBI had COINTELPRO. They were infiltrating citizen groups, the anti-war group. There was this big big huge thing came down when Reagan was still governor of California and the Vietnam, anti-Vietnam war movement was sort of in full swing, you know, they had a thing called Project Cable Splicer in California,

Starting point is 01:40:39 where they were going to try to link together all the law enforcement units, the highway patrol, the city police, the local county sheriff's offices, all private security companies at the shopping malls and stuff. They had a thing called Operation Cable Splicer, where they were going to link all of them together. And the whole scenario was that if in fact the anti-Vietnam War movement joined forces with the black nationalists and tried to overthrow the state of California, that they would be able to link all of the law enforcement to be able to

Starting point is 01:41:11 assert this kind of almost like continuity of government kind of thing that they could assert. And do total martial law and all that. Total martial law, you know, and so that whole era that we were in was very intense. I mean, there was like borderline warfare going on because we had resolved that we were going to get the troops out of Vietnam, that we weren't going to stand for this any longer because it was now being totally exposed to what was going on. You know, by the time we got to 1974, you know, the hearts and minds won the Academy Award for the best documentary film, you know, just radically exposing the kind of hypocrisy of the Vietnam War, you know, that we were in kind of full flower by that time. You know, but we'd gone through the 1968 conventions.

Starting point is 01:42:03 You know, we had Bobby killed. You know, Martin Luther King was killed. You know, that... Yeah, who really killed Bobby Kennedy? Well, it was... It's interesting. It's interesting. You know, I've talked with Bobby about this a bunch.

Starting point is 01:42:15 You know, he's... Junior. He believes... Yeah, Bobby Jr. And Bobby III. You know, but they believe that it was one of the guards that was standing behind him because he was shot behind the ear you know and and sirhan sirhan was shooting at him from the front and he got a few shots off before rosie greer tackled him but you know he was shot behind the ear and

Starting point is 01:42:36 they've got a photograph of the the gun drawn of the guard behind him and bobby uh bobby jr believes that he may have been the one that did it he was actually an employee of bob mayhew robert mayhew was oh yeah it was uh it was uh a little uh bettanoir uh but anyway because bob mayhew was was what the aviators guy howard hughes right and then he was the guy that put together roselli and gianc with them. That's right. That's right. That was Bob Mayhew. Yeah. So the guard worked for him.

Starting point is 01:43:10 Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That is true. Yeah. So we've been at this for a long time. As I said, coming right straight out of the Harvard Civil Rights Law Review to the Cahill firm, which was the number one corporate litigation law firm in the world at that time. And I got to do those kind of cases so that I got to do half of my time because I demanded it as a condition for going to work with them. Because if I hadn't come with them, then the case wouldn't have come to them.

Starting point is 01:43:41 Right. You know, the NBC case. They didn't think you were going to take it all the way, though. No, so they just assumed that I was going to be doing these little public interest cases. They thought it was kind of cool, actually, to have kind of a little public interest. The human rights guy. In the office. And so I remember when the law commune guys asked me to help on the Panther bombing conspiracy case.

Starting point is 01:44:06 And that was Jerry Lefcourt and Carol Lefcourt and Bob, there was Freddie Cohen, Bob Bloom and the guys. And I sent a note around to all 176 lawyers in the Cahill firm saying that I'd been asked to help volunteer to help on this case. And I wanted to see who else wanted to help volunteer to help on this case. And I wanted to see who else wanted to help volunteer. I said, I was convinced that they were innocent of the charges that were being filed against them. And I, so I wanted, I just wanted to let them know that they could reach me and we could put together a team to help defend them. Not a soul responded.

Starting point is 01:44:38 Not a soul responded. So we go through the entire trial and, we get to the end of the trial, and the jury, after an 18-week trial, 18-week trial going day after day after day, war footing in the courtroom, threatened with getting in contempt of court with the judge. And the bottom line is, it took the jury like 18 minutes to come back with 157 innocent verdicts. Because the whole courtroom explodes, starts jumping up and down, everybody's celebrating, and the judge, who was it, Murtaugh, pounding, pounding the gavel, pounding the gavel, saying, sit down, sit down, sit down. He said, there's no such thing as an innocent verdict. He said, all they have is guilty or not guilty. You're to go back into that jury room, and you're to come out with either a guilty verdict or not guilty, that's all. And they go back in, they came out three minutes later with

Starting point is 01:45:34 157 innocent verdicts again. So the whole place, the judge throws, literally threw his gavel down, and it bounced off on the floor, and he was just completely in despair. And the whole courtroom erupts and starts jumping up and down. And I remember I was interviewed by ABC. Who was it? One of the guys, I remember him at the time. Anyway, a big famous guy interviewed me out on the front steps of the courthouse saying, well, Mr. Sheehan, they said, you know, you guys were all saying that the judicial system was loaded against you, you know, and he said, so that don't you think justice has been done here? And I said, yeah, you know, these people have all been in jail for 18 weeks,

Starting point is 01:46:15 you know, on charges that are just totally bogus. It took a jury of average, you know, New Yorkers, you know, 15 minutes to find them innocent of all 157 charges. So I guess you could say the justice was done from their own point of view, you know, and so that the word went back to the law firm, you know, that the case had been won. I went back to the law firm and I sent a note around to all 176, thanking everybody who came forward to be courageous enough to help us on the case. How did you send a note back then? It wasn't email.

Starting point is 01:46:48 You have to send it through Winnie. Winnie was the secretary. She would just send them around. Whisper down the line. And so this big thing went around. Everybody's going, holy shit, we didn't know anybody had helped him. You know, who helped him? Who helped him?

Starting point is 01:47:04 And they spent the whole next two days trying to figure out who in the world it was that helped me. And they realized that nobody had helped them. And I remember Larry McKay said, that little prick. And he said, she and that little prick that he sent that note around to everybody on that. So they ended up telling me that I'd be happier elsewhere. And I said, no, I'm fine. I'm doing NBC stuff and stuff in new york times stuff they're like no please get the fuck out and so so then they they actually called me in and uh

Starting point is 01:47:30 the same same guy that had told me that they wanted me to do the uh the amp case you know he called me and he said you know uh they've decided to terminate you i said terminate me i said is that like the mafia i said or something like you terminate and uh and uh and uh i said is that like the mafia i said or something like that you terminate and uh and uh and uh i said is that like fired and they said no no no we don't fire people at cahill but you know they are terminating you and it turns out that uh that i was the second person uh in history to actually be terminated from the cahill firm he said they don't fire people we terminate people they just they've only it's only the second person they ever terminated. The first one was Alger Hiss. Oh, like the Alger Hiss.

Starting point is 01:48:08 Like Alger Hiss. The only other guy that they ever terminated. Only they went through every single memo in the law firm and expunged his name from everything. They didn't do that for me. He was a Soviet spy? Is that what it was? No, he was accused of being a spy. It was a really big

Starting point is 01:48:24 famous thing with Alger Hiss and the pumpkin Tapes and all that stuff. What happened again? There was it was a big trial that he was he was a very very progressive Harvard Law School graduate Cahill partner and was it was accused of providing information to the Rosenbergs, among others, you know, on the nuclear, the atomic bomb, thinking that it was absolutely unacceptable to have the United States have sole control of the atomic bomb. It's the same kind of thing that

Starting point is 01:49:03 Oppenheimer got in trouble for. That there was that whole group of people, the intellectuals, that thought that this was a horrible moment and that they ought to get rid of all the bombs. And the only way to get rid of the atomic bombs was to make sure that everybody had them so that they could get rid of them mutually, you know, because the United States would never do it right so so that was so they ended up telling me that uh I had to leave and so I got contacted by F. Lee Bailey uh this was June of 1962 uh in the burglary the Watergate burglary 72 72 yeah sorry 1972 you know June of 72 June 17th 72 the burglary took place and so uh so uh he he reached out to me around the 21st or so of June. Right after.

Starting point is 01:49:47 Bailey. And asked me to come. As far as he knew, I was still at the Cahill firm. So you did all this, all these cases at the Cahill firm. This was not that long a time. Right. Where you did all these cases. Two years.

Starting point is 01:49:58 Oh, my gosh. Did you sleep? I was the only bachelor of 176 trial lawyers. Oh, there you go. They viewed it as a sign of instability, actually. So I had all this time. I got to do all this. I did all this other stuff.

Starting point is 01:50:16 I still had the highest level of billable hours of any of the entering class. I believe you. So I did all those cases. We represented the first U.S. military regimental band that in the 4th of July of 1971, they marched out on Long Island, and they had drafted, what was his name? What was it? Let me think of the guy's name.

Starting point is 01:50:57 Courtright, David Courtright. David Courtright was a music scholar that had been, was graduating from high school and was offered a full scholarship to Juilliard School. Oh, yeah. But then he got drafted to go to Vietnam, and he wrote a letter saying he wasn't going to go, and he was going to go to the Juilliard School. And he said, no, you're going to get arrested if you don't come. But what we'll do is we'll make a deal that if you'll if you'll Voluntarily sign up. We'll put you in the band, you know, we'll give you an assignment the band And so he ends up signing up and they put him in the first US Army regimental band at Fort Hamilton New York outside of New York City right there the big New York City regimental band

Starting point is 01:51:40 And he comes in of course, he plays every kind of instrument, he knows all the music, so within a matter of a few weeks, he becomes the drum major for the US military band, right? Fort Hamilton. And they're allowed to live off base. They have apartments, they get music lessons, they don't have to come to, they don't have to do any KP, they don't have to do a reveille in the morning or anything. And so they end up taking out a full-page ad. Well, first thing, that's how I got involved. They took out a full-page ad in the New York Times,

Starting point is 01:52:13 you know, listing all of their names, ranks, and serial numbers of all the members of the band, because David Cortright started organizing all the guys in the band to be opposed to the war, right? And so they were doing, they set in the band to be opposed to the war, right? And so they were doing, they set up a little coffee shop outside of the base, and they had people come there, and they were handing out literature against the war in the online yards. And he was pressing it, for sure. And they took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with their name, rank, and serial number opposing the war in Vietnam. And so they come back in and they get

Starting point is 01:52:46 called in by the Spec 4. This guy, Gonzalez, calls them in and they have to stand at attention. And he says, you know, that General Higgins, the commanding general of the First U.S. Army, is furious that you guys are taking out this full-page ad and you're going to have to stand here at attention and I'm going to have to go meet with him. So they all stand there. He leaves. They go and get tape recorders, right? And they all come back, and they all turn on the tape recorders, and back comes a spec four, and he says, I've just gotten back from talking to General Higgins. He's furious. If you guys do anything like this again, you know, they're going to revoke your right to live off base. They're going to revoke your rights not to have to do KP duty. You know, you're going to have to do Reveille every morning, blah, blah.

Starting point is 01:53:27 He lists all these things that they're going to do to him. So they contacted me because the New York Times, right, who had done the article. So wanted to know whether I would be willing to help represent them. So what I did is I drafted up a complaint under the Federal Civil Rights Act to argue that it was violating their First Amendment rights to be threatening them with all this stuff, right? But they didn't want to file it yet. And then it turns out it comes the 4th of July, 1971, and they're marching out on Long Island.

Starting point is 01:54:00 And they've got the first U.S. Army regimental band marching along. They've got all local three television stations there, you know, taking the obligatory footage. And all their wives and fiancés and girlfriends and stuff are marching along next to them with these big signs saying, Nixon war, you know, does the fact that we've killed 10,000 people make us great? And they're marching along. And it's all on live television. And the veterans of foreign war see these women marching along next to them and they break ranks and they attack the women.

Starting point is 01:54:29 Start breaking their signs and pushing them down. And it's all on television. Can't do that. It's all on television. And so the bottom line is it goes out all across all three of the national networks about how these veterans had beaten up these women that were protesting the war. So they show up the next Monday morning or the Tuesday morning after the July holiday, and they know that there's trouble, so they brought their tape recorders with them, and the Spec 4 shows up, and he says, that's it. You know, Higgins is totally furious. You guys

Starting point is 01:54:58 got your rights to live off the camp, off base, revoked. You know, they're going to shut down your coffee house. You know, you're going to shut down your coffee house, you know, you're going to have to do KP and all that. So they call me, they call me at the office and they say, you know, I said, look, we need to get ready to file this complaint right away because they're going to do something more to you than just this, you know. And so I said to him, I said, look, if you guys are on building and grounds and KP duty that you have to do, I said, one of the jobs you're going to have to do is take out all the trash and stuff for the different offices. I said, so find out who are the guys that are going to be assigned to do the office from General Higgins,

Starting point is 01:55:36 because General Higgins is going to be sending a letter to somebody at the Pentagon about you guys. And so what they did is they go into his office to clean up the office. They're perfectly legit, right? They got the burn bag there. The burn bag, at that time, they would type letters on the typewriters, and they had the ribbon, and they would type one letter, and they'd take the ribbon off for security, and then they would put it in the burn bag. And so what they did is they went into the burn bag, and they pulled out all the different rolls of the typewriter ribbon and held it up to the light and found the letter. For General Higgins, he sent this letter out to the commanding general at the Pentagon, ordering all of them to be shipped to frontline combat units in Vietnam. They said, but don't

Starting point is 01:56:22 send court right. He's got lawyers. That's what it said. And so what they do is they also get a copy of his letterhead out of the drawer where they are, go to the typewriter where it was typed on by his secretary, and retype the entire letter. So they've got the letter verbatim on letterhead, and they've got it, and so they bring it to us. So we bring a motion in front of, who was it, Judge Jack... Southern District? In the Eastern District, turns out. Eastern District of New York, Jack Weinstein. Jack Weinstein teaches constitutional law at NYU Law School, right? So we bring the action with him in the Eastern District of New York. We bring out a motion for an immediate injunction to prohibit

Starting point is 01:57:10 them from sending them anywhere, right? Because they were going to send them to frontline combat units. Well, it turns out they sent them out the next morning. And so they were already on flight sending them out. So we get in front of Judge Weinstein, and we've filed a complaint and demanded an immediate deposition of General Higgins, right? The commander of the first U.S. Army. Yeah, yeah. So we appear in front of... So we appear that Monday morning for the deposition. We've taken... We got the deposition scheduled in the conference room right next to the judge's office, right? And so we show up at 9 a.m. for General Higgins, and Fred Cohen is there, and I'm there.

Starting point is 01:57:50 He's there from the law commune, right? And we're all sitting there waiting. 9 o'clock comes, and in walks Major Starr, who is the judge advocate for the First U.S. Army out of Fort Hamilton, right? And he comes in all alone, right? And there's nobody here. And so, Freddie Cohen, you know, sets him up and says, okay, Major Starr, what's the story here? Why isn't General Higgins here? And he says, well, General Higgins is a general officer in the United States Army, and he doesn't have to appear except by

Starting point is 01:58:22 consent. He's citing the U.S. military code of justice to us. Is that even, you can't do that? No, no, no, it doesn't count in the federal court. Anyway, so the bottom line is, Fred says, I don't think so. He says, I think, you know, we've got Judge Weinstein sitting waiting for us. We thought we might have a problem with this deposition. So we go out into the courtroom, and Jack Weinstein comes out and gets behind the bench and says, and Fred Cohen gets up and says, Your Honor, we've, you know, as you know, we've got the emergency deposition scheduled here with General Higgins, and he hasn't shown up this morning.

Starting point is 01:58:52 He's just a major star. I think Major Star would like to go on the record to explain why General Higgins is not here. So Major Star gets up and says, Your Honor, General Higgins is a general in the United States Army and doesn't have to appear except by consent. Judge Weinstein rises up and stands up and puts his hand behind his ear and says, Excuse me? He says, I don't think I heard you clearly. He says, Could you state that again for the record? And so Major Starr says, General Higgins is a general officer in the United States Army and doesn't have to appear except by consent. He says like that.

Starting point is 01:59:29 And Judge Weiss, he says, Major, sir, I think we've got a problem here. I said, I don't think the general appreciates the gravity of the situation here. He says, I'll tell you what. He says, you just give me his phone number and we're going to wait right here. And I'm going to go explain the situation to him, okay? And we just wait right here. So we all sit there and he gets down off the bench, and he comes back about ten minutes later, and he comes out, and he says, I've spoken with General Higgins. He stated that he will come

Starting point is 01:59:54 and appear for the deposition, but only on one condition, and that there be no one else allowed in the room except Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sheehan, who are the attorneys, and the stenographer, and he said that that's the condition in which he'll appear. He says, what's your position on that? And Fred Cohen says, Your Honor, I'd like to renew my motion that General Higgins be held in immediate criminal contempt of court and sentenced to six months at prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Judge Weinstein turns to Major Stein and says, well, Major Stein, you heard him. I don't think he accepts the condition.

Starting point is 02:00:30 He said, I would propose that the general be here, you know, at one o'clock. Why did he only want you guys in there? He was just mortified at the whole idea of having to appear and have anybody interrogate him, right? And so what we do is we send out to every fucking, oh, excuse me. You say whatever you want to hear. We send out to every blow hair freak that we can get our hands on from the walk-on,

Starting point is 02:00:52 you know, right, to come to the hearing. So that afternoon at one o'clock, we've got like about 50 people in the room, you know, just filled the whole place up. There's standing room only all around the place where the deposition is right. Two o'clock or one o'clock he comes in he comes goes walking with major star he's got his got his lid under the arm you know and he's

Starting point is 02:01:10 got this little crew cut haircut you can see his head shining through it you know he's got all of his medals on he comes in and he sits down at the thing and fred cohen you know takes a chair and turns it around and puts it down in front of me and puts his foot up on it and leans over onto him. He says, well, General, he says, can you tell me why you transferred David Courtright and all these other people, you know, frontline combat units? And he said, those men were transferred in the normal course of administrative affairs of the United States Army. And Fred says, oh, really? He says, you know, you're under oath, and you're saying that that was what happened? He said, yes. He says, that's oath, and my word is an officer. And then he says, Mr. Sheehan, he says, can you bring that letter to me, please? So I come over, and I have the briefcase, and I flop open the briefcase right where General Hayes can see it, and he can see

Starting point is 02:01:59 the letter, and I take it out like this, and he can see it right in front of him on his letterhead, all typed out and stuff like this, and I hand it to Fred, and I turn around and go back, and I take it out like this and he can see it right in front of him on his letterhead all typed out and stuff like this. And I hand it to Fred and I turn around and go back and I close the thing up and I sit back down and Fred says, okay, General, he says, I'm going to start reading from this letter here and just tell me if there comes a point in time that this refreshes your recollection as to what the real cause of the transfer is, just stop me at any time. So he starts to read the letter, you know, I mean, and Higgins is just turning green, you know, turning the color of his uniform. You know, when he's reading the letter, he says, okay, okay, okay. He says, these people were disrupting, you know, a unit of the United States military.

Starting point is 02:02:35 The United States military, every single unit of the United States military has to remain combat ready at all times. And Fred Cohen says, the band? He says, yes, the band. you never know when you're gonna have to have to fight he said you have to be combat ready and he said well he says let me just explain one thing to me i said i take it that the reason you had these people transferred is is because of this parade out at long island is that correct and he said that was part of it he says so so you understand that it was the the, you know, the wives and fiancés and stuff of the band members. It wasn't the men themselves that didn't say a word or didn't do anything.

Starting point is 02:03:11 And he said, yes, but it was their wives and their girlfriends that were doing this. And Fred says, so let me try to see if I can understand this. Are you saying that men are responsible for the activities of their wives and girlfriends, sort of like a man would be responsible for his dog if he bit somebody. And he said, yes, that's exactly right. He said, that's exactly right. This woman, one of the black women, she goes, she goes to him like that. And he's kind of mortified.

Starting point is 02:03:38 So Fred says, I think we've got enough now. I think we can go in front of Judge Weinstein. So Judge Weinstein ordered them back. Ordered them. And they were on the plane already. They were already on. First class, next commercial airline out of Saigon, that all of those people would be on that flight to be returned here immediately. And he's commanded them to build a bandstand on the drum field, the marching field at Fort Hamilton to build a major platform, and General Higgins had to get up in front of the entire assembled First U.S. Army and apologize to the women that he had insulted in his deposition.

Starting point is 02:04:20 And Jack Weinstein signs this order, right? And so we end up going back home. Of course, then the word comes down to the law firm that I've been involved in this. Oh, they don't like that. So anyway, the Court of Appeals reversed the part about him having to put up the bandstand. Oh, he didn't have to do that? But he had to post in conspicuous places throughout the grounds, the apology to them. But the bottom line is it was cases like that that I was doing in the other halftime. But the other halftime,

Starting point is 02:04:50 I was doing stuff for the New York Times and NBC. And so the bottom line is I left and went to Bailey's office instead, right directly to Bailey's office in Boston. To bring this back, F. Lee Bailey, as you said, called you on like June 21st, shortly after the Watergate break. Yes. Now, Watergate is another case that obviously at the time was covered extensively. It's constantly cited in basic parlance when we discuss things politically. But the details and the timeline of the case and how it played out is often totally forgotten about the history. So can you just walk people through exactly what happened here? Sure. Now, it's interesting because these cases were all kind of things that so really, and

Starting point is 02:05:32 it must be for like a lot of the young kids, it must be like the American Civil War. The Civil War, the American Revolution, they're all kind of back in there. I didn't say you were that old, Ben. There's Watergate back in there. So what happens is Richard Nixon, remember, Richard Nixon in 1960 was the vice president under Eisenhower. That's right. He had become the Republican nominee for the presidential nomination in 1960. He lost the election to John Kennedy. John Kennedy came in and went through that entire era. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd

Starting point is 02:06:13 of 1963, and Lyndon Johnson becomes president. And Lyndon Johnson then runs in 1964, in November of 1964, and is elected for his first term. It goes all the way to 1968. Lyndon Johnson has cranked up the Vietnam War. He's engaged in massive war crimes against the people of Southeast Asia. People are in the streets rioting against him here in the country. Bottom line is, in 1968, there's this election getting ready to take place, and it was going to be Lyndon Johnson against Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was going to come back and run against him. And then we were trying to—I was at Harvard Law School by that time, and there were a bunch of us that were trying to get Bobby Kennedy to run against Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Bobby wouldn't run against an

Starting point is 02:07:12 incumbent like that. And I was, a number of my professors were working with him in his campaign that, anyway, the bottom line is Bobby just finally said he wasn't going to do it. So we had Joe Grammazon and Gary Hart went and met with Gene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota, to have him run against Lyndon Johnson. And in the first primary up in New Hampshire in January of 1968, Senator McCarthy almost beat Lyndon Johnson. The opposition to Johnson was so intense. And Johnson comes out and announces that he's decided he's not going to run. Bobby comes out right away and says that he's going to run.

Starting point is 02:08:06 And so Bobby starts campaigning for the campaign in 1968. And then in April of 68, Martin Luther King is killed. Then the day of our first exam, of our final exam at Harvard Law School, June 13th of 1968, Bobby is shot and killed in Los Angeles. Spends a whole day lingering before he dies. And so then this horrific demonstration takes place at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Senator Humphrey, who was the vice president under Lyndon Johnson, was going to ascend to beat the candidate for the Democratic Party. And the tens of thousands of young Americans gathered in Chicago and laid siege to the convention. They laid siege?

Starting point is 02:09:01 They did. They did. They encircled the entire place there were tens of thousands of other people no no no no there was no weapons they they just they say siege danny i started thinking weapons no they they were just marching around and opposing them and chanting and everything in the in the uh the chicago police were turned loose on them by mayor daly and they just had a police riot. And it was officially found, as a matter of fact, that the police had just rioted and attacked the demonstrators. And it was mayhem at the convention.

Starting point is 02:09:36 And Richard Nixon ends up winning in the presidential campaign against Hubert Humphrey. No, no, no. No? by like no no no no no no no no he ended up winning by less than one percent oh i didn't know that oh yeah i know no no no no no that was in 72 against mccarthy or against uh mcgovern yeah no but no no this was a super tight race even against hubert humphrey. Didn't know that. Yeah, very important, very important piece. So he just wins by a hair's breadth and comes in and is super unpopular because he's such an arch reactionary. And everybody who's opposed the Vietnam War hates him.

Starting point is 02:10:22 And so it was a very unpopular presidency. Quick question on that. I'm just curious, because it does technically change parties at that point. You had said this earlier, how some of the attitudes on like Vietnam and on different wars, obviously past president to president. I think we saw that again with Bush to Obama, to Biden, even to Trump to an extent. And, you know, at that time, why did Nixon take on the stance that was so, you know, I might be cherry picking here to say this, but so similar to Johnson? Was it simply like Intel walked in the office day one and said, look, sir, you're going to have to do this?

Starting point is 02:10:59 Or did he actually like believe we needed to be there? Well, he was, you got to understand, it was back in 1954 that we originally went in to take over from the French after Dien Bien Phu. He was the vice president in 1954 under Eisenhower. And he ran the 5412 Committee, which ran all covert operations and stuff. So he was intimately involved in the CIA operations in Vietnam. So he was one of the original architects of the whole insurgency operation that was going on in Vietnam. So when he came into office in 1968, even though it was eight years later, he had been one of the major instigators of the whole war in Vietnam. So he was in full-throated support of this whole operation. But he didn't – you know how politicians, they change their opinion with the wind based on where it's blowing.

Starting point is 02:11:55 He didn't change his opinion at all despite all that? No, he just kept hammering down more and more and more. We're going to go in there and rain down hell on them. down more and more and more. Just like with Johnson, you know, and ended up, you know, bombing into Cambodia and doing the response to the Tet Offensive, all that. Anyway, all of that horrible stuff was going on, and the people were rising up. The young people were all rising up against Nixon in 1972. And so there was a huge insurrection still going on, and there was a hardcore right-wing people that were clamping down on all the Vietnam protesters, etc. And there was a kind of an air of potential civil war sort of in the air at the time. And the problem is that the candidate that was selected by the Democratic Party in 1972 was George McGovern. George McGovern was a sweet, South Dakota,

Starting point is 02:12:58 very progressive senator, and was very articulate against the war and was carrying the banner against the war. Nobody thought that he had a real chance to be able to beat Richard Nixon, except that all of a sudden this weird thing, they go, they're in the midst of the campaign. They have 1972. In June, they have the conventions. Nixon gets the nomination. McGovern gets the nomination. They're going through the whole motions. And then all of a sudden, this weird thing happens. Well, Nixon's kind of on the roll, heading into being assumed to be elected president.

Starting point is 02:13:42 All of a sudden, this Watergate break-in happens. And word goes out that there had been this peculiar event has taken place that that these these four Cubano guys and an American CIA person had been arrested in the Watergate Hotel. They had burglarized the Watergate Hotel, which was the head of the Democratic National Committee headquarters there. And nobody could figure out what exactly was going on. And there was a little bit of a flurry of news stories about it going on. But we were into June now. So there was just the July, August, September campaigns rolled on. The election comes down, and in November, Nixon ends up winning in a huge landslide.

Starting point is 02:14:35 You know, wins all but like two states. I think it was Massachusetts and California. Sounds right. They voted for McGovern. And the bottom line is he comes into office and immediately starts slamming down on Vietnam, doing all the same stuff he was doing. But then these two young reporters on the Washington Post start digging back into the story. I was brought on by Bailey to work on the case. But he had called you way back when it happened. Yes, yes. So I ended up coming down there later in the fall and started investigating it. I was saying, now, what the hell is going on here? I said, you know, that by that time,

Starting point is 02:15:28 the Washington Post had started having a number of stories about it. And this is fall of 72? This is the fall of 72. Okay. Okay, and they then brought in a special select committee in the House and Senate on Watergate to investigate what was going on, because they were starting to reveal things in the Washington Post about the connections between the people that were in the Watergate Hotel and the president's office. Okay. So at that time,

Starting point is 02:16:03 people weren't paying a lot of it. It was like kind of stuff going on sort of in the background. But when I got involved in it, I started saying, I need to find out what happened here. If I'm being asked to participate in this, I need to find out what happened. What in the world are three of these trafficanti gunmen doing in the Watergate Hotel?

Starting point is 02:16:27 What has that got to do with anything? And I started investigating it and found out that Bailey was the attorney for Santos Traficante. And so I said, oh, look, Traficante obviously must know what his guys are doing in there. So let's find out what's going on. So we have Bad Andy Tooney, who was our chief investigator, that he was the head of a thing called Moriarty and Associates. It's got 40 class A licensed private investigators that are at our disposal at the Bailey firm, right? And he goes and sits down, he goes down to, who is it, down in Tampa. Tampa, yeah. Over in Tampa.

Starting point is 02:17:10 And over in Chuck Gonzalez, Henry Gonzalez, Hank Gonzalez. Hank Gonzalez's office brings in Traficante and brings him over to Hank Gonzalez's house. And this is when he's the Don. Yeah, he's the Don of Havana. He's up in Tampa because he's fled back in January of 59 when Batista was overthrown. So he's up there. So they bring him over to Hank Gonzalez's house,

Starting point is 02:17:39 and Batty Andy spends the weekend with him interviewing him in the guest house and gets the story about what's happened here. And he ends up telling us what's happened. And what we discovered is that the reason that, in fact, it had been Nixon himself that had personally ordered them to go into the Watergate Hotel. It wasn't just a brain know, a brain fart or something on the part of the plumbers unit, that this was actually ordered by Nixon himself. He's telling you. Yeah, he's, this is Traficante is being very clear about this, that this was ordered by Nixon himself, because Nixon was terrified that Larry O'Brien, Lawrence O'Brien, had just been made the new head of the Democratic National Committee that June and was going to be supervising the campaign against Nixon.

Starting point is 02:18:35 And it turns out that Larry O'Brien, prior to being made the head of the Democratic National Committee, was the 20-year lobbyist, chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for Howard Hughes. Oh, shit. And it turns out that Howard Hughes is the guy back in 1960 when Richard Nixon was the vice president under Eisenhower and realized that he was going to be the nominee for the Republican Party for the presidential nomination in 1960 against John Kennedy, he reached out and contacted Howard Hughes, who was a secret consultant to the National Security Council of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. He was responsible for designing the Glomar Explorer, which was this special ocean-going ship that had the capacity to reach down to the bottom of the seafloor and pick up submarines. So in case any Soviet submarine had become disabled and incapacitated, that we would be able to go recover it and recover the technology that's in the submarine, et cetera. Uh, he had, uh, also

Starting point is 02:19:50 done the, the, uh, Spruce goose, which was the prototype to the C5A cargo plane. He set up a thing called the Summa corporation. That was a, uh, a corporation, uh, where they, uh, where they did covert technical work for the CIA and NSA. Anyway, he was a contractor, a secret contractor. There were a few other programs he was involved in, it won't help to talk about. But the bottom line is that Nixon reached out to him on the secure phone from the 5412 Committee, which is the section of the National Security Act of 1947 that ostensibly authorizes them to engage in other activities from time to time at the behest of the president. And they've deemed that as being the source of their authority to engage in covert operations, what they call kinetic action. And so that Nixon reached out on the secure phone to talk to Howard Hughes, asking him to set up a political assassination team to kill Fidel Castro.

Starting point is 02:20:55 In 1960. In 1960, June. While he's vice president. Well, he's vice president, right? And so he asked that that be set up and that Howard Hughes take steps to keep it away from the White House so that it doesn't get tracked back to the White House. So Howard Hughes doesn't agree or disagree in the telephone call, according to Traficante, but he ends up hanging up and then he calls in Bob Mayhew, one of his lawyers, and says

Starting point is 02:21:21 to Mayhew, here, you take this. Nixon's getting set to be president now. He wants to have this assassination team put together to kill Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and these other five commandantes that are the head of the new revolutionary government in Cuba. And so we want to keep this away from the White House. So Bob Mayhew reaches out to Johnny Roselli. Johnny Roselli is there in Las Vegas where Howard Hughes was. Howard Hughes was at the, I think it was the Sands Hotel,

Starting point is 02:21:53 in the penthouse there. It was one of the two mob casinos. I actually just had a guy in, Tom Meyer, for episode 236, who just wrote a book, Mafia Spies, that became a docuseries as well, all about this. It's a pretty wild history. Oh, far out. That's way cool. All right. So the bottom line is that Bob Mayhew reaches out to Johnny Roselli, who was the bag man there in Vegas for Sam Giancana, who was the don of the mafia in Chicago.

Starting point is 02:22:30 And Mayhew reaches out to Johnny Roselli, and he says, Roselli, look, why don't you guys mob? You have your own reasons for wanting to get rid of Castro. He's closed down your gambling casinos. He's closed down the whorehouses. He's closed down the whorehouses. He's shut off the heroin supply that's coming through with Batista, you know, that was being used to help fund covert operations, et cetera. You know, that you guys have got your own reasons for wanting to get rid of them.

Starting point is 02:22:58 Why don't you guys put together a team to get rid of them? And Gianni Roselli says, well, you know, I'd have to clear this with Giancana. I can't just do something like that. And so Gianni Roselli goes back to Chicago, meets with Sam Giancana. Giancana says, wait a second, you're talking about knocking off Castro in Guevara. We're going to have to clear that with Santos Traficante. Traficante is the Don of Havana. Even though he's fled and he's up in Tampa right now, he's still a Don down there. So we have to talk with him. So they fly down in late June of 1960.

Starting point is 02:23:37 And they have three meetings with Traficante at the fontainebleau hotel uh and in the third meeting he ends up uh traffic county ends up saying i agree in principle to do this but i have to make sure that this isn't some kind of a brain fart you know of howard hughes or you mayhew or any of these guys i got to make sure that nixon is the guy that's ordering this because we need that kind of cover right if we're going to do this. And so the next meeting, they have a short meeting, and a guy comes to the meeting using the nom de guerre, Mr. Ed, and it's Sheffield Edwards, who is the chief of security of the Central Intelligence Agency under Richard Nixon, who has the 5412 Committee that handles covert

Starting point is 02:24:23 operations out of the National Security Council, right? So he greenlights this operation. And San Francisco Traffic County then picks 15 guys that are his former gunmen from Havana who have been recruited. He wants to make sure that all the guys that he recruits into this S-Force, he's called, is that are people that are working with the Central Intelligence Agency now in a thing called Operation 40. Operation 40 was this covert operation that was being mounted out of five paramilitary bases that have been established all through the southeastern United States. One on Swan Island, one on No Name Key, one in the Everglades, and then two of them at Lake Pontchartrain over in Louisiana. Yep.

Starting point is 02:25:08 Anyway, and they're all set up. And they've got CIA liaison people functioning to them, but they're made up of a lot of the anti-Castro, pro-Batista, right-wing Cuban organized crime guys that were working with Traficante in all the different gambling casinos and houses of prostitution and heroin trafficking they had going through Havana under Batista. And so these guys are all operatives now working with the Central Intelligence Agency in the thing called Operation 40. And then comes the election time after setting all this up in June and they set up a scheme for financing

Starting point is 02:25:51 the training of the Zest Force that they were taking a skim off the casinos, off the two major mob casinos. I think one is the Flamingo and one is the Sands and they were skimming cash off of them and they were putting them in these brand new expensive suitcases and putting them in the trunks of Cadillac automobiles and then driving them down from Las Vegas through New Orleans where Marcello would do the audit on

Starting point is 02:26:21 what the cash was that was coming off the skim. Then they would pack them back up and they'd take them into Miami and they put them in the Miami National Bank of Meyer Lansky, the bank down there. And then what they would do is they would wire some of that money down to a bank account down in the Banco Internacional in Mexico City. And they would put this cash into this bank account of a lawyer by the name of Ogarrio, his name was, Manuel Ogarrio. And they would put this cash into this bank account of a lawyer by the name of Ogarrio, his name was, Manuel Ogarrio. And they put the money in there, and that money was used to finance the training that was taking place of this triangular fire team base that was down in Oaxaca, Mexico, on the ranch of Clint Murchison Jr. Who was he? Clint Murchison is the son of Clint Murchison Sr. who owned the Dallas Texans football team out of Houston, Texas.

Starting point is 02:27:16 And they were very wealthy guys, businessmen down there, oil men and stuff down there. Oh, yeah. Wait, wait, wait. You mean the Houstonston texans yes no it's the yes well they they were originally the the texans houston texans yeah that's right yeah what was the mclean what's the name of that family again the owner died a couple years ago i don't know who that is i'll look look it up. But anyway, it was Clint Murchison that owned them. And the bottom line is that Clint Murchison Jr. had this ranch down in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Starting point is 02:27:52 And on that ranch, they were running covert operations against Cuba in Operation 40. And he would send like a private plane to pick them up, fly them to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. And then they would sign in there and then disappear. And nobody knew where they were going but it turns out that they were being secretly brought down to this triangular fireteam training base down in Oaxaca Mexico and trained there and the guy that was training them was a guy named Carl Jenkins Carl was a former United States Marine Corps guy that got recruited into the Army Special Forces when it started going. And he trained them down there in that.

Starting point is 02:28:51 And so all of that operation was underway when Richard Nixon ends up not getting elected in November. And to everyone's surprise, Kennedy wins. That's all still really strange and weird and very close race and all the stuff in Chicago and all that boss daily and all that Sam Giancana stuff goes on. So the bottom line is Kennedy becomes president. They then confront Kennedy with the fact that there's this covert plan underway to launch a military assault against the island of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He tells them that he absolutely refuses to provide any kind of air cover, prohibits any kind of U.S. military intervention to support them. If, in

Starting point is 02:29:39 fact, the CIA is telling him the truth and that people will rise up in Cuba behind any just group coming in, landing on the beach, then let him do it. But he's not going to give him any air support or any kind of military support. Which to this day, many Cubans view him like as a traitor just for saying that. Except that the real gripe they had was later with the Cuban missile crisis. It wasn't this thing. Really? Because he was very clear from the very beginning that he wasn't going to provide air cover.

Starting point is 02:30:10 It wasn't that he withdrew the air cover or any of that stuff. That's all bullshit. But they tried to rewrite that as history. They tried. He withdrew it. But the bottom line is that he refused to do it. And what they did is they put the guys ashore. Really, they screwed up. They had some,

Starting point is 02:30:28 I think they were B-26s or something, old war surplus ones, and they had them based down in Nicaragua under Somoza, and that they were scheduled to fly in to provide air cover for them. It wasn't the United States, but it was the old B-26s, and they were in a different time zone. And they actually arrived an hour late during the invasion. I hate how that happens. Yeah, I hate how that happens. I mean, just out of history, as it turns out, they got there an hour late,

Starting point is 02:30:59 and the guys were already beaten flat on the beach. They'd sunk their ammo ship. They were trapped on the beach. It was too late for them to be able to do anything. They turned around and fled. Bottom line is that that whole fiasco comes down. Kennedy turns around and publicly takes responsibility for it, tells Khrushchev that he apologizes for them doing this. He's going to shut down Operation 40, gives his word to Khrushchev that he's going to shut down Operation 40. He goes down to the Orange Bowl down in Miami and convenes all of the hardcore right-wing anti-Castro Cuban community there at the Orange Bowl and apologizes to them publicly. He does this and swears to them that the flag, a free flag of

Starting point is 02:31:53 Cuba will be flying over the island by the end of his second term. And so he kind of gets them to kind of acquiesce to that. And the word really went out that, you know, that he hadn't really betrayed them. It's just that he'd always refused that he was going to provide the air cover. So the bottom line is that goes on. And then all of a sudden, Nikita Khrushchev realizes that Kennedy had lied to them, that they weren't shutting down Operation 40. They just changed the code name. They changed it to Operation Mongoose. They set up a big airplane hangar on the campus of the University of Miami called JM Wave, and they were running the operation there. They brought in Theodore Shackley out of Berlin, who was the deputy to Reinhard Galen, the head of the Waffen-SS, anti-communist Third Reich intelligence,

Starting point is 02:32:48 and brought him in to run the Miami station. And they continued the operation, and they never told the Kennedys about the existence of this assassination team that was functioning. And the assassination team, we've all heard stories about them, the lengths to which they went to try to assassinate Fidel Castro and Raul Castro, etc. How did they not get those guys? The number of things they did, like those dudes just wouldn't die. as a Democratic supportive group that's going to try to support a Democratic uprising on this imprisoned island,

Starting point is 02:33:30 you know, when they drink their own Kool-Aid and they believe that, and it's completely inconsistent with reality. I mean, the fact of the matter is that Batista was horribly unpopular in Cuba, and Castro was extraordinarily popular. He was very, very pro-democratic to begin with. He wanted to have a regime that was extremely friendly to the United States. The reality is that Richard Nixon confronted him as the head of the 5412 Committee

Starting point is 02:34:00 and said, look, if you're January of 59, you've overthrown Batista, you're in power now, we want to set up a deal that you just don't have any relations at all with Russia or China, don't have any kind of diplomatic relations with them, because this is the Monroe Doctrine, we're in charge of the whole Western Hemisphere, we're to have no foreign influences in here, you can have no foreign relations with these people. And Castro tells them to piss off. You know, he'll have relations with whoever he chooses. And Richard Nixon says, if an economic war, you know, against Cuba to try to be able to convince people to see these people are not supportive

Starting point is 02:34:53 of American industry and business. You know, they shut down the tourist trade, i.e. the casinos down there. It's a PR campaign too, yeah. So the bottom line is that that whole operation continues apace, but now Nikita Khrushchev knows that he was lied to, and so he starts sending in missiles, starts putting in the missiles into Cuba. And so by October of 1962, they've discovered that Russian missiles are being put up down in Cuba. And the whole Cuban Missile Crisis comes down.

Starting point is 02:35:29 And the bottom line is that, you know, we can go into graphic detail about that because it's an extraordinarily important point in history that we came within two minutes. The doomsday clock that the atomic scientists have set at the Bulletin of Atomic Science, you know, was lowered to two minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the fact is they came within minutes of launching a full nuclear war. Curtis LeMay, who was the chief of staff of the United States Air Force, was this hardcore right-wing guy that really thought that we should have a nuclear war with Russia. We had a distinct advantage over them missile-wise. They thought 240 to 60 was a win.

Starting point is 02:36:17 That's right. Sick way of thinking. Yep. So the bottom line is that we came within a couple of minutes of a total thermonuclear exchange at that point, and both Kennedy and Khrushchev were so incredibly traumatized by that that Kennedy ordered them to shut down the whole covert operations, shut down Operation Mongoose, ordered them to stand down, to shut down the paramilitary bases down there. That was viewed as betrayal because he had given his solemn word in the Orange Bowl that he would, in fact, have the free flag of Cuba flying over the island. Didn't he also, like he and Khrushchev had these 18 calls that were off the record or whatever, and they agreed that they were going to shut down actual disassembles they were going to start disassembling uh each respective they were going to start disassembling the warheads uh of their respective nuclear arsenals uh and that's what got him killed uh the the china lobby uh in the united states very much grounded in

Starting point is 02:37:21 brown brothers harriman and that whole crowd there lobby? There's a group that they called the China lobby that believed that they were the ones that wanted to, back at Brown Brothers Harriman, they wanted to finance the rise of Germany to be the bulwark against Bolshevism in Europe. And they would control the controlling stock and all those corporations in the military of there. And then the United States would be able to turn all of its attention westward to develop the markets in Asia. And they realized that China was going to be their major adversary.

Starting point is 02:37:56 And they realized that they couldn't take on China in a traditional land war because China can put a billion men in uniform. They realized that at Incheon, you know, in North Korea. They realized that at the reservoir. The Chinese put in like 10,000 men and just swarmed the NATO forces, the U.S. forces, and drove them all back. And that's how they ended the Korean War is the Chinese sent a huge wave of uniformed men across the border into North Korea and pushed the Allied forces all the way down to the 42nd parallel. So that they took up route in South Korea, but that's how that happened. And so the China lobby who had been at Brown Brothers Harriman, that had been choreographing, kind of setting up the Germany as the power astride all of Europe to

Starting point is 02:38:52 protect Western capitalism and the business community that they'd invested in all these war industries and stuff there, that they would develop the resources of Asia, that the Vietnam invasion was all part of that. The whole Korean War, I think, was part of that, was trying to establish a land base in Asia. So they had this entire group called the China Lobby. That's Claire Booth Luce and Henry Luce and Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles and William D. Pauly.

Starting point is 02:39:24 There's a whole bunch of these people that were involved in all that but that's that china lobby group and they they realized that uh that they had to maintain the nuclear weapons so that no matter how much the soviet union agreed to get rid of all their nuclear weapons and no matter how much china was willing to agree not to have any nuclear weapons the united states unilaterally insisted upon maintaining its military nuclear arsenal because they would have it available to deploy against China in the future. They were thinking long range on this. So the bottom line is that when, in fact, Dulles and the people realized

Starting point is 02:40:01 that Kennedy and Khrushchev had this backdoor channel going with their 18 letters, actually, that were being communicated back and forth. Norman Cousins was carrying these letters back and forth, and they were getting set to start to disassemble the warheads, respectively. And John XXIII, Pope John XXIII was going to be the broker for this deal. Oh, they had the Pope in the middle of it. Yeah, they had the Pope in the middle of it. First Catholic president put the Pope in the middle of it. Because Khrushchev trusted John XXIII. And so they were going to broker this,

Starting point is 02:40:39 and they were going to start to disassemble these warheads. And the China lobby said, no, that's not happening. And so what they did is they turned loose the S-Force, who wanted to kill him anyhow, because they thought he was betraying them, you know, over the Cuban Missile Crisis thing. And so they'd actually sent, in defiance of President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy,

Starting point is 02:41:04 who ordered them to stand down from those five military bases after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Frank Sturgis, who headed up, was the CIA liaison out on No Name Key, he launched an actual attack against Cuba and sank a Russian ship in the harbor in December of 1962 after the October Missile Crisis. Can we pull that up a little? 1962, December, Cuban attack? Yeah. Almost nobody found out about it because they were terrified that it was going to be exposed and that that was Frank Sturgis that did it. Type in Sturgis on the end of attack.

Starting point is 02:41:47 If they've got any data at all about it, that's the story. Okay? Okay, let's see here. He used the U.S. Marshals to—that's the one where they went in and burnt out the base. They went out and burnt out the base on No Name Key because they had launched that attack against the ship. It may well still be secret. They may not even be talking about it, but it was extraordinarily important. And that's the thing that triggered the people in the S-Force. They were furious that he went in and

Starting point is 02:42:26 burnt out the base. Bobby and John went in and burnt out the base at No Name Key. And then what happened, they arrested them and charged them with a violation of the Neutrality Act of mounting military operations against a foreign power without authorization. But then he let them go after a few days. And then they started planning in the Everglades, the base there, the Cuban, anti-Castro Cuban base, started organizing a second attack against Cuba in defiance. And Bobby and John sent in a second wave of helicopter gunships, all U.S. marshals, to burn out the base in the Everglades.

Starting point is 02:43:09 And that was E. Howard Hunt was the liaison. So all of a sudden you have Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt who are the liaison to those Cuban refugee groups. Watergate, those are the two guys that coordinated the Watergate break-in with Traficante's three guys who were the gunmen. Okay? Got it all tossed together. And because Bernard Barker, Bernard Barker was found as one of the Cubano guys. He had a whole in his jacket, sports jacket pocket, He had a whole sequentially numbered set of $100 bills that

Starting point is 02:43:46 was in his pocket. And they tracked them back to the bank down in Mexico, this Banco Internacional, into the account of Ogarrio. And Mark Felt was getting set to, after the burglary, Mark Felt, who was the deputy director of the CIA, or deputy director of the FBI, he came in under Pat Gray. Pat Gray got appointed when J. Edgar Hoover died. And Pat Gray, this all becomes critical during the Watergate burglary because the burglary takes place on the night of the 17th. They're arraigned on the 18th. Bob Woodward picks up on the fact that one of the guys that's been arrested is a CIA wiretapping specialist at McCord. And then starts trying to track the June, what's it said?

Starting point is 02:44:53 His chief of staff. Nixon? Nixon's chief of staff. Wasn't. No, what's it said? Can we Google that? Not John. It wasn't John. I can't remember the name it was

Starting point is 02:45:07 No, no Altman Alderman Alderman. Yeah. Yeah that He he come he comes into the incomes into the Oval Office and he said mr. President. We got a problem here That John Dean has just called Pat Gray has just come over, the head of the FBI, said that they're getting lots and lots of pressure to go investigate this bank down in Mexico City where these $100 bills have come from. He said he wants to know if that's going to cause any problem. And Nixon says to Haldeman, he says, look, get a hold of John Ehrlichman. Get a hold of John and go on over to the agency right away.

Starting point is 02:45:58 And go over there and sit down with Vernon Walters and with Dick Helms, and you tell them right now to call the FBI and tell them to get the hell out of that part of the investigation. And Haldeman says to him, well, what am I supposed to tell them to say? And he said, you just tell them that if they don't get the FBI out of this part of the investigation, all the Mexico stuff about the Bay of Pigs guys could all come out. Nobody knows what that means. Nobody knows what that means. But what they're talking about is the base.

Starting point is 02:46:38 They're talking about the base in Oaxaca, Mexico, with the training of the Bay of Pigs guys, that those are the guys that were being trained to do the assassination, because he knew that the assassination team could have gotten exposed, because it turns out that's the place where they paid the Watergate burglars out of that account down in Mexico City, out of the Ogarrio account. That's where those $100 bills came from, and that's the account where they were paying for the triangular fire team base. It would have led right back to the assassination. And it turns out that Howard Hughes, or excuse me, that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were liaisons to the S-Force, both of those guys, okay?

Starting point is 02:47:27 So they were not only coordinating the burglary, but they were coordinating the S-Force that was the assassination team that was designed. And as Traficante told us, this is the team that killed the president. That becomes crucial. So you're sitting in a room in Tampa with your partners, and you're talking to this mob boss. No, no. It was a bad Andy was the one talking to him. Bad Andy was the one talking to him. And Traffic County sits right there. Well, you're sitting there.

Starting point is 02:47:58 Can you hear this? No, he comes back and tells me this. Oh, okay. But the bottom line is, there he is saying flat out, this is the team that killed the president. He said... How do you react to that? Well, when I found that Bill Taylor told me, because Bad Andy had come back from interviewing Traffick County, and was just completely thunderstruck by what he had found out. And he reached out to Bill Taylor, my investigator, and said, look, you two boys are good boys. You ought to leave right now. He said, you don't want to go any

Starting point is 02:48:31 farther in this. You both want to leave Bailey's office and don't come back. He said, just leave. And Bill Taylor, my chief investigator, that's not something you tell him. Oh, you don't want to know. And so Bill just leaned in on him and got him him to tell him uh what traffic on he had told us and so bill taylor and i just said this man you know we're out of here wait wait a minute let me let me back up for one minute just because i'm trying to put this all together too obviously it's tied but there's also this weird like recent small movement online there's a movement with every goddamn thing these days where they try to relitigate Watergate as, oh, no, Nixon didn't order anything. It was just the CIA set up because they wanted to get him out of the way, maybe because he knew too much. That's bullshit.

Starting point is 02:49:19 It's all bullshit. Right, because he did order it. People don't know anything about what they're talking about. Right. But the people who did it. People don't know anything about what they're talking about. Right. But the people who did it... Did what? Who actually broke into the building and did Watergate are completely inseparable from the Kennedy situation. Well, that's right, because three of them were part of the S-Force.

Starting point is 02:49:40 I mean, the three, you know, Rolando Martinez, Ricardo Chavez, the guys, and Bernard Barker, you know, are all part of the S-Force. They were part of the 15 people that were gunmen for Santos Traficante. They were part of the force, right? going in trying to find out whether Larry O'Brien, who had been the lobbyist for Howard Hughes, had somehow found out about the fact that Hughes was the guy that Richard Nixon had create the team that created the assassination team back in 1960. Remember? So Howard Hughes is the guy that set up the team to kill Castro. They're the ones that killed the president. And Nixon was sure that if it leaked out that he's the one that created the team who end up being the one who killed the president, everybody would have been convinced he was

Starting point is 02:50:35 in behind it. But it's not like they acted on their own. When we're talking about killed the president, there's also, you know, obviously there was a falling out with JFK and Allen Dulles where he fires Allen Dulles and then Alan Dulles effectively runs the CIA from his Georgetown townhouse or whatever. So when you look at it from a high level based on all the wild information, you know, who's responsible? Okay, S4 killed him. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 02:51:00 And we can go into exactly who you think did. But who's responsible? Like who said we're doing this who were the guys it was it was the brown brothers harriman people that they're the ones that would green light this and it was alan dallas who was their consigliere yeah you know what it was but he wasn't the reason he was made the head of the central intelligence agency was because he was legal counsel for brown brothers hariman. It's not the other way around. The military industrial complex, if you will. Yeah, because the CIA was actually created pursuant to a memo that was written by Robert

Starting point is 02:51:32 Lovett, who was the senior partner at Brown Brothers Harriman. He wrote it to Truman advocating that they create a central intelligence agency and that they have this capacity to do this. So that's who Allen Dulles was. So the green light that got given to the S-Force to go ahead and kill him, which they wanted to do anyhow, came from that group. And that's partly because it's China lobby, that they have the long-range view that what they're doing

Starting point is 02:52:01 is they're going to have to maintain preservation of the nuclear weapons systems in order to confront China, because you can't back China off with any kind of a threat of a traditional land war against them. You know, you have to just threaten them with nuclear weapons. And that's why they couldn't get rid of them. And that's why Kennedy had to be gotten rid of right away. People keep saying, why didn't they just wait until the election? And, you know, put in billions of dollars and beat him, you know, in the election. They couldn't wait because he had a whole other year from November of 62 to November of 63 to 64. And he could have undertaken unilateral action as the president, commander in chief, to start disassembling the warheads. And that's what

Starting point is 02:52:42 he was in the process of thinking of doing. How do you know so confidently that, what was his name, Lorenzo Morales? Is that it? Roger Morales. Roger Morales? Yeah, David Sanchez Morales is the guy. David Sanchez Morales was the dude from the Grassy Knoll working in context with Lee Harvey Oswald. Everybody knew that he was the shooter. He was the shooter for the team. He was the shooter for the team. You know, he was the... The S-force.

Starting point is 02:53:08 The S-force. Yeah. What was his background besides being a Cuban revolutionary? He was the maximum marksman for them in the triangular fire team base. That's who he was, Morales. And the 15 guys there, we got the names of them base that's who he was morales and uh and the the 15 guys there we got the names of them we know who we know who they were they when did you get the names i got the names back in may from traffic county traffic county may 73 73 yeah he gave you all

Starting point is 02:53:37 yeah he laid them out just like that and they weren't it's not like they were all physically there that day well actually actually they were pretty well deployed in Dallas. Yeah, the whole team. The whole team was there. It was a full operation. They had Rip Robertson was there. Rip Robertson is their field commander. There's a photograph of Rip Robertson standing right next to the Stennis Freeway sign.

Starting point is 02:54:00 Standing right there. You can see the front. In the photograph, you can see the whole front bumper of Kennedy's limousine coming into, and there's Rip Robertson tipping his hat to the president, like, you know, 1.2 seconds before the first shot rang out. Oh, my God. So, and Rip Robertson is the field commander for those. I know guys who know Rip Robertson. They played, you get gone hunting with Rip Robertson. You know, Rip Robertson, you they knew they knew exactly who he was

Starting point is 02:54:25 and he was the guy that trained them all he stood my guy stood right on the deck of the flying tiger too with rip robertson and uh and uh uh what's his name uh uh what was the guy's name paulie william d paulie you know who owned the Flying Tiger too. And, you know, when they, when Johnny Martino was just bitching about the Kennedys and how, what sons of bitches they were and how they betrayed them and all that. And, and William Paulie turned directly to, turned directly to Johnny Martino at the time. He says, don't worry, Johnny, we're going to kill that motherfucker. Said it right in front of my guy. It was Dick Billings. Dick Billings, who was the, the Miami Bureau Chief for Life Magazine. He was on board the ship because this was the last attempt

Starting point is 02:55:10 they were going to make to try to assassinate Castro after they'd been ordered to stand down by John Kennedy and Bobby. I might be getting this mixed up, but was Jose Rodriguez a part of that S-Force? Jose Rodriguez. There's a Jose Rolando. There's Rolando Martinez. No, not that I know of. No. What was his tie, though, to JFK? Jose Rodriguez? Jose, you were talking about Felix. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 02:55:37 I keep saying Jose. Yeah, because I was trying to figure out who you were talking about. Felix Rodriguez. Felix Rodriguez was, in fact, on the S-Force. Okay. Felix Rodriguez was on the S-Force. Rafael Chichicantaro was on the S-Force. Whoa, Rafael Chich on the S-Force, Rafael Chichi Quintero was on the S-Force. Whoa, Rafa Quintero like the fucking cartel guy? Yes, Rafael Chichi Quintero. The Mexican? No, Rafael, no, Rafael Chichi Quintero is a particular guy. He's a long-time Cuban hardcore guy. He was the number two to Felix Rodriguez at the Ilepango at the weapons transfer for the for the Contra weapons supply operation. That was Chichi. Okay. But Chichi was one of the main

Starting point is 02:56:13 shooters. And Chichi was one of the trainers. Chichi, let's see here. Felix Rodriguez ended up being one of the trainers for the Lebanese phalange assassins under Shackley. Who were they? Shackley was handpicked. Theodore Shackley is this really important character that people don't know about. Theodore Shackley is the guy that he was a German and Polish-American translator back during World War II. His family fled from Poland before World War II, and he grew up here. He was in the 101st Counterintelligence Corps at the end of World War II. And when Reinhard Galen, who was the head of the Waffen-SS anti-Soviet and anti-Eastern

Starting point is 02:57:09 bloc intelligence, turned himself in to the 101st Counterintelligence Corps in Germany, this fellow was assigned to be his translator, Theodor Shackley. So he was with him when Galen came to Fort Hood outside of Washington, D.C. and had a long, protracted Reich with him into West Germany to head up the anti-Soviet and anti-Eastern bloc intelligence for NATO for 26 years. And Theodore Shackley was left on as his deputy. He was in the original class of the CIA in 1948. And he was assigned, his first assignment was to go back to Berlin and to work directly under Galen and General Galen became the head of the West German intelligence for 26 years and and Shackley was his deputy there at the Berlin operating base of the CIA

Starting point is 02:58:17 and and Shackley was brought in in 19 was brought in to be the new Miami station chief out of Berlin, out from under Galen, who was this kind of rabid anti-communist guy, a fascist, full-scale, you know, Third Reich fascist. And so they brought in Shackley to be the new station chief in Miami to run that JM wave operation that was the prodigy to the Operation 40. That was Shackley. And Shackley, therefore, had supervisory authority over the S-Force. The S-Force, since it was made up of guys out of Operation 40, those guys were under the auspices of Theodore Shackley as the CIA station chief in Florida. Then he went from there, from being the CIA station chief in Florida to being the CIA deputy station chief in Laos and the CIA station chief in Laos, where he established the contract with Vang Pao, the opium warlord.

Starting point is 02:59:18 And ended up eliminating both competitors to Vang Pao in the Golden Triangle by calling in sorties against them, and ended up reducing by one-third the total output of opium coming out of the Golden Triangle, but established complete monopoly control over it on behalf of Vang Pao, and then was given a percentage of the profits, which he put over into the Nugent Hand Bank. I've talked to the guys that used to bring suitcases. And this is where it came to the church. That's the source of the money. That's Theodore Shackley. And Theodore Shackley ended up being handpicked by George Bush Sr. when he became the director of the CIA under Ford, that he brought in Bush to be the CIA director, and Bush brought in Shackley to be the head of covert operations worldwide.

Starting point is 03:00:14 And that's Theodore Shackley. He's the one that ran the enterprise. He's the one that created the enterprise. It wasn't Oliver North or any of those people. It was Theodore Shackley who ran that entire operation, created that entire thing. Set up the Egyptian American Transport and Service Company, which was the mothership for that whole thing. Set up the off-the-shelf enterprise, ran all of the midnight aviation, all of those corporations that were smuggling the weapons into the Contras and smuggling the cocaine back into the United States. That's all Shackley. Shackley's the one that supervised the October surprise

Starting point is 03:00:45 against Carter when they made the deal with the hostages to hold, to have Hezbollah hold 52 hostages. That was Shackley. And wait until Reagan. That's right. That was Shackley's operation. Shackley ran that whole thing. And he was the director of covert ops for George Bush Sr. God, there's so much there. All right, let's tie the bow on the Watergate thing. This was an amazing loop around with this. But you got involved with the case, like you said, June 21st, shortly after it actually happens. You're investigating it throughout the fall of 1972.

Starting point is 03:01:20 Obviously, Woodward and Bernstein start reporting on it over those years. You get the whole Deep Th throat thing to come in and it culminates with nixon having to resign office in 1970 but concealing the fact that the bank account was a lot more serious than what they thought it was that they that woodward and bernstein stopped as soon as they established the fact that the money part of the money that was at the Banco Internacional that had been translated into the checks into the Bernard Barker's pocket had come from CREEP, the Community Re-elected President. What they didn't do, if they had gone down and pressed on what that bank was all about,

Starting point is 03:01:57 they would have found out the assassination team had been trained there. Do you think they were told to stop? No, no. I think what they said is they settled for having this story of the century that here's the money from creep directly from the committee to reelect the president in the pocket of the burglars in the thing. That's all they needed. And so they had the story of the century. And so they never dug to really find out what the full story was. And they missed it. There's a there's a famous story that that uh jacques valet tells yeah yeah you know the the one about the uh

Starting point is 03:02:31 well we'll get we'll get to it but it's a it's analogous to this you know where they where they settle they settle for something much less uh because it seems so good to them you know that they settle for it and then they let the big story go. And what was your exact, like, what did you end up doing from a litigation standpoint as it relates to Watergate? You were called in by a fleet. What we did is we helped coordinate John, I would say, yeah, what am I, the fellow who was our client, that McCord, James McCord, is the one who wrote the letter to Judge Sirica, blowing the whistle on the Watergate Plumbers Unit. So he was the one that blew the whistle, because he was furious. As your client. Because he thought that he'd been told that they were going in to do the wiretapping

Starting point is 03:03:31 because they thought that these people were supporting the anti-Vietnam War people and that that was unpatriotic and that it was illegal for them to be doing that. Right? I'm getting that these people were supporting the anti-Vietnam War people, and that that was unpatriotic and that that was illegal for them to be doing that. Right. And so he thought that he was doing a good thing. And he thought that he'd been properly dispatched to to do the thing. And so he was all indignant. And so he ended up writing a letter to Judge Sirica, blowing the whistle on Richard Nixon and the and the Watergate plumbers. That's that's the key that blew the whole case up and so you're involved so so we were we were involved in that that's what

Starting point is 03:04:10 we were doing okay and then the last thing on the Kennedy assassination the cover-up after that where you know they have the Warren Commission that has Dulles on it where rfk even asked dulles to be on it which is a wild like little twist in that whole thing and then you know arlen specter young and excited to get some power i guess comes in and invents this magic bullet theory where it comes through and shoots through six fucking different places like what what why did the American public accept that at the time? Well, because at that time, they still tended to believe what they were told by the government. When the government sets up these full commissions to do things, they were still believing them at that time.

Starting point is 03:04:59 You know, the shock of the Kennedy assassination in 63 was the beginning of the unraveling of the confidence, the kind of blind confidence that people had in the government at the time. So it was just starting at that point. So you have the shock of the assassination in November of 1963, that the commission is immediately appointed by Johnson. They come out a year later, and they lay out this kind of simple narrative of the lone gunman and telling about, you know, what his background was and all that,

Starting point is 03:05:33 and leaving out all the important stuff about him. And so that the people look at that and say, oh, well, that explains that. Even as traumatic as the whole thing was and how hard it is to believe that history could be changed by just one lone gunman like that, blah, blah. And then out start coming the books, the Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane's book, and they start picking apart the commission and say, wait a second, when you really look at the actual data, it isn't supportive of what their conclusions were in the opinion. So they start taking it apart. And I'm going to be delivering one of the keynotes this November,

Starting point is 03:06:14 actually, in Dallas at the annual conference we have there each year about the Kennedy assassination to re-review this history for the next generation so that they can keep in mind what really happened here. That's awesome. You know, so that the, so that it's that, and then the war with Johnson coming back in and it started to get revealed that Kennedy was already deciding he was going to start pulling the guys out of Vietnam, and that Johnson reversed that as soon as he came in, you know, those national presidential decision directives. Did Johnson know this was going to happen?

Starting point is 03:06:50 Johnson knew it was going to happen the night before. How do you know that? Because there's testimony of three different people that there was a meeting that was held at Clint Murchison's house in Houston the night before. On November 21st. Yes. Yeah. That J. Edgar Hoover was there, and George Bush Sr. was there.

Starting point is 03:07:15 Richard Nixon was there. Johnson was there. Richard Nixon was there. He's not in office anymore. Nixon was there. Nixon was there in town delivering a speech to the Pepsi-Cola company, stockholders. But he was there. They all came to a meeting at Clint Murchison's house that evening and were told to be prepared for this.

Starting point is 03:07:38 For Kennedy to be shot the next day in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was going to be eliminated. Yes. So do you think that Watergate could have been once Nixon, you know, who certainly had an issue with power? That's pretty well established. Do you think that once he actually was ordering something like that, this then was maybe people in the intelligence community going, God damn, this guy is such a fucking loose cannon and he he's a liability, and he's also party to the biggest secret in maybe U.S. history at that point, maybe then making sure that he's removed from office and seeing this through?

Starting point is 03:08:12 No. No? No. No. The die was cast. It was really interesting. The Woodward and Bernstein tracking that money because Mark Felt was the one, as you know, who was feeding the information to Bob Woodward. Yeah, deep throat.

Starting point is 03:08:33 And Mark Felt was really pissed off over the fact that he hadn't been made the head of the FBI. That they bring in this guy, Pat Gray, who was like a nobody, you know, to head up the FBI. And he was the one that was actually scheduled to go down to do the investigation of the bank. And he's the one that was ordered to stand down by Pat Gray to not go down and investigate that bank. Okay. And the money. And so he said, if you follow the money, if you follow the money, they only followed the money into the jacket pocket of Bernard Barker. If they'd followed the money all the way down to the assassination team down there, then it would have been revealed that Richard Nixon is the guy that ordered the creation of that assassination team that ended up killing the president. And if that stuff had all come unwound at that point where Nixon would take the fall,

Starting point is 03:09:30 people would probably believe that he had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, which it doesn't appear that he did at all. Well, he knew about it. He was told the night before. He was told the night before. I mean, that's having something to do with it, technically. Yeah, yeah. You could be charged with

Starting point is 03:09:49 misprison of a felony, theoretically, but no one's been prosecuted for misprison of a felony for the last 200 years. But the bottom line is that there are moments here, just as we'll get to with this UFO thing, there are moments when you have an opportunity, if you take the opportunity to bear down and suffer the pain that's necessary to go through, to purge an infection, you know, you can purge the body of that infection.

Starting point is 03:10:21 But if you just let it simmer and keep on going, it's going to poison the entire body politic. And it has done. It has done that. The Kennedy assassination has done that. The Watergate burglary has done that. The Iran-Contra thing has been allowed to let them all walk away. They refuse to come to grips with the implications of a national security state. That's the infection that we've got here in the country, is that we have taken the step over into establishing, you know, just exactly what it is that we train all of our young people to abhor, which is an authoritarian national security state.

Starting point is 03:10:58 And they still write negative science fiction stories about it, you know, with George Orwell and the others. This is what it looks like a horrible authoritarian state and they don't they're not protecting themselves against it adequately part of the problem though, is that you the people who are then like Peddled out there to be the voice to supposedly change this are our elected officials Who and when you're talking about Congress and Senate, don't have term limits right now, aren't incentivized to put term limits in there because they're the ones in there that would vote on that, and who are always trying to win the next

Starting point is 03:11:34 election. That also includes in the White House as well. So in order to change, like you're saying, because you make all the sense in the world to me, I agree with you wholeheartedly, but in order to change, you need to create a break in the system where suddenly people don't want to kick the can down the road. And what's happened throughout all of American history at different levels that's gotten worse and worse over time is we kick the can down the road. Yeah, that's right. So cynically, like, how do we solve that? Well, what we have to do is we have to find something, some issue that the people feel strongly enough about so that they rise up, you know, and that they say that we're not going to stand for this anymore, you know, and that they have, and that's the issue here with the UFO issue.

Starting point is 03:12:14 We believe that there's an issue that the people suspect that this is such a profound importance for the whole human family, that all across the political spectrum, people are saying, look, wait a second now. Are you telling us that you're in possession of an extraterrestrial non-human origin spacecraft and the bodies of extraterrestrial beings that are non-human beings piloting these spacecraft, and you're just keeping this a secret from us? Well, because you think somehow we're not mature enough to know about this? What's going on here? You know, if we can get people to follow up on what's going on here, we may have an issue

Starting point is 03:12:57 here that is broad-based enough for people to feel strongly enough about it to say, this is an outrage that you're keeping this information from us. And when you keep saying, oh, there's going to be this catastrophic event, you know, if we tell you about this, you know, you say, like what? And they keep saying, we can't tell you, you know, because, you know, it's national security. It's like you're back in the judges' chambers again in 72. Exactly. Yeah. Over and over and over again. They do the exact same thing all the time. And it just turns out I happen to

Starting point is 03:13:29 have the continuity of experience of having lived through it over and over again to say, look, don't try to give us this again. You've done this before and it didn't... I mean, from their perspective, it was a tragedy to lose the Vietnam War. And there was no doubt that the publication of the 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers contributed to them having to withdraw their troops out of Southeast Asia. They did it to themselves. Yeah. Well, sure they did. And they always do.

Starting point is 03:13:59 They've done it to themselves. They've got themselves painted into a corner, and then they're going to try to blame us for it, you know? And so what we're saying is that we have this particular opportunity with this particular subject, and it's not coincidental that I happen to be the lawyer that is here, you know, drafting the legislation in part for the Congress to say, here's how you do it. If you want to get at this thing, this is how you do it. You know, and so it's not that they can't figure out what to do. You know, and we've crafted this 64-page bill, which, you know, we'll get into, that has set forth an entire procedure by means of which we can, you know, in a sound and responsible way, roll out this information to the American public and to the people of the world

Starting point is 03:14:45 and give ourselves time to adjust our economic structures, our geopolitical structures, you know, our religious institutions, et cetera, to try to accommodate this kind of huge expansion of knowledge about our place in the universe, actually, and have a soft landing here. The problem is that the people in positions of power and authority aren't convinced that they'll end up still being in power. Right. Yeah, that's always the issue. And that's a catastrophe to them. Sure. Well, let's take a quick break. I got to go to the bathroom. This has been amazing so far.

Starting point is 03:15:21 So when we come back, we're going to get all into all your litigation over decades now with UFOs. We're going to talk about the Vatican. We're going to talk about some other cases in the 80s and 90s. We haven't got to. There's a lot left on the bone. So that's going to be episode one. We will come back and have episode two. If you're not subscribed, please subscribe.

Starting point is 03:15:39 Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D Dory. Both links are in the

Starting point is 03:15:58 description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

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Julian Dorey Podcast - #245 - Harvard Lawyer EXPOSES Most Disturbing 1960s & 70s Conspiracies | Danny Sheehan

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