Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/12/25 Wally Rashid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Congressman the Israel lobby put in prison

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Scott interviews Wally Rashid about the Freedom Flotilla he is helping to organize, which is attempting to bring aid to Gaza by sea. That leads to a broader discussion about the ongoing crimes Israel is committing against the people of Gaza. They then talk about Congressman James Traficant, an early critic of US policy towards Israel, who was unfairly taken down by the Israel lobby. Traficant’s story is detailed in a YouTube series Rashid produced.   Discussed on the show: Israel Got Him — The Congressman the Israel Lobby Put in Prison Wally Rashid is an entrepreneur and multidisciplinary analyst committed to advancing humanity through innovative ventures. From geopolitical analysis to exploring the frontiers of science and technology, Wally’s work is rooted in a mission to push humanity into a new era of technological progress and possibility. Follow him on X @wallyrashid For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott's full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.comYou can also support Scott's work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and x at scott horton show all right you guys introducing wali rashid and you know uh we're going to talk about the reason i asked him to come on the show here in a minute but first we're going to talk about the news

which is that he is in tunisia on his way to gaza with the flotilla so welcome to the show wali how are you doing doing good thanks so much for having me on i appreciate it Well, I was just glad to see that you had done this thing reminding people about Jim Trafficant and the way that he was persecuted and run out of power. And so I do still want to talk to you about that, and I'm happy to have you on. But then when I got you on, he says, yeah, sorry for the noise. I'm on a boat because I'm on my way to the Gaza Strip. So they're trying to do this flotilla thing again to deliver humanitarian aid.

And you're part of this, huh? Tell me everything about it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I'm part of the organization. It's the Global Samud Flotilla, and they are on a mission to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. This is actually the largest flotilla that's attempted to break the siege in Gaza. So we'll have anywhere about about 70 or more so boats planned to go. We'll see how that number does. But so far, I've started the leg of the journey from Barcelona to Tunis, and then boats will be departing from Tunis tomorrow. all the way to the Gaza Strip. We'll see if I'll be going all of the way or I'll just be going part of the way. It's mainly a non-Palestinian trip because there's more risks for Palestinians.

So I've just been doing a lot of the organizational stuff and I might be continuing up to Cyprus or not, but it's everybody else that's really going all the way there. I'm one of the organizers of the organization just helping out with the management. All right. Still though. And then there's so much going on, of course. I think I saw some video, but I couldn't tell you what day this was that Israel

bombed one of these boats with a drone out there in Tunisia, correct? Just, what, two days ago? Yeah, just a couple days ago, actually twice. There were, we don't know the origin of the drones, but you know, you can only assume they were drones and they had some sort of like fire incendiary device. So it looked almost like a flare or flamethrower that they dropped. So it was twice. It was one on one of the main ships called the family and then just a couple days ago was actually on the ship that I'm on called the Alma. Yeah, so just like a drone in the middle of the night just like flew over and then dropped this device. It kind of looks like a little canister filled with diesel and some sort of mesh or something. And it just like lit up the entire top deck.

It waited specifically when the captain or one of the crew was actually on the deck to drop it. So it seems like it's a lot of psychological operations just to scare people. you know it didn't actually cause much damage at all to the ship but they're yeah they're definitely already started with trying to stop us and influence our mission so well now if i remember back and i don't remember the years anymore i mean we covered this at the time but i'm sorry i lost it on the timeline in my head but when this was attempted in the past it was always only just a small handful of boats where this time the point is to assemble so many boats that it makes it very difficult for the

Israelis to stop you coming in basically right yeah absolutely i mean i think the most was somewhere in the what was it in the 30s or something but usually it's just like one or two usually just like one i mean back in jude when gretta thunberg she went it was just one boat uh prior to that it's typically just like one and then uh they actually came up with the idea to have just you know as many as possible after talking to bison she's uh she's a journalist in gaza she makes a lot of videos um she was like you know, no, you have to bring hundreds and hundreds. And this entire effort was just set up within a couple months, honestly. So for a couple months, the amount of work that they've been able to do is pretty incredible. And yeah, so the goal is to hopefully break the siege. And

that's the intent. And of course, Israel's already made statements. They're trying to stop it. But it's not going to get in the way of our efforts. So we're going to keep trying. Yeah. Well, I mean, it does raise the question of if they're determined. to stop the flotilla this time of what level of effort it'll take and hopefully not violence i mean we saw in the past i'm so sorry i'm forgetting what year this was but they killed some people including an american citizen named ferkan dogan was it in 2010 um i believe you're correct yeah i believe it was uh 10 people died and um that's why now you know the entire the entire mission And we do like a few drills every single day on just like nonviolence, really hammering that on.

They do like a thorough background check of everybody that's joining the flotilla. And then throughout the entire training and everything, they're really pushing nonviolence. And just the nonviolence of the entire mission and the importance of complying, you know, we have the full intent of making it to Gaza, but we have to be prepared for all scenarios, which includes interception. So there's a lot of drills for that to just try to mitigate those risks. as much as possible but as we know israel uh really doesn't care what it does and it seems to have total impunity so you can only hope for the best and just uh you know just pray i guess and see what happens all right now tell me wali why would anybody need to float a boat over to gaza yeah you know it's uh there it's it's not just well one of course you know it's just to break the sea

it's to start a humanitarian sea corridor i think that's the most important thing And two, what's happening, this entire effort, it's completely abiding by international law. There's not one aspect of it. That's not. It's a humanitarian mission. All the boats are full of aid. It's a nonviolent mission just to break Israel's illegal blockade on the strip and allow humanitarian aid. Israel's been starving the Gaza population. They're not allowing any aid to come through. They have a complete blockade. They control access to everything that enters in Gaza. So it's really, it's one, to bring in aid and to help that starving population. And it's, too, it's more so a long-term thing to allow for a continuous humanitarian sea corridor, which is currently not viable.

And if Israel decides to try to intercept our fleet simply for bringing humanitarian aid in, I don't understand why Israel would have an issue with rice and antibiotics and medication coming to a starving population. but if they did it would be another war crime that that is rules committed so it's uh it's about you know opening up a humanitarian seat where that's the number one that's the number one aim yeah all right well so go ahead and talk about what's happening in the gaza strip because i don't know it's come and gone as a media issue probably for many people you know depending on what you've clicked on in the past your algorithm might not show it to you at all anymore so is that still going on yeah absolutely uh no it's it's continuing to go on and it gets worse and worse unfortunately what tends to happen is that when conflicts

are drawn on for so long especially when it goes on for a couple of years uh the the shock factor tends to go away regardless of how uh how evil the atrocities are the shock factor tons to go in away. And I think that's what we're starting to see happen. In the beginning, if Israel bombed one hospital, there was total rage. And it was, you know, headlines all over the news. And what's starting to happen now is now Israel's bombed every hospital in Gaza. So I think just naturally, people begin to unfortunately normalize those things. The Gaza population is starving. There's simply just not enough aid going in. It's been leveled to the ground. And, you know, Israeli Prime Ministers have said over the past couple years, the intent is to starve the population.

We have radical settlers. Their intent is to settle the land to continue their mission of greater Israel. So they claim it that it's a war against Hamas, but every action that they're taking, if you just take an honest, unbiased assessment of the situation and how they're acting, it has very little to do with Hamas and more so their greater aims. And I think that what we're seeing is israel's using uh october 7th as an excuse to finally ethnically cleanse the population and push them out of there yeah it looks like it's working and then they've launched this massive attack on gaza city and you know there's reports uh there was one from what a week and a half or two weeks ago where the israeli army was telling how retz yeah you know we've

completely failed in our mission here and they were kind of narrowing it down they weren't talking about the entire campaign but they were talking about well our our recent campaign in i forget uh which part of the strip it was in forgive me but they were saying you know we had launched this large scale kind of campaign over three months or something and accomplished zero except getting their own guys killed and of course killing innocent people as they went but as far as quelling the insurgency there they have not done that Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is the thing that people need to understand is that, you know, Hamas, when they, when Israel goes ahead and states that it's in a war against Hamas and it takes out a Hamas fighter, I mean, they're taking out guys like, you know, with some guns and flip-flops. They're not, they're not, they don't, they're not going up against an equal army. And when you're, I believe recently, what was the, what was the data that about 83% of the of those killed? in Gaza were civilians around 80 percent so when you're going on and you're just indiscriminately

bombing and killing all of these people uh and it's there has been a blockade on the strip for years now you're going to naturally have young men i can't imagine any young men that wouldn't feel some sort of desire to want to resist to in some way uh when they're seeing their family be slaughtered when they're seeing uh when there's you know when they have really no freedom in any way whatsoever so for every hamas fighter you kill when you go ahead and kill that entire family and you go ahead and maim people uh how many new fighters does that end up recruiting and i think that's where israel's never going to be really able to get rid of hamas because it's an ideology and unless you change their circumstances israel's actions are only enabling that ideology even

further because all these young men know when they the way they grew up is they grew up without any freedom they grew up with a nuclear armed nation uh bombing them to oblivion uh murdering them murdering their families so what other they have no other idea of who this person is on the other side of this law of this tall concrete barrier aside from the fact that that person is and that that organization that country is keeping them locked in there so i don't see how they wouldn't resist you know yeah well i mean that was what israel's founders said you know in many cases geez if it was me i guess i'd join the resistance too and you know the thing is if you go back it's funny because erifat and them were like kind of kami and kind of nationalist and so you can

go well those guys are completely illegitimate their commies are sort of kind of and then with hamas I mean, they are Islamists. They're not been Ladenite, you know, world revolutionaries. But if they had their way, it would be an Islamic rule over the place. And so then, you know, it's like idiocracy. Well, just look at them, Your Honor. And in fact, they have a history of doing terrorist attacks against civilians, including on October the 7th, where, yes, there was the Hannibal Directive and all that.

But they did not skip over civilian targets and go straight to the military base. they did attack the rave and the kibbutzs and all of that and kill innocent civilians and so once you do that and you combine that with Islamism then it just is the perfect cudgel for you know all of western media and of course the Israeli and American regimes to just paint all of the Palestinians with that terrorist brush like yeah see that's you know they all get to share in that collective uh guilt for Hamas's identity and and and behavior when in fact of course the has i know you know the israelis the israeli government has done more than anyone to prop up hamas in gaza uh ever since the late 1980s so yeah absolutely

that's that's the thing you know in the western media will never headline uh the atrocities that israel commits my family's in the west bank they'll never headline the terrorism that's coming from the extremist settlers in the west bank uh but they have no issue and they love to highlight whenever Palestinians commit crime in the West Bank or commit murder. However, when you look at the Sats published by the United Nations, you know, the settlers in the West Bank commit more violence against Palestinians and the other way around. But the media loves to just present it, present it in one way. Yeah, your family is on the West Bank now, huh?

Yeah, my extended family. So a lot of my grandparents, uncles, they're actually in a small town in the west bank next to an extremist settlement called yitzar it's the most uh it's actually the most violent settlement in the entire west bank um so during biden's administration i was actually working with the state department at the time biden released an executive order that sanctioned uh extremist settlers so i was working with an organization just uh targeting sanctions on these settlers um but yeah so the situation in the west bank is horrible just uh in a much different way than Gaza. Yeah. Well, I wonder, do you worry that that could change and that they're going to just start carpet bomb in Ramallah and Janine and everywhere else and turn the West Bank into the

Gaza Strip in that sense and drive everybody off into Jordan or the Sinai or something? Yeah, I do. And it's, I mean, it's clear in every, in all of their actions and all of their rhetoric that that's exactly what they want to do. I think in the West Bank, it's a little bit different. I think that, I mean, I'm sure they've committed some airstrikes in the West Bank, but I think Israel's goal in the West Bank, Gaza is very flat. The whole entire terrain is very flat. So you can actually like forcibly displace them much easier than you would in the West Bank, which is very mountainous.

So Israel's approach has been just basically creating South African Bantu sands. All Palestinian villages, including my family's village, are in the valleys. Any Palestinian home that used to be on the hilltops was pushed down. and all of the Israeli settlements are on the hilltops. So it makes it very easy for Israel to just create checkpoints at the entrances and exits of the valleys. And it ends up creating this Swiss cheese type state where everybody is in South African Bantu sands. And they kind of choke them out to make it insufferable to want to live there. And they'll displace them one village at a time.

So you'll have extremist settlers, you know, push one. one village out and push them into maybe a larger city. So Israel's goal has really been to just create more of a Bandsasan model in the West Bank. But I can easily see that eventually becoming something where they just have, you know, try to push them to Jordan. The amount of desabilization it would cause in the region would just be astronomical. I can't even imagine. But that's the, that's Israel's larger aim.

They want to also, you know, settle southern Lebanon, uh, southern Syria. And all of their actions have already shown that's, uh, they're working towards that. So yeah, well now, this is often some crazy stuff, but I'm not sure where the line is anymore anyway, but they have successfully now genetically engineered a pure red heifer before it kept having a little flock of white here or there somewhere. They've been trying this for years, but they have actually slaughtered a pure red heifer and distributed its ashes, whatever, according to some ceremony. And so now it's okay to rebuild the temple, according to at least some factions over there.

And I believe closely associated with Idemar Ben-Gavir and his group of people who, he ain't the prime minister, but he's close. And of course, they'd have to blow up the Al-Aksa mosque to build the temple there. And then who knows what all, you know, animal sacrifices and crazy shit's going to go down then and the Third World War breakout. but um it seems like that was one of the things that they i read about this a long time ago but it was like they either have to wait around for the messiah to come or they can do the pure red heifer thing and then that's like a shortcut or at least maybe that was just supposed to happen according to the prophecy but then they made it happen you know through and it's like this west texas rancher was the guy who financed it all or something this is crazy yeah i didn't

actually know that they went ahead and come i think the the temple sorry about that i think the temple mount ceremony stated that they didn't but i guess what i was also told is that they did it behind the scenes and they they didn't want to outwardly say that they did it because they just didn't want to cause um more uproar regarding it um i mean yeah this is this has been there well i i hope i'm wrong about that i really only read one thing about it and i've read about it in the past but i only read one thing about it recently so if there's if there's nuance i appreciate you bring that up No, I think you're right. I heard they did. They say that it was a practice ceremony, but then people were saying, no, they actually did it. What I do know is I was actually at Ola-Aksa Mosque. Back in 2022, I visited my family and I visited Jerusalem.

And Israel has been taking a very quiet approach to the mosque. And what they, excuse me, what they've been doing is they've been actually digging massive tunnels directly underneath the infrastructure of the mosque. And they're stating that they're doing it because they're looking for Jewish artifacts and, you know, old pieces of the third temple. And the more that they dig underneath the mosque, I mean directly underneath, you can actually look at photos of these tunnels and these digging. They're weakening the structural integrity of the mosque. And whenever Palestinians apply for repair permits to fix the mosque from underneath, Israel denies it. And there was already, I think, pieces of stone that started crumbling off of the mosque. Palestinians wanted to repair it. Israel stated no. So I think Israel's what Israel is trying to do is to actually collapse the mosque from the bottom,

uh, from the bottom and completely just have it collapse on its foundation and then just say, oops, sorry, you know, it's an old building. It collapsed and use that as an excuse. Uh, it seems like that's, that's, that's been Israel's approach. And it's, um, it's crazy. If you see those images, it's just wild how Israel's so deceiving and it's, uh, in the way it's handling the issue. Yeah. And you know, I, I shouldn't say third world war thing because I don't like it when people use at hyperbole and that usually means thermonuclear war with Russia and or China and that's not an issue here but you got to wonder whether any of the local regimes could stand if they just sat and did nothing in such circumstances you know what I mean a popular uprising or

a coup d'etat is possible everywhere and then there are a lot of armed forces in the region available to be used you know like when the houthis took over Yemen Yemen already had a military. Now it belongs to the Houthis. You know what I mean? So that kind of thing can happen, man. Yeah, I can't even imagine, honestly, like, you know, typically before Empire's fallen history, it's when they're actually their most violent and they're their most rabid.

And I think that's what we're seeing with Israel is that it's really overextending. It feels like it's very strong. I mean, it's really, it's been able to expand. It's occupying more land. but I you know we know that their end game is a greater is role they've made they've made that very clear but they have some serious issues of trying to make that happen one is uh you can't bomb your way to peace which is not even what they want and two they have a demographic problem too I don't know why they want all this land they don't even have enough people to fill it um so uh yeah the idea

that this you know this moss collapses the backlash it would uh it would the backlash that would be created, the Muslim, how the Muslim world would react. I can't even imagine. And it's, it's just so, it's so difficult to imagine. And the fact that Israel's completely backed by the United States, how would the United States respond to that? It seems catastrophic. Yeah. Well, I mean, full annexation is clearly on the table for sometime in the next three years,

whenever they think is the smart time to pull the trigger. Trump called it off in 2020 for election reasons. wasn't enough but um otherwise he let him do it yeah and i wonder like because really what's the only thing that's stopping is the only thing that's allowing israel to continue doing what it's doing is the united states if it's every other country it seems like uh overall the vast majority of countries are against what israel's doing even the american citizens if you will get the polls are against what israel's doing but it's the u.s government that's allowing this to continue what we're seeing in the United States, the fracturing towards Israel in the United States,

Democrats, you know, vast majority, I believe 76 percent or so have a negative perception of Israel. We're seeing a huge divide in the conservative right, especially the younger generation. So I wonder if, you know, typically when a country like Israel begins to act very rabid, it will eventually make a mistake. And we're starting to see Israel make a lot of mistakes. I wonder if Israel is going to be, able to get away with its annexation or if in between its efforts to do so, it makes one very big mistake that leads to the U.S. responding in a way that the U.S. Republic responding in a way that the government can't ignore. That's what I imagine. That's the only way I can see things changing. But if not, I think you're right. I think then we would see total annexation.

It just seems that Israel's actions are very unstable right now. second for me. Hey, you guys, this October, Mikhail Thorup, is once again hosting the free expat money online summit this October 10th through 12th. Thorpe is a great dude. How do I know? Well, I toured ancient mine ruins with him in Mexico one time. It was rad. He's a serious expert in residency and citizenship laws and customs around the world. He knows it all, chapter and verse, where he can put your money and put yourself anywhere in the world you might want to go. He can show you how to acquire second residences and other real estate, get foreign citizenship, legally mitigate taxes, set up offshore banking, and more.

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Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. All right, man. Let's talk about Jim Trafficant. When I was a boy, I used to love watching, well, first of all, when I was a boy, there was this thing called TV. We used to just sit and watch it. You couldn't really interact with that thing. You just watch it. You could change the channel. We had various numbers of channels depending on your cable package if you had cable. But once they came out with this thing called C-SPAN, I would sit there and I'd watch these politicians because that's kind of interesting. And occasionally, they were actually entertaining. And particularly

this one guy from Ohio who had this ridiculous bird nest, I think, toupee, or if that was his hair, then I don't know what was going on, but it was just kind of funny. Pretty sure it was fake, a ridiculous tope thing going on. And then I never knew what in the hell he was talking about, but he ended everything he said with, beam me up, Scotty, which is, of course, a reference to the original Star Trek thing and a reference to him being somehow stranded on an alien planet and needing to get the hell out of here. So be me back up to the starship and get me away from this crazy place. And so I can't remember exactly on the timeline when I started to learn more about his substance and

what he was about and the trouble that he was in and all of that. But I was late to that game and then probably too late. And of course he was a Democrat. So I was just so biased against the Democrats at that time. I couldn't see. We're like, oh no, this guy's friends with Ron Paul or whatever. I didn't know that, you know?

So, anyway, and I've been a Ron Paul guy since way back then. But so but then I saw you're great, and I've known a little bit about this. I've read whatever over the time. but I don't even remember anymore like what I could cite for you about it that I've read about it. So I'm happy to have you on to talk about this YouTube series that you did, where it's two or three parts long.

It's at YouTube.com slash at Wally Rashid. And Israel Gottem is the series, the congressman and the Israel Lobby. And so please tell us this story of this guy. And well, go ahead and make your whole case. Yeah, definitely. You know, the way I initially started looking into James Trafficant and just really started to admire him is seeing our politics and politicians today and how the vast majority of them are bought out by APEC.

And it's a new phenomenon that we have politicians actually speaking out about APEC's influence in U.S. politics. We're seeing the media speak out about it. This is very new, and it still is a huge cost for politicians to talk about APAC or be against APAC. We've been seeing that with Thomas Massey, Jamal Bowman. But nowadays, it's a lot easier to talk about it versus the early 2000s. And I was wondering who was, you know, were there any politicians at the time back in the early

2000s that were even mentioning APAC or the influence of Israel, and there were really just one or You know, Pat Buchanan was one and James Trafficant. And he was speaking out about APAC 25 years prior before anybody else was like they have today. This was before the age of social media. This was where you're getting all the information you're being fed is coming from the mainstream media. And he had the courage to really speak out about APAC. And he was a very extroverted individual. And he spoke out about a lot of a lot of things, a lot of political career.

corruption, and that made him a target very early on in the early 2000s. So that's how initially I started looking into James Chavikin, I started watching his videos. There was a very famous interview that he did with on Fox News back in, I believe, was it 2009 or 2014 after he got out of prison and he mentioned Israel's stranglehold in America, that video started to go viral. So I started to look into him. And I realized that, you know, back in the late 90s in 1999, in the early 2000s, he would routinely mention Israel and it upset the Israel lobby a lot.

And like I said, it made him a target. And he believes, and what he stated is he eventually ended up getting 10 federal charges related to bribery and racketeering. He's a Democratic congressman from Ohio. And he stated that there was a target on him to just get him out of Congress. The media headlines were always against him. A-PAC was always against him. There was a lot of very powerful forces that wanted to take him down.

And he believed that A-PAC put a lot of pressure to put him in prison. So he ended up getting charged with 10 counts, 10 federal charges related to bribery and racketeering. And there was a court case against him saying that he was taking money from companies that he was working with to basically passed legislation for them that would benefit them and that he was accepting bribes from these companies and he was uh he was just you know doing illegal things with his employees and charging kickbacks so the more i started to look into the case the more i started to realize is that it was really a case based on very little very little physical evidence and it was all based on hearsay uh so much of it so that's initially what started my journey and i started requesting uh government

documents i started i reached out to the national archives and i requested court documents which really showed me it just felt like it was a kangaroo court to put him in prison you mentioned ron paul previously and how he had a good relationship with him ron paul was actually one of the very few congressmen to speak out in the congressional hearing regarding james trafficant and say you know this guy's only got in 30 minutes to really defend himself what's going on here um and it ended up working. He was kicked out of Congress and he was put in prison and he was completely shunned honestly and the media really went after him. So my series is directly related to that, his statements regarding Israel, and a lot of the issues in the court case that led to his

conviction. Yeah, so talk, well, actually pick up any of those threads that you want, but make sure you hit them all. Yeah. Well, so, you know, one of the, one of the charges was um that he sold his boat to uh he sold his boat to uh an employee of of a of a company that he was working with and they uh the government said that he was basically it was all it was all for show and that he um the reason that he even sold this boat was to accept ten thousand dollars as a bribe in order to push legislation forward for this company and uh then i started listening to his podcasts and listening to his interviews this is after his his arrest where he started to say, you know, I was placed on, I was, I was charged with bribery for

accepting $10,000 cash. But the boat that I sold was actually worth $35,000. And he's done a boat survey and he said that he even submitted the boat survey in court to show that why would I accept $10,000 as a bribe when I could sell this boat anywhere else and receive $35,000 for it. It just didn't make sense. Why would you accept a bribe for $10,000? If you could sell the same boat somewhere else

and receive more money, it's not actually a bribe. So he mentioned that he had this boat survey, and none of the jurors at the trial were able to see any of these documents, but it was in the, it was actually submitted in the courts. So I reached out to the National Archives and I was able to get a lot of dossier, like a whole thing, a whole sack of documents,

documents back. And one of them was the boat survey. It's directly listed, you know, an evaluation was done on the boat. And the boat evaluation show that it was between $30,000 to $35,000 that's not including repairs. So it completely disproved that. And the witness testimonies that he had against him, that's, that's what's so, that's what's so sad about this entire case is that so many of the key witnesses, there were there were, I believe, like over, I believe over 80 witnesses total on both, uh, on both sides of the aisle. But it really came down to just maybe eight or so key witnesses that really ended up sealing the deal. And almost every single one of those witnesses were threatened by the federal government in some way, or they were actually criminals. And the federal government told them they would put them in prison, and they ended up getting shorter sentences or not being targeted by the federal government if they lied about him. So another one of the charges that they said again related to bribery is that he accepted welding equipment on his farm. James Trafficant lived on a farm and one of the charges was that he accepted this large welder from a

company that he was that he was pushing legislation for. And James Trafficant said at trial, you know, this is this, I'm not accepting this welder as a bribe because this isn't even my welder. I just accepted this welder to give it to somebody else in my district and I was just the middleman passing it along and i did pass it along i don't even have the welder with me it's not in my garage uh it's actually with um it's it's actually with the individual from my district so the best way to prove that would be to actually you know bring the welder to court and to show or to have that witness come out and say uh you know this is uh this is actually my welder has nothing to do with james trafficant this was not a bribe and uh this individual was richard detour

And he stated, and this wasn't until actually after the fact, because he was so scared to mention this at trial and to speak out about this, that a group of, I believe it was three or four men randomly arrived to Richard Dator's house, the individual that owned the welder. And they went to his garage and they started putting the welder onto their truck. Richard Dator comes out and says, like, what are you doing? this is uh this welder is going to ohio where the court cases and these men say this welder is not going to ohio uh you better keep your mouth shut and they started threatening him and they started asking him questions about his son they saw his son leave um leave the house at the same time they were grabbing the welder and he was so terrified um about that event that he ended up keeping his mouth shut and he never ended up bringing the welder to court and he didn't tell james

trafficking about this until afterward so uh it was never known who these men were who ended up taking the welder it was never known whether or not they were working with the federal government but there was something very shady happening behind the scenes that nobody was able to uh that nobody really spoke about until afterward there was another individual that was at trial and um uh i believe his name is ryan kidwell and he was supposed to speak out and he that he that the federal government was threatening him, saying, you have to lie and say that you saw James Trafficant accepting money from this company when he really didn't. And Ryan Kidwell, he refused to lie. He said, I'm not going to lie. And he would continuously receive throughout this entire

process, receive phone calls from anonymous numbers. And whenever he would answer, the phone, the line would hang up. But whenever his daughter would answer, his nine-year-old daughter, The person on the other side of the phone would say your dad, he's a horrible person, your daddy's going to die, somebody's coming to kill your dad. And it just terrified her. And it terrified him as well. And he refused to lie. He seemed like he was an honest man. And the federal government, the prosecutors threatened him.

And they said, if you don't lie, we're going to have the IRS go after you. And he didn't lie. And the IRS did end up going after him. He did end up getting indicted afterward, which shows that, you know, the IRS was, or not the IRS, sorry. the prosecutors were threatening these witnesses and the ones that didn't comply did end up getting indicted so it seems like it was one of those cases where it was an entire kangaroo court to really just take him down it's it's funny that he's you know getting placed on charges of bribery and racketeering for accepting ten thousand dollars here um supposedly which i i don't believe is really

the case while if you look at the politics today ten thousand dollars seems nothing in regards to a bribe when you see the amount of political corruption that we see in the in in our congress today. So it seems like it was a very intentional targeting. And it's, you know, we have social media nowadays. But if you think back to the early 2000s, you know, the media is a very powerful force. So he really had nobody on his side at the time. And it was very difficult for him to to really have anybody, you know, proving it and when he was speaking at trial again like i said he was only given 30 minutes and a lot of the documents that he wanted to put forward a lot of the jurors never even saw any of those documents so hey let me ask you this one it was a lot of hearsay yeah go ahead i seem to remember a faint echo of this from back then during one of those prosecutions although i don't remember if you had mentioned this in your documentary about it but wasn't one of the charges that he got some local company to repair his fence and that was supposed to be like some kind of in kind

contribution or something like that. Do you remember that part of it? Yeah, I do actually. There was a lot of cases like that where because he has a large farm and he has a tractor on his farm as well. So he there were, this was like in a whole entire dossier, honestly, of ways he was accepting, ways that he was accepting bribes. And they said that there was a company that repaired his fence. And that was actually a bribe. There was another one where they stated that the prosecutor stated that his employees were working at his farm, fixing his fence, I believe one was one of the things, just doing basically handy work at his farm. And they were they were forced to do it by James Trafficant. James Trafficant forced them to do it. And he was accepting kickbacks

from these employees where they would give a portion of their salary back to James Trafficant. And a lot of it was based on, you know, a lot of it was based on here, say he had 30, was it 30 or 40 witnesses on his side in defense of him. But, you know, and the witnesses that testified against him, like I said, a lot of them were a lot of them were bribed, including some of the former employees. I also mentioned, you know, APAC was very much so against him. Back in the 80s, he actually had a had another court case against the Department of Justice in a RICO trial, which he ended up winning. And I believe it was the same, the same prosecutor that was against him in the, in the RICO trial, ended up being the prosecutor that was going against him in this, in this latest trial that ended up putting him in prison. So there was a lot of like, you know, there was APAC influence. There was just a lot of very influential people that had a desire to see him out of Congress.

All right. Now, so when you go through and read through all the trial stuff and everything, do you have like a steel. man kind of argument here, we're like, well, some of this does look a little shady, or this is really just the case against Saddam or Rushagate or something where like, it's just a bunch of crap. It's a lot of it, but it's still nothing. Yeah, you know, this is the thing that when you want to find evidence to put somebody in prison, you're going to find it. And there was definitely, a lot of it was based on witness testimony. It was just a lot of hearsay. And there was also a lot of bank transactions as well, where they showed, you know, here's specific bank transactions

and wire transfers and whatnot. There were specific cases where there was actually transfer of money. For example, the boat transfer was one specific instance where he was actually paid for the boat. And it would show that there was actually a transfer. And they used that to say that he was accepting a bribe. But the case is when you look at the boat valuation, which he presented, which none of the jurors really even saw, then you'd notice, okay, there's actually a lot more to the story. So I think there was definitely, there were definitely some instances that required you to look further into it.

But at the end of the day, I just felt like if it was a very honest trial and the jurors were provided all of the evidence and people knew that people saw the full story, it would have ended up a lot different. Previously, Ron Paul, we were actually just talking about him, him as well. He said he just didn't believe it was a fair trial. and he was actually in a congressional hearing and it's recorded actually had it in as a clip in in the in one of my episodes um uh he stated that he believes that there were people that were being bribed into saying and doing certain things and then if you look at those things uh the witnesses that testified against him uh they did end up receiving lighter sentences uh they didn't get some of them were were threatened that they would be looked into the into by the irs they weren't so i think that there were a lot of the a lot of things were misconstrued, and the sentencing, I don't believe, was fair. It should have been a lot. I don't believe it was fair whatsoever. And at most, just, it should have been lighter, if that means.

Remind me, was it, you quote either, was it witnesses or jurors who you quote saying, hey, wait a minute, this is not right. Yeah, so one of them was Richard Detour, and I believe he was one of the, he was giving a testimony, actually. And the jurors actually, so this is the thing with the jurors, he was in his previous trial back in the 80, back in the 80s against the Department of Justice, and I showed some clips of this as well, is that the jurors at the time he won that he won that case. And the jurors were completely on his side at the time. And later on, in his second case that ended up putting him in prison, a lot of these previous jurors were actually interviewed again. And they said, you know, we just really don't believe this. This whole thing seems like it's the Department of Justice and the IRS trying to go after him again. because they were never able even to get him the first time and we completely stand by James Trafficking and it was actually three of his previous jurors in the case back in the 1980s and then now this time comes around and it was in the early 2000s and the jurors ended up all against him it was really those witness testimonies that were supporting him

that were presented in congressional in congressional hearing he had a lot of sworn affidavits that ended up that were in support of him but the jurors ended up being a against him in the second trial. And that ended up really influencing the court decision as well as the federal charges. So I think, genuinely, I truly believe that if the jurors had all the information and they had the affidavits, they were able to see everything.

And he had more time to simply just defend himself, not just 30 minutes, a few hours. And he was actually given a lot of time. And they had all the things. I think it would have been, things would have went in a completely different direction direction. Yeah. All right. Now, so talk to me a little bit about the Greta Van Sustrin interview. For people who may not be familiar, Greta Van Sustrin used to be legal correspondent on CNN back in the OJ Simpson trial days. And then she moved over to Fox News and got a weird facelift. But she got, I guess, the last big substantive interview with him, or at least big one. so and and sat down with them and talked with them for what 40 minutes or something right

yeah i believe it was about there uh actually no it was uh i think it was actually a 15 minute uh a 15 minute interview on fox news and it was like broken up into parts and i believe maybe it would have been a little bit longer but i think like a full four and a half minutes or five minutes was completely just dedicated to israel and he really just like uh he really just spilled all the beans honestly it caused him a lot of uh caused him a lot of controversy And that same interview ended up just, you know, coming back into the limelight recently over the past couple of years. Oh, yeah, I see a 10-minute version here. I'm not sure why I thought it was so long.

Anyway, so, yeah, and then he does go off to her and explain that, yeah, it's the Israel lobby is coming after me. And then one might ask, and I don't think she did, but what are you saying that? The Israel lobby can tell the IRS which American congressman to target? Which is, yes, absolutely the implication of what he's saying here that this boring government has an enemy, not just in the American population somewhere, but in the American government, well, they just remove them. It's up to them to decide. Yeah. Yeah, no, that interview caused so much controversy. And again, you have to remember, this is one, like, social media was, like, non-existent to just really starting to bud.

So the media, the headlines had full, had full impunity to just. really changed public opinion so he's excuse me so easily he was honestly so ahead of his time and he said you know i believe that israel has a stranglehold uh on uh on america they control both members of the house or the house in the senate uh and it caused so much controversy at the time but now you know it went viral again after october 7th because people watch that and they're like okay wait there's something i actually connect to here does seem like israel has a stranglehold. I think, honestly, the one thing that October, one of the things that October 7th showed is, is exactly that is Israel's heavy, heavy influence on the United States

to where James Trafficant said it in his, in that interview, to where America is acting in a way that is not even beneficial to America. American foreign policy, American foreign policy in the Middle East doesn't even seem like it's actually to the advantage of America anymore. It's completely one-sided towards Israel, and it doesn't benefit us. And he said this, and of course, he was completely accused of being an anti-Semite. Sean Hannity ended up having him on his show afterward, just completely disparaging him. But, you know, now people are starting to realize, okay, what he said was completely, like, he definitely was on to something very early ahead of his time. Same with Pat Buchanan at the time. He was definitely one of those individuals. that was also targeted in the same way. And I think people notice it now. I don't think it's, you know, APAC is a lot more in the headlines. People are waking up.

So I think if he said what he said then now, it wouldn't be nearly as controversial at all. Yeah. Well, and there are others who came before him, Paul Finley and other congressmen. Yep. So it's a real problem, but it's funny because we clearly do not have the power, but we are definitely winning the narrative more and more of people. people can see it. As Colonel McGregor says, time wins more arguments than reason. And people can just tell that now it's just gone so far. Their welcome is so worn out. It's unbelievable. So Wally Rashid, everybody. He's in Tunisia on his way to Gaza or helping organize the flotility of Gaza, at least. So good times. Check him out over there at YouTube. YouTube.com slash at Wally Rashid.

listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.