The President's Daily Brief - May 4th, 2022. Roe v. Wade Leak Is Real, What Is the Reason It Was Leaked?

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

It’s May 4th. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. I’m your host and former CIA Officer Bryan Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. First up, There’s heated debate over the leaked Supreme Court ruling, specifically who leaked it? I’m going to explain who I think it is, and why you should care. Your second brief, Mexican Cartels, they’re poaching endangered animals and then trading them for drugs with their Chinese partners. And as always, I’m keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. There’s a global outbreak of hepatitis amongst kids, I’ve briefed you twice on this issue, could be COVID related. I’ve got an update. All up next on the President’s Daily Brief. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's May 4th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events of the past 24 hours, all delivered to the president each day by the nation's spymasters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy and this is your brief. Here's what we're going to be talking about this morning. First up, there's heated debate over the leaked Supreme Court ruling, specifically who leaked it. I'm going to explain who I think it is and why you should care. Your second brief, Mexican cartels, they're poaching endangered animals and then trading them for drugs with their Chinese partners. We're going to talk about that secret exchange and whether we can stop it. And as always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories.

Put this one on your radar. There is a global outbreak of hepatitis amongst kids. I've briefed you twice on this issue. it could be COVID-related. I've got an update. All up next on the President's Daily Brief. Your first piece of intel this morning, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts yesterday confirmed that the leaked draft opinion regarding the Roe v. Wade case is authentic, and that the person or people who leaked it, quote, intended to undermine the integrity of our operations. Then he added, it will not succeed. Roberts also said that the marshal of the court is going to launch an investigation

to try to figure out who in the heck did this. And that raises the question this morning, who could it be? And why'd they do it? Now, one possibility that's been raised is that it's a foreign entity of some kind, like a country such as China or a troublemaking, anti-American person somewhere in the world. The idea here is that someone hacked into the court's computer network, found the document, and then leaked it to the press. Their goal would be to sow chaos in our already divided country. In other words, to rebel rouse, and in fact, that's what has happened. But there's a second possible culprit here, and frankly, the more likely the two. It's one of the liberal justices or their staff members,

who are usually called clerks. The idea here is that a justice or their staff, well, frankly, they were willing to blow up the court to undermine its integrity, which is what Justice Roberts said, because they were on the losing side of the abortion decision. And they thought that maybe a leak could somehow overturn the vote of another justice who was secretly waffling on their vote. Now, we don't know if the chaos of the past 24 hours or so has worked to change the mind of any waffling justice, but what we do know is this. Democrats are honing in on the argument that the court is now illegitimate, packed with a conservative bias. So listen to New York Representative Hakim Jeffries, who's a very senior Democrat in the House. This is what he said

late Monday night. Quote, the radical right stole two seats on the Supreme Court. Obviously, he was implicating that the court and its rulings are no longer legitimate. Then there's this headline on CNN, which read, the Supreme Court's legitimacy has been pierced. That kind of talk is really dangerous, because if it takes hold, then partisan governors, particularly in blue states, are incentivized to ignore Supreme Court rulings, because again, the court is full of partisan hacks who stole their seats, as they would say. And in that nightmare scenario, the federal judiciary starts to fall apart. And with it, the union. So it's very, very serious rhetoric. But putting that rhetoric aside for just a moment, we should ask ourselves, how likely is it that a

Supreme Court justice or one of their clerks would ever leak something so sensitive? Well, I can actually tell you, it's not just that it's likely, it's actually happened before. In the 1850s, there was a very chatty justice named John McLean. Historians believe that he was behind a number of leaks to a newspaper at the time on internal deliberations and votes of the court. Now, in the 170 years since, there have been a number of additional verified leaks by Supreme Court clerks as well, and for a variety of different motivations. There was one in 1968 about the Vietnam War, another in 1972 about Rule v. Wade, actually.

and yet another one in 1986 about budget balancing laws. There are actually a bunch of more, too, but the point is pretty clear, based on historical precedent, the likelihood of a leaky justice or a leaky clerk is actually pretty strong. But I want us to stop and really think about that. Think about what that means. It means that a justice is trying to destroy the court and ultimately undermine the country. Or a clerk is ignoring laws and rules, all being. because they believe their personal politics are more important than the nation's judiciary.

And that is the stuff of the deep state. All right, now that's a loaded term, so let me explain what I mean. You may have heard people talk about this idea of a deep state, and usually it's tied to some sort of grand conspiracy, involving international bankers and the Freemasons. But for me, and I hope for you, we should define it differently. and I'm going to tell you about a case that best exemplifies it. In 1994, a CIA officer named Aldrich Ames was arrested for spy. It turns out that he was not just an employee of the CIA, but he was also a secret agent for the Soviet Union. So his treachery left a horrible trail of blood behind him.

He turned over the names of many CIA agents, and he left some of them dead and others tortured. Now, when the FBI arrested him, they asked him a very good question. Why? They asked, did you do it? His answer, and I want you to listen to this very closely, was this. I know what's best for foreign policy and national security, and I'm going to act on that.

You see, what Aldrich Ames believed was that he was better than everybody else. He was smarter than even the president. And so in his mind, to hell with the rules, to hell with the law, and to hell with the country. Aldrich Ames was going to do what he wanted to do based on his personal beliefs and personal politics. And he did. Now, that's how I define the deep state. It's a government employee unaccountable to the people, but with profound powers of the state, who suddenly decides that they're going to act on their personal beliefs, irrespective of the law or the rules. And you know, we've been seeing a lot of that lately, haven't we? You may remember James Comey, the former director of

the FBI. He leaked sensitive, classified information to the New York Times about the Trump-Russia conspiracy. And as he later admitted to Congress, he did it because of his own personal political beliefs. Let me say that more plainly. An FBI director tried to take down a sitting president, not because of the facts or the law, but because he just didn't like the man. Now, Comey's not alone. You may remember the case of Natalie Edwards. She was a high-ranking Treasury Department employee, who leaked confidential tax documents to the press that had to deal with former Trump officials. When she was asked why she did it, Ms. Edwards said that she was a whistleblower, despite the fact that none of the information she leaked was connected to a crime or impropriety of any kind.

Now, there are other examples of this behavior, but the point I'm trying to make, and if you were the president, the point that I'd be emphasizing to you is this. Our country is falling into a really dangerous pattern. it's a culture where partisans are emboldened to use state power, their authority, and to leverage it to accomplish their own political goals. That's really dangerous. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican, because when your nation's capital is run by people who think they're above the law, that they're somehow anointed to serve as a country's superhero based on their own ego, well, then you are in real trouble, my friend, Democrat or Republican. So stopping that culture becomes incredibly important. All right. So if we agree that a deep state culture is bad, the question becomes how do you stop it?

Well, you start arresting people for breaking the law. You put them through public trials. And when they're found guilty, you send them to prison for the rest of their lives. In other words, you need deterrence. You need to ruin people so that others waiting in the wings don't try to do the same thing. and that's why this Supreme Court leak is so important. More than likely, we have another Aldrich Ames on our hands, or James Comey, or Natalie Edwards. Someone in the Supreme Court thinks that they know what's best for America, and they're going to act on it,

no matter the laws and no matter the damage, that it may cause our republic. To say it differently, ladies and gentlemen, I suspect that the Supreme Court and this country has a deep state problem. Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows

the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Your second brief this morning, we all know that Mexican cartels are awful. They traffic drugs and people and as you're about to hear, endangered animals, all with the help of their Chinese partners and all to pump more drugs into America's streets. Those are the conclusions of an alarming new report that explains exactly how to how this dirty trade works and how bad the problems become. To explain, there's a huge demand in China for exotic animals of all kinds. Chinese people eat them or grind them up for potions and lotions that make up traditional Chinese medicines. It's a huge market, and poachers from around the

world, especially Africa and Asia and Latin America, are very happy to cash in. The animals of interest vary, but in Mexico, they're mostly after turtles, jungle cats, parrots, and birds of all sorts. But aquatic animals are of greatest interest, and they are incredibly valuable. For instance, there's an endangered fish that's called the Totoava. It's a delicacy in China, and a single kilogram of the bladder from a Totoaba fish is worth $60,000 once it makes its way to a customer in Hong Kong. But that's not what a Mexican fisherman gets, by the way. They only collect 5,000, and then the cartel takes out their cut. Regardless, that money, whether it be 5,000 or $60,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people. But what's more important than the immediate

cash for the cartels in this particular case is that their Chinese partners have chemicals that can make meth and fentanyl. So instead of cash, the cartels swap fish for drugs. Now, we know exactly who's involved in all of these crimes. First, the Gulf Cartel, second, the Sinola cartel, and third, the Halisco Cartel, New Generation. Those are the main three. There is a fourth, known as the dragon cartel. They are especially focused on this poaching, that endangered Totoab fish that I mentioned earlier. So the question is, what can we do about this? All right, let's start with the Chinese.

Multiple U.S. presidents over many years have asked the Chinese government to crack down on this illicit trade, and not just animals, but supplying the drug chemicals to Mexican cartels. But again and again, Beijing says no, that either the problem doesn't exist, that we're just making it up to make them look bad, or even if the problem does exist, it's the problem of Mexico and America, not China. In other words, there is no help coming from Beijing on this one. The main reason for that, by the way,

is that Chinese government officials get a big cut of all that illicit trade. In other words, corruption is big business for them. All right, so that leaves Mexico to help. Now, what I can tell you is that the Mexican government is very good at talking about cracking down on cartels and drugs and poaching all of it. But there's one long-running problem. The Mexican government and their armed services and their police, all of them are wildly corrupt. Now, it's important to note that there are pockets of resistance, good men and women who fight to do the right thing.

The Mexican Navy, for example, has a pretty good reputation for fighting lawlessness, and they seem to have the least corruption of the country. But the bottom line is that we really don't have a reliable, effective partner in the Mexican government to shut down the poaching or even shut down the cartels. So that means America has to take its own actions. Now, some have suggested that we should label the cartels foreign terrorist organizations. Now, conceivably, that could allow some more aggressive set of actions to be taken by our government. And President Obama considered doing this, and President Trump did too.

And, you know, almost did it, in fact. But then he backed off at the advice of his team who said that there would be some very bad unintended consequences. Perhaps the gravest, they said, was that we could have millions of Mexicans applying for asylum in the U.S. because now they would be able to say that they were attacked by a terror group instead of just criminal organizations. So that means that we're left with very few options to help, well, certainly the animals, but then also to help the American people, certainly with the cartels. That means we're left with very few options to help certainly the animals, but frankly the American people. And the one option that we do have, the one that we can control, is our border.

And that means more agents and better walls and fences, more tunnel detection equipment, and more drones and sensors. But all right, still, what about all those animals? Is there anything that we can do? Well, if you were the president, I would encourage you to use the bully pulpit of the presidency. Start telling the world about how awful the Chinese government is, and how their demand for all sorts of things, but certainly poached animals. is driving this crisis. Imagine if there were like a daily or a weekly PR campaign designed to degrade China in the eyes of the world. I mean, there is so much that we could talk about. I mean, certainly poached animals would be a very good, powerful story to tell.

But what about the 100,000 dead Americans who have died because of drugs sourced to Mexico and their Chinese partners? I mean, that's a pretty important story, too, I'd say. The point is that this is an information war, and it's got to be. be fought on social media, in YouTube videos, with influencers and the rest. And not because any of that in and of itself will make China stop, not at all. It's because it'll make corporate America's boardrooms very nervous. And that is your leverage, ladies and gentlemen. Companies don't like being associated with bad things. So that's why you have to smear every U.S. company that does business in China. To put this differently, a good American president would understand that we have to raise the price of doing

business in China to damage the reputations of corporate Americans who make lots of money in China. Once you do that, it's those corporate owners who will in turn either pull out of China or behind the scenes ask Beijing to address the situation. And that is when you might start to see things change. Now, unfortunately, all of this is a very hard ask of President Biden. Remember, he was once asked on the campaign trail about whether the Chinese government is a threat to America, or not, he dismissed the idea out of hand, saying they're not bad folks, folks. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's your problem. Not just with Joe Biden, to be fair, but a whole bunch of your leaders who are sitting in Washington, D.C. this very morning. You tell yourself, no one wants your

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Start selling on Deepop, where taste recognizes taste. As always, I'm watching a few other stories today. Put this one on your radar. The global hepatitis outbreak in children is growing. It's a story that I briefed you on twice and I promise that I'd keep an eye on it. Well, here's an update.

There's been another small, outbreak this time in Indonesia. Records are spotty, but it's multiple kids with one dead, all in the capital city of Jakarta. That brings the number of affected nations to 14, and that includes countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America. If you recall, the first recorded case was believed to be in Europe in January this year, with a nexus actually in the United Kingdom. The number of kids impacted there has now reached 145, mainly aged 5 and younger. It's not clear if there is a particular spike in the United Kingdom or the numbers are just a result of very good health surveillance programs in the country. Regardless, the UK now has more cases of

childhood hepatitis than they normally have in a full year. There is some good news, by the way, and it continues to be that most children seem to recover after they get this sickness and without permanent damage. One interesting side note, UK health officials don't think there's a connection to the COVID vaccine because none of the ill British kids were vaccinated. Still, they haven't ruled out a different COVID connection, and we talked about this one before. Kids were hyper-protected during the pandemic, and some of their immune systems were actually weakened because of it. They weren't exposed to mild bugs like the cold or the flu, which in turn helps train their immune systems for more serious viruses. Regardless, the hunt goes on for the underlying cause of this global hepatitis outbreak.

The process, by the way, is expected to take until late summer before we have firm answers. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your morning brief. Some more good news to share this morning. We broke our own records for listenership on Monday and Tuesday. And that's because of you. You're coming back each morning and then you're telling your friends to listen to. And I think that the reason why is that I brief you on things that, well, they just make you think or reflect, perhaps a little bit more informed about different things you might not be seen elsewhere or you don't have time to dive into. And that's my goal.

It doesn't matter to me if you and I agree or disagree on something. I just want to encourage us to really think critically and for ourselves, to strive for truth. And that is why I end every show in the same way. To remind each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John chapter 8, verse 32. And you shall know the truth. and the truth shall make you free.

Good day.