Will Cain Country - From the Vault: Did Would-be Trump Assassin Ryan Routh Work For The US Government? (ft. Mike Benz)

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

In this "Best Of" edition of ‘Will Cain Country,’ Will sits down with the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online & Former Official with the U.S. Department of State, Mike Benz to discuss would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh’s potential ties to the U.S. government. Plus, Will and Mike discuss the truth surrounding the 7 U.S. soldiers who contracted COVID in Wuhan in 2019, and the lesser discussed aspects of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Subscribe to ‘Will Cain Country’ on YouTube here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch Will Cain Country!⁠⁠⁠ Follow ‘Will Cain Country’ on X (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), Instagram (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), TikTok (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), and Facebook (⁠⁠⁠@willcainnews⁠⁠⁠) Follow Will on X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@WillCain⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Feeling festive? Catch classic holiday favorites, like Home Alone, the Santa Claus, and Die Hard, along with holiday episodes from Family Guy, Abbott Elementary, and more with Hulu on Disney Plus. From festive Disney flicks to binge-worthy Hulu originals, Hulu on Disney Plus is your home for the holidays. Celebrate the season with Hulu, available on Disney Plus in Canada. Welcome to Wilcane Country. I am Wilcane. We're taking a short break, but we didn't want to leave an empty seat.

Today, you're getting a best-of show, a collection of interviews, arguments, and ideas. They got people talking, were they agreed or not? If you're new, this gives you a good sense of the show. If you've been here a while, you'll know exactly why these made the cut. Let's jump in. Mike Benz is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He's a former official with the U.S. Department of State, and he joins us now. What's up, Mike?

Hey, doing well. Great to see you. I'm doing well. It's good to see you as well. You have been all over some of the stories that we will and will not talk about in our public discourse. Let's start with the one that really honestly hasn't been talked about much, at least in the acceptable mainstream corners of conversation. And that is the entire hoax perpetuated on the American public of whether or not the 2016 election was influenced to place into power Donald Trump by Russia. The revelations

coming from Tulsi Gabbard, and now, and now, an order to impanel a grand jury from Attorney General Pam Bondi has pushed this along into at least some corners of American consciousness. But in the mainstream media, Mike, it's still ignored. It's still seen as a hoax and it's still dismissed as Russian disinformation. Tell me how big you think this story is about the hoax and Russiagate. I think it's going to be with us for all four years of this presidency. And the fact is, is Russiagate permanently changed the fabric of American society. The second order and third order effects of this hoax were, they, they, they, totally warped our universities, Harvard University, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT.

They all got tens of millions of dollars from the federal government to study the scourge of Russian interference and Russian hacking and Russian influence on social media. Our military contractors got tens of millions of dollars to build technologies to counter this phantom threat that never existed. Our NGOs got tens of millions of dollars to go after this threatened build resilience and counter strategies and mitigation and risk mitigation strategies for something that never existed. The media, the courts, the universities, it all got changed. We have entire government agencies that exist now because of this hoax. SISA at DHS, the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, was created because of the

hoax idea that Russia had hacked the DNC election servers when we now know that CrowdStrike, who the FBI relied on to make that determination, had no evidence that they did so. And yet we still have SISA getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year from taxpayers to take on a threat that, They, that never existed. You can say the same about entire university departments, hundreds of them across the country, across entire beats.

How many journalism beats exist about Russian disinformation, which never existed before 2016, and it only existed because of this beat? We've created a kind of war economy over a false flag, non-war. And the people who are responsible for dragging us into that non-war. are the same ones who were responsible for dragging us into actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

and who played very curious roles in the lead up to that, I should note, including John Brennan, Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI at the time, John Brennan, who was the chief of the CIA station house that was doling out visas to terrorists in Saudi Arabia. It's the same crew, and I think finally now there's an opportunity to bring them to justice. We'll take a quick break. More of this best of Will Cain Country coming up. When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat. This winter, make any moment golden and play thousands of games like her new slot, Wolf It Up,

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Gambling problem call ConX Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600. 19 and over, physically present in Ontario. eligibility restrictions apply see golden nugget casino.com for details please play responsibly this is ainzley airhart thank you for joining me for the 52 episode podcast series the life of jesus a listening experience that will provide hope comfort and understanding of the greatest story ever told listen and follow now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts you know you're talking about how it flipped on its head that the deep state infrastructure but driven by the Democrat Party and the ideology of the left went from, and this is what strikes me the

timeline of this, in 2012, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama stood on a presidential debate stage and were asked their greatest foreign policy concern. Mitt Romney answered Russia. Barack Obama's rebuttal to that became a punchline. The 1980s called. They want their party policy back. That's right, Mike. Barack Obama responds. Russia. The 1980s have called and they want their foreign policy back. He was dismissive of the nefarious capabilities of Russia. Three years later, Russia is the world's super villain that is totally infiltrated the United States of America. Well, it's amazing. I mean, the answer to that is very easy to calculate simply from the numbers. But what was happening at the time was

Russia had been perceived as invading and doing soft power gas diplomacy war in central and eastern Europe, primarily affecting Republican oil and gas interests in Georgia, in Azerbaijan, in the Balkans, where you had partnerships with Houston oil and gas companies, and there was a fear within the Republican donorist. that Russia's hardball tactics and their sort of soft economic invasion through shutting off the gas and forcing the government to buy Russian gas at much more favorable to Russia terms was essentially impacting the Republican side of the economic stakeholder game in Washington. but Democrats were still playing nice with Russia at the time, and we're still doing business with Russia at the time.

I should say Democrat-associated businesses. And you can, if you recall, that same election cycle, Medvedev was the president in Russia, and Obama was caught on a hot microphone after a debate, whispering into Medvedev's ear, tell Vladimir all have more flexibility after the election, meaning that Obama knew that he had to talk somewhat tough about Russia in order to get reelected because of the hawkish foreign policy establishment and needing their support, but that after he won the election, he could go back to Democrats doing business.

If you remember, Hillary Clinton was doing business with Russia through uranium one, And you still had this robust relationship through this Russian reset. What changed the game was when the Obama administration thought they could simply roll over Russia by orchestrating the Maidon coup in tandem with the internationalist Republican set. You had this sort of Obama administration, Victoria Newland, Jeff Pyatt, Operation, run through the embassy and the U.S. State Department in tandem with their British partners, with USAID providing $5 billion to the Ukrainian civil society organizations that organized the complete devastation of the Maidan Square. I'm literally setting it on fire

surrounding the parliament and forcing the democratically elected president Yanukovych to flee, and then the Obama administration literally installed the next president in Ukraine, Yats and Yuc, without a vote. And I think they were expecting that Russia would simply eat that the way that Russia had eaten everything else. When what happened next ensued, it is what brought the Democrats into the fold with Republicans in a bipartisan posture towards Russia post-2014. Of course, what happened next was Crimea broke away, declared itself a part of the Russian

Federation in a referendum vote, and the Donbass decided that it would be a breakaway state with an autonomous government, not respecting the new Obama-installed government in Kiev, forcing the U.S. to provide military funding to the Ukrainian government to recapture the entire eastern half of the state, after those militants killed about 35,000 Ukrainians in East. eastern Ukraine, Russia stepped in and launched what we now call the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and here we are. But effectively, what changed the calculus was Soros, Inc. Soros, Bill Browder, this whole investor set of Democrat limousine liberals who have hedge funds and private equity funds and alternative asset funds that have invested tens of billions of dollars in both

but often times illiquid investments in Central and Eastern Europe and across Eurasia, which gets to the heart of the Russia hoax that's playing out right now. The bombshell that dropped last week was this classified annex that containing information known to the Central Intelligence Agency for nine years, and just discovered by the American people last week, these include e-mails, purported emails, from the Open Society Institute Eurasia Center. There was essentially a Russian hack of information in 2016 called DC leaks, which quickly disappeared off the internet.

And the CIA appeared to mine those leaks and found emails that were completely shocking. But including in the highlights of these emails of the Open Society. Institute Eurasia Center were an admission that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to vilify Trump by stirring up a fake scandal that Russia would be interfering in the election. This is in July 2016, mind you, right at the time that Hillary Clinton made her pivot publicly to accuse Trump to turn the whole election on Russia. She would make her first speech about it just weeks after, that they had no evidence that Russia actually was interfering in the election,

but that they would deploy the Democrat-aligned digital cyber hoax firm crowd strike to, quote, do the media in the absence of any actual evidence, but that later in time, the FBI would come and pour oil on it. And that in the meantime, they would also declare that in the absence of any evidence, critical infrastructure, a threat to critical infrastructure would be declared as a menace to elections, which then catapulted us into this concept that DHS would declare on January

6, 2017, that critical infrastructure was, that elections were critical infrastructure, which then federalized elections. We're now living in the aftermath of that, add that to the second and third order effects of Russiagate. We now have federalized control of elections to the Department of Homeland Security, something all 50 states opposed at the time when this was declared, and it was all because of the Russia-Russia-Gate hoax. I think that executive order has to be repealed

in light of this as well, but just to put the button on this, and I'm sorry for taking so long. But those Open Society Institute Eurasia emails, the Open Society Institute is downstream of the George Soros hedge fund. George Soros met with Hillary Clinton while she was the Secretary of State on June 2nd, 2016, and who did he bring with him to the State Department to meet with Hillary Clinton?

The head of the Open Society Institute Eurasia Center, a month before this, they had been working on this together protecting George Soros' investments while George Soros was the largest campaign donor. the story, the now the origins of the hoax, they all fit together like a glove. We'll take a quick break. More of this best of Will Cain country coming up. You know what's fascinating in listening to you describe that is how Donald Trump remains an aberration on their ability to control the public mind. Listening to you talk about that evolution and the success of marshalling not just money but public sentiment toward Ukraine is reflected in this. Gallup poll I just talked about, the 2025 newsmaker favorability rankings. And Volodymer Zelensky comes in second, only to Pope Leo the 14th, and he's far ahead

of every other public figure. And that just illustrates to me the success of all of these enterprises, both governmental and non-governmental organizations, in manipulating the public mind, along with their either willing partners or easy marks, the mainstream media. And I think that's reflected in the favorability. of Vladimir Zelensky. By the way, I don't think you have to run. The point of these conversations for me isn't that you run to the other extreme and say Russia is definitely not trying to spy on the United States or that, you know, Putin is the good guy and Zelensky is the bad guy in Ukraine.

But I do think it shows how shallow the public's concept is and opinion is on these figures and these wars and therefore how successful all of this manipulation is on our minds. But their one big failure is the inability to convince the public about Donald Trump. Well, this is why internet censorship was such a big focus for them. And internet censorship through Russiagate is the predicate for it. The, I mean, that's a, that's a stunning statistic to the extent that, uh, that it's reflective of reality that you have the Pope and Zelensky neck and neck there of Zelensky, of course, is, uh, now, well over a year since it was supposed to be an election.

There's a five-year election terms for presidents in Ukraine. Zelensky was elected in March 2019. It is now August 2025. He banned elections three years ago. Elections were supposed to take place last year. He may be the, you may have a new sort of royal family, crown prince, it could be the year 2085 and there's still

democratically elected President Zelensky. He's banned 19 political parties, banned all independent media. It's a pretty incredible job that's been done there, but not

unusual in any historical sense. These sorts of you know, I mean anytime you have a a kind of useful foreign policy figure who has got the benefit of USAID and State Department and Internews and DoD, civil media support, they can be deified. I have no problem with the Dalai Lama, for example, but it's worth noting that I think very few people knew that the Dalai Lama was being actively backed by the Central Intelligence

agency when he was being given Nobel Peace Prizes and being put on the cover of Time magazine as a sainted figure. This is a very common thing where we kind of Dalai Lama eyes anyone who's useful. And then the moment they become less useful, suddenly their sins are revealed. I'm old enough to remember when Osama bin Laden, for example, was gracing the front pages of American newspapers as a warrior on the road to peace as he was being funded by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of the Mujah Hadin against the Soviets. But then, of course, you know, times change.

But the importance of controlling the media is absolutely critical to these folks because it impacts the amount of funding that Congress, allocates to support their war effort, their war efforts, their propaganda efforts, their soft power influence efforts. It also impacts, of course, who people decide as president, and then the executive branch decisions. It impacts private philanthropy and the ability to mobilize NGOs. And this is why control over media was such a fixture in the fight around Russiagate. They used the idea that Russia had controlled hearts and minds on American social media as the justification as the political and legal predicate to censor the

internet. For the first time in internet history in America, you had wide-scale mass bannings of completely legitimate First Amendment protected speech by real American voices who are being mass-reported to the tune of tens of thousands by State Department and Pentagon-funded NGOs like the The Hamilton 68 Alliance for Securing Democracy Project and the Atlanta Council who were simply co-leading reams of Trump supporters calling them Russian bots because they tweeted high frequency 50 or more times a day with anti-NATO talking points. That was the test that the Alliance for Securing Democracy and their, out of the German

Marshall Fund, which ran this Hamilton 68 project. basically said, do you support Donald Trump's talking points on foreign policy? And do you tweet more than 50 times a day? Okay, you must be a bot. You must be a Russian bot. Mass report. Right. Right. Until they start reporting real people like the Baldwin brothers or one of the baldwins and got too much even for Twitter. We'll take a quick break. More of this best of Will Kane country coming up. At Capital One, we're more than just a credit card company. We're people just like you who believe in the power of yes. Yes to new opportunities.

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necessarily a historical aberration. I mean, so does Putin. We should point that out. Putin manipulates elections, but the point we're making is that Zelensky is not the Pope. And hell, we'll wait and see if the Pope is even the Pope. Mike Ben's here with this. And I want to, I want to, before we go, talk to you from in about Jeffrey Epstein. I think the way to do this in a concise manner. And that's the way I want to do it, Mike. I want to do it concisely because I feel like so much of this story is about the side issues, the salacious issues. It's rarely about what it's really about in my estimation. So let's start with what it is not.

This story is the one that has captured the mind and the attention of the left. When I'm around someone, conversationally, who is from the left, they want to talk about Epstein. Which is interesting to know in that it was totally off their news radar some five years ago. Cared nothing about it, and honestly still know nothing about Epstein. All they think of it is as another smoking gun to get Donald Trump. What it is not, I don't believe. there is a client list that includes anyone like the name of Donald Trump. And I think my biggest piece of evidence or rationale, biggest piece of logic to support that is,

are you telling me that a Biden administration and a Biden Department of Justice who did everything under the sun to take down Donald Trump, every piece of lawfare they could conjure up would have sat on the smoking gun of Donald Trump's incriminating relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? That's just not the story, Mike. 100% correct. I think we actually had testimony from Galane Maxwell reportedly that that Donald Trump had not done anything untoward in her presence. Now, of course, Democrats will argue that she is no longer a credible witness as she is sort of auditioning for a pardon, they will argue. And I think that argument is not without merit. The fact is Galane Maxwell is in a very strange place. given that she has been given such a heavy-handed sentence for appearing to help, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, or appearing to serve, you know, thousands of women in this process for sex trafficking. And then the curious statement post-conviction now coming out of the

Justice Department that the only end-client for all these women was Jeffrey Epstein. It's hard to imagine one man could have that voracious an appetite, but I don't know. I guess I'm open-minded if I would be impressed. But I think that the issue is, is the left, the Democrats have been trying to find an angle to get back cultural, cultural cleavage points that. Credibility. a toll hold, anything in the culture? Right. As they've seen, I mean, voices like Joe Rogan, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, that used to be kind of avant-garde tip of the spear for being able to sort of get soft support for Democrats and the like. And the fact that there's such

overwhelming popularity for Trump on social media and even, I think, in many pockets of traditional media, there's simply no longer this complete stigma that there was around the MAGA movement. And I think that they see how much it's dividing the Republicans. And so they think this can be a wedge issue. But I think you're right. There's simply no, they're there on Trump. There is, there's enough to talk about it. Trump does appear on the flight logs in 1993, traveling with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that Jeffrey Epstein did associate socially at the Mar-a-Lago club in the 1990s. But that was 15 years before there was even the first plea deal struck with the Justice Department. And Trump kicked Epstein out before the conviction even happened.

And also, whether or not it's Donald Trump or Bill Gates or Bill Clinton or anyone else, knowing Jeffrey Epstein is not in and of itself incriminating. There is need for something more. And right now, in the public mind, any connection to Jeffrey Epstein itself is incriminating. but you have to ask deeper questions. And then there's the what is this story, Mike. And I only have a few minutes left, but I think you've been somebody who tells the truth on this and looks deeply. But I think that in the end, people always ask me about this story, all signs point to Jeffrey Epstein having deeper connections, a deeper purpose, and a deeper role than simply depravity.

Depravity is part of his story, either enabled or put up with by the deeper elsewhere. elements of this story. And there is just too much there there, maybe circumstantial evidence, some direct to point out that Jeffrey Epstein had connections to very powerful figures and very powerful organizations, perhaps the FBI, perhaps the CIA, perhaps foreign intelligence. But that seems to be a big part of the story when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. And because of that, I'm pessimistic that we ever know the truth. That's true. You know, hopefully, our children and grandchildren will be getting the Epstein files like we got the JFK files earlier this year. But it does seem too soon. Unfortunately, I wish this wasn't the case.

I'm still going to be calling for it. But I think that exactly what you said is likely the reason that the easy answers that they could give us are, do not appear to be being pursued. For example, we don't know the results of a CIA name trace done on Jeffrey Epstein. a simple trace of all of all traffic documents, references for Jeffrey Epstein. We don't have the 21-month investigation into Epstein's intelligence ties done by the Justice Department between February 2019 and November 2020 in which the Justice Department specifically was told the people they investigated Epstein's intelligence ties and then simply put their findings. in a bizarre footnote on page 244 of the 169 page report.

That's something that Pam Bondi could get us the transcripts for those interviews and publish them immediately. We don't have that. The fact is, is Epstein was with these international intelligence ties as pretty much his entire career from his 20s until the day he died, claimed to have Adnan Khashoggi as one of his marquee clients in the 1980s. Adnan Khashoggi was the CIA's middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal. He literally was the middleman between the U.S. and Israelis for the sales to Iran of illegal weapons.

While he was essentially the right-hand ban of every U.S. military contractor and the Saudi royal family, and then his money was being managed by Jeffrey Epstein in the 1980s, while Jeffrey Epstein had a fake passport claiming his residence was Saudi Arabia, the home of Adnan Khashoggi. And then you had the Southern Air Transport, the CIA proprietary airliner, literally a spin-out of Air America, the CIA proprietary, that moved directly to Jeffrey Epstein's Columbus, Ohio in 1994, while Jeffrey Epstein had power of attorney over the limited,

the CIA airliner that was used to move guns and drugs and laundered, cash to the British to the US Virgin Islands moved specifically to service the limited while Jeffrey Epstein had durable power of attorney was the authorized signatory on every limited document. So they basically a CIA airliner that was servicing the U.S. Virgin Islands and Iran Contra moves to service Jeffrey Epstein's company. And then Jeffrey Epstein goes and buys the island two miles away from the landing point of that CI proprietary with which is the famous little st. James and then you had the Jeffrey Epstein having 17 visits to the bill Clinton White House while simultaneously Jeffrey Epstein is getting having 43 visits from the head of

Israeli military intelligence and then simultaneously the the head of the prime minister of Israel at the same time, Bill Clinton is the president, seeming to be an essential back channel during the Oslo Accords and the, during the Camp David Accords. And then you have Jeffrey Epstein claiming to be a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, that it was his idea as Epstein was flying the president, Bill Clinton, around the continent of Africa on his private plane. While simultaneously securing these international deals and everything from the tech to the university space, this appears to me to be a facilitator, a broker of deals between foreign nation states and the U.S. government, as well as a financial support mechanism for both overt and covert activity done by the U.S. as well as international allied governments.

And like many of those figures in history, they are controversial. They are they are checkered. They don't behave well in their personal life. And when they get in too much trouble, they end up being burned as many assets and associated figures are. And I think what we watched in 2019 was the burning of Jeffrey Epstein. We should clarify, the limited that you're talking about is limited brands, the parent company of Victoria's Secrets and many other shopping mall. brands owned by billionaire Les Wexner, and Jeffrey Epstein maintained power of attorney over Les Wexner at some period of years in the, I believe, 1990s to early 2000s.

And that description you just gave of they are checkered, their past, they are serviceable, you could pretty much apply that exact same formula to one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest relationships, as the father of Galane Maxwell, Robert Maxwell. furthering those correlations and ties and circumstantial evidence that suggest we'll never know the truth when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. You get a lot of truth, though, by checking out Mike Binns, the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Check him out on X at Mike Benz with a Z, cyber. Thank you, Mike. It's always great to talk to you. You too. Thanks, well.

That's going to do it for this best-of edition of Will Kane Country. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back soon. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Prime members. You can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music app.