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Ryan Breaux
Morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com Good morning everybody. Happy Tuesday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. There it is. Ryan Breaux Show. People live for the pound. Have to say it now at this point I do. It's a mantra. It's religion. That's what people want out there.
Krystal Ball
We need to do one of those videos about our self care routine in the morning. We're journaling.
Ryan Breaux
And then our self core routine is not nearly Andrew Huberman approval. Waking up in the dark, you know, you're taking care of your kids. I'm locked in. I'm listening to clips from the Departed, drinking Diet Coke. That's how I start every day. The opening monologue of the Departed from Jack Nicholson. Just love it. All right. Okay, let's talk about what we have on the show today. We've got the group chat story. This is just unbelievable. Broke yesterday, literally. The National Security Advisor of the United States, Mike Waltz, accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most prolific neoconservative journalists in the United States, to a group chat where secret war plans to strike Yemen are discussed. And you also see some dissent and internal decision making inside the Trump administration, possibly one of the largest breaches in national security. And what do you think, Ryan? Decades in terms of accidental breaches. Not saying it's like causing longstanding damage, but in terms of an own goal, I mean, this is as big as it gets.
Krystal Ball
It's as comical as it can get.
Ryan Breaux
It's unbelievable. And now they're circling the wagons around this guy, which definitely tells us a lot. We're gonna talk about Israel, man. This is a really just horrible story. One of Ryan's colleagues over at Dropsite was killed by the IDF just yesterday. He's gonna break down all the details for that. We're gonna talk about soda. That's a story that we did not get to yesterday, but is, again, unbelievable. Just showing a bunch of conservative influencers online allegedly taking money to pump big soda and its inclusion in the food stamp program. We're gonna talk about 23andMe. This is a absolutely crazy story. 23, which has some 15 million DNA samples filing for bankruptcy, and its samples are basically now available to the highest bidder. Huge privacy implications, regulatory implications, all of that. Then we gotta talk about BYD. As people know, I'm obsessed with these Chinese EVs and the competition and basically what it says about our market here in America. More and more, I'm just watching this social media revolution happen where YouTubers and other car influencers are showing people the basically, like, astounding performance capabilities of these EVs. And it's showing up now in BYD data. It also shows us a lot in their profits, shows us a lot about how far behind we are here in the United States. And then finally, Jefferson Morley, one of the most preeminent journalists on the JFK assassination, he's gonna join us. He's had several days now to Digest the JFK files. So we can say there's no, quote, smoking gun. There probably never will be. But he has done the best job that there is of putting all the breadcrumbs together, and he can tell us a cohesive narrative. So I'm really excited to talk about it.
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I was talking to him last night, and he thinks. And I. The most interesting things to come out of this are the fully declassified Schlesinger memo and also the Angleton testimony that he gave in 1975. This was a guy who was basically handling the Israel file. He was working on Castro assassinations. And now we have his full testimony from the 75 hearings. There you go. It's not gonna tell us exactly who shot Kennedy, but it's interesting stuff about our history.
Ryan Breaux
Right? Well, that's the. You know, it's funny. There's a conservative influencer, YouTuber out there who recently went viral for saying, I don't care who killed jfk. He's like, yeah, it's interesting. I'll just say it's Ben Shapiro. So he said like, yeah, I think it's interesting. But, you know, he was shot in 1963. And it's like, yeah, but you know something? Oliver Stone, when we had him here on the show, really hit home for me. It's like, yeah, it is history, but the reason it matters is because the knife's turn of that history led us down a catastrophic path. And the one that we can still rediscover of JFK's basic. The American university speech, the peace speech, effectively the one that got him killed, if you believe that, is really a legacy of somebody who himself had seen the inside of the deep state. He had seen how it almost destroyed him. His presidency wanted to take a different path after the devastation of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how that mentally affected him. A man who literally swam miles with a life vest str in his teeth from the bustling, with a broken back, trying to save people who saw the face of what war actually means. And instead, his murder leads to the war in Vietnam. I mean, the Brit, Nixon, a decade of, you know, millions dead in Southeast Asia, the prolongation of the Cold War for multiple decades. So, yeah, I think. Sorry, Mr. Shapiro. I do think it still matters. Yeah, it matters a lot.
Krystal Ball
And people will weigh that history and say that it's just a fairytale about Camelot, but it's plausible.
Ryan Breaux
There's great evidence. No one's saying the guy was Jesus Christ. Okay? He had a lot of issues. You can go actually Some of the best parts of the JFK files for me is going and reading all those South Vietnam assessments and how deeply they are. They're like, oh, Nien Dan, whatever is doing this. And pre the assassination. And they're like, oh, in this province, this governor is saying. And you're like, oh, my God. I mean, it's worse than I even imagined in terms of the puppet mastery of trying to, you know, this fake experiment of South Vietnam the entire time. And they just would not give up. If anything, it showed us how ideological it really was. So, sure, he was responsible for that, but he was starting to have different thoughts there near the end, and I think that's what got him killed. So, anyway, let's get to the group chat, shall we? This is just unbelievable. Like I said, Jeffrey Goldberg, the most preeminent neoconservative journalist in the United States, there's no question, beat the drums for the Iraq war. Beat the drums for Obama bombing Iraq Iran. Actually believe that might be his most shameful episode is whenever he basically was a cutout for the Netanyahu government to try and put pressure on Obama to.
Krystal Ball
Bomb, he wrote a cover story, within six months, we're gonna bomb Iran.
Ryan Breaux
This was all designed basically to push the Obama administration in a direction of wanting to bomb Iran. That's not even me saying it. Ben Rhodes and others basically said the same thing at the time. They're like, this is ludicrous. Some of us don't forget here. Jeff. Of course, he's also written all these stories since the suckers and losers Ho. If you will, he could believe it if you want to. I don't know what to tell you if you do, but if you wanna believe that, that's the person who wrote it. He did some famous interviews there with Obama. But Trump in particular hates Jeffrey Goldberg specifically because of this whole suckers and losers story. So there's really.
Krystal Ball
He said a bunch of like that Trump called some veterans.
Ryan Breaux
That's right, Grieving Veterans. World War I. Yeah. He said that the people were killed during roll. Allegedly said that, according to John Kelly.
Krystal Ball
And everybody involved says that he didn't say that.
Ryan Breaux
Except for John Kelly, who is the chief of staff, who also hates Trump and can't campaign. So. Okay. And he decided not to go on the record about it until three years later. So you can decide Trump's saying something.
Krystal Ball
Crass about veterans, though.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's one of those where. Look, I just think it would have come back.
Krystal Ball
The point is, Trump hates him.
Ryan Breaux
Trump hates him, all right? And so there's really no good reason for a national security advisor to have this guy's cell phone number. And here's the inside story from Jeffrey Goldberg about how this all went down. He was all over television last night. Let's take a listen.
Jeffrey Goldberg
The Houthis are not gonna know about this for another couple hours.
Krystal Ball
And you know about it.
Jeffrey Goldberg
Well, and I know about it. And I'm thinking to myself, I mean, honestly, I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm glad that Mike Waltz didn't invite a Houthi into the group or a Russian spy or an adversary of the United States. But put that aside. I'm reading this, and I'm wondering, not only why am I reading this, but why would the Secretary of the treasury need to know the precise attack sequence of this upcoming operation? Again, I don't want to talk about weapons systems, packages, targets, in any specificity, because, you know, I just. I'm trying to be. I want to be a responsible person, and I'm more interested in the decision making anyway than I am in the actual technical details of it. But thing is just very flummoxing to me because I haven't seen this kind of unserious behavior before. And, you know, and the Secretary of Defense, all due respect, in that presentation, seems like a person who's unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn't have participated in.
Ryan Breaux
And there are receipts for it, which is always a danger of that. So the receipts, as we said, let's go and put these up there on the screen. You can't make this shit up. You really can't. So Goldberg gets added to this group chat. This group chat ends up having J.D. vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Witkoff, Steve Miller, Mike Waltz. Mike Waltz, by the way, according to Goldberg, and this is not disputed by the White House, who says this is an authentic chain where decisions were made. Adds Jeffrey Goldberg here, where the full discussion and debate around bombing Yemen and the Houthis is all taking place. So the first message here is from JD Vance Ethegsep. If you think we should do it, let's go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let's just make sure our messaging is tight here. If there are things that we can do up front to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities, we should do so let's go to the next next one, please. Pete Hexath, vp, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic. But Mike is correct. We are the only ones on the planet on our side of the ledger who can do this. Nobody else is even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any. Given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go. But potus still retains 24 hours of decision space. Stephen Miller, quote, as I heard it, the President was clear green light, but we should soon make clear Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We need to figure out how do we enforce such a requirement. Eg, if. If Europe doesn't remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return. And what we did not have here is that before these messages there was actually some dissent from J.D. vance where he said, quote, 3% of U.S. trade runs through Suez, 40% of European does. There is a real risk. The public does not understand this or why it's necessary. The strongest reason to do this, as POTUS said, is to send a message. Vance continues, I am not sure the President is aware how inconsistent this is with his message. On Europe right now, there's a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil. I am willing to support the consensus of a team and keep these concerns to myself, but there is a strong argument for delaying this. A month doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, et cetera. So a lot of things being revealed there behind the scenes. Number one, there's only one voice actually in the group chat, Ryan, who seems to have any sense or reason, who's like, hey, why does this matter? Actually for us, it seems to matter a lot for Europe. There's a little country with the name I, whose name is also not mentioned there, about who it's super important to, but not all that important for us, right? Why are we doing this? Could shoot up oil prices. It's not consistent with the Europe message. And the best part is that Mike Waltz in the chat is the one who's like some brain dead neoliberal being like, but freedom of navigation is so important, really. Empire or unipolar moment type stuff. So you get ideological divisions very clearly happening in the group chat. You get also though, just the sheer incompetence and idiocy of a person who adds accidentally a journalist to a group chat. It was Mike Waltz and it was Mike Waltz. There's no disputing this. That's what I want people to understand. NSC has come out and said this is an authentic chain, and the chain of events in which it happened is how it happened. Mike Waltz accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat where he's basically lurking and watching this debate happen. And then, according to Goldberg, sharing the war plans or the strike package or whatever. Pete Hegseth has disputed that, and we're gonna get to that in a little bit. But let's say even if there was no classified information that was being discussed there, to add accidentally a journalist to highly sensitive internal deliberations over a wartime maneuver of bombing a foreign country is just insane in any normal administration. He's fired yesterday, not even fired. He resigns for the good of the President. And yet this is where we are. Rya. It's a clown show.
Krystal Ball
And it'd be one thing if he's like, U.S. trade Representative, right?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, that's right.
Krystal Ball
Who was apparently who he was trying to add.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Krystal Ball
He's National Security Advisor.
Ryan Breaux
He's the national security.
Krystal Ball
You gotta be good at that stuff, Right? Especially when he's in the thread talking about how his OPSEC is on point. Yes. It's like, bro, you just tweeted to a journalist, or DM'd to a journalist, DM'd a journalist that your OPSEC is tight.
Ryan Breaux
Your OPSEC is tight.
Krystal Ball
But I will give J.D. vance credit. I think his argument is a little.
Ryan Breaux
Bit silly, but you gotta understand who we're talking to.
Krystal Ball
Exactly. Exactly.
Ryan Breaux
He's consistent within the MAG framework.
Krystal Ball
If I were making the argument to not bomb Yemen, I would make the same argument. Because this is to those guys.
Ryan Breaux
That's right.
Krystal Ball
I wouldn't come in and be like, well, actually, the Houthis are correct here in the sense that it is their right under the Geneva and their obligation under the Geneva Convention. So to stop a genocide that they see unfolding, they have told Israel to continue to allow the flow of medicine, food and water into Gaza, and that is their obligation on the Geneva. Therefore, we should not bomb. That's not the argument I would make. To this gang of warmongers. I would say exactly what J.D. vance said. Let's couch this in the America first we hate Europe stuff. And one reason I say it's such a silly argument. I understand tactically why he made it, but from the silliness perspective, two things. A, Europe didn't really have anything to do with the crisis. Like Europe passively supports the US Support of Israel. And half or more of those countries send weapons and diplomatic support to Israel. So they're on the hook, but they're not driving this train. The United States and Israel are driving this train. But the more important point, which never got discussed in this conversation over signal, is that their plan has no intention of even working.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Krystal Ball
Their plan, the missiles they send will blow up, they will hit buildings, they will kill people. So that part of it will work. But the idea that it was going to get the Houthis to stop the blockade was never discussed.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Krystal Ball
Because it wasn't going to happen.
Ryan Breaux
It's literally impossible today.
Krystal Ball
The blockade is still happening.
Ryan Breaux
That's right. And if it was possible to bomb them out of his business, then Biden would have done it. Okay. And then the Saudis would have done it before them. We're not the first people to make this happen.
Krystal Ball
Amazing quote from Biden when he was bombing Yemen, a reporter asked him about it. I remember he said, are the strikes working? No. Will they continue? Yes. Yeah.
Ryan Breaux
Okay, got it. I mean, in his dementia addled mind, he was actually honest for once. So here's the first reaction here from Pete Hegseth after he lands on the ground in Hawaii immediately after the story breaks. Let's take a listen.
Mike Waltz
You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia or the fine people on both sides. Hoax or suckers and losers.
Ryan Breaux
Hope so.
Mike Waltz
This is the guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does. I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and.
Ryan Breaux
Courage of our troops.
Mike Waltz
I've monitored it very closely from the beginning. And you see we've been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets our ships couldn't sail through. And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. President Trump said no more. We will re establish deterrence. We will open freedom of navigation and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we're doing as we speak, from the beginning, overwhelmingly.
Ryan Breaux
So that's basically all he had. You can tell he's pretty upset about all this.
Krystal Ball
He's playing to Trump. He's reminding Trump who Jeffrey Goldberg is.
Ryan Breaux
Well, actually that's a great point. Is that on television he's like, hey, by the way, you know their person who Mike Walz had this phone number for was the guy who made up this story, or at least reported this story. Who you believe is made up. And yeah, he's messaging there. But I can tell you this inside the administration, people are furious with Mike Wall. It's basic competence. Like it's one thing if you accidentally do it with your friends or whatever. What we are told from this administration is what we're firing tens of thousands of federal workers. We're doging the government to make it more efficient and only the best of best will survive.
Krystal Ball
Meritocracy.
Ryan Breaux
Meritocracy. I believe in meritocracy. I believe in excellence. Nothing about this screams meritocracy or excellence. It just screams absolute stupidity. And there's a different word I could use, but I won't Right now with.
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Ryan Breaux
Pulling the old RBG you're Telling me for the first time here.
Krystal Ball
Let's take a listen. Mr. President, your reaction to the story.
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In the Atlantic that said that some of your top academy officials and aides.
Ryan Breaux
Have been discussing very sensitive material through.
Advertiser 1
Signal and included an Atlantic reporter for that. What is your response to that?
Ryan Breaux
I don't know anything about it.
Krystal Ball
I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it's not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it.
Ryan Breaux
You're saying that they had what they.
Advertiser 1
Were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive.
Ryan Breaux
Materials and having to do with what? Having to do with what? What were they talking about?
Krystal Ball
The Houthis. You mean the attack on the Houthis?
Ryan Breaux
Well, it couldn't have been very effective because the attack was very effective. I can tell you that.
Krystal Ball
I don't know anything about it.
Ryan Breaux
You're telling me about it for the first time. You tell me about it for the first time.
Krystal Ball
And by the way, can we get a definition for the word effective that somehow doesn't include accomplishing its mission? That's what. And nobody in the media is talking about that either.
Ryan Breaux
Why would they? Because they like bombs to go off, Right?
Krystal Ball
The strike didn't do the thing they said it was. He's like, oh, it's gonna create a deterrent. It's gonna decimate the Houthis, and it's gonna restore freedom of navigation. Strike one, strike two, strike three. None of those things happen. All you did is share your Signal chat with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Ryan Breaux
Let me tell you something.
Krystal Ball
And blew up the construction of an oncology center.
Ryan Breaux
Right? There is a secondary story here where Goldberg is, like, a confirmed CIA spook. Because that's what he should say. Kind of a journalist. What kind of a journalist gets added.
Krystal Ball
To the secret chat.
Ryan Breaux
Okay. Gets added to a secret chat, refuses to publish or even report on the specifics of the strike, voluntarily leaves the chat and then alerts the people, being like, hey, was this real? You don't leave, bro. You stay forever until they kick your ass out. Because then who knows what better information that you could get?
Jefferson Morley
Yeah.
Krystal Ball
And you let your colleague. Shane Harris.
Ryan Breaux
That's right, your colleague.
Krystal Ball
Yeah, Shane Harris. Sorry. According to a source with direct knowledge. Source with direct knowledge in the meetings.
Ryan Breaux
Reviewed by the Atlantic, tell us this. This. And then, by the way, the people in the administration are gonna freak out.
Krystal Ball
And make them figure out.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. And they're gonna be like, how did this happen? And there'll be a knife fight inside. It'd be glorious, to be honest. And then actually, they probably discuss leaking in the chat, and you get even more information about it. That's what somebody who's actually good at their job does. Somebody who's not. It's not competent. Yeah, you're right. It's not about competence. It's basically like. Even the way he's like, I'm not gonna disclose the strike package or whatever, I'm like, why not? Okay. I mean, look, they literally brag about this sh. They publish a video showing the ship that. Or the. Yeah, the guided missile destroyer that's launching the missile. You think I can't go on Wikipedia and see what kind of armaments they have over there?
Krystal Ball
And, like, if the Houthis find out what brand of flying at them, they're gonna be able to.
Ryan Breaux
Oh, right, yeah, I forgot that the Houthis have a very sophisticated anti missile detection technology. What are we doing here? So Goldberg is an idiot, and you're.
Krystal Ball
Still attacking sheds, by the way.
Ryan Breaux
Such an obvious. Just like. Just such an obvious, like, CIA cutout. This is. Ken Klippenstein's been going off on this. I mean, everybody's praising Jeffrey Goldberg. Oh, he didn't publish the war plans. I'm like, what are you doing, bro? When we had those Discord files, I got my hands on those over here at breaking points. Yeah, I didn't publish them, like, word for word until later, but we did all the reporting on the inside in the way that Glenn covered the Snowden documents. You wanna do it responsibly? Okay, you don't want anybody. And even then, I think you would be within your rights to just upload it if you want. I actually would not criticize anybody for doing that. But you don't want to take any of the hits about you're endangering national security or whatever, so you just. What do you do, Ryan? Whenever you publish classified information, you take it, you review it, and then you publish whatever's newsworthy within it. They're still gonna scream that it's dangerous to national security, but as long as you take some responsible stuff here, I actually do think it's in the public interest to tell us how exactly they went this down. According to Goldberg, they had the specific names of the people they wanted to target. I would go, hey, hey, maybe you should publish those names. And then did they kill them or not? Because if they didn't, with a $200.
Krystal Ball
Million bombardment, that's pretty newsworthy.
Ryan Breaux
That's pretty interesting, isn't it? It tells us a lot about our military.
Krystal Ball
There's a good chance they didn't.
Ryan Breaux
Because there's a very good chance that they didn't. Exactly. So that's just a lot to say there about journalism itself. Our own Emily cracked the case. She's the first person to do so. About how exactly Jeffrey Goldberg got into this group chat in the first place. Let's put her tweet up here on the screen. Quote, my soft theory is that Walsh thought he was adding the US Trade Representative, Jameson Greer, who had the name JG in his context. And that has now been confirmed by the New York Post. So let me explain. The US Trade Representative is a member of the National Security Council. It's called the Principles Committee. It's everybody but the President of the United States.
Krystal Ball
Which Mike Waltz spelled wrong.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, which by the way, Mike Waltz spelled wrong. That's a whole other level. Thank you for reminding me of that. We're dealing with the best and the brightest here, folks. Folks. So jg, he clearly, in his phone has Jameson Greer, who is the US Trade Representative, saved as jg. He also, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, recently got into contact with Jeffrey Goldberg. Now, why would you recently get into contact with Jeffrey Goldberg? You're neocon, who is now Mr. America First National Security Advisor, and you're now having the phone number of Mr. Goldberg. That's interesting. And so you accidentally add said JG to the group chat. Nobody checks. You've got Marco Roux, you've got the Secretary of State, you got the entire national Security, you got Scott Besson, you got Steve Witkoff in there. I mean, this is the highest, highest level of national security decision making. And the level of incompetence here from Waltz is again, just unbelievable, especially when you are firing tens of thousands of people under the assumption that they're dead weight. I'm looking at the deadest weight I've ever seen here at the top of the Prince. Not to mention somebody who is genuinely stupid, not just for doing this, but listen to his messages. Mike Walsh is sitting there, like I said, he's like repeating some religious mantra about freedom of navigation. This guy doesn't have a single original thought in his entire head. It's crazy to watch.
Krystal Ball
There's a lot of people kind of pearl clutching about the nature of the security breach, but it turns out there may actually have been like an actual breach. So Witkoff, who is a real estate developer.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Krystal Ball
So this guy, not a guy that you can imagine, has even two factor on his phone, you know, let alone, you know, his phone on Lockdown mode or taking the types of OPSEC that you would need to be doing as somebody in his position of power. He was in Moscow when he got added to this signal check. So if the Russians were anywhere near him, hitting him with one of those little. You know, there's like, I was in Doha once, and somebody's going around with a backpack, and they're like, oh, there's one of those backpacks that, like, gobbles up that data. Oh, wow, Interesting. And I didn't. When I went to Doha, I didn't bring my phone.
Ryan Breaux
Smart.
Krystal Ball
I brought a burner phone and left my laptop at home. I'm not. Because just being in proximity to some of this stuff that you don't know about. Plus the Pegasus can just drop onto the screen.
Ryan Breaux
All they need is your phone. They don't need anything.
Krystal Ball
Drop it on. You don't even have to click the link. And then they're in. And then they can read everything you read. So, yes, signal is secure from the nsa, from the outside.
Ryan Breaux
Right. But your iPhone's not secure.
Krystal Ball
But if they're on your phone. So did they get in?
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Krystal Ball
I don't know. Like, they legitimately actually might have gotten in. It would have to have been good spy craft on the part of the Russians to, like, go after Witkoff immediately. But if they did, then they got in.
Ryan Breaux
Wouldn't you assume that they're doing that?
Krystal Ball
You would think.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, you would think. And by the way, this is another thing. This is all on their purpose. Personal devices. Just so everybody knows, you're not even allowed to have signal. It's not allowed. You can't download signal on your government phone. I confirmed this with multiple people who have had top secret security clearances. And I was like, hey, tell me how this is all supposed to work? And they're like, dude, if I was. You know, I remember I covered the Hillary email scandal back in 2016. I actually wrote a story about a Navy sailor who accidentally had shared photos when he was on a nuclear submarine. He didn't even reveal any classified. They threw his ass, literally, in the brig. He was prosecuted. He served time in the break. So the people I spoke to were like, yeah, if I was at whatever, E3 in the Navy and I did this, I would be prosecuted. And these guys are doing it at the highest level of government, and not to. And then even if you're gonna do it, be subtle about it. Okay, let's also be honest. As you and I know, half the governments run on signal. Why? To get around the Freedom of Information act and the presidential records.
Krystal Ball
It's more convenient.
Ryan Breaux
It is, yeah. Let's be honest, it's more convenient.
Krystal Ball
I got everybody going to a.
Ryan Breaux
Right, yeah, exactly. Who wants to go on a skiff?
Krystal Ball
They got a kid's birthday party to go to. It's the weekend, right?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. Send email on your. It's called High side. That's how it works, the High side.
Krystal Ball
You can only access.
Ryan Breaux
We can only access it inside of a skiff. Probably giving away too much here. Whatever, I don't care. I don't have a security clearance. Yeah, it's one of those where. And people do have a right to know about how this stuff actually works in the backside. So the reason why they do it is because, like you said, it's more convenient. It's got disappearing messages, et cetera. But. But the downside of that is, as usual, what does the hacker do whenever the system is impenetrable? You do find the weak link. You find the weakest link. And here he didn't even have to find anything. He just let his own stupidity and incompetence give all of this away.
Krystal Ball
And the savvy cybersecurity guys will always say that the problem with a system is when it becomes too inconvenient for users.
Ryan Breaux
Yes, that's why. That's right.
Krystal Ball
And so you'll have like two factor. People have figured that out. Authenticator codes, people are basically figuring that out. But back in the day when you used to have PGP and downloading keys and uploading this, and it became so cumbersome that people basically stopped using it and went back to insecure channels. So the government has these. You have to be on a particular laptop or that. You have to be. You have to leave your cell phone and go into a room that has lead walls around and people are like, well, I can't do that.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, I'm busy.
Krystal Ball
I like to do war on a weekend and I'm going to the Eastern Shore.
Ryan Breaux
Right, exactly.
Krystal Ball
So, sorry, I'm just gonna do it on signal.
Ryan Breaux
Right. Won't somebody think about Mike Wallace and his ability to go to his kid's birthday party? I mean, you know, somebody's gotta speak up for those folks.
Krystal Ball
Not like the war can wait for Monday.
Ryan Breaux
It's especially ironic. Look, I don't have to be a shitlib to say this. Like, did we not forget about the whole butt her emails thing?
Krystal Ball
Yes. I mean, the email single presidential campaign was bad.
Ryan Breaux
It was bad. I wrot. I know you wrote about it too. Let's Go and put this up there on the screen. Here's A tweet from Mr. Wallace. June 12, 2023. Biden's sitting national security advisor sent top secret messages to Hillary Clinton's private account. What did the DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing. Oh, okay, let's go to the next one. It's from Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of law. It will be treated as such. I look forward to that.
Krystal Ball
Exceptions may apply.
Ryan Breaux
I look forward to that. A nine. This is even better. So inside the Pentagon, there's a witch hunt right now for people who are leaking classified information. Nancy Youssef covers the Pentagon for the Wall Street Journal. She's a great reporter. She says this seems like a good time to point out DoD just released a memo saying they were gonna use polygraphs to find unauthorized disclosures. And then finally, of course, what do we have right now? Now Press Secretary Caroline Levitt releases a statement as President Trump said, the attacks on the Houthis have been highly successful and effective. President Trump continues to have the utmost confidence, his national security team, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Now, does that mean that he is golden? Is he safe? I don't know. I wouldn't go that far yet. There's a lot of discussion right now here in Washington. The group chats, the actual group chats, the secure ones that we're not in, are flying. From what I'm told, people inside the White House are absolutely furious with Mike Walsh. But they may. And what I'm watching right now is a downplaying of this by maga, Fox News. Jesse Waters is defending him, being like, yeah, it's bad. It was a mistake. It won't happen again. But it's not like having a private email server or classified documents next to your Corvette in your garage. I'm like, no, dude, it's kind of the same.
Krystal Ball
It's kind of way worse.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. If anything, it might be worse if.
Krystal Ball
They found war plans in Hillary's email. Are you kidding me? It was just like, appointments with, like, ambassadors or whatever. And just so people understand the context here of this internal battle and why it's playing out. Mike Waltz is the. What do you call it? Anti America first coalition.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Krystal Ball
He's in the faction of the administration that is more hawkish, more pro war than the America first section that is organized around, say, Pete Hegseth and Jamie Vance, who are, you know, more skeptical of war.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Krystal Ball
And so that's why you're Gonna see, you know, by an effort to weaponize this in a way that in the past you wouldn't even had to weaponize it like you said the guy would just resign.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. In the past people who screw up like this understand last thought that a they're get charged. This is even just this is take the ideology out of all of this. In Washington there is a creed. The creed is the staffer is never the story. And when the staffer becomes a story, you have violated the sacred creed. So here you have a staffer who has breached national security classified information. Strike one, that's immediately fireable. Sentence two, done something so stupid you now create a problem for your boss. Okay. And then three, you're actually caught having been in communication and obviously leaking to a reporter who your boss hates. Any one of those three is completely a fireable offense.
Krystal Ball
And I tweeted this yesterday. But a source who's familiar with what's going on here inside the administration said that that is the running understanding that he was in regular communication with Goldberg and that Goldberg then. So then people are like, well, why would Goldberg out him? This is what a journalist does.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, it's a good story, right?
Krystal Ball
It's a good story. And he has other sources.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, that's right. He doesn't need you sources. Also at this point he'd done something so dumb, he would assume the note would be dumb enough to keep him around so he can just cultivate the next national.
Krystal Ball
And also he had no choice. Also.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah.
Krystal Ball
Was he going to not report this?
Ryan Breaux
I agree. You have to do it. If you have it, you got to do it. Okay, let's get over to the Israel block. Ryan, tell us what's going on with.
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Krystal Ball
Killed two journalists yesterday in what were both both deliberate targeted strikes. One, Mahmoud Mansour, was killed with his family in his home. The other, Hossam Shabbat, was killed while driving in his car. Hossam Shabbat was a contributor for Dropsite. He had been in communication with Sharif Abdel Kaddus, his editor at Dropsite, within just hours of having been assassinated. Going over edits for his latest story, which we published yesterday afternoon, we can publish. Put this up on the screen and we'll have Sharif on the program tomorrow to talk more about Hossam's life and death. Sharif is joining Democracy now, where he previously worked as a correspondent, so you can check out his interview, which should be up later this morning. We'll also have him on tomorrow. Hossam is from northern Gaza and was only 23 when he was assassinated. If you remember, northern Gaza suffered the worst of the genocidal assault by Israel throughout the war. It was the first place where people were displaced down to the south, and Shabbat was one of the very few journalists who both refused to leave and refused until yesterday to die so that he could bear witness to the ongoing assault on his people. There we can put up this element. There's been a lot of images that have been going around of Hossam. This is the moment when the ceasefire was finally implemented back in January, and the feeling of euphoria to have survived this genocidal assault. Here is another video that's been going around which is a young girl stops him because he had become a true hero to so many throughout Gaza for his relentless willingness to run toward the fire to report what was going on. So here is this young girl who's telling him that she had heard that he had been mob. And it was devastating to her that hope had drained from her when she had heard that rumor, because there would be a lot of rumors that he had been killed because he was put on a literal hit list by the IDF before he was finally assassinated. So when she saw him in person to realize that he was still there, still steadfast, still reporting, she was telling him it was giving her hope that she could pursue her dream of becoming a journalist so she could speak the truth. And underneath it all is this poignant belief that if the world only understood what was happening in Gaza, that the world, whatever the world is, that the world would step in, that. That there's no way that we live on a planet that would allow this to happen. That the only explanation, the only way that you can rationalize the decency of humanity is that people just don't know. And so therefore you go out and you risk your life to make sure that people know. And then people will step in and say this is wrong. This has to stop. I think a lot of people, Hossam, I think towards the end have come to the conclusion that that may not be true. That the world does know. In your discussions and nobody's going to stop it.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. In your discussions with him, was he aware that he was going to be targeted by the Israeli military?
Krystal Ball
Oh yes. They publicly announced that they intended to target him and 5A other journalists.
Ryan Breaux
And what's the justification?
Krystal Ball
They were saying that. The same justification that they use, that he's a terrorist.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Krystal Ball
Which is like he's 23 years old. He's been live streaming his life since October 7th. When did he have time to do this? Secret terrorism.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. So yesterday, they say over six months ago he was role within Hamas was exposed to us here on X. He carried out all of his actions under the COVID as an Al Jazeera journalist. And yesterday he was eliminated by the idf. Don't let the press fest confuse you. Was a terrorist. Here's a document published in October of 2024 proving his participation in Hamas.
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Utter absurdity.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. What is the dossier?
Krystal Ball
They just make stuff up. They constantly make things up with other journalists. They've said that they were terrorists when they were seven years old. None of it makes any sense. And it doesn't have to make sense like the. Any, any journalist who gets any level of international attention is a target. And like if you. They have actually tried to put up some evidence and it just all falls apart.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, my friend, there's nothing there. Trey Yingst over at Fox News, ironically has been been, let's say what, the only American mainstream media voice who's been speaking out for Palestinian.
Krystal Ball
He's a Fox News reporter and he deserves old friend of mine, consistently. Yeah, well there you go.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, we cover the White House together.
Krystal Ball
Good for him. Yeah. And he very consistently speaks out.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. He said, you know, Palestinian journalists Mohammed Mahtur and Hassan Shabbat were killed by Israel today in Gaza. 124 journalists were killed around the world in 2024. Two thirds of of them were Palestinian. As he says, journalists must be protected amid war. You know, look, he has very little power. He can't really do anything about it. But people need to understand he's a Jerusalem based correspondent for Fox News. The Israeli military can kick his ass out anytime that they want or not invite him on their little press tours inside of Gaza. So he's doing this at literal risk to his life inside of Israel considering the, you know, like the animosity and the way that you'll have government sanctioned violence if they want to against any amount American who's inside of the country and basically just hoping, you know, there's enough of us out here in the, you know, world superpower who might speak up for him or for people like.
Krystal Ball
And including 2023 and also 2025, you're now at 208 media workers, which includes camera people and others who have been killed in Gaza since, since the start of the war. And yes, Trey has been criticized every time he stands up and he continues to do it. I wish that more journalists would do so because Israel feels a deep sense of impunity, but not a complete and total sense of impunity. And so their ability to kill more than 200 members of the media over the past year and a half plus and only get criticism from us here and from Trey has emboldened them to continue to do it.
Ryan Breaux
You're right.
Krystal Ball
And to put people on a list and say we're going to kill them, to then kill them and then to announce that they killed them and say that they did it because they're terrorists.
Ryan Breaux
At the very same time. Ryan, we got this from the Financial Times. I'm curious for what your reaction is. Quote, Israel Ready, let's put it up there on the screen. Israel Ready's plans for the occupation of, of Gaza. So what is military like? What is distinctive of this as opposed to previous, quote, occupations? Is this like settlement or is this, you know, they've had invasion, they've had troops on the ground. Obviously they, I forget the Name of the corridor that they've occupied, what makes this like a next step in the military campaign.
Krystal Ball
So what they are saying is they're going to clear out huge areas of it and keep everybody in the Selma Waasi corridor, which would cannot hold the number of people that they're saying would fit in there. But they have also created a basically Department of Ethnic Cleansing, a Ministry of Ethnic Cleansing that is going to facilitate this is what the agency says it's going to do, facilitate the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. So the idea would be that maybe you can't fit all of the Palestinians who are there now. Well, they're going to continue killing them for some period of time. They're going to continue dying of malnourishment. There has been no food that has gotten in since March 2nd. And then they're going to keep the rest cramped in here. Now this does not account for how they plan on eliminating Hamas, which they failed to do after a year and a half long campaign. It doesn't account for the tunnel, it doesn't account for the lack of kind of reservists and manpower which they are.
Ryan Breaux
Having major problems with.
Krystal Ball
And it doesn't account for ammunition. Yeah, like they fired off so much, you know, so many tank shells and so many 155 millimeter shells in this genocide so far that they're running, you know, they've been able to replenish in the meantime. But our production capacity is not unlimited.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Krystal Ball
And they're firing it off at a pace that is higher than we can produce and that Pakistan and anybody else can secretly produce for them. So it's a sketch, it's an idea. And it's closer to a plan than the Israeli government has put out so far, which previously has been zero plan. Just going to continue this until America tells them to stop. But it has so many gaping holes in it that the only way you could see it be successful is with a massive scale depopulation of the area, which obviously is the vision. But whether or not they can achieve that remains to be seen.
Ryan Breaux
Why don't you tell us now about this no Other Land situation?
Krystal Ball
Yeah. My God. Yeah. Put this next element up. And this news came out, out within it felt like an hour or two.
Ryan Breaux
It was within hours of.
Krystal Ball
Learning that our drop side colleague had been killed. So Hamdan Bilal, the co director of no Other Land, as reported by Yuval Abraham, his co director, was lynched by a group of settlers. Now it appears that they did not kill him. Beat him him, beat him. Ruthlessly he was able to get into an ambulance. The IDF then, or some security forces stopped the ambulance and dragged him out and took him to detention. And as often happens, the victim of this attack becomes the one that then literally gets interrogated and charged with something related to the attack.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. So can we, can we put the image of him up on the screen? Just identify for people who aren't familiar with the documentary.
Krystal Ball
So that's Yuval on the far right. And that's Hamden there to his left there. Bald headed gentleman there.
Ryan Breaux
This is in the United States of America. This is Los Angeles. So he was here a few weeks ago on the stage of the Oscar.
Krystal Ball
Accepting his Oscar, accepting this for a documentary, making the case that these violent settlers are illegally uprooting people from their land. And then he goes back to his land and the violent settlers continue trying to uproot him from his land. Which goes to the point we're making about impunity. Because there used to be at least this sense that, okay, this is a person that the west cares about. There are millions of Palestinians, you know, that we could. That we can kill or disappear, but there's a handful that the west has heard of, so we're gonna leave them alone.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Krystal Ball
To not even follow that norm anymore suggests how far the society is going. And the settler society is leading. That's the leading edge of this kind of.
Ryan Breaux
And we have a video of this attack. This was released by Yuval Abraham, the co director of the film. Guys, why don't we go ahead and play some of that so people can see. I mean, it's like out of a movie. You have a group of these settlers that literally are throwing stones and attacking him. As you said, after he's attacked, he is then arrested in the ambulance by the Israeli security forces. Right, right. And then taken into custody for basically no reason other than what was the justification? They didn't even give one.
Krystal Ball
There were the allegations that there were some Palestinians who were throwing some stones back. And so that maybe would be the. I mean, being Palestinian and getting attacked is enough to get you arrested.
Ryan Breaux
Here is the latest update from Yuval as we are filming. He says he is now free and is about to go home with his family. But I mean, it's pretty insane ordeal. And it's very likely, as you said, Ryan, that he was likely only freed because of the international national attention here on his case. This is just minutes ago, according to Yuval Abraham. He says after being handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base, Hamdan is Now free and is about to go home to his family. So that's the update.
Krystal Ball
We've partnered with Yuval too, at dropsite. Yuval's had an absolutely incredible run of journalism. Broken some of the biggest stories on IDF war crimes. The use of AI to choose and then execute on target, which is as dystopian a thing as you can imagine. Like, you just feed information into this AI and it looks at names and then with a vague like, sign off, you see a building collapse.
Ryan Breaux
Okay. And then final thing, because you know, you've talked about the film, but you watch this film.
Krystal Ball
I haven't seen it yet.
Ryan Breaux
Oh, sorry. At the very least, like, it's hard.
Krystal Ball
To see here in the United States. It won Oscar. You can barely see.
Ryan Breaux
I was about to ask you about that. So. So why don't you tell us about the difficulty of being able to.
Krystal Ball
They have basically been unable to find a serious distributor in the United States that is willing to run this high profile, Oscar winning documentary that is at least half produced by Jewish Israelis.
Ryan Breaux
So think about like, right, and then remember the mayor of Miami beach tried to shut down a theater that played.
Krystal Ball
The documentary, not block the theater from playing it.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, Shut down the theater.
Krystal Ball
Shut the theater down. And he has backed off of that at the very end.
Ryan Breaux
Well, it took a while.
Krystal Ball
It took a long time. It was weeks later. He backed down. He's like, that's the kind of thing you back down from within five minutes in a civilized society. He for weeks was like, yeah, I'm gonna get this theater.
Ryan Breaux
It's unbelievable. And is it available on streaming? Do you know?
Krystal Ball
That's a good question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure you can find it.
Ryan Breaux
Right? I remember talk. I forgot. I totally forgot his name. The person who did. It's Brian something. He did the, the, the documentary on Jamal Khashoggi, if you'll recall. And he also did Icarus. So he was an Oscar winner. Yeah, he did Icarus. Huge hit. Then he did his next boo movie on Jamal Khashoggi and he couldn't get Netflix or anybody to distribute it.
Krystal Ball
Because Saudi Arabia bought it.
Ryan Breaux
Exactly, because Amazon and Netflix, all these other people have all this business in Saudi Arabia and people had to go and pay 1999 or whatever on Amazon prime just to rent the movie. Right. Just to be able to watch it.
Krystal Ball
Looks like you may be able to pay 8.99 on Prime.
Ryan Breaux
Okay.
Krystal Ball
But get it.
Ryan Breaux
It's a little different as compared to the watch.
Krystal Ball
What that means is that it's not they did not license it. It's not included in your prime video. You have to spend on top of it.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, well, insane story. Our producers brought it to light. One of our producers, Griffin, made a good point here is it's going to be will anyone in Hollywood, will the Academy speak up, you know, for one of their Oscar winners? Will anyone in Hollywood who was, you know, ostensibly met this man, was on a stage with him, watched probably, you know, probably went to a party. I mean, he's a literal Oscar winner here. So yeah, insane situation that this all happened.
Krystal Ball
Adam McKay and Hasan Piker are the only Los Angeles residents we'll hear from, I'm sure.
Ryan Breaux
Good point.
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Ryan Breaux
Now this, we, we wanted to cover this yesterday, but we just talked too long with Glenn Greenwald. So we gotta get this in here. Let's put it up there on the screen. A little mini scandal erupting. This is from end tribalism in politics. Great account actually, by the way. And he says conservative influence are selling their souls. I'm gonna add a allegedly there to soda lobbyists for a few extra bucks.
Krystal Ball
They allegedly have souls.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, there you go. To keep soda on Snap. Anyone backing this is not Maha or Make America Health, Make America healthy again. They're anti health, anti aggressive, truth and anti kids. It's time to expose the grifters trying to hijack the Maha movement. Oh, so who is he talking about here? Let's go and put these up there on this screen. And what you guys can see in front of you are a series of tweets made by some pretty big conservative accounts. Let's go to the next part, please, just to show people where they basically all boil down to the same talking points. Quote, efforts to restrict SNAP purchases. Takes away the autonomy of the consumer to make their own decisions. This is an example of government overreach, but an example of why. Why people should strive not to be dependent on the government at all. Go to the next one. So these are all like pretty large accounts actually, which, you know, significant following, et cetera. And all of them just all seem to have the same language. Government overreach. They wanna restrict. A new war on soda has begun targeting purchases made through snap. This is from Ian Miles Chong. I don't believe it's the government's role to decide what people should or shouldn't eat.
Krystal Ball
Now look, why does it say the government?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, right.
Krystal Ball
He does not live here.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, good point.
Krystal Ball
What government?
Ryan Breaux
We need to a place where right wing influencers just live in America. Is it too much to ask? Is it too much to ask? All right, I guess. I mean, it fits with my nationalist beliefs, so I'm glad you agree with me.
Krystal Ball
Let me have a little light xenophobia with that guy.
Ryan Breaux
It's not xenophobic to just say, bro, you don't live here. You live in an Islamic theocracy. Bro, like, what are you. Why are you telling me about Snap? All right, go find Jho Low.
Krystal Ball
That's what you should be focusing on, the government.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, yeah.
Krystal Ball
The government is your government.
Ryan Breaux
You're Malaysian. Yeah. Go and find Jolo.
Krystal Ball
Return him tax when you find Jho Low.
Ryan Breaux
That's right.
Krystal Ball
Talk to me.
Ryan Breaux
We'll give you citizenship. Give us Jho Low. All right, that's my demand. If you don't know what I'm talking about.
Krystal Ball
For 5 million.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, that's right. For people who don't know what we're talking About Billion Dollar Whale. Isn't there a documentary on this?
Krystal Ball
Yes.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, watch the documentary.
Krystal Ball
More importantly, man on the Run, I'm in it.
Ryan Breaux
The book is. Oh, that's right, you are in it because I texted you about it. I was like, oh my God, Ryan's in this. Jholo documentary. Guys have to watch it. The book is unbelievable. It's genuinely unbelievable. That's just a side note. So Nick Sorter, great journalist, he uncovered what this all is. Let's put this up there on the screen. He shows us direct screenshots. Quote, these influencers were given a couple of templates to use by, quote, influenceable. One of those templates specifically tells them to mention Trump's Diet Coke habit. This was done to invoke an emotional response from loyal Trump supporters, making them feel as if banning soda from Snap Snap is the food stamps program would be anti Trump. This is an incredibly dirty tactic meant to manipulate loyal followers. And you can actually see there's these soda bans and government overregulation. And it says up at the top, the campaign highlights the dangers of government overregulation. The narrative emphasizes how such regulation is an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice. Key resources. Trump with Diet Coke image. And he goes on to say that these influencers were texted by influenceable telling them to help push back against government overreach and told that they would be paid between several hundred and even $1,000 for each post attempting to turn MAGA folks against RFK Jr. And MAHA. Now, now, again, whatever you think about this whole soda thing, you might even agree. Ryan, I suspect that you do agree. I don't fear that you're getting paid 1,000 bucks by the big soda lobby to say what you think and you would, you know, maybe I'm naive. I've never been paid to post literally anything in my entire life. And so, you know, I just thought that we all just post what we're thinking, you know, and then we all make our money in the way that we do our job. But for some people, this is their job. I just thought that at least in politics, again, naively, you usually do it by building up an audience, telling people what you think, criticize, whatever, but it's not like fashion. It makes sense that a fashion influencer would be paid by fashion companies. But here you're literally watching under the table deals to post political opinions and advocacy specifically for the purpose of trying to shape government regulation. So it actually tells us a lot both about the right wing ecosystem where so many of these People are genuinely for sale. Also, a thousand bucks. Come on. You know, you guys make.
Krystal Ball
That goes a long way in Malaysia.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, it goes a long way in Malaysia. Not for the rest. It's like, really, you're not making money elsewhere. I know all of you people. I know how you're making money. You're making money doing speaking fees and all this other stuff. So I guess this fits into that. But it's like, is it really worth it being outed as a joke like this? Because why should anybody ever trust any of you ever again? And now, you know, you just can't help but notice and continue about how many of these campaigns are so obviously organized behind the scenes. Maybe whenever it applies to a foreign country, you know, might be noticing some of that as well. Very interesting. Everybody always seems to be on script. Sometimes the script is real and they actually believe it, but it's just obvious in this case, and again, allegedly for some of those people, it hasn't been confirmed, but they haven't denied it either, that they're being paid to do this. The policy implications of it are actually important because there is an ongoing fight within the Maha movement to try and remove unhealthy food and soda from the food stamp program. And again, we can have a big political fight about it if we want to, but we should at least have some good faith, I would think, online that these people aren't getting paid to post their opinions and they obviously are. So anyway, if you saw any of those accounts, you should ask them questions. Ask them some questions.
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Like. Right. Which other of your opinions.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah.
Krystal Ball
Which other ones have paid for?
Ryan Breaux
What do you believe this is really, literally.
Krystal Ball
And then there's going to be a troll farm underneath all of these, paid for by the soda lobby. That will be like, Ian is so right. Oh, Ian is based. Great take. Yeah. On the policy itself. I have an unpopular opinion on this probably. I grew up on food stuff stamps, and I hate any nanny state humiliation of the poor. I just.
Ryan Breaux
I just hate it.
Krystal Ball
I want poor people to be treated like human beings, like everybody else, and that if other people are allowed to buy terrible things, they should be able to buy terrible things. Now, I would say let's start with.
Ryan Breaux
I mean, you can buy terrible things with your own money. You can buy anything you want with your own money.
Krystal Ball
I know. Because America just cares so deeply about the poor.
Ryan Breaux
Okay, but that's a separate argument, right? Which is we can care more about the poor, which we.
Krystal Ball
It's just about. Well, yeah, then increase the SNAP benefit. You Know, help actually help people out.
Ryan Breaux
I don't know. I feel very torn about it. The food system is obviously the number one culprit here. That the people designed all of this in the first place to make it ultra.
Krystal Ball
Yes. So stop the subsidies of sugar industry.
Ryan Breaux
Right. Well, why don't we do both? Right? That's what I would say. I would say, okay, we'll send the subsidies. Let's make it so that these soda programs and others aren't even available in what, high schools and others. I remember reading about the war to keep soda in high school. It's the craziest thing I've ever.
Krystal Ball
Yes.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah.
Krystal Ball
That's completely insane. Right? I think if you want to use government policy to make America healthy, do it for everybody.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, I agree with that.
Krystal Ball
And so then tax, you know, put a tax on sugar stuff. And take this literally. Because Florida is so important to our politics, sugar gets massive amounts of subsidies. And it's not just because Florida's important. It's also because the sugar lobby then uses the money and buys off politicians. Just literally get rid of the subsidy and make sugar compete. Flip the box over and look at added sugars.
Jefferson Morley
Oh, I know.
Krystal Ball
It's like, really? Cheez. Its needs added sugars. Cheez. Its will be fine without the added sugars. Good luck. Go through the grocery store and try to find something that doesn't have added sugars. Like whole wheat bread. Flip the whole wheat bread over. It's like added sugar. It's like, oh, my God, why are you adding sugar to wheat bread?
Ryan Breaux
It is. Look, it's. I have. I could.
Krystal Ball
It's because you're subsidized to do it.
Ryan Breaux
It's not just subsidy, though. This is where it's on the consumer as well. And I don't blame people.
Krystal Ball
It's on the consumer. It's on the. They go into a lab and they figure out what makes your brain go bing.
Ryan Breaux
Yes and no. But I mean, the thing is, is that if you just look at the amount of processed food that we consume now, it is just exponential compared to the past. In fact, I think that's the main thing.
Krystal Ball
Right. But that's not because consumers led a movement and we're like, what we. More processed food.
Ryan Breaux
But they were responding a bit to consumer choice. Like, the truth is you can eat healthy if you want to. You just have need time. And the people think what people don't have is time. And it's very fresh. Cooking is a pain in the ass. You can do it. You know, it's Actually quite cheap if you want to. But the point, the problem is that it takes a lot of time. People are busy.
Krystal Ball
Got the crock pot?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, you can crock pot it up. I mean, it's not. It's not that hard. But again, it's about intention and brain space, which most people are busy and they don't have the time. Or you have two parent households who are working. I don't blame anybody out there. If you put something in the microwave and you've been working for 12 hours a day and let's say your husband's on a night shift and you're on a day shift and you're the sole caregiver. Listen, I'm here. I'm here for you. I'm with you. I'm not gonna lecture you and tell you, oh, it's so easy or whatever. I totally agree. We should design the system to change things a little bit.
Krystal Ball
Also, snap should cover diapers. It should cover medicine. Like snap should be able to cover things that you really need.
Ryan Breaux
Are there not other programs about Tylenol? Well, diapers. I know that's a big one.
Krystal Ball
How about Tylenol? Yeah, like your kid's got 104 fever, and they want $15 for this bottle of Tylenol that they keep behind a lock and key. And you can't use your benefits for it. What good is being able to.
Ryan Breaux
But you can use soda. See, that's where I am. The things that are included in that are very obvious part of. They're very obviously included as part of a lobbying campaign that has been very successful over the last several years. So we'll return to the story.
Krystal Ball
There's like a hot food thing. You can't get hot food, but I thought you could.
Ryan Breaux
There's a loophole where I've seen them in 711 before.
Krystal Ball
Well, there's various loopholes where if you can buy it cold, but then it's heated up.
Ryan Breaux
Oh, that's right. That's right.
Krystal Ball
So like, I used to be able to get shrimp because you'd get the shrimp cold, but then they'll steam it for you.
Ryan Breaux
Yes, that's right. Publix will do that. I think people always say about how.
Krystal Ball
Great Publix that would be covered, but if it's already steamed, forget it. That's not for you.
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Ryan Breaux
Let'S get over to 23andMe. I definitely wanted to include the story in here. This has touched a nerve everywhere. So 23andMe, the company obviously very famous. It popularized the whole DNA testing thing to see your heritage. People found lost relatives and there were great stories. Ancestry.com, well now we're seeing the downside of some decades long of voluntarily millions of people just giving DNA samples to private companies. Private companies have the ability to just sell it off if they want. They don't necessarily keep your data all that secure. They claim that you can have your data deleted. Is it really deleted? Well, now the company is going into bankruptcy and it's bankruptcy means that its assets the only valuable thing on its balance sheet is what your DNA. If you submitted your DNA there, our own James Lee did a video about it. Let's take a listen.
J
Heads up, if you've ever given your DNA to 23andMe, you should probably go and delete that right now. This morning it was announced that 23andMe filed for bankruptcy and that its CEO Ann Wojcicki was resigning 23andMe is, of course, the DNA testing company. They said that this morning, 23andMe shares dropped more than 50% in early trading after the company filed for bankruptcy late Sunday. Blah, blah, blah, shareholder value, whatever. Here is what's actually alarming. Quote, 23andMe's global database has grown into a virtually unprecedented repository of human genetic information that can now be sold in bankruptcy proceedings. That's right. The Privacy statement of 23andMe says that, quote, if they are involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your personal information may be accessed, sold or transferred as part of that transaction. Transaction. So what does that mean? Well, it means that the DNA that you've given them could be scooped up by whoever and used in all sorts of crazy ways. Things like maybe cloning you without your permission. Your DNA could be sold to malicious actors who could then use that DNA and leave it at crime scenes that you were never at. Of course, bioweapons is always a possibility. I mean, okay, those are admittedly kind of crazy examples. Maybe they won't happen. But then there are those mundane use cases that probably will happen, one of which is insurance companies using that DNA data to deny you coverage, which is something they definitely love to do. So if you don't want that, here are the instructions on how you can delete your data from 23andMe.
Krystal Ball
Pause to read.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, so actually yesterday after the news broke, the D23andMe website was experiencing problems because so many people were trying, trying to delete their data. But, you know, that's a drop in the bucket if we're being real. Of the 15 million DNA samples that they have. Regulators are starting to take notice. The government of California. Let's put this up there. The Attorney General is now urgently issuing a consumer alert for 23andMe customers, asking them to take down their genetic data. One point somebody made to me, Ryan, is that this is actually really scary because the worst, this is the most mundane but dystopian use, use case. Let's say you're a healthcare company and you want to decide whether to insure somebody or not or how to adjust their premiums. What would you do? Me? I would buy, let's say, genetic repository of 15 million people. And then I would cross reference your name with any of the samples of your relatives and see what you are genetically predisposed to. Pre diabetic. Oh, let's add five more dollars a month to your premium. You won't even notice it. You'll just think that that's your Quote, you also have something called an LLM which would easily be able to use AI and others to scrub those and flag, let's say the top 10% of the most unsurable people. And then do everything you can bureaucratically to make sure that those people never become a customer of yours and give them a sky high premium whenever they apply or let's say deny some coverage here or there and you can move things in a direction. And if you're, let's say UnitedHealth Group or BluePras or any of these other people, you have market caps in the hundreds of billions. This ain't gonna cost anything to be able to buy this. And the potential savings for you in the future, sky high.
Krystal Ball
Rare moment to be a tiny bit grateful to Obamacare, which.
Ryan Breaux
Oh really?
Krystal Ball
Because before Obamacare there was no ceiling on what you could charge for somebody with a preexisting condition. And in fact, if you were a cancer survivor, you could be straight up told, no, we're actually not going to insure you. Obamacare said you basically have to keep it within this range and you can't move it much. But what they will do is they would use this data and move the people that they can all, all the way up, up to here. You'd be like, oh gee, why, how'd that happen? And you don't even know because it wasn't even your DNA that got tested. It was somebody else's turns out your DNA.
Ryan Breaux
Well, that's.
Krystal Ball
People need to understand.
Ryan Breaux
I mean, the craziest thing, and I really have complicated feelings about this one, right? Because we all love when the Golden State Killer gets caught. Oh, that's fantastic. It's like, well, how did they do it? Well, they took his DNA and they uploaded it to like 10 different websites and they found his fourth cousin and they worked his way down from the fourth cousin down this tree. And then we figured out this was the only guy who could have done it. And you're like, I don't know, man, that's pretty creepy. That's weird. He was just the first. There's been multiple killers actually who are rapists who have been caught because of by using this DNA database since 2020. They're fascinating stories to read, but they do raise a lot of questions about privacy, etc. And here it's a private company. They can do whatever they want with this. Ryan. Yes, they have to abide by some regulation. You have regulators who have to apply, approve any said sale. But I mean, that healthcare one I just gave there's nothing technically that violates your privacy about that one. Right. It's just that it would be used for super dystopian ends. So it's one of those where, look, I never participated in one of these specifically because I was always afraid of things like this. And so I guess if they really will delete your data, it's worth trying right now because this is scary stuff. And. And don't Forget that already 23andMe had been hacked previously. Let's put it up there on the screen. This was just a few years ago or. Yeah. February 2024. Hackers got nearly 7 million people's data from 23andMe. And the firm blamed users, quote, for not securing it enough. This was, I believe, it was sold on the Dark Web or others. And there's apparently been allegations that the Chinese government and other large data brokerages have been trying and stealing this stuff now for years. So this is just a wake up call, really, about the entire industry. And I hope that everybody pays attention. If you did submit your data to one of these, maybe try and go and delete it after they've given what it is or alert your relatives. I know a lot of elderly people were doing. People were giving it as gifts. Cause they thought it was fun. And I totally get it for looking back into it. But the real downside here, in terms of what this could all become, especially in the age of AI, I think it's very scary. The only thing that has been flagged to me by multiple different people, and I have noticed this one hit a nerve. The 23andMe people are really upset at the idea that their most intimate thing about themselves and their bodies, their genetics, their family, could be used for such nefarious purposes. They were assured that this was just about ancestry. And now that the company's in bankruptcy, it literally, they have a fiduciary responsibility to seek the highest bidder.
Krystal Ball
I think that we should trust whatever company Chairman Xi sends out to buy this data to in a way that is best for.
Ryan Breaux
Beneficial for mankind.
Krystal Ball
For mankind and our collective betterment.
Ryan Breaux
All right, yeah, maybe you're right, Ryan. Maybe we should just surrender to our Chinese overlords, which is a good transition to, of course, something that we near and dear here to the show's heart, which is the state of the electric vehicle market. It's just unbelievable that the world's greatest electric vehicles are not here in the United States. And we are being lapped and crushed so deeply that influencers and others who are really into cars, who don't even think about geopolitics or any of that. Are experiencing them and posting videos for nerds like me to be able to watch and lust after these. And look, I say this with no pleasure. It gives me no pleasure. You know what was it?
Krystal Ball
Gives me some pleasure.
Ryan Breaux
What did Louise Mendes say? She was like, it gives me no pleasure to report this, that we're getting destroyed. That we're getting destroyed here. Here's a video of very popular streamer ishowspeed, otherwise known as speed. Apparently very popular guy here in America experiencing a Chinese vehicle for the first time blown away by how fast it is. Let's take a listen.
Krystal Ball
Car call.
Ryan Breaux
Retail is about 6.
Jefferson Morley
$70,000.
Ryan Breaux
70,000? Yeah. Yes. And it's faster than my Lamborghini, unfortunately. It is. And it's electric. All right, so I'm do a little bit of exploration. Hold on. Let me see.
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Krystal Ball
Oh.
Ryan Breaux
That'S all.
Jefferson Morley
Whoa.
Ryan Breaux
I won't do any faster than that, bro. Ain't no way. Yo, maybe a little more up to 70, bro. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. Please. Yo, ain't no way. All right.
Jefferson Morley
Really?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, I'm ready. Yeah. So. And it cost 70,000. 70,000. That's it. Chad, my Lamborghini costs $250,000. Model S plant in China costs about 100. A bit more.
Krystal Ball
One hundred and twenty.
Ryan Breaux
What the hell? It's just funny to watch him react there. I mean, I guess it's comparable to a Tesla Model S plaid in terms of its.060 speed, but the cost differential there is pretty significant. I'm not sure what a Model S plaid will run you these days. Probably like 100,000, 120,000. Some 50,000 cheaper. The reason why?
Krystal Ball
Order of magnitude more.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, I wanted to highlight this because the sales numbers out of BYD are insane. Let's go and put this up there. Just came out yesterday. The annual sales have now topped $100 billion as of yesterday. This is the 29% increase in overall BYD revenue just from last year. I can't even think of a car company in the United States because 29% increase year over over year in its sales domination at $100 billion level. Huge percentage of those compared to last year actually being exported across the world. It says, quote, unlike its US Rival Tesla, which sells only fully electric vehicles and reported revenue of 98 billion, China has benefited from the resurgent demand in China for hybrid vehicles. This is BYD specifically. And I actually thought that's the most interesting thing that I've learned about all of this is their plug in hybrid market is just so fundamentally different than ours. I looked into it. The farthest range plug in hybrid you can get in the United States is something like 400 or so miles. We're talking here about cars that have 1300. Put the next one up there just to show people plug in hybrid, 1300 miles of total range. And we're talking this is like a sedan.
Krystal Ball
Right now there's a Lexus that can get six or seven hundred.
Ryan Breaux
Oh, is there? Yeah. That may not be available in the US though, from what I saw. I just looked at a car and driver or whatever and you know, Toyota RAV4 prime is as good as it gets. Got a 40 mile electric battery. It's like, okay, cool. These guys have 300 electric mile battery plus 800 miles tank of gas. That's incredible. It's like, you don't have to stop. It's awesome. The point, first of all, I'll put the caveats from a lot of the America firsters like, oh, they're lying about their range. EPA range is very different than in the Chinese range. You have to chop 35%. I'm like, okay, I'll chop 35% off. It's still double than whatever we get over here. It is just obvious now. Every serious industrial person I speak to, every serious cars person, I speak to, every serious car reviewer and all that. If you are interested at all in electric vehicles. The Chinese are kicking our ass, there's just no question about it. And their ability to have sales and export all across the global market is disrupting a core part of American industry. And we, they just have no capability yet for catch up, no plan, nothing. It just directly shows the difference in our two economic models. My friend Joe Weisenthal has a great statistic, so I actually want to read it to all of you. It is, let's see here. Here we go. One of the most important facts about the world is that in the last 15 years, China has become the global manufacturing powerhouse at the cutting edge of multiple industries. But the Shanghai Composite stock index is scarcely above where it was in 2009. So our stocks are way up. But is our material life all that better? You should ask that question for yourself.
Krystal Ball
Our meme stocks are way up.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, that's right.
Krystal Ball
Let's look at how we got here. In the 1960s, LBJ gave a speech about climate change. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House.
Ryan Breaux
Reagan took them off though.
Krystal Ball
Reagan took them off amid a massive Massive disinformation and lobbying campaign from Big Oil and Big Auto. And Big Oil and Big Auto spent the next three decades saying @ first there was no climate change. And also what we need to do is block the EPA from even raising mileage standards. So like for a while in the 90s, you started to actually see mileage standards go up. So we weren't getting electric vehicles. Vehicles, but at least you were getting a little bit more per gallon. And that was even too much of a threat to the oil companies. And so they roll that back and then we do an entire war in the Middle east to make sure we have more oil. That was the American strategic approach to this recognition that a transition was coming. China's like, let's build up a manufacturing base using American note how and then build up this dominant electric vehicle manufacturing capacity. And here we are. They can now sell these dope cars for like $13,000. Even with 100% tariff, they would be able to sell them here in the U.S. so they're gonna have to like do a 200% or 3,000? Well, no, they're just gonna block it completely.
Ryan Breaux
I actually looked into it. Cause I'm curious, by the way. Yeah, let me do this announcement. Now. I would like. I think, think it's time I need to drive one of these things. I've got a. So if you have a line, if you know anybody out there who has a connection to a byd, to a Xiaomi, can you drive them in the.
Krystal Ball
US or do you have to.
Ryan Breaux
People do have them here. I think. I forget exactly legally the loophole that they're able to import them. I think maybe car companies and others. I've seen car YouTubers, you know, people who've been able to get their hands on. I want to see this video at this time. It's now time. My specifically, I'm in love with the. The Yangwang 8. That's my. It's like a Land Rover, Defender style by byd luxury vehicle. It's awesome. I need to drive it. I need to get my hands on any byd, so. And maybe I can produce one of these videos for the Breaking Points channel. So anybody out there, please reach out to us if you have a line on a byd, a Xiaomi. I'll drive anything if it's an electric vehicle made in China. I just want to see what the competition is like and not just have to watch other people's videos. But with that, we've got a great guest standing by. Jefferson Morley, one of the most preeminent journalists on the JFK assassination. He was going to break down the.
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Krystal Ball
One week ago today, there was a large release from the JFK archive. And you all know who we're going to ask to come on to talk about it. It's our friend of the show, Jefferson, veteran journalist who has been going through these records for many decades now. We don't want to date you.
Ryan Breaux
Thank you. Thank you.
Krystal Ball
It's been a couple of years. Yeah, it's been a few months at least. And we wanted to wait to have you on so that you had time to kind of digest when stuff first comes out. You're like, oh wow, look at this. You're like, oh wait, they already released this. They just put a different date on and did a different kind of redaction.
Jefferson Morley
I had that familiar dismal experience. Fifteen minutes after the 60,000 pages of material drop, I get a call and somebody say, is there a smoking gun? And I say, well, I'M only reading the third document of the 60. So, yes, after a week, we've had a chance to absorb and figure out what's important here. So there's a couple of things we need to step back. We're not going to get the answer in a day. People want a smoking gun. I say don't look for a smoking gun. Look for a fact pattern.
Ryan Breaux
Yes. Okay.
Jefferson Morley
Don't push the string of a theory. Look for a fact pattern and let the fact pattern tell you what's really going on here. And after 60 years, with this very significant disclosure that we got last week, the story of what happened in 1963 is becoming clearer. Two documents came out that I think are really important, and they kind of set the stage for what we're going to learn and what we have learned. And I want to caution people, this is a very complicated story. We're talking about covert operations. They're wrapped in official secrecy. They're wrapped in deceptive statements. And we're only learning about them many years later. But as we learn about them, we do see a new fact pattern. So that's one thing. What are the important documents? The first, I think, is one that really sets the stage. It's a memo that Arthur Schlesinger wrote to President Kennedy.
Krystal Ball
This is F2. If we can put this up.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, let's put it up on the screen.
Jefferson Morley
Yeah. A whole page of this document had been secret for 62 years. You can see that on the left and on the right was what we got last week. And this is a very significant chapter because. What's this memo? Kennedy is furious after the Bay of Pigs. He felt that the CIA was trying to impose their forum policy on him. And he said, how could I have been so dumb? And he raged. There's a quote that you'll see all the time. I want to split the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds. He said that to a New York Times reporter who reported it later. But when Kennedy calmed down, he said, well, what can I do? And Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal advisor, said, well, what you could do is you could reorganize the CIA. And he writes a long memo. If you want to do that, Mr. President, here's. Here's how you do it, and here's why you do it. And this page that was kept secret for 60 years really tells the why of what Kennedy wanted to do. Now, ultimately, Kennedy didn't do it right. It was a big job to reorganize the CIA. He had other Priorities. He decided not to do it. But this is an insight into his thinking. And it's an insight into his thinking that the CIA didn't want anybody to know about.
Krystal Ball
Why? What does it tell us?
Jefferson Morley
It tells us a bunch of what Schlesinger is talking about in this passage is what's called controlled American sources. These are American sources that we totally control. CIA officers who work for the US Government in official cover positions. And Schlesinger says, you know, the CIA is encroaching on your foreign policy. And he says at the time of your inauguration, 47% of the state Department political officers around the world.
Ryan Breaux
World.
Jefferson Morley
Were in fact CIA officers. 47%. We knew a lot of CIA officers took those cover positions. We didn't know half. They had half of them. That's in 1960, I mean. And it made me wonder, what's that figure today?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah.
Jefferson Morley
And you know what?
Ryan Breaux
It's a deep stage, probably just as high.
Jefferson Morley
It's a classified secret. So this is very sensitive stuff. 123 people working in the Paris embassy were with the CIA. And in there, Schlesinger tells a very telling anecdote. In 1961, there was an attempted coup against French President Charles de Gaulle. He was trying to pull out of Algeria. Algeria was kind of like Vietnam for America. It was like this intractable foreign involvement and just ultimately we just had to get out. But very divisive at home. And so divisive, in fact, that the right wing in the French government went after de Gaulle and they were going to overthrow him. And the story was that it was known that the CIA station in Paris was on the top floor of the US Embassy. And the story was the lights in the embassy were on all night on the night of the coup. And de Gaulle always thought that the CIA was behind that coup. A year later, when a group of assassins from the same right wing faction try and answer, ambush De Gaulle when he's going to his country house and almost succeed. Unlike Kennedy, De Gaulle had a very good driver. And when the shots rang out, he did exactly the right thing and evaded the gunfire and De Gaulle escaped. But de Gaulle thought the CIA knew about that attempt on his life. And de Gaulle never believed the official story of the assassination. So that story, this memo, that that page, is the origin story of the mistrust between the CIA, between Kennedy and the CIA that would endure for the rest of his presidency.
Ryan Breaux
Right. I think that's so important for you to lay that out in the way.
Krystal Ball
The suspicion that the CIA might assassinate A.
Ryan Breaux
So what is the decision tree that flows from this memo? How do we then get to characters like Angleton and the organization of an abandoned, eventual alleged plot?
Jefferson Morley
Right. So the second most important document that came out is not. It's actually not one document. It was nine documents about F4. Nine documents about James Angleton. And, you know, so I don't go looking for one document that's gonna tell me the whole thing. But when you look at these documents taken together and documents that have been released in recent years, you understand something that I just don't think people. I mean, I know. No one knows. And the mainstream media organizations just don't want to talk about it. Okay. Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut. He was a known quantity to a small group of CIA counterintelligence officers. For four years between November 1959 and November 1963, we now have all of the information that the CIA had on Oswald. 42 documents, 180 pages of material. Okay? And he was followed from beginning. There was no point in those four years or very few points in those four years where top people in the CIA did not have Lee Harvey Oswald's home address.
Krystal Ball
Wow.
Jefferson Morley
Between November 1950 and the guy's moving all the time. He goes to Moscow, to Minsk, he comes back to Fort Worth, he moves to New Orleans, he comes back to Dallas, he goes to Mexico, he comes back to Dallas. Every step of the way, top people in the CIA knew about it. So that alone is. That's another thing that sets the context. Now, I have a lot of arguments with mainstream media journalists who say they were just incompetent. They just missed him. Okay. Well, a couple of things. And this is what's important about the document that came out last week. Angleton, this new document shows lied under oath to JFK investigators. And there's a very stark exchange in the new document, which shows very clearly. So. That he lied about Oswald's involvement in one CIA project. But Oswald tripped many CIA. So what Angleton was hiding and what the CIA was hiding was, and what the story of the quote unquote, lone gunman hides is this extraordinary level of interest at the top of the CIA in this alleged pathetic, sociopathic loser who nobody would ever care about, or so we are often told. And yet James Angleton, one of the smartest, most capable intelligence officers of his generation, regarded as the premier counterintelligence officer in the Western world, is paying attention to Lee Harvey Oswald. For four years, the CIA has never explained this because they don't have to, because reporters from the New York Times. Don't go and say, what is this? And you have this weird cognitive. Cognitive dissonance going on where people won't look at this new evidence, they won't talk about it, they won't cover it, because it works like this. Well, that's a piece of evidence that's of interest to Morley. And we know he's a conspiracy theorist, so that's kind of tainted evidence. And we don't need to think about it because we know for sure that Oswald killed the president.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Jefferson Morley
And so that's been going on for years. And so nobody knows the story that's just coming into view. So I'm saying somehow this is part of the JFK story. You can't say. One question was, does this change the narrative? No, one document changes the narrative. But the entire Oswald file that James Angleton had on his desk when Kennedy left for Dallas, that changes the narrative. What the file shows, there were two FBI reports, reports on Oswald, everything he had been doing. Recently gotten arrested. He'd gone to Mexico City. He'd come back, two FBI reports saying Oswald's in Dallas. They land on angleton's desk on November 14th and 15th, 1963. Never been explained.
Ryan Breaux
Wow.
Jefferson Morley
So that's where we're at. And, you know, will they. Will the CIA explain? You know, unlike the FBI, the CIA has not turned over any new documents as a result of Trump's order. The CIA, I would say, is not in compliance with Trump's order. They have JFK documents in their possession. So what happens with the CIA? Are they going to turn over the JFK documents they have in their hands? That's a big question. But with these two documents, I think we see kind of the big picture of Kennedy in conflict with his national security establishment and CIA officers paying close attention to the man who supposedly killed him. And we're going to learn more about that. And it is complicated. But I'll tell you a little bit of good news. I am going to testify before Representative Luna's hearing on JFK on April 1st.
Ryan Breaux
Excellent.
Jefferson Morley
And I'm going to talk about this. And you need to slow down. And I'm hoping that I'll have the time to explain to the task force what this story is and how we can get the rest of it. What's interesting about this story is, you know, I'm so happy to be here because right now requests for interviews are running about 2 to 1, 3 to 1 in favor of conservative sites.
Ryan Breaux
Oh, really?
Jefferson Morley
Yeah.
Ryan Breaux
Right.
Jefferson Morley
Jesse Waters called me up. Jesse is My new best friend, I go on a show and he's like, those Democrats, they're burning down the Tesla's all over the world. And I'm sitting there, man, I can't afford a Tesla. I drive a Nissan Rogue.
Krystal Ball
Why is he asking you about Tesla?
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, no, he didn't. He's probably in the lead in the kid.
Krystal Ball
No, no.
Jefferson Morley
So, no, that was the show before. And I'm thinking, I'm gonna say something to this guy. I'm gonna say something to this guy. And then he comes on and he does like a four minute introduction to JFK's story. And it's like, I pretty much agree with that, Jesse. You know, and you know what I realized? I think what the JFK issue does is it unites the anti war base of both sides.
Ryan Breaux
That's right.
Jefferson Morley
On the last, you know, people remember Kennedy as an inspiring leader. Wants to end the Cold War, wants to take the American empire in a new direction and are anti war today. Right. Like, whatever the details of Ukraine and Gaza, we're against those wars because we're against war in general. You know, we don't think there's good wars. Those wars could have been prevented. And on the right you have a similar sentiment. It's more about, we don't want to spend our blood and treasure on foreigners. Okay. But it's anti war also. It's an abhorrence of war. That's what's driving the JFK story and that's what brings people together. And that's why I have no problem going on Jesse Water.
Krystal Ball
You know, Angleton's relationship with Israeli intelligence has also been getting a lot of attention. Can you unpack some of that?
Jefferson Morley
Yeah. So I talked about, don't look at one document, look at nine documents. So the nine documents about Angleton tell two stories that are important. One is about the birth of cointelpro. Okay. Cointelpro is typically thought of as an FBI program. Right. J. Edgar Hoover, it's associated with J. Edgar Hoover. But cointelpro was really a joint CIA FBI program which Angleton as counterintelligence chief had a lot of influence on a counterintelligence program of the FBI. So that's one thing. And we can talk about how that emerged. That's a very interesting story that doesn't take you into, into the history of JFK's assassination, but takes you a history of the repression of the Left in the 60s. Very important story.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Jefferson Morley
And the stuff about the Fair Play for Cuba committee, that's in here, that's Another story that's coming. And I've got another good story about CIA spies in New Orleans. It's very cool.
Krystal Ball
This will be fun.
Jefferson Morley
So I'm going to tease that for you. But the other thing that the nine Angleton documents that came in was his very close relations with the Israelis. And he gave testimony. Angleton gave testimony to the church Committee in June 1975. He'd just been fired from the CIA. He's eager to justify himself and say, look, I was doing good. And he explains his extraordinary relationship with the Israeli security services going back to 1951, when he and David Ben Gurion come over and make a deal with Alan Dulles about how the two intelligence services were. Will share information. That story of Angleton and the Israeli services, which I talk about in my book about Angleton, the Ghost. And let me plug that right now.
Ryan Breaux
Sure. Go to link. Link in the description.
Jefferson Morley
Yes, the Ghost. The Secret Life of James Jesus Angleton tells this story. And I had read a lot of these documents when I'd read all of these documents when I did my book. And now for the first time, I see them. And we understand the Angleton story with new clarity. The birth of Cohen Telpro and the birth of US Israeli strategic relationship. Angleton, you know, like him or not, you know, people told me, people who liked him said, this guy's a world historic figure. And, you know, you can say he's sinister and he did bad things and all that, but that is not an unfair estimation of James Angleton. And he's at the center of what we're learning about the JFK story.
Ryan Breaux
This is where my brain always gets so tickled too, about the coincidence Intel Pro, like you were saying. And so I was curious if we shed even more light. This gets to a bigger question. Ben Shapiro recently had a viral clip. I talked about it in your introduction before you were here, about where he was like, who cares who killed jfk? And he's like, I think it's interesting, but it's, you know, it happened in 1963. We're in 2025. And so I talked to Oliver Stone about this, and he gave me such a poetic answer. But I want to ask you the same thing. Why does it matter who killed jfk?
Jefferson Morley
Because when JFK was killed and there was no accountability, the American empire took a turn. Kennedy was trying to steer the ship one way. And when Kennedy was killed and there was no accountability, the ship was steered another way. And we never had a course correction after that because the faction that avoided accountability with Kennedy's murder and avoided responsibility for it. They had impunity, and they could dominate all the policy debates that followed. And also because they had the secrecy of apparatus. The apparatus of secrecy. You know, why does it matter? Here we are attacking the Houthis, okay? A people who, you know, pose no threat to the American people.
Ryan Breaux
As our vice president says secretly in his chat, we only have 3% of the trade that moves through this. Why are we doing this? Yeah, Right?
Jefferson Morley
And so, you know, I imagine a young John F. Kennedy running for president, and here we're bombing the hell out of these people 7,000 miles away. And I remember what JFK said at American University, we do not want a Pax Americana. We are not the world's policeman. That would be JFK's message to us today. And that's the relevance for Ben Shapiro right there. We do not want a Pax Americana. Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate saying that today. I think if one did, they would find a lot of success.
Ryan Breaux
Right?
Krystal Ball
And I think the fact that there was no accountability led to what, to me is the most salient fact about JFK's assassination, that pretty much every president after him, definitely Johnson, definitely Nixon, you can talk about whether it's every single one. Whether or not the CIA or the security services killed Kennedy. Those presidents believed that they did or probably did. And as the person now occupying that chair, that changes your calculation. When you're in the room with them, talking about how many covered agents they've got in the embassy, whether or not you're gonna reduce that.
Ryan Breaux
You can hear it in Johnson's phone calls. He's terrified.
Krystal Ball
Like Chuck Schumer said, Trump is gonna find out that the CIA.
Ryan Breaux
That's right. Yeah. He's like, oh, they're gonna find. It's like, oh, my God. We're just saying this stuff out loud. You can hear with Nixon, you know, Nixon. I mean, not that he was a great guy or whatever, but you could hear the terror in him. And in Haldeman's voice, they got you. They're like, listen, with Hoover, like, we gotta.
Jefferson Morley
I tell the story. I tell the story. In my book, Nixon calls Helms into the overlock. I want that report on the vampigs, God damn it.
Ryan Breaux
Right?
Jefferson Morley
And helms is like, Mr. President, why do you need that? And you hear Nixon say it. The who shot John angle? Nixon thought he knew.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah, exactly.
Jefferson Morley
Johnson told Walter, one of his aides, that he thought the CIA was involved. He didn't believe the Warren Commission. And I always ask people, you know, If Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the Warren Commission, didn't believe its conclusions, like, why should I? Right, right. Like, why is that irrational?
Krystal Ball
Where do you come down, by the way, on Johnson's knowledge or anything?
Jefferson Morley
I think the most telling thing about Lyndon Johnson is that within two days he said, we have to prove Oswald acted alone.
Ryan Breaux
Yes, right.
Jefferson Morley
I mean, he's ordered his finding before the investigation has begun. What was he afraid? You know, he was afraid that he would have to investigate his own government and tear his own government apart or he would have to go to war with the Soviet Union or Cuba. And he didn't want to do either one of those things. So Oswald was the perfect solution, the patsy, the fall guy. It's all his fault. Nothing's wrong. Let's move along, people. And that was the political solution, and it held. And a lot of people bought it, and a lot of people bought it for the best reasons. We believe in our government and there's a terrible tragedy and we have to cope with it somehow. And there's this story, it's hard to believe, but let's get on with it. And people's trust was really abused. And now here's where the CIA inherits the whirlwind, right, because their bogus story about Lee Harvey Oswald has bred a conspiratorial culture that thrives on suspicion of government. Government and undermines it. And, you know, that's a terrible thing. And so when I go on these shows, the right wingers, they wanted to use this story to kind of beat up on what they call the deep state and help Trump do that. And the liberal media is kind of like, oh, we hope that there's nothing in there that supports conspiracy theorists because they're so irrational and stuff like that. We got to get past that. You know, I agree with you, you know, and with getting this record and, you know, kudos to Trump, right? I don't agree with him on practically anything, but he definitely did the right thing on this. And you see it, we see it now, and we're going to get the benefits of it once people are a little patient. Stop looking for the smoking gun and start looking for the fact pattern.
Ryan Breaux
Jeff, while I have you, let's talk about Jack Ruby. That's where it all falls. Falls apart for me, where it's just not falls apart per se, but that's where the ultra conspiracy starts to.
Krystal Ball
You're like, yeah, you're not even trying.
Ryan Breaux
Yeah. It's like, what are we doing here? He shoots this guy on live television. He says, He's a patsy. Jolly west is involved. I mean, like. I mean, after reading the Chaos book, I'm like, oh. They literally. Mind control is real. I'm like, this is CIA operation. Actually, there's no Chaos documentary out.
Jefferson Morley
So about Jack Ruby, I mean, you go read the Warren Commission. They tried really, really hard, and they were successful in avoiding the fact that Jack Ruby was an organized crime figure. And they bought this ridiculous story that he killed him because he was angry.
Ryan Breaux
He's a super patriot.
Krystal Ball
What?
Jefferson Morley
Yeah, I talked to one. I talked to one of the women who worked for Jack Ruby in the club. And I asked her, she was close to Ruby and I said, why did he. Why did he kill Oswald? And she said, I don't know. But she said, jack worked for people, and I don't think he had a choice. I thought that was very interesting. And I said, did he ever say anything good or bad about President Kennedy? She said, I never heard anything. But he hated Bobby Kennedy with a purple passion. Something the Warren Commission also totally omitted.
Krystal Ball
He was trying to go after all the organized.
Ryan Breaux
He did the test. Yeah, he brought them. Exactly.
Jefferson Morley
So people say, was there an organized crime plot? We know the organized crime role in what happened, and that was to eliminate the most important witness in Oswald. I was on Piers Morgan and Michael Franzine, who was kind of a made guy in the mob.
Ryan Breaux
I know he is. Yeah, He's a big YouTuber, right?
Jefferson Morley
Yeah, he's a talking head now about. And he said, you know, when I was in the mob and we talked to these guys, it was common knowledge, totally accepted. You know, we were asked to get rid of Oswald and we did it. That was our part, you know, and that was. They were very matter fact about it, you know, and I thought, this guy knows, you know, he was in that world. So that's the organized crime part of it. Jack Ruby is the organized crime component of what happened. You know, we can talk about, like, what really happened that day, but, you know, clearly Oswald was not supposed to be captured alive.
Ryan Breaux
Yes.
Jefferson Morley
And when Oswald was captured alive, you know, those people in the CIA who'd been watching him for four years, they had a big problem because Oswald was not unaware that, you know, he had friends, you know, he had people who assisted him. And he was a cap. You know, he's. He's a smart guy, enterprising guy. So he took advantage of those contacts that he had. But that's the story that's coming out is Angleton's role around Oswald, the surveillance of Oswald. What was really going on there. My friends in the mainstream media said they were just incompetent. You know, when top CIA officials lie about in a homicide investigation, I can't take that as evidence of incompetence. To me, that looks more like complicity. That's where we're at now.
Ryan Breaux
All right, man. I always love talking to you, Jeff. Plug. What else you got to plug?
Jefferson Morley
So if you want to follow me, JFK facts on substack jfkfacts.substack.com and more to come.
Ryan Breaux
All right, excellent. We will have a link down in the description. Everybody go watch his testimony too, April 1st. All right. We'll all be looking forward to that and we will see you all later.
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Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar: Episode Summary (March 25, 2025)
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, delivered a compelling episode on March 25, 2025, tackling a myriad of pressing issues ranging from national security mishaps to international conflicts, privacy concerns in the digital age, and significant revelations about historical events. This episode delved deep into the complexities of power, accountability, and the pervasive influence of technology and lobbying in contemporary society.
Timestamp: [03:00] – [19:33]
The episode opened with a shocking revelation about a severe breach in national security protocols. Ryan Breaux discussed how the U.S. National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, inadvertently added renowned neoconservative journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a confidential group chat. This chat included key political figures such as J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and others, where sensitive discussions about war plans to strike Yemen were taking place.
Ryan Breaux: “This is as big as it gets in terms of accidental breaches.”
Krystal Ball: “It's as comical as it can get.”
The inclusion of Goldberg, a journalist known for his pro-war stance, raised alarms about the integrity and security of internal communications within the Trump administration. The conversation highlighted the ideological divisions within the group, revealing a faction more hawkish and pro-war compared to the America First supporters who are more skeptical of military interventions.
The mishap led to immediate repercussions, with Waltz being forced to resign to preserve the President’s reputation, showcasing a blatant disregard for operational security despite the administration's rhetoric about meritocracy and efficiency.
Timestamp: [35:00] – [51:10]
Krystal Ball brought attention to the targeted assassination of Hossam Shabbat, a young 23-year-old journalist from Gaza who worked for Dropsite. Shabbat was killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in what was portrayed as a deliberate strike, exacerbating tensions in the region.
The episode highlighted the brutal reality faced by journalists in conflict zones and the apparent impunity with which such acts are carried out. Sharif Abdel Kaddus, Shabbat's editor, shared moving tributes, emphasizing Shabbat's commitment to exposing the truths of the genocide in Gaza.
Additionally, the episode covered the lynching of Hamdan Bilal, co-director of "No Other Land," by settlers, followed by his subsequent detention by Israeli security forces. This incident underscored the volatile and dangerous environment for activists and journalists in occupied territories.
Timestamp: [56:02] – [75:54]
The hosts delved into the alarming news of 23andMe filing for bankruptcy, which has significant privacy ramifications for its 15 million DNA samples. With the company's assets—including genetic data—potentially accessible to the highest bidders, concerns were raised about the misuse of this sensitive information.
The discussion highlighted the potential for DNA data to be exploited by insurance companies to deny coverage or by malicious actors for nefarious purposes. The Attorney General of California issued a consumer alert, urging customers to delete their genetic data to prevent unauthorized access and exploitation.
The episode emphasized the urgent need for stricter regulations and consumer awareness regarding the handling and protection of genetic information.
Timestamp: [76:02] – [85:36]
A significant portion of the episode focused on the U.S. lagging behind China in the electric vehicle (EV) market, particularly highlighting BYD's astounding success. BYD reported annual sales exceeding $100 billion, a 29% increase from the previous year, surpassing Tesla in revenue.
The hosts discussed the technological advancements of Chinese EVs, such as BYD’s plug-in hybrids boasting ranges up to 1,300 miles—a stark contrast to American models like the Toyota RAV4 Prime with a combined range of around 400 miles. This disparity underscores the critical differences in manufacturing capabilities and economic models between the two nations.
The conversation also touched upon the strategic policies (or lack thereof) in the U.S. that have hindered the advancement of the domestic EV industry, emphasizing the need for a robust national strategy to compete globally.
Timestamp: [85:00] – [105:54]
In an in-depth segment, Jefferson Morley, a veteran journalist specializing in the JFK assassination, joined the show to discuss newly declassified documents from the JFK archives. These revelations provide deeper insights into the CIA’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald and the intricate web of relationships within the intelligence community.
Morley highlighted a memo from Arthur Schlesinger to President Kennedy, revealing Kennedy's frustration with the CIA's overreach and his desire to reorganize the agency post-Bay of Pigs. This memo, kept secret for 62 years, sheds light on the underlying tensions between the presidency and intelligence agencies.
Additionally, nine documents pertaining to James Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, unveiled his deep connections with Israeli intelligence and his persistent surveillance of Oswald over four years. These documents suggest a complex narrative where the CIA had significant knowledge of Oswald's activities, challenging the lone gunman theory.
Morley emphasized the importance of holding the CIA accountable and understanding the broader implications of Kennedy’s assassination on American foreign policy and trust in government institutions.
Timestamp: [56:02] – [66:10]
The episode also tackled the manipulation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by soda lobbyists. Investigations revealed that conservative influencers were allegedly compensated to promote anti-regulation narratives against initiatives aimed at restricting soda purchases through SNAP.
The hosts criticized the unethical strategies employed by the soda industry to sway public opinion and influence government policies. They highlighted how such lobbying efforts undermine public health initiatives and exploit political loyalties for corporate gain.
The discussion called for greater transparency and accountability in lobbying practices to protect consumer autonomy and ensure that government policies prioritize public welfare over corporate interests.
This episode of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar masterfully navigated through a spectrum of critical issues, unveiling layers of governmental incompetence, international power dynamics, and the sinister intertwining of corporate interests with public policy. Through meticulous discussions and expert guest insights, the hosts underscored the urgent need for systemic reforms, heightened accountability, and vigilant protection of individual privacy and rights in an increasingly complex global landscape.
Note: This summary excludes commercial advertisements and non-content segments to focus on the substantive discussions presented in the episode.