RWB 81 James DiEugenio: The Bibi Files

Reality with Bruce de Torres 81

James DiEugenio: The Bibi Files

On Rumble and the usual audio platforms

James DiEugenio discusses the documentary, THE BIBI FILES, by Alexis Bloom, and his Substack series about it, THE BIBI FILES: How Bad is Benjamin Netanyahu. (Links also below.)

Jim is a most respected researcher about the assassinations of the 1960s. He has written or co-edited many books, including THE JFK ASSASSINATION CHOKEHOLDS That Inescapably Prove There Was a Conspiracy and the screenplays for Oliver Stone’s documentaries, JFK REVISITED: Through The Looking Glass and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. Jim’s work can be found at KennedysandKing.com and at JamesAnthonyDiEugenio.Substack.com.

Jim told me, “Ever since JFK’s assassination, we have gone further and further into the nest of not just Israel but of the worst policymakers in Israel, which is made of the Likud Party today.”

Near the end we discussed Trump’s war against Iran and the part Netanyahu played in its instigation.

From Jim’s Substack:

“If you have not seen THE BIBI FILES by director Alexis Bloom, I recommend you do so. It is informative, neatly made, and a necessary refutation of the present regime in Israel.”

Netanyahu has been on trial for breach of trust and accepting bribes and fraud since 2021. He has caused his trial to stop and start citing national emergencies he has caused, including tremendous protests against some of his moves. His trial is not being televised. But …

“What [Ms. Bloom] did--and it’s amazing she did it--is she got access to bootlegged witness interviews by the police. These include the prime minister and his current wife Sara.”

“Make no mistake about these transactions. They are illegal. And the precedent the film uses to show that is the case of previous prime minister Ehud Olmert. He served as prime minister from 2006-09, when he was forced to resign. Olmert went to prison and served a 16-month sentence beginning in 2016 on very similar charges: bribery, fraud and obstruction of justice. So the threat of a prison term is not unprecedented or out of the realm of probability for Netanyahu. And this is not all there is, not by a long shot.”

From Wikipedia:

“The Bibi Files is a 2024 American documentary film directed by Alexis Bloom. The film features leaked interrogation footage from the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu. It was screened as a work-in-progress film at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, and had its official world premiere at Doc NYC on November 14, 2024. It was later released on direct-to-consumer film platform Jolt in the United States on December 11, 2024.”

The Bibi Files: Part One - by James Anthony DiEugenio

The Bibi Files Full Movie Documentary | Benjamin Netanyahu | Raviv Drucker | Nimrod Novik | Hadas K

Amazon.com: The JFK Assassination Chokeholds: That Prove There Was a Conspiracy: 9798989393510: DiEugenio, James, Crumpton, Matt, Bleau, Paul, Iler, Andrew, Adamcyzk, Mark: Books

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass: DiEugenio, James: 9781510772878: Amazon.com: Books

REALITY WITH BRUCE DE TORRES

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See the amazing reviews for GOD, SCHOOL, 9/11 AND JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free at brucedetorres.com.

Subscribe to brucedetorres.substack.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Reality with Bruce Vitoris. With me is James Di Eugenio, a most respected researcher about the assassinations of the 1960s. He has written or co-edited many books, and he wrote the screenplays for Oliver Stone's documentaries, JFK Revisited Through the Looking Glass, and JFK Destiny Betrayed. His work can be found at KennedysandKing.com and at James AnthonyDiugenio.substack.com. Thank you very much for joining me today, Jim.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

All right, nice to nice to be here. Let me uh do a little commercial. Okay, this is the latest book, the JFK Assassination Show Colts, all right, which I'm a contributor to. And I it's come out it came out in 2021 and is still doing fairly well. So it obviously uh impressed a lot of people. Um the the one you're talking about with Oliver Stone, that's this book, JFK Revisited. This has both the complete screenplays for the two-hour version and the four-hour version of the film, and it has excerpts from interviews that didn't make it into the film with people like the late Henry Lee, Jefferson Morley, Gary Aguilar, Doug Horn, etc. So both of these are are are well worth your while. You can get them on Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

And you were invited, and as was Mr. Stone, last year, the year before, I think it was last year, in front of Congress to talk about the documents and the nonsense that still is the official story. So everyone really needs to dig into your work all about the assassinations, and particularly JFK, because what a turning point in American.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Which, by the way, is a nice inadvertent lead-in to what we're going to talk about today.

unknown 2:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

And allow me to set that table. We're going to talk about your text series called The BB Files, which is about the documentary of the same name about the accusations and the evidence and the and the trial that Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is going through. The video can be in the show notes. Everybody can click and watch the movie.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

The BB Files is a two-hour film directed by Alexis Bloom, who is a very accomplished documentary filmmaker. All right. And I was attracted to this subject in a roundabout way because to put it simply, President Kennedy was the last president who had any kind of a balance to his foreign policy in the Middle East. And I that has been proven so many times out, you know, that I really don't think that uh it's necessary to belabor that point. Ever since his assassination, we have gone further and further into the nest of not just Israel, but of the worst policy makers in Israel, okay? Which is made up of the Likud Party today. All right. Now, the Likud Party, to understand where they're coming from, the leaders of the Likud Party came from the Stern Gang and Ergin, okay? If you know any history of how Israel was founded, it was those gangs, and that's being mild, okay? They were terrorists, right? And they're the ones who blasted the British mandate out of the Middle East so they could take control of Palestine and turn it into Israel. Okay?

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Was that in opposition to British intentions? I understand they were aided and embedded and supported by British, at least British intelligence.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

Well, no, the the the uh the the there was supposed to be a UN partition of the area, okay. The British were supposed to supervise that, okay. These Israeli gangs did not want that to happen because they wanted more of the area, okay? And they did not want to have any Palestine designate, okay, in the area, okay? And so by essentially terrorizing the British out of there, they essentially took over the area they wanted to take over, all right, and then there really then of course came the Nakba, okay, the Israeli invasion of Palestine, all right, which resulted in 750,000 refugees. All right. So what happened, these people, these people who ran these gangs, all right, you know, like Shamir, they became the leader of Likud. And that they formed this Likud party because they thought labor, which was the leading party up until that time, was not hard enough on the Palestinian problem. Okay? So the Likud Party drifted more and more off to the right. And the end result is this guy, Benjamin Netanyahu, okay, all right, who came up as a special forces guy, educated in the United States, all right, Sloan School of Management at MIT, all right, and brought up in the UN department, one of the Israeli representatives at the United Nations, okay, walks, acts, talks like he was born in the United States, okay, and he eventually became the Prime Minister of Israel.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Where was he? Where was he born?

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Uh I I I I think he was born in Israel. Okay. All right. It might have been an outlying area, okay, of Israel, but he was I think he was born in Israel.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Right. And this early bio about him is in your substack, so people know, like, okay, they can dig into uh you know the four parts on your substack. And I had earlier heard, and you you show uh yeah, he graduated from a high school in Pennsylvania. I think it's Philip.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Right, he did. Yeah, yeah. Yes, right. Okay. And uh he became see one of the most important watershed moments in the history of modern Israel was the election of 1995, in which you had Rabin running on the labor ticket, and Netanyahu running on the Likud ticket. Rabin openly supported the Oslo agreements, okay, which was supposed to be a negotiation with the PLO, all right? And in fact, one of the theme songs of his campaign was Give Peace a Chance. All right. Now, if you read about what happened in that election, there's no other way to say this. Likud demonized Rabin. All right, they they put out placards that had Rabin in a Nazi uniform. Okay, all right, with a target over his head, all right. And they had these all over, okay. Now this is so incredible because Rabin came up in the army, he was part of the IDF. Okay, but just the insinuation that he was willing to go to the negotiating table with the PLO, that's enough to get him targeted as a Nazi. Okay, this is this is how bad the Israeli political system had become by then. All right. Now, we all know what happened. This led to the assassination of Rabin, which I believe was a milestone that Israel has never come back from.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Well, it allowed it allowed Netanyahu to win, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

And and uh you don't mention in the subsext, but what's your personal impression, or what have you seen, about the evidence that that was the assassination was uh an inside job. That's my memory.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

There's a writer who passed away. He was his name was Barry Shawnish, C-H-A-M-I-S-H. He brought up some very, very interesting questions about the Rabin assassination. All right, he showed a film, he showed a film in which the assassin shoots a bullet into Rabin's back, and Rabin doesn't react. This is pretty close range, all right, and Rabin did not react. So Barry wrote a book about this, which I can't recall the name of it now, but you can find it under his name, C-H-A-M-I-S-H, all right, in which he postulated an alternative theory to the crime, okay, that the authorities, this alleged Secret Service authorities, were actually in on it, and that the assassin was urged on by Shin Bet, which is the equivalent of the FBI in Israel. Now, I'm not saying that I agree with that, okay, but I am saying that it's out there, and if you're curious about it, I still think you can buy his book.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

And I'm not saying I quote unquote believe that's what happened. I just wanted to ask your opinion. I saw compelling evidence. I don't know if I saw that film or I read I read things that make me want to ask someone like you, like, hey, what did you what have you seen about it? Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Yes. It's an interesting book. Okay. Uh again, I'm not saying I endorse that theory, but what I'm saying is it's worth looking at, all right, because that was such an epic event. That was, you know, that was a really mega event in modern Israeli history, which I I I said before and I'll say it again. I don't think Israel has ever recovered from the assassination of Rabin. All right.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Um which is synonymous for saying that it it had it elevated Netanyahu prominence in so many positions ever since then, which everyone can learn in your Substack series.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Yes. It established Benjamin Netanyahu as a fixture on the Israeli scene. And he has been the longest reigning prime minister ever, easily passing Ben Gurion. Okay. I think he's been in power for seven. And by the way, when he's not in power, he's in a high position. So when he's not the prime minister, he's like the finance minister or whatever. Okay, he's still there. All right. Uh he's he's clearly become a kind of almost an institution in Israel. And that has allowed him to do what he's doing, and now we can get to the BB files, all right. Everybody thought that he would lose the 2015 election because labor had unified with a minor party in order to win that election. As the BB file shows, he won by five points. And this really surprised a lot of people. Okay. And many commentators believe that when he won that election in an upset, he really began to believe he was untouchable. Okay. And the investigation of Netanyahu began shortly after that, went on for three years. Okay. I believe from sixteen to nineteen. All right. And they uncovered a whole series of what the attorney general eventually decided were impeachable offenses that allowed for a trial. Okay. Now, the first group of charges against Netanyahu concerned corruption. This was the taking in of illegal gifts from very wealthy patrons. Like, for example, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. Right? Sheldon Adelson made a gigantic fortune in the casino business in both Las Vegas and in Macau. Right? He had always been a staunch backer, a Zionist of the Israeli cause. He was married to a woman named Miriam Edelson. Sheldon passed away. Miriam inherited his estate. Okay. They're in the movie. They're in the BB files. Oh, by the way, we should talk about or at least explain how Alexis Bloom got this footage.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Please do.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Because the judge in the corruption case against Netanyahu did not allow cameras in the courtroom. Alexis, I don't know how she did this. She got bootleg copies of the depositions.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

I think you wrote hundreds of witnesses, I think.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Well, they interviewed hundreds of witnesses. Now she I don't know how many she got.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

But she got film of the Adelsons.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah. Okay. And many more.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

That's just one. Okay. Both Sheldon and Miriam. All right. In other words, the police are interviewing these people, and there's a camera in the room. I don't know what it is, if it's actually a set film camera or a cell phone camera or whatever. Okay. And she got these bootlet copies of these interrogations. Fascinating. All right. So the Adelsons talk about how BB wanted these top-of-the-line cigars. And when I say top of the line, I'm talking about the Rolls-Royce version of, I mean, look, an average cigar will c a good cigar will cost you like five bucks. All right. And that's a really good cigar. BB wanted these, Sheldon Adelson says they were $110 per cigar. A 10-pack would cost you over a thousand dollars. All right, and that's what they gave them. It's this very, very rare Cuban cigar, okay, that is almost impossible to get, okay, uh, and that's what makes it so expensive. They're even sold at auctions because they're only made in these very limited editions, which jacks up their price. And they're later. And by the way, that price that Sheldon Adelson quoted, that's the cheap version. Because once they go to auction, I took a look at this. Once they go to auction, they're 300 bucks a cigar. What kind of people pay 300 bucks for a cigar? You know? All right. So, anyway, anyway, these are some of the things that Netanyahu and his wife Sarah wanted from their backers. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:15

And it didn't end with that. They also wanted cases of champagne. Now, when I talked about the cigars, you know, they wanted the Rolls Royce of cigars. Well, they wanted Dom Perignon. Okay. You go into a liquor store in LA, okay, a bottle of Dom Perignon is 350 bucks. Okay. And they were getting cases of it. So just figure it out. If there's there's like eight bottles in a case, you're talking like about three thousand dollars. All right.

unknown 20:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

All right.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

And so And this was over and over and over. And then an easy. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Well, there was transfers made.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

The way it adds up. You keep going, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

The transfers that were made were from one car to another car. It wasn't like they give them a few bottles and you you they had to open up the trunk, put it in the put cases in the trunk, and transfer it to the Netanyahu residence. Okay? Sarah really liked the bubbly, to put to put it mildly. All right. So just go ahead and start adding up. You're talking thousands of dollars already. And then the capper was Sarah wanted jewelry. Okay. Necklaces, bracelets, rings. And these are these are things. She got from Arnon Milkon. Arnon Milkon is an Israeli billionaire who started in television and films. He later became he became very diversified, okay, in stocks, energy, et cetera, things like that. But what he did is he pyramided the money he made in broadcast and in film distribution, film production, I should say, into even more lucrative fields, and he became the estimated worth is about four or five billion dollars. All right. Well, I don't know how she did it, but Alexis Bloom found a witness who had worked for Arnold Milcon for three decades. And evidently she was called in for a deposition. All right. Alexis Bloom got this one also, all right, and she said that the I think it was, and correct me if I'm wrong if you remember, the necklace was worth forty-two thousand dollars. The necklace was worth forty-two thousand dollars, and it was so bad, it was so glittery, it was so ostentatious that even BB said, Sarah, you can't wear this. Miriam Adelson says on camera, I can't do something like that. I I I'm a casino owner, okay? That would be interpreted as a bribe or a quid pro quo. Okay? So you can imagine if you if Miriam Adelson is screaming morality, you can imagine how bad the Netanyahu's are. And so this was this was the first level of the charges that the attorney general made against the Netanyahu's, all right. Like I said, the investigation went on for three years, all right, and then the trial began in 2021, and it's still going on.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Right. They indicted they indicted Netanyahu.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

Right. Okay. And so Netanyahu, because of all these external hostilities that Israel has been involved in, has been allowed to stretch out the trial over a number of years. Okay. All right. Now, the second set of charges which which, by the way, is such a huge point.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

I want to circle it now, and then you'll we'll develop it through the rest of the conversation, including the uh response to October 7th, 2023, and the whole uh violence destruction of Gaza that Yahoo's been able to parlay, and I'm gonna pick your brain later about the chance or your thoughts about uh how much October 7th was goaded into happening, if not aided and embedded. You don't allude to that in the Substack, I'm putting I'm just planting those seeds, but whether or not it was, assuming it was uh uh an authentic and souly Hamas attack by by this the size of the Israeli response and the outrage about it, etc., seems to me Netanyahu's reasons for postponing and postponing and delaying and delaying portions after portions after portions of this ongoing trial. It's 2026, it started in 2021. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

What happened is that Netanyahu has been able to ask for recesses and continuances because of what you just said, because of the Hamas assault into Israel, the almost imbalanced I mean, you know, the retaliation has had no equivalency at all. Okay, you know, uh because the Israelis and Netanyahu use this, I believe, and again, I'm gonna I'm I'm labeling this as something I think, okay, I can't prove, but I suspect and we're gonna get to this a little bit later, because what happened is Netanyahu became so isolated in the Israeli polity because of these charges that like who it had been bad enough. He now had to go even further right to maintain his position because he refused to resign. Okay. If he would have resigned, there would have been no delay in the trial. Okay, the trial would have been done all in one setting in one sitting, continually say all the way through. But the fact that he would not resign allowed him to A use these hostilities as an excuse to elongate the trial, and B, by staying in power, he was able to make new alliances with right-wingers, even more right-wingers than Likud is, which is pretty bad, okay? And I name a couple of them in Ben Gavir and Smoke, okay, are two of the really extremist parties in the Israeli Nesset, okay? And he decided that the only way, and by the way, this is true, because it was their votes that allowed him to stay in power, okay? All right, and getting back to my original point, these guys believe in the the word, the phrase in English today is called Greater Israel. There's a there's a Yiddish phrase which I don't recall, but it translates into greater Israel. In other words, that Israel should go back to the days of King David and King Solomon, all right, and take over whatever was left of Palestine, and there isn't much left at all today, okay? And if it that should be part of Greater Israel, and so the wars that are going on there now, there's three, right? There's one in Lebanon, one in Gaza, and one with Iran.

unknown 30:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

Okay. Uh these are part of the isra the Israeli ambitions of the Likud and the other right-wing parties to expand the Israeli borders even further than they are now. And you can make a circumstantial case that this is one of the things that Net Netanyahu has to do in order to stay in power. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Yeah. And but and uh in the sequence that you presented in your substack, in the middle of that also is the great uh revelations that are obviously in the movie about Netanyahu's political maneuvers to stack his judiciary to prompt you to teach about that.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

See, Israel does not have a written constitution, unlike the United States. All right. Therefore, the main bodies of power are the NASA, the Prime Minister's office, and the judicial branch. But there's no formal declaration of who does what. In the United States, with our constitution, we have a designated check and balance system. Okay. Theirs isn't. And so the judiciary has an even wider function in Israel than it than it than the other two branches. It really does. And it has always been a neutrally appointed judiciary. And what what I mean by that is that the committee that picks the judges is balanced. It does not have a majority of political appointees. Well, Netanyahu wanted to change this. Okay. And he wanted to change the makeup of the committee. Instead of minority political appointees, he wanted to turn it into a majority political appointees. Right? Well, when he announced that this is what he was going to do, this created chaos, okay, in Israel. The largest street demonstrations that anybody has ever seen there, and they went on for thirty-nine weeks. Okay. In other words, two-thirds of one year they went on. All right. This is how deeply felt most Israelis were about maintaining the power and the efficacy of the judiciary in Israel. This is how important, okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

So I understood reading your substack. It also would have allowed Netanyahu more pressure to delay, further delay, or even shut down his trial. Is that true?

SPEAKER_02 33:55

He wanted to fire the attorney general.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

So if he wanted to fire the attorney general. The attorney general was supervising the prosecution in his trial. Okay? And and and so what happened was when he moved. You know, if I if if I had to make a comparison, I think at least some of your listeners will remember the night that Nixon fired Archibald Cox. Okay, Archibald Cox was the first Watergate prosecutor, okay, back in the 70s. All right. And he went ahead, Nixon went ahead and fired Archibald Cox. Except the Attorney General would not do it in that particular case. All right. So he quit. All right. Then the second in command was ordered by Nixon to order to fire Archibald Cox, and he quit. All right. All right. And finally, they got the Solicitor General to come in, and he said, look, I'm going to end this parade. I'll go ahead. And that was the beginning of the end for Nixon. Well, in this case, you had Netanyahu trying to fire the Attorney General in Israel. And she went to the Supreme Court, okay, and the Supreme Court ordered an injunction against that order. So Netanyahu could not fire her, all right? So this led to even more of these disturbances, okay, in these these street demonstrations in Israel. All right. So Netanyahu has this, you know, it really reminds me of that famous saying by Louis XIV, you know, I am the state. Netanyahu really thinks that he is the state, that he's bigger than Israel. That he deserves his say there no matter what anybody thinks.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Right, and he's moving heaven and earth to keep his power, I think to obstruct the continuation of his trial or to delay it as much as possible, knowing as you teach in your substack series, Jim, 2006, I forget, of a prime minister convicted of uh other other corruptions, sentenced to jail. That's what BB is is afraid of.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

He hit Omert. Okay. He resigned, unlike Netanyahu. He resigned, went to trial, and I think he served something like 18 months, okay, in prison. All right, and he's he's in the movie, by the way. Okay, he's in the BB, the BB files, all right, talking about how, you know, this guy had the honor and the courage to go ahead and step down, take his chances at the trial, was convicted, was in for a year and a half, right, came back out. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Rather than drag his country through hell, which Netanyahu is perfectly willing with the arrogance you alluded to, by him thinking what happens to him is the only thing that matters. F the Israeli people. And one of the another fascinating tidbit in your subsect is how you you describe how Israel is a diversified nation and culture. So that's not the impression we get over here. The average American doesn't know that. Hence I hence my pleasure in inviting you on here to highlight your series and bring attention to this movie so that we can have a better understanding because of the weight around our neck, and then you get to this, and we'll talk about it, I'm sure, before we're done, the horrible influence that Israel has been and Netanyahu has been on Trump dragging us into this absolutely insane war with Iran.

SPEAKER_02 38:21

See, another set of the charges against Netanyahu has been that he has rigged the media in Israel into backing him. All right, and I think I mentioned two cases where he wanted favors from one newspaper and he would agree to weaken the other newspaper because he liked the coverage he was getting in the original one. And there was also a website in which he convinced the publisher, who's another very rich guy, I think his name is Smolovich or something like that, all right, to get rid of its lib what he considered its liberal bias, okay, and install a more conservative editor. I think it's called Walla, is the was the website.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

You talk about that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

Yeah. Okay. Well, see, when you can do stuff like that, all right, when you can go ahead and literally have a hands-on control of the media, then you can in you it's easier to influence. And by the way, the relationship of Netanyahu with the Trumps and Kushners goes way, way, way back to when Netanyahu was in the UN, okay, when he was the Israeli representative there. Okay, he got to know Fred Trump and J and the Jared Kushner family, Kushner's father.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

And Fred being the president's father, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:12

Yes. All right. Now, if you can believe this, Netanyahu visited Trump last year, I think five or six times. Okay. He was actually invited into the situation room, okay? And he was allowed to make a multimedia presentation to Trump and his advisors. Right. And if you can believe it, the idea was to eliminate the leadership in Iran. Right? Now many I don't know how many, but I think Netanyahu had tried to do this with at least three other presidents. Okay, and they had all I think he tried to do it with Bush, okay, Bush too, with Obama and with Biden. Okay. And they had all said no, we're not gonna do it. Trump actually went ahead and approved the operation. All right. At Netanyahu's request. And this was supposed to be a preemptive strike against Iran. All right, and they picked a date where much of the high-level leadership would be in one place, thinking they could knock it out with airstrikes. Well, the airstrikes went on, there were literally hundreds of sorties, right, to go ahead and try and eliminate most of the leadership. And what you're supposed to do in a situation like that, and what somebody like Kennedy would have done, you're supposed to bring in what are called area specialists, okay? The area specialists are people in the State Department who know a lot about the culture and the mores, the political leanings of that country you're attacking. And you have a back and forth of questioning will this work? Is it worth doing? What's the alternative? Okay, what's gonna happen even if it succeeds? Well, in the story I read, the only person who made any of those questions was Vance. Okay, and quickly when he under he put his finger in the air and decided that he wasn't gonna win the argument, you know, he relented. All right. And so it went forward. It didn't work. It didn't work.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

No, and so that's such important timing that Netanyahu was there, I think, February eleventh, and then on the twenty eighth was the launching of

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Two and a half weeks later. All right. And what happened, of course, is that they seriously underestimated the power of the fundamentalist regime in Iran. Because although they eliminated the former leader, his son ended up taking over. Okay? And they very vastly overrated the power of the dissidents in Iran. Okay? And in fact, the Mossad had tried to create these riots, okay, in Iran previously. All right. Didn't work. All right. And it didn't work here. And in fact, if I put a clip in my Substack showing how Iran has now rallied to this new leader. Okay? This is the second time in the last seven or eight months that the United States, on one hand, has negotiated with Iran and then turned around and attacked the country while they're negotiating with them. They did it last June and now they did it in February. Okay, now doesn't that remind you of Pearl Harbor? You know, where the Japanese are negotiating in Washington with the United States and they're planning a sneak attack on Hawaii, you know. So this is what Trump has done. You know, and I and I guess $100 million from Miriam Adelson gets you a lot of favors in the United States. All right? Yeah. Because these these were not smart moves. Iran is not to be underestimated. They have spent literally billions of dollars on a missile arsenal that is second to none in the Middle East. Okay? They, I mean, they literally have thousands of these things of all different types, you know? And they really haven't even, from what I've been able to see, they have not even really greatly utilized the top level of that missile arsenal, which is the uh the hypersonic missiles that they've gotten from China and Russia. You know, these things are almost impossible to knock down because they can change their guidance in mid-air. All right. They don't go on a straight ballistic missile path. You can change it at any time in its flight path, all right, and and they move at about 6,000 miles an hour. So they Trump and Netanyahu very vastly underestimated Iran, all right, and they've now made Israel into something of a rogue state in Europe. All right. You know, Spain, Germany, even Italy with its right-wing leader Maloney, has canceled a treaty with Israel. All right. Turkey, you know, is another country that is now very disengaged. And so this is what this is what has happened because of this one guy.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Yeah, and and and you fleshed out in the series the briefing that Netanyahu gave Trump and his high echelon around February 11th, urging the attack on Iran was, it seems, countered the next day, kind of like a response to President Trump from many of his team. He did get some pushback. He got some that said, no, this doesn't make sense. If I understand correctly, it wasn't just J.D. Vance. Did I read your piece right?

SPEAKER_02 48:35

What they told him was this. You might be you might be able to knock out the leadership, but they said you will not be able to choose or pick what's going to come in second. You will that that is a they actually said that's a fairy tale that now he was selling you on that one. All right. Okay. So they were very clear on that particular point. All right. Well, they even underestimated that because they were not able to knock out the entire leadership, okay, with one preemptive strike. So Trump would have been very well advised to have taken that estimate and asked Netanyahu, all right, how were you gonna pick who's gonna come in? That would have been a very good question. How are you gonna do such a thing? You know? All right, but he didn't. He didn't. You know, Trump. I don't know exactly why he has, you know, I said Miriam Adelson and her hundred million dollars, you know, but does money buy stupid? Okay, I mean, you know, how how can he fall for this Netanyahu guy who is simply trying to hang on to his own political career by the skin of his teeth?

unknown 50:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

Well, Netanyahu presumably will play every card that he has, and there's two things. Before the first thing I want to just remind you, of course, is on the last page of your four-part series about this, this is what's being analyzed, and you compare it to, as you call it, the god-awful decision to go into the Bay of Pigs that President Kennedy did, with the same kind of lies being presented to him by Alan Dulles and others at that time. But here, why would Netanyahu urge this on him? Or how could he get him, or how stupid it was Trump to do it? What do you make of the speculation or the evidence the circumstantial evidence that Trump is in these Epstein files, and Netanyahu is well aware of what's in that, Epstein being what he was in relation to the Mossad and other Israeli uh forces or institutions. Did Netanyahu threaten Trump with revelations of a kind that made Trump go along with this?

SPEAKER_02 51:15

Okay, let's first of all, since Pam Bondi would not declassify all of the Epstein files, and the uh the estimate is that as much as she declassified, there's just as much that was remained classified.

SPEAKER_00 51:43

I saw that.

SPEAKER_02 51:44

Okay. So I want to label this as we can only speculate, okay, because we don't have the black and white evidence, all right? But I have read that before. I have read that. And I have to say, without saying that I think it's true, it does offer a possible reason why Trump is being led around by the nose by a guy who I think is a con artist. Okay? It would provide a possible explanation. I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying that it it does have some possibility to it as explaining this completely irrational. I mean, look, Trump's presidency has gone down the toilet. Okay. I mean, when when you're at 35 percent in the approval polls, when people are paying you live in California, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 52:57

Okay, I'm paying over six bucks a gallon on for for gasoline now. Okay, before this started, it was like 470. All right, and it has caused an inflationary spiral. When when you put on the back of your own citizenry a war that was requested by a foreign leader, that is not an American war. It's not a war of necessity at all. Okay it's a war of somebody else's choice that you went along with. I mean, how why would you do that to your own citizenry, thereby more or less sinking your own presidency? All right. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

At the risk of going off on a tangent that prevents us from making all the points of the BB files, the film, and also your Substack series, I'll ask you: are you aware of a group called Prometheanaction.com, and they're wholehearted supportive. Much, if not everything, President Trump does.

SPEAKER_02 54:08

Say that again. What's the name of the group?

SPEAKER_00 54:10

Prometheanaction.com.

SPEAKER_02 54:12

No, never heard of it.

SPEAKER_00 54:15

Well, now you have, and you can look it up at your leisure. And I won't invest a lot of time here. I'm just glad to mention it for everyone watching and listening to check it out because um I'm gonna say they seem delusional in how they evaluate much of what the administration is doing against Alexander Hamilton's American system of economics. And if you squint and twist your head, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe if it all comes out in the wash by the end of the year, maybe that interpretation will prove to be true. Meanwhile, the hurdle to Maya uh going along with it is how come the White House and Trump isn't messaging it anywhere near like the way this group Promethean Action is doing it. But if you dig into them, Jim, I'll circle back with you or circle back with me to just say because the likes of Alex Craner and a few others are giving them a hearing and are saying, well, well, maybe, but to defend Alex Crane, who I consider a friend, he has published voluminously in the last few weeks how dumb and unnecessary this war with Iran is. So that's all I can tell you about that.

SPEAKER_02 55:29

Well, I mean, it's it's completely, you know, uh see, one of the ways you measure the validity and the value of a presidency is did the guy do everything he could to keep us out of war? And Trump flunked that test, you know, with an F minus.

SPEAKER_00 55:56

I was just looking, I have a little bust of JFK I brought to work. I wanted to hold it up right here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 56:03

Okay. So Trump, you know, not only did he not do enough to keep, he actually walked us in like a parade into a completely unnecessary war. And let's let's close with this. The excuse now that Trump is using is the whole thing about the enriched uranium. Okay? That's what he's saying. The last thing he wants to admit is the obvious. The reason that now is a problem is because he canceled the Obama deal. The Obama deal that they made with Iran, which was very effective. They could only enrich it to 3 percent. Okay, and according to everybody who supervised the uh agreement, it was working. The Iranians were obeying it. And so Trump tries to say that we we bribed the Iranians. No, no. What we did, and I'm sure you're aware of this, and I'm sure you told me that's not true. What we did is we agreed to unfreeze their assets. So it's not like the United States paid Iran to go along with it because of what happened under the Carter administration during the whole hostage crisis, that kind of thing. Okay. All right. We agreed to unfreeze their assets. That's what that was. Now, if you ask me, that was a pretty good deal. I give Obama some credit for that. Why Trump canceled that is is I have no idea why. I don't, I can't explain it.

SPEAKER_00 57:55

Well, and you you well make the point about the job of a president is to keep us out of war, along the lines of JFK, who quoted, I think, Churchill, it's better to jaw jaw than war war. So had that's a good one. Had that agreement, yeah, had that agreement, however imperfect it might have been, human humaneness and our ideals would much prefer work it out at a table. We don't care if it's a hard process, we don't care if it takes months and months and months, bombs aren't falling, children aren't being slaughtered. We like that. Jim, your final thoughts and words about the BB files and what the American what it what the American people need to know about the nature of Benjamin Netanyahu and his impact on Israel, America, and the world, please.

SPEAKER_02 58:58

There's just one thing that we didn't touch on that I wanted to touch on.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

I'm all ears.

SPEAKER_02 59:03

And we'll close with this. And in my essay, I quoted from an author, okay, of a very uh, I believe, important book called Devil's Game. The Mossad created Hamas, and they did this because they wanted to avoid uh sitting down at a table and negotiating with the Palestinian Authority. So they decided to back the formation of Hamas. Okay? That was after the 1967 war, that decision was made by the Mosad, and it was backed by the Prime Minister. So this is how bad things have become, all right, you know, and this is the wages that the United States has more or less spent in order to aback the Israeli regime at all costs. And it's now come back, as they say, like a boomerang, all right, to haunt the United States today. All right. Thank you so much for having me on, Bruce.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

Thank you. I just want to reflect on the point you just made about the creation and support of Hamas by the Mossad. You know, to perpetuate your power expanded, uh frequently powers will create enemies that seem to justify your your strength and your growing strength. It's horrible, it's duplicitous, it's beyond the imagination of the vast majority of humans who I believe are regular good people who want the simple pleasures, you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a healthy family, and then some time off to watch the game at night or on the weekends. And your work is invaluable along these lines, all the history you've brought. Um KennedysandKing.com for your great work into the assassinations of the 1960s, JamesAnthony Diugenio.substack for all this and more. And we are soon recording another episode about your uh pieces on the uh reflections on the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:39

Okay. Thank you, Bruce.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:40

All right, and I want to thank everybody for how do I kill it anymore? Thank you, Zoom. Thank everybody for watching and listening today.