"The Pentagon LIED!" - Vatican Lawyer on the WORST Cover-Ups | Danny Sheehan

Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10 once. Seven days delivered or returned, Mr. Shaq? Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Do you ever like sit back and think about like the ride you've been on or are you still just so in the middle of it you can't? Just still in the middle of it. You know, you don't have time to, you know, we don't even get to watch the news most of the time while we're making it. Yeah. So we just keep on going straight forward. Yeah. Now, one of the cases you were talking with me right before we were on camera about is the Karen Silkwood case. Yeah. Because apparently that's coming up on the 50th anniversary of her murder on November 13th, 1974. So that ABC and a lot of the other major networks are gathering around asking questions about it because we know who murdered her. We tried to get it put into the trial back in 1979. We won the $10.5 million judgment against the Kerr-McGee Corporation, shut down the entire. Nuclear fuel reprocessing facility there. But they wouldn't do anything about who murdered her because it was going to unlock the secret that they were smuggling 98% pure bomb grade plutonium out of the facility to go to Israel to make nuclear weapon for Israel and Iran, as it turns out, under the Shah. So the source of the nuclear materials for both those countries came out of the Kerr-McGee facility. Whoa. So, and what was Karen's role over there again? She was a health and safety organizer for the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. She was trying to organize a chapter of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers at the Kerr-McGee nuclear facility, the reprocessing plant outside of Oklahoma City. And she was trying to organize everybody like during the lunch hours and coffee breaks and stuff. So they assigned her to the midnight shift so that she was only there from midnight until eight o'clock in the morning so they could get rid of her. And so since she was the only one running around in the plant, she kept going around to the offices looking in the files. And she ended up finding a set of files that showed that they were missing over 40 pounds of 98% pure bomb grade plutonium. And she got on the telephone and called the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers headquarters in Washington, D.C. and told them that she'd found these documents. And unfortunately, her phones were wiretapped by the security department. Of course. And they realized that she was revealing this. And the New York Times sent a reporter out, David Burnham, to get copies of the documents themselves. And she was murdered on her way to deliver the documents to him. And the documents were all taken out of the car. And we ended up doing the trial that resulted from that and caught the people who murdered her and tried to get it put into evidence. But the court ruled that one of our complaint filed under the Federal Civil Rights Act for violating her rights to privacy because they contaminated her home. They broke into her home and put 400,000 disintegrations per minute of radioactive plutonium on the food in her refrigerator. Who's they? This is the security department of the Kerr-McGee Corporation. James Reading was the head guy for that. And he had previous to his being hired by the Kerr-McGee Corporation to be their chief of security, had headed up a special intelligence team. And he was the head guy for that. And he had previously been hired by the Kerr-McGee Corporation to be their chief of security, had headed up a special intelligence team. And he had previously been hired by the Kerr-McGee Corporation to be their chief of security, had headed up a special intelligence unit in the Oklahoma City Police Department, which was like their red squad that was like, you know, surveilling local political people, ACLU people, you know, NAACP, you know, the National Organization for Women, all the kind of suspects. And he had headed up that group. And they hired him to be the chief of security for their nuclear reprocessing plant. And he hired that group, the same group that was in the unit, the special intelligence unit. And he retained them to do the surveillance on Silkwood. And so they're the ones that wiretapped her phone. They're the ones that he gave lot number 29 to, to contaminate her home. And they're the ones that chased her down on the highway that night and rammed her car, ran her into the concrete culvert, killed her. They tried to say at the beginning that that was just a car crash. Yeah, right. Which, obviously, it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't. And then when did you, so that's like 1974? 74, November 13th, 74. Okay. So when did you get, learn about the case and get involved with it? Well, I saw the, I saw the report. Shoemaker, ABC did a special bulletin about the fact that she'd been killed. It was so incredibly suspicious what had happened to her. I saw the, I saw the bulletin come in. I was out actually at Wounded Knee at the time. I was legal counsel for ACLU during the occupation earlier in 73. So I was out there doing mop-up in 1974, and I saw the bulletin come in on the television, and I was with Russell Means and Dennis Banks and the guys, and I was saying, holy shit, I said, look, somebody's got their ass in a ringer on that one. They're not going to get away with that. Little did I know that I was going to end up being the one that ran the case. So we got brought in very soon after that. The National Organization for Women had been organizing to try to get women to be much more active in the male-dominated unions, and Karen Silkwood had been a very active member of that oil, chemical, and atomic worker organizing operation. So when she ended up getting murdered, and nobody was going to do anything about it, the local police weren't going to do anything about it, the FBI wouldn't do anything about it, so the National Organization for Women started a major campaign around the country to mobilize people to come forward, and they reached out to me. I was chief counsel at the United States Jesuit headquarters in Washington, D.C., in their national policy office we had there, the social ministry office, and I had done a number of big trials by that time, so they knew about me. So they contacted me to see if I would be willing to run the investigation in the litigation, which I did. You were also still young at this point. As far as being an attorney who hadn't been around years or something, but you were in the middle of all these insanely huge cases like this. Turned out, yeah. Well, what happened is in 1968 at Harvard Law School, that I had co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Law Review, along with Mark Green out of New York, and that I was in charge of soliciting cases from around the country from different people that had major constitutional questions that they might want us to work on from the law review. And so I ended up representing the NBC television journalists during the April 1968 riots around the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Oh, yeah. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day, because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the description below. And if you'd like to join my Patreon, you can do so via the link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I really appreciate that. Also, the like button's a big help. And you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. And the bottom line is, we asserted for the first time the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources against a grand jury up in New Bedford that was trying to get at the sources for the NBC television journalists. Pappas, his name was. And so we asserted the First Amendment right of the journalists to protect their confidential news sources. And it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. So I had a case that was in the United States Supreme Court, but I was only a second year law student at Harvard at the time. So I ended up getting recruited by the number one corporate litigation law firm in the country down on Wall Street that represents NBC. So they brought me in to do that. Cahill Gordon, in all, was the name of it. So that's Floyd Abrams' firm down there. And so I ended up being there to do the litigation on the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources. So needless to say, that gave me a good standing with a lot of the investigative journalists right from the very beginning, right coming around to Harvard Law School. And then because I had done not only the major briefs in chief for NBC on that issue in the Supreme Court, but I also did the work for ABC and CBS and for the New York Times and the Washington Post at the Supreme Court level. So I got to know Jim Goodell, who was general counsel for the New York Times. So when they got the Pentagon Papers later that next year, I was the one that got the call from Jim Goodell. And he came over to our firm to see whether we would represent them to protect their right to publish the papers, because their law firm, Lord, Day and Lord, threatened to turn them into the FBI if they didn't give the papers back. So I took the call from Jim Goodell. We agreed to do the Pentagon Papers case. We did that. I was one of the principal attorneys for the New York Times. in that case. We won the case, got to publish all 47 volumes. And then I got recruited by attorney F. Lee Bailey, who was the number one criminal defense attorney in the country when the Watergate burglary took place in June of 1972. And he recruited me to come over to their firm to work on the Watergate burglary case. And so I ended up running the investigation to find out, you know, why, you know, three Traficante gunmen were in the Watergate hotel as part of that burglary team. Santo Traficante. That's how I found out. So that's how I got involved in doing the field investigation. And much to my surprise, it turned out that F. Lee Bailey turned out to be the attorney for Santos Traficante. Of course he did. So that they, we were able to sit down and have that interview of Traficante, who explained to us the entire thing about the Watergate burglary and what his connection was to the Kennedy assassination, that that was the key to the Watergate burglary. But anyway, so that's a long story. Yeah, we'll come back to all this. I'm letting you go right now. But anyway, that was, that was the, that was how I got involved in all of those cases right at the very beginning. And so because of those first handful of cases that I did coming directly out of Harvard Law School, I realized that what was going on behind the scenes with our government was dramatically different than what they told us about. You know, and so I ended up going back to, to Harvard to do a Ph.D. in comparative social ethics, trying to, to ascertain what the kind of sources were for the normative principles that guided different people in making their ethical decisions. And I was, that was where I got recruited for the Jesuit order that, that one of my professors, Professor Roger Couture, who taught the course on the theological underpinnings of human rights, came to me and said, "Look, the, the Jesuits are looking for a general counsel in their new national headquarters in Washington, D.C. in their public policy office, and they want to come and interview you." So I did, and ended up taking a leave of absence from doing my Ph.D. work at Harvard. I'd already gotten my undergraduate degree from the college and studied with Henry Kissinger, foreign policy, you know, studied economics with John Kenneth Galbraith and did sociology with David Riesman. All those folks were there at the time. Those were those kind of halcyon days, and then I, then I went on to, I said, "Look, what I found out in my first two years out here doing these cases is that there's this whole criminal background going on of government activities." And I wanted to get an analysis of how to swim in that particular sea, and so that's why I ended up going back to, I went over to have an interview with John Rawls, who was the head of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, to discuss this with him, and he's the one that suggested I come back and do the Ph.D. on comparative social ethics. So that's where I was when I got recruited by the Jesuits, and that's where I was when I got contacted in, right after President Carter got elected in November of 1976, when he came on board and demanded to be briefed in on the UFO issue. So that's your first introduction to UFOs in your law career? Yeah. Now, had you, were you subject to any kind of media attention? Did someone who, as a kid, thought about that stuff, thought about life beyond? Sure, sure. Oh yeah. No, there wasn't any doubt about it. And I, when I, when I was like seven years old, when I first discovered what stars are, I said, "Wait a second, these are like suns for other whole planetary systems." I said, "Look at it." So you'd sit and look up into the stars at night, and you'd say, "Look at that. All of those billions of planets around, going around all those stars, and just think of all those different people and beings that are there." You know, and it, and it started to become more and more bizarre to me how we acted toward each other down here. You know, I started finding out about things when I got to be seven, eight, nine years old that, you know, the, the, the war was going on in Korea. They had all these weird things happening all the time, and I kept saying, "Look, this doesn't make any sense why we would be acting like this in light of, you know, where we really are in the galaxy here." And so it all seemed rather strange to me. And so I decided that I was going to, originally going to become an astronomer, so I could figure out what was going on, and all these, and then I realized, "Wait a second, that's doing a lot of math and sitting looking at all the long, you know, photographs, you know, these, these time exposure photographs of stars, I didn't think that was fun." So I decided I was going to be an astronaut, and that was prior to the launching of Sputnik and stuff, so, but I was going to be an astronaut, and I'd heard that they had just created this new United States Air Force Academy out in Colorado, and so I was going to go there, and that's what I planned to do. And so I ended up in New York State, where I grew up, up in Northern, way up in Northern New York. I was one of the top nominees for the senatorial appointment to the Air Force Academy back in 1963. So what changed? Well, I, when I was being interviewed by Jacob Javits, Jacob, Senator Javits asked me why I wanted to be an astronaut, and I said, "Well, I want to be an astronaut because this is an extraordinary time in our whole human history." We're getting set to go out to the stars, we're going to get to meet all these extraordinary other civilizations, and he looked at me and said, "You actually believe that there's other, other beings out there?" And I said, "Well, sure." I said, "You're a United States Senator." I said, "You know that too." I said, "You know, you gotta know that." And he was kind of totally flabbergasted that I said that to him, and he said, "Look, I need to be candid, I need to admit to you that I, I've already given the appointment, the senatorial appointment, to the son of my principal financial contributor." There you go. He said, "Lookit, this is the way this world really works, Danny." He said, "But, but I'll, I'll tell you, I'll give you the nom, I'll give you the nomination to the Naval Academy." I said, "Well, I'm not into boats." You're like that. I said, "I'm not into boats, I'm into planes." So he said, "No, no," he says, "You can, you can become an astronaut from there." I said, "No, lookit, I," he said, "Well, oh, you just go down, you take the congressional appointment. You can get it from the local congressman." And, and he said, "Who, who's your congressman?" I said, "Actually, I, I told him who it was." He said, "Oh, I, I know him." He said, "Uh, I'll give him a call and have him get you that appointment." But, uh, turns out that he gave the appointment to the son of the mayor of Glens Falls, uh, who was number seven in our congressional district. And so I said to myself, "Wait a second, this isn't working right. You know, there's something wrong here with the way this stuff is functioning. Uh, I'd better go to law school." Uh, so I went to Harvard College instead and Harvard Law School and decided that I would come out into the world and spend some time helping to kind of re-tune the government a little bit. the government a little bit, working as a lawyer. And then I realized that the government wasn't just a little bit out of tune. It was playing an entirely different song than we've been taught. And so I ended up sort of getting trapped, as it were, spending time trying to figure out how to solve this problem. So I've been at this now for 50 years. And it's led to most recently my being retained to represent Lou Elizondo down in the Pentagon. Who we just had in here as well. So I know we'll get to him for sure and all the different things around disclosure. There's just so much on the bone to talk about. And you were on a roll there at the beginning going through the resume. I didn't want to stop you. Those were just some of the early cases that I got involved in. But some of the early cases you got involved in were ground shakers. I mean, these were earthquakes of cases. And the first one you got involved in was the one that you got involved in. Yeah. You mentioned is the Pentagon Papers, which I feel like is something that sometimes gets a little lost in the recounting of history. But it involved Daniel Ellsberg, who just recently passed in the past couple of years. And can you just go through exactly what happened there for people out there who are unfamiliar? Yeah. Well, what happened is back up, and I studied about this at Harvard College, the history of it, that the French back during the imperial age, when the United States in the 1890s had decided that it was going to become a world power, they refer to this in high school history courses as the age of American imperialism. This is when we went out and took over the Hawaiian Islands and Guam and Philippines. We moved and took over huge sections of southwestern United States. From Mexico, we ended up initiating the Spanish-American War against Cuba, et cetera. There was this whole era of the American imperialism. And I think it was the American age of imperialism. And during that period, various nation-states were vying for colonies in different parts of the world to develop their economic resources. And France actually sent a gunboat into Vietnam and came into the harbor in what later became Saigon and ended up, their French sailors got off the boat and went into town and they were milling around and ended up getting in a fight in the marketplace. And so, you know, it was a very, very, very violent war. And they went out and got in the boat and the ship and fired on the town and took it. And they didn't know what to do with it. And so they ended up deciding France was going to keep this Indochina, this colony there. And they stayed there trying to figure out how to make an economic go of it. You know, rubber trees and different pineapple plants, everything they were trying to figure out what to do. And then when the second were working, the Japanese swept in and took it over. And at the end of World War II, when the Japanese were being pushed out of there, the French wanted to have the United States support them and go back in and reasserting their colonial power in in Indochina and the United States ended up eventually doing that and so until 1954 in 1954 the people in Vietnam had risen up against the French colonialists and basically mounted a war against them and drove them out and surrounded them at Dien Bien Phu back in 1954 General Giap you know disassembled all the artillery and carried it on back all the way up the mountains and surrounded the Dien Bien Phu and then rained down death on the French troops there and then had them surrender they set up a treaty in 1954 in Geneva to agree to allow the French to withdraw below a certain line the 42nd parallel with the understanding that they would then remove all their troops in the United States under the Eisenhower Nixon administration at the time thought that that was a bad idea that we ought to maintain Western influence in Indochina and so that we moved in and set up a complete public a puppet regime under neo-Din Diem took him out of Columbia University as a graduate student actually this is the CIA this is the CIA yeah did it and that they they brought in neo-Din Diem they installed him and said oh there's a South Vietnamese Democratic Republic here which had never existed that's right New York Yankees baseball cap you know and so so that they ended up starting to provide massive military funding to him and political support and and also covert operations of the CIA being able to identify some local citizen groups who didn't support this endeavor and that they were being kidnapped and tortured and disappeared by a secret political police force in South Vietnam which is all supported by the central intelligence agency and then one administration after another started out with the Eisenhower Nixon administration then it went to the Kennedy administration you know then it went to the to the the Johnson administration and all the way to the Nixon administration all of those administrations Republicans and Democrats alike were just lying to the American public trying to pretend that there was this budding democracy that was attempting to flourish in the southern tip of Vietnam you know it was total horseshit and it was just a total fascist regime there trying to take over and so all of a sudden the Johnson administration fabricated completely fabricated a story that our United States warships instantly patrolling the international waters around Vietnam were fired upon by a uh by Vietnamese naval forces you know uh at the Bay of Tonkin uh and it was an absolute fabrication uh and uh and then on the basis of that ordered 500 000 United States military troops into Vietnam uh in the Vietnam War was on in Ernest and uh we were we were all going into college in 1963 you know that I I was the the kind of one of the senior class of the baby boomers yeah and we came out and uh and I ended up because I didn't get to go to the Air Force Academy uh you had to spend two years in military service at that time it's a little strange for all of our our men and women now that don't realize you know you come out of high school and immediately uh you were raw meat you know to be sent into wherever they wanted you to go and in that particular case it was Southeast Asia but bottom line is I studied a lot at Harvard College and came to understand all the details of of how that thing came to pass and what was going on there so in the 60s in the 60s yeah that's right so I I did part of my junior essay on Vietnam and ended up becoming the chief research assistant for Professor Jerome Cohen who was the head of the international law department at Harvard you know writing a major book against the war in Vietnam so I knew all about this and so when I when I came out of law school and ended up finding myself being legal one of the legal counsel for the New York Times to get to publish all all 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers I was one of the few people alive that actually read them uh and so we were we were having to make determinations as to what portions were going to be published in what order in the New York Times so that uh we were involved in that at our law office and who was Ellsberg again like what was his role Dan was a Dan was a uh actually a gung-ho Vietnam uh military advisor in the United States Marine Corps uh and then he had gotten secunded to the Rand Corporation the Rand Corporation down in in uh in uh was it uh where are they down on the beach down there and down in L.A anyway that Malibu uh they're based down there and so he yeah right good good territory so he ended up being a consultant for them and he helped work on the Pentagon Papers drafting them all up doing a deep dark review of the history of the Vietnam War and and what was really going on uh and he became totally disenchanted uh with the cause uh and he realized that uh that that more and more tens of thousands of people were going to be dying on both sides of this and so he ended up deciding he was going to Xerox a whole set of all 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers uh that were top secret uh classified papers and he brought them uh to the New York Times to uh to uh Neil Sheehan actually he brought no relation no relation but uh brought him to him and then they they brought them to Lord Dan Lord their law firm to get their agreement that they would protect them in publishing them and Lord Dan Lord threatened to turn them into the FBI actually if they didn't turn the documents back over immediately so Jim Goodell called me uh at the Cahill firm where I was because I mentioned I'd known him from doing debriefs for the New York Times and the the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources case so the bottom line is we agreed to represent him I was in the meeting uh with uh Jim Goodell and uh Floyd Abrams and myself and Eugene Scheinman we sat in Floyd Abrams office and and uh Jim Goodell pulled the chair up and started telling us what they had uh and uh Jim asked what what we should do with these papers and I said publish them yeah you know I said the only I said decision you need to decide is the size of the font on the front page I said that's what I said and uh and he said well what's going to happen he said I said well you know given Mitchell Meathead Mitchell who's the attorney general who's a bond lawyer I said you know who thinks the Constitution is a ship that sits in the harbor in Boston I said you know that I said uh he'll he'll probably try to threaten you you know and punch Sulzberger and the rest of the folks on the board of editors and he said like with what what would they charge us with and I said I said well if we're lucky espionage and he said he said lucky espionage I said yeah yeah I said usv Gorin there's an old case usv Gorin you know that they in order to prosecute you for espionage they have to prove scienter have to prove an evil intent that you're actually intending to damage the National Security United States they can't they're never going to be able to establish that so I said let's let's print these things and Floyd Floyd Abrams the partner kept saying wait a second wait a second this is just a first year associate here he's just here's this isn't the opinion of the firm you know but but Jim Goodell was very happy with a proposal uh so we went forward and uh started publishing uh went for 13 uh 13 days from start to finish we we published for three days and then I get a telephone call from Whitney North Seymour who was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York he called he calls me on the phone he says hello Mr Sheehan I said yes he says this Whitney North Seymour and I said uh Whitney North Seymour who you are he said I'm the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York oh right right right right right and he said look at he said I'm calling you up he said because you know I'm calling you as a courtesy to ask you to to uh to advise your client to stop publishing these papers uh and I said uh I said well thank you very much I said you know but uh I'm not going to do that he said well but you're obliged to tell him that this is an offer uh to uh to avoid litigation I said I don't care I said that's what we do over here we do litigation that's what the cable firm is you know and he said that well it's a matter of a courtesy I'm trying to ask you to ask them to stop publishing voluntarily I said no I'm not going to do that he said but you're obliged to do that I said no I'm not I said so don't kid me and he said well then I I need to instruct you that we're going to be going over to uh Judge Marie Gerfind tomorrow at one o'clock in the afternoon and to be seeking a temporary restraining order against the New York Times if you don't voluntarily agree to cease the publishing and I said you're talking about a prior restraint a prior restraint against the New York Times she said well I'm not I'm not here to quibble with you about language she said English with that it's a it's a it's a violation of the first amendment it's a flat-out prohibition you know under the first amendment and so uh I said well you're talking about a prior restraint against the New York Times in order of prohibiting us from publishing something and he said I'm just not going to argue with you said about semantics he said I'm just uh as a courtesy I'm letting you know we're going to be going there and I said well you know I said we're awfully busy over here right now as you might imagine I said you know we've got a lot of things to do here you know uh I said so I I said I'll I'll let I'll let Floyd know you know that you're going to be there and I don't know whether we'll be there or not so then he hung up on me and so say, I felt like you were going to hang up on him. Thanks. See you. No. So the bottom line is I wouldn't tell Floyd. And so we ended up going over to Marie Gerfein's chambers, right, the next day. And we're in chambers, and he's all robed up in chambers. And so we're sitting there, and Whitney North Seymour is there, and Floyd is there, Floyd Abrams, myself, Gene Scheinman. Actually, we had Larry McKay there, who was the senior partner at Cahill. And we also had the First Amendment constitutional law guy, Alex Bickle, from Yale Law School, who was Floyd Abrams' con law professor. So we had him in there because we were doing the briefs on the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources. A Harvard man letting himself be seen with a Yale man? Well, I wasn't being seen. It was kind of private. Okay. You know, so the bottom line is. The bottom line is that we were all there in chambers. And so we come in, and I said, okay, so look, I said, it's your motion. I said, you're the ones that are here with a motion to get a prior restraint against the New York Times. So what's your argument? So Whitney North Seymour says, well, Your Honor, he said, there's information in these papers that if it were publicly revealed, would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. So I said, like what? And he said, well, I can't tell you. I can't tell you because it's classified. And I said, well, you know, if, you know, if you're here to try to get a motion to get an injunction against the New York Times predicated on that assertion, you know, you have to be able to provide some evidence to it. So the judge, Judge Griffine says, well, what about me? He said, he said, if you're going to ask me to get an injunction against the New York Times, you ought to be at least share the information with me. And Whitney North Seymour says, no, I'm sorry, Your Honor, we can't, we can't share it with you either. Because you don't have the adequate security clearances. So I said, well, you know, I can't tell you. And he said, good. Are we done here? You know, you've got the burden of proof here. You aren't going to offer any evidence whatsoever to support your assertion. And I said, moreover, let me make it clear that even if your assertion is true, that you don't, the court doesn't have any jurisdiction to enter an injunction against the New York Times. And the judge looked at me, he said, what? He said, we don't have any jurisdiction. I said, I said, there's no law. Well, what's the statutory authority? Where's your, where's your jurisdictional authority? You know, that you're arguing is the Justice Department to the court that they have jurisdictional authority to enter this order against us. And, and he said, well, it's kind of like an inherent authority that the government of the United States must have the authority to be able to stop the publication of top secret classified documents. And I said, no, no. I said, and you know why you have no statutory authority? And he said, why? I said, First Amendment. He says, you know, the Constitution, you got to understand the Constitution, the First Amendment of the Constitution doesn't just say, oh, the government of the United States can't violate your First Amendment rights. What it says is the United States government as constituted by this document has no authority whatsoever to interfere in the exercise of free press. So the government, the very government that you're soliciting here, the court, it doesn't have any authority to do that. You know? And the judge said, well, I don't know about that. He said, and I said, well, we do, we do. It's the New York Times. And he said, well, look, he said, since Woodner Seymour isn't going to be providing counsel here to the court, Mr. Abrams, he said, I'm assuming that your firm is in possession of a set of these 47 volumes. I said, excuse me, Your Honor. I said, you can, you can assume anything you want. I said, but we're not, we're not acknowledging that we have a copy of these files at all. Never seen in my life. And so he said, yes, Mr. Sheehan. He said, but Mr. Abrams, what I want to do is I want to ask as a courtesy to the court, would you please, would you please provide a copy of these 47 volumes to the court so that I and my law clerks untutored by Mr. Seymour can at least look through the papers. And unless there's anything in there that strikes us as clearly, you know, irrevocably damaging the national security of the United States, then I would not have any authority to really impose an injunction. And I said, absolutely not. I said, we're not going to, and Floyd Abrams said, excuse me. He said, yes, as a courtesy to the court, we'll do that. I was totally flabbergasted that he was going to do that because they didn't have a leg to stand on. They didn't have a single piece of information or evidence to support their case. But Floyd said he would agree to do that. And so then Judge, Judge Marie Griffine says, you know, okay. In further spirit of cooperation, he said, could you please voluntarily agree to stop publishing the papers while my law clerks and I have a chance to review these? It'll only be a matter of a few days. I said, absolutely not. I said, that's not going to happen. We're not going to do that. And here I am, a first year law student, just coming into the firm. You know, I'm here saying this and here's Floyd going, well, I, you know, and so the judge said, well, then in any case, I'm going to enter an injunction against the New York Times prohibiting you from continuing to publish until I have an opportunity to review this with my clerks, right? So then he ended up issuing the injunction. And in your opinion against the First Amendment? Totally, totally. So I said, well, we're going to be, we're going to be, you know, appealing, you know, immediately. And he said, well, look, it's only going to take a couple of days for me to go through this. I said, if you'd just hold up on your appeal to just give me a couple of days. And so we go back to the office and we had to have the discussion as to whether we'd file an immediate appeal, or we were going to let Murray Gerfein and his guys go looking into the documents for a couple of days. But we knew that we had extraordinary pressure on him, you know, to have to do this as rapidly as possible, because there'd never been anything like this, an injunction against the New York Times. And so, you know, I said, well, we're going to against the New York Times prohibiting us from publishing something. So they decided that given the exigencies of the circumstances, we'd leave that pressure on him. So he buzzed through these things. Within two days, he calls back and invites us back over. We come back over and he said, look, given the pressure of time, he said, and without any counsel from the government, we haven't been able to discern anything here in the documents that we think would irrevocably damage the National Security of the United States. So I'm lifting the injunction. And William R. Seymour says, Your Honor, we'd like to have you put a stay on that so we can go upstairs and potentially get a ruling from the Circuit Court of Appeals on this. And the judge said, no, I'm not going to reimpose this thing. He said, you can go try to get an injunction if you can. So he runs upstairs. We follow him upstairs. He goes upstairs in the federal courthouse. We're following him up the stairs and we get up and they go into the chambers. And it was, who was it? It was the, who was it? The judge. Anyway, the judge that was there, he ends up, they make the motion to have the injunction reinstated, right? And Kaplan, his name was Judge Kaplan. Not Louis Kaplan. Yeah, Louis Kaplan. He's, oh my God, he's still around. So he says, they go into Kaplan. He says, he said, we'd like to have this injunction put back out. Kaplan. Yeah, for sure it was. He said, he says, you know, he said, he said, 25 years ago to the day, he said, see, he's, I'll tell you, we can figure out who the judge was here because he said, 25 years ago to the day, I was asked by the government to issue an injunction and I declined the injunction at that point. He said, and I've often wondered about whether that was the right thing to do. So I'm going to give this injunction. I'm going to say, he was talking about the Rosenberg case. Yeah, 53. Yeah, it was the Rosenberg case and he refused the stay of execution against the Rosenbergs and they were executed. They were allegedly Russian Soviet spies. Yeah, yeah. And so, so, so the bottom line is we go, they didn't have a three judge panel. I went right to the full panel of the, of the second circuit court of appeals within, we were there in days and we were arrayed out in front of all 13 judges of the, of the second circuit court of appeals. They had a resolution. They had reserved seats in the, in the federal courthouse just for federal judges from out throughout the country, all flooded into Washington, DC to, to come into the, or into New York city to come to the second circuit court of appeals. And they brought their law clerks with them. It looked like a reunion of our Harvard law school classes. It looked like, you know, it's not Yale. No, there were a couple of them in there, but so we were sitting there and so we made the argument and they lifted the thing and we, they allowed us to print all 47 volumes of the penitentiary. So we went from start to finish in 13 days from the day they put the, they put the injunction on to getting the, and it's the only case in the entire history of the United States Supreme Court where with only nine judges on the court, there are 10 written opinions in the Pentagon papers case. There's the one per curiam, the one page that says, whatever the burden is that the United States government might need to make, if any, to be able to get an injunction against the Supreme Court. And so we're going to have to do that test in this case. And so therefore we're refusing the injunction. And then every single one of the other nine judges wrote a major opinion in that case because it was, it was one of the most important decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. When you were talking at the very beginning of our conversation, running through all these cases in sequence, and you mentioned that one of them also involved setting the precedent that the government cannot for confidential sources to be revealed. Was that the Pentagon paper? No, no, no. This was Pappas. That was the Pappas case. That was decided under the case of U.S.V. Bransberg, was the Supreme Court case that decided this. But we argued it on behalf of Paul Pappas, who was an NBC television journalist in New Bedford. Got it. And that case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. So that case was actually literally in front of the United States Supreme Court when this case came up, because that's why Alex Bickle was in the office. We were still consulting with him about the briefs that we were filing in that case. So when the Pentagon Papers case came in, we did that case all in 13 days, and then later decided the case that established the right of journalists to protect their sources. Got it. Just as a quick aside, and then we'll come back to Pentagon Papers, but I hope I'm remembering the case right, but there was some sort of case in the late 2000s – I want to say '07, '08. It may have been the Plame Affair where there was a journalist who kept on being held in jail for not revealing – it was a New York Times journalist for not revealing her source. Wouldn't that have been taken care of by the precedent of the secret of the Supreme Court ruling? It's interesting. It's interesting that it should have. What they did, however, is they passed a statute in New York at that particular time. What they did is they put in a statute saying that the Justice Department, both in federal and state, before they can, in fact, issue a subpoena to a journalist, what they have to do is they have to meet a certain burden. They have to prove that the information that they're seeking is of utmost importance, not just a normal investigative piece of information, that they've exhausted all other means of trying to secure this, etc., and that this person is in possession of the knowledge, the source that they have, is in possession of the knowledge that is indispensable to the case. So they had established a statute that had this caveat in it that allowed them to put the person in jail. And as you recall, they ended up releasing her because they realized that she wasn't going to tell. So it didn't serve any purpose. It's crazy that they could put her in jail, though. Yes. Like, that's wild to me. Yeah, I don't know. That was that particular statute. It was interesting because Floyd Abrams was involved in that case, our partner. In fact, they did a television dramatic series about that case. And Floyd Abrams played the judge, actually, in that drama, talking about the kind of burden that the court was under to release the person, and that he played the judge who released her, saying that it was clear that she wasn't going to give up the source, and so there was no reason to continue to keep her in jail. Yeah, and you're talking about, like, with that kind of case or with the Pentagon Papers case, where it's a national security issue, this is where the government actually gets involved in a litigious manner and is trying to block it. That's right. But on a day-to-day, as well, I think about this often. It's the difficult dance you play with the intelligence community who's never incentivized to actually tell you the truth. Yeah. You know, a friend of mine, Joby Warrick, who's won a couple Pulitzers, he's been on the show a couple times, he has been a national security reporter forever at the Washington Post. And he talks about this openly, about how difficult this is. But literally any time that he and his other guys are working on some sort of, like, pretty big story vis-a-vis, you know, national security, if you will. If you will. It happens every time they get a phone call from their -- Yeah. Contacts at CIA or NSA or you name the agency that says, "All right, you guys can't run this story because people are going to die." Oh, yeah, always. And they never give proof. No. But then Joby's like, "The really difficult thing is every time we have to hang up the phone and go into the conference room and meet and try to play, you know, whack-a-mole guest game of, like, are they actually telling the truth? Or are they just trying to obfuscate so that we don't report this?" And then you put it out there and you hope that they weren't telling the truth. Yeah. It's a tough dance. Yeah, well, it isn't really. You don't think so? Because it's bullshit, you know? I mean, really, you know? I need to clip that to watch Joby's. That's like the fraternity brother who's got a $500 bet that he can go to bed with the head of Tri-Delt, right, you know, and then he tells her that he really loves her. He says, "You know, no, I really do." She says, "What about the bet you've got?" You know, "Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean anything." You know, these guys are just a lying sack of shit. I mean, that's their job, you know? But what we're looking at here is a national security state. You know, it's the classic national security state, and we've all been tutored on it. You know, we know what it looked like in the Third Reich. We knew what it looked like under Berea and Stalin, you know, in Russia. You know, we know what it looked like under the Shah of Iran. We know what it looked like under Somoza, you know, under Noriega. We know what all those. And the bizarre part of it is that half of them we support, you know, and the other half Russia supports, you know, or China, you know, and so they've all got the same game. And they're always trying to assert that some poor, helpless spy who happens to be over in their country, you know, doing exactly what we would execute someone for doing here against us, you know, is in danger if you publish this story, which just happens to turn out to be mortifyingly embarrassing to us, you know? So it just isn't true, you know? And I know it isn't true. I would imagine a lot of the times it's not true. I just do wonder sometimes. About the times it is, and maybe when it's not like just a spy or something like that, but there's actually, you know, there could be diplomats or things like that. But you're right. It goes to that whole, that 1% kind of theory of like, "Well, if there's a 1%, someone's gonna die. You wouldn't want to do this, right?" That's Dick Cheney's theory. Exactly. The 1% theory. The 1% doctrine. Yeah. Yeah. If there's a 1% chance, we have to just conduct ourselves. That's the absolute authoritarian masterpiece. Yeah. You know? If there's one. If there's even a million that you've got a nuclear bomb hidden in your basement, we have to go find it. Yeah. You know? And you say, "Well, how about getting a warrant?" We don't have time for a warrant. You know? Yeah. We don't have time for a warrant. Any magistrate will give you a warrant. You know? No, we don't have time. We're gonna have to come into your house right now. And if we happen to find something else while we're looking for the nuclear bomb, you know, like a whole ounce of marijuana in your dresser. That's right. Marijuana. You're getting arrested. It just happens to be we're just gonna bring that right in. You know? So it's. You know, there's no doubt about what is this going on. And so right from the very beginning, my constitutional law professor is Lawrence Tribe. You know, and they say, you know, that right from the very beginning, you have to understand that the government of the United States, as constituted, is without authority to do those things. Yeah. They're not. They don't have the authority to do it. They think that they're like kings and queens that are endowed with kind of sovereign. Yeah. sovereign authority that they get from the infinite and eternal, you know, that authorizes them to do whatever it is they think they need to do at any given point in time. But that just isn't true. The entire theory of our government is exactly 180 degrees the opposite of that. You know, if they run into trouble and not being able to, for example, secure their continued privileged access to the strategic raw materials of another country, you know, which they view to be of a national security interest themselves. Yeah. you know, that we had made an agreement at the very beginning that they're going to have to forego some of those privileges, you know, of the sovereign. They're just not going to get to do it. They aren't going to just go into your house, they aren't going to get to, you know, tell you what to do. They aren't going to get to tell you what to think. They aren't going to get to tell you what to read, you know, even though they always want to. Right. Always want to is part of the bureaucratic imperative of any national security state, you know, and so that's what you face all the time. And so all you have to do is say to them, "Prove it," you know, and they never will. And that's exactly what we're dealing with now. We're dealing with the whole UFO thing. Oh, we can't reveal to you the secrets, you know, because it would be catastrophic, you know, catastrophic disclosure. That's the big, you know, the trigger word now. We can't allow the information that we know about the UFOs to be revealed to the public because it would be catastrophic. And you say, "Like what?" I'm sorry, we can't tell you because that's really national security, you know. And then I say to them, "You're making a big mistake. Get out of here because I will find out." Hmm. Dennis Sheehan's gonna come get 'em. I said, "I will find out," you know. That's our job. We've done that historically. You've said that we can't find out. We can find out, you know, and we will. You know what part of the problem is though, like, 'cause we'll get into it today with some of the other cases as well as we go along here, but you have found out things, allegedly, of some of the wildest secrets that have happened in this country and you shot it from the rooftops, but it. Mm-hmm. There's noise around these events because that's what, you know, the people who don't want anything, anyone who know about it do, they create noise with it, that like your, what may be truths in some case, get lost in that noise and people continue on with their lives. Yeah. You do what you can do. You know, you try to share with people that you, we believe in the principles of the First Amendment and that, you know, that the cure for lying is telling the truth. You know, and you tell the truth when you have an opportunity to do so, you try to make opportunities for you to do so. you know, that will fly all the way here into New Jersey. and come on shows to talk to people and say, oh, look at, you know, that you need to listen. There's information that you don't know. And now what's happened, of course, is we have like probably two entire generations younger than the boomers now who disbelieve almost everything that the government tells them, you know. And I must say we've contributed to that particular state of mind considerably down through the 50 years that I've been working on these cases because I think that's a healthier disposition than just believing blindly in what they say because they have abused that so many times. And it's been demonstrated that they've abused this over and over again, that they lie to us, they lie to Congress, Congress knows they're lying to them, and they let them get away with it, you know. You know, we have examples. Don Frazier was the congressman from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't remember this. And he's sitting in a. A budget committee hearing in the House Appropriations Committee, and they're reviewing the CIA budget. And he says, you know, what's this item here about miscellaneous interrogation equipment? And the CIA person says, well, that's, you know, like lamps and tables and chairs and stuff like this. And he says, well, what's this item here about thumbscrews? Bingo. It was over. His whole political career was over. Millions of dollars comes pouring in mysteriously into his congressional campaign in the next term, and he's ousted, you know. Frank Church, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, you know, very next election, people are like, out he goes. Very next election after he chaired the church committee, you know, because all of a sudden millions of dollars comes flowing into his campaign up in Idaho for the United States Senate seat, which he'd had two full terms, you know, with a 70% election. All of a sudden, millions of dollars. And he comes in publicizing the fact that he supports the Equal Rights Amendment for women and that he supports the background checks on handguns. And so he was out and we tracked that money and it came out of the Nugent Hand Bank in Australia. It was money that was put in there from the Nugent Hand from the purchase of heroin in Southeast Asia by the Southeast Asian station chief, a CIA station chief, Theodore G. Shackley, the station chief in Saigon, you know, had a partner. He had a partnership with Bank Pal of the heroin smuggling and a share of that money was put into the Nugent Hand Bank. That money came out of the Nugent Hand Bank, went through two South African banks into the campaign against Senator Church up in Idaho. Same thing happened to Dick Clark in Iowa, Senator Dick Clark in Iowa, who opposed the covert operations of the CIA in Africa. All of a sudden, millions of dollars shows up in the campaign against him and he loses his Senate seat. OK, I mean, people know this, this is this is as dark as you can imagine, you know, the Central Intelligence Agency's operations directorate, the guy that ran that handpicked Theodore Shackley, the same guy who had the contract with the heroin smuggling in Southeast Asia, handpicked by George Bush senior to be the director of covert operations worldwide for the Central Intelligence Agency under George Bush when he was the director of the CIA under Gerald Ford. We know these things. You know, we tell people these things. People don't pay a lot of attention to it because they're very busy. I mean, there are football games to be monitored, you know, and, you know, elections to be monitored and in other things, getting and spending, laying waste their power. And these things go on under the radar. Our job is to try to make it public. And what we do is we we think of different ways of communicating this to people, along with the evidence to prove that it's true. So that. If they're interested, they can they can watch. Now, one of the challenges is that the public school system that we have, you know, trains people from the time you're in preschool, basically, to believe whatever the people in positions of authority tell you. Yes. You know, here's your school teacher. You have to do whatever it is they say. They're here to help you. Here's Mr. Policeman. We're going to have him come in and give you a lecture about how he's going to help show you across the street to be safe. You know, and you're supposed to. Here's Mr. Fireman, who's going to, you know, blah, blah. You know, these people in positions of authority that you're supposed to believe what they say. Now, there was a whole period in time in our history when we all thought, well, that's cool. We can depend upon these people. They're trustworthy people. You know, I was sort of the last full generation of kids who were raised to believe that, you know, and then all of a sudden they started drafting us by the tens of thousands, you know, to go into Southeast Asia to be, you know, assaulting people, you know, and killing women and children and stuff and burying them with your shoot. You know, things like that. And, you know, they used up their goodwill with us. And it became clear to us that the blind trust that we had placed in the government institutions was misplaced. And it turns out, lo and behold, you're taught that, you know, at least subversively. You know, you're taught, well, there's the Constitution and you're not supposed to just blindly believe your government. You know, we're different than kings and queens. You know, they don't have the right just to do whatever. They want to do, here's all your rights and all that. And so we have this opportunity here in the country still to lift up that element of our knowledge about free rights and independent liberties, et cetera. And so our job is to try to help get people to understand that and to reify those things and to do it under duress. Oh, yeah. Not just when it's comfortable or it's the cool thing to do, but to really resist, you know. You know, not just when it's comfortable or it's the cool thing to do, but to really resist, you know. you know, that they, one time after another, you know, that they just come up with these narratives, and the thing is that you have to push back against them. And the problem is that they're extremely sophisticated. What they've done is they've developed these techniques to engage, allegedly, in international warfare against, allegedly, the communists that are trying to take over the world, you know? And so therefore, they've developed all these skill sets, and what they do is they turn around and they deliver them against us, the citizens here. You know, you've got Project Mockingbird, you know, they got 42, we identified 42 specific national security reporters, you know, who all come from a national security background, as a rule. They've all been in one of the agencies or another, and that's why they're there at the news media, because they've got good contacts with the people. But Danny, they would never do this today. That's right, that's right. They would never do this today. I'm glad they stopped. We've never, we've never done that. this, besides we don't do this anymore, you know? So that is what, so it's just a peculiar practice that I've developed over the years, because of the happenstance of the early cases that I did, that people tend to think of calling us, you know, and I've made sure to have an institute that has got a standalone capacity that just gets, you know, $25 contributions from people across the country. This is the Romero Institute now. It was Christic to start with, But, of course, George Bush Sr. ordered the revolutionaries revocation of our 501c3 tax-exempt charter for the Christic Institute. Why would he do that? Because we're the ones that did the Iran-Contra case against them. We're the ones that filed the Federal Criminal Racketeering Act charges against Oliver North and all of the people working with him in the off-the-shelf enterprise. And Reagan and Bush kept insisting that there was no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that they were providing weapons to the Contras, you know, in violation of the Bole Amendment. And we said, oh, really? Okay, we'll take a look at this. So what we did is we began to assemble all the information. We ended up having, you know, the tail numbers on the airplanes they were flying. We had the serial numbers on the weapons. We had the code words that they would use to land. We had the landing strips where they were landing them. We had photographs of them unloading the weapons and stuff and loading the cocaine onto the same airplanes at Ilopongo. You know, and we had gotten the photographs from the head of the district. And we had gotten the photographs from the head of the district. And we had gotten the the photographs from the head of the district. And we had gotten the the Drug Enforcement Administration, you know, right at Ilipango.