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

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 you still just so in the middle of it, you can? Just so in the middle of it. You don't have time to, 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. 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 us. The 50th and 50th anniversary of her murder on November 13th in 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 and we tried to get it put into the trial back in 1979. We won the 10 and a half million dollar judgment against the Kermaggi 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 Kermaggi 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 Kermaggi 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 8 o'clock in the morning to get rid of her. And so that since she was the only one running around on the plant, she kept going around to the offices looking in the files and she ended up finding a set of files. This 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 DC and told them that she'd found these documents. And unfortunately her phones were wiretapped by the security department. Of course they did. And they realized that she was revealing this in 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 the count 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 integrations per minute of radioactive plutonium on the food in her refrigerator. Who's that? This is the security department of the Kermagee Corporation. James Reading was the head guy for that. And he had previous to have been hired by the Kermagee 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, and double ACP, you know, the national organization for women, all the kind of suspects. And that he had headed up that group and they hired him to be the chief of security for their for their nuclear reprocessing plan. And he hired that group, the same group that was in the unit, the special intelligence unit, he retained them to do the surveillance on so quick. So they're the ones that wire tapped her phone. They're the ones that he gave lot number 29 to contaminate her home. And they're the ones that chased her down on the highway that night and rammed her car and ran her into the concrete culvert killer. They tried to say at the beginning that that was just a car crash. Right. Right. Obviously it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't. And then when did you, so that's like 1974. November 13th, 74. Okay. So when did you get learned 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 wounded knee at the time. I was legal counsel for ACLU during the occupation earlier in 73. So I was out there doing a mop up in 1974. And I saw the, I saw the bulletin come in on the television. And I was with 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 that I know that I was going to end up being the one that ran the case. So we, 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 well comical 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 of the United States Jesuit headquarters in Washington DC and their, their national policy office. We had there the social ministry office. And I had done a number of big trials by that time as 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, like, like as far as like being an attorney who hadn't been around for like 40 years or something, but you're in the middle of all these insanely huge cases like this. Turn out. Yeah. Well, it happened that 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 journalist 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 of 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 discord link of my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link about a 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 buttons, a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. And bottom line is we asserted for the first time the right of journalists to protect their confidential new sources against a grand jury up in New Bedford that was trying to get at the the sources for the NBC television journalist. And so we asserted the first amendment right of the journalist to protect their confidential new sources in and 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. And so they brought me in to do that, K. Hogan, Sonic, Rhine Dell and 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 new 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 a Harvard law school. And then because I had done not only the major briefs and chief for NBC on that issue in the Supreme Court, but I also did the amicus briefs for ABC and CBS and for the New York Times and the Washington Post for the 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 get 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 Wargate burglary took place in June of 1972, and he recruited me to come over to their firm to work on the Wargate burglary case. And so I ended up running the investigation to find out, you know, why, why, you know, three Trafalconty gunmen. were in the Watergate Hotel as part of that burglary team. 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 Efflee Bailey turned out to be the attorney for Santos Trafacanti. Of course he did. And so that we were able to sit down and have that interview with Trafacanti 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, that's a long story. >> Yeah, we'll come back to all this and let you know right now. >> But anyway, 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. And so I ended up going back to Harvard to do a PhD in comparative social ethics, trying to ascertain what the kind of sources were for the normative principles that guided different people and making their ethical decisions. And that was where I got recruited for the Jesuit order that one of my professors, Professor Roger Kutur, who taught the course on the theological underpinnings of human rights, came to me and said, "Look, the Jesuits are looking for a general counsel on 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 PhD work at Harvard. I'd already gotten my undergraduate degree from the college and studied with Henry Kissinger for in policy, studied economics with John Kenneth Galbraith and did my sociology with David Reesman, all those folks were there at the time, those were those kind of halcyon days. And 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. 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 suggests that I come back and do the PhD 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 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 and your locker. Now had you, were you someone who has a kid thought about that stuff, thought about life time? Sure. Oh yeah. No, it wasn't a doubt about it. When I was like seven years old, when I first discovered what stars are, I said, wait a second. These are like sons for other whole planetary systems. I said, look at it. So you'd sit and look up into the stars and I used to 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. And it started to become more and more bizarre to me how we acted toward each other down here. I started finding out about things when I got to be seven, eight, nine years old that the war was going on in Korea. They had all these weird things happening all the time and I kept saying, look, it just doesn't make any sense why we would be acting like this in light of 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 then I realized, wait a second, that's doing a lot of math and sitting looking at old long photographs, 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. But I was going to be an astronaut and I had heard that they had just created this new United States Air Force Academy 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 Jabbits, Senator Jabbits asked me why I wanted to be an astronaut. And I said, well, I wanted 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 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 got to know that. And he was kind of totally flabbergasted. 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, uh, the senatorial appointment to the son of my principal financial contributor. There you go. You said, look at this is the way this world really works, Danny. He said, but, uh, but I'll, I'll give you the nom, I'll give you the nomination to the Naval Academy. That's it. Well, I'm not into boats. You're like that. I said, I'm not into boats. I mean, the planes. So no, no, you can, you can become an astronaut and I said, no, look at, uh, he said, well, you just go down. You take the congressional appointment. You can get it from the local congressman and, uh, and he said, who, who's your congressman? I said, uh, uh, actually, I told him what 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 it turns out that he gave the appointment to the son of the mayor of Gonzalez, uh, who was number seven in our congressional district. And so I said to myself, well, I say, this isn't working right. You know, there's something wrong here with the way the stuff is functioning. Uh, I better go to the law school, uh, so I went to Harvard College instead in the Harvard Law School and decided that I would come out into the world and spend some time helping to kind of retune the government a little bit, you know, working as a, as a lawyer, uh, and then I realized that the, the government wasn't just a little bit out of tune. It was playing an entirely different song. Yeah. Yeah. You know, then we've been taught. And so I ended up, uh, sort of getting trapped, as it were, uh, spending time, uh, trying to figure out how to solve this problem. And so I've been at this now for 50 years, uh, and it's led to, most recently, my being retained to represent Luel Azando down in the Pentagon who we just had in here as well. So I, I know we'll, we'll get to him for sure and, and all the different things around the disclosure, there's just so much on, on the bone to, to talk about it and you were on a roll there. I didn't go in through the resume. I didn't want to stop. You know, just some of the early cases that I, that I got involved in. But those, some of the early cases you got involved in were, were ground shakers. Yeah. I mean, they were, these were earthquakes of cases. And the first one you mentioned is the Pentagon papers, which I feel like is something that sometimes gets a little lost over accounting of, of history. It was 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, what happened is, you know, back up a nice thing about this at Harvard College, the history of it, that the, the French back during the, the Imperial age when the United States in the 1890s, uh, had decided that it was going to become a world power. Uh, they, they referred to this in high school, uh, history courses as the age of American imperialism. This is when we went out and, and took over the Hawaiian Islands in Guam and Philippines. We moved and took over huge sections of, uh, of, uh, Southwest Western United States, uh, from Mexico. We ended up initiating the, the Spanish American war, you know, against Cuba. It said there was this whole era of the American age of imperialism. Uh, and during that period, the various nation-states were vying for, you know, uh, colonies in different parts of the world to develop their economic resources in France. Uh, I actually sent a gunboat into Vietnam, uh, and, uh, came into the harbor and what, they became Saigon, uh, and ended up, uh, their, their French sailors got off the boat and went into town and they were milling around and ended up getting a fight, uh, in the marketplace and fired upon the people there and they went out and got in the boat and the ship and fired on the town and took it, uh, and then didn't know what to do with it. And so they ended up deciding France was going to keep, uh, this Indochina, this, uh, this colony there, uh, and they stayed there, uh, trying to figure out how to make an economic go of it, you know, rubber, rubber trees and different, uh, uh, pineapple plants, everything they were trying to figure out what to do. And then when the second we were working, the Japanese swept in and took it over, uh, and at the end of World War II, when the Japanese were being pushed out of there, uh, the French, uh, wanted to have the United States support them in going back in, uh, in reasserting their colonial power, uh, in, uh, in Indochina, uh, and, uh, the United States ended up eventually doing that, uh, and so until 1954, in 1954, uh, the people in Vietnam had risen up against the French, uh, colonialists and basically mounted a war against them and drove them out and surrounded them at DMB in Foo, back in 1954, generally. you know, JEP, you know, disassembled all the artillery and carried it on back all the way up the mountains and surrounded the DMVM foo 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, a 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 of a puppet regime under Neo-Dindium, took him out of Columbia University as a graduate student. This is the CIA. And that they brought in the Odin DM, they installed him and said, "Oh, there's a South Vietnamese Democratic Republic here, which had never existed." That's where an I love New York shirt. That's where a New York Yankees baseball cap. You know, so they ended up starting to provide massive military funding to him and political support and also covert operations of the CIA, being able to identify civil-local citizen groups who didn't support this endeavor in that they were being kidnapped and tortured and disappeared by a secret political police force in South Vietnam, which was 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, then it went to 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. 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 innocently patrolling the international waters around Vietnam were fired upon by Vietnamese naval forces, you know, at the Bay of Tonkin. And it was an absolute fabrication. And then on the basis of that ordered 500,000 United States military troops into Vietnam, and the Vietnam war was on in Ernest. And we were we were all going into college in 1963, you know, that I was the kind of one of the senior class of the baby boomers. Yeah. And we came out and I ended up because I didn't get to go to the Air Force Academy. You had to spend two years in military service at that time. It's a little strange for all of our men and women now that don't realize you come out of high school and immediately 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. Bottom line is I studied about it at Harvard College and came to understand all the details of how that thing came to pass and what was going on there. So in the 60s. In the 60s. Yes, right. So 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 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 47 volumes of the Pentagon papers, I was one of the few people alive that actually read them. 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 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 actually a gung ho Vietnam military advisor in the United States Marine Corps. And then he had gotten secluded to the Rand Corporation. The Rand Corporation down in was it where they down the beach down there and down in LA. Anyway, Malibu, they're based down there. And so he became a very 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 what the history of the Vietnam war and what was really going on. And he became totally disenchanted with the cause. And he realized 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 zero acts a whole set of all 47 volumes of the Pentagon papers that were top secret classified papers. And he brought them to the New York Times to Neil Sheehan, actually. He brought no relation, but brought him to him. And then they brought them to Lord Day and Lord, their law firm to get their agreement that they would protect them and publishing them. And Lord Day and Lord threatened to turn them into the FBI. Actually, if they didn't turn the documents back over immediately. So Jim Goudelle called me at the K-hill firm where I was because I mentioned I'd known him from doing the briefs for the New York Times in 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 with Jim Goudelle and Floyd Abrams and myself and Eugene Shimon. We sat in Floyd Abrams office and Jim Goudelle pulled the chair and started telling us what they had and Jim asked what we should do with these papers. And I said, publish them. I said the only decision you need to decide is the size of the font on the front page. And he said, well, what's going to happen? He said, well, given Mitchell, who's the attorney general, who's a fucking bond lawyer, I said who thinks the Constitution is a ship that sits in the harbor in Boston. I said, he'll probably try to threaten you, you know, and punch those burger 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, well, if we're lucky, espionage. And he said, he said lucky, espionage. I said, yeah, yeah, I said, you know, USB core is an old case USB core. And you know, they, they, in order to prosecute you for espionage, they have to prove scientific, have to prove an evil intent that you're actually intending to damage the national security in the United States. They can't, they're never gonna be able to establish that. So I said, let's, let's print these things in flight. Of course, the partner kept saying, wait a second. Wait a second. This is just the first year of SoShit here. He's just, this isn't the opinion of the firm, you know, but Jim Gidele was very happy with the proposal. So we went forward and started publishing, went for 13, 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 calls me on the phone. He says, hello, Mr. Shean. I said, yes, he says, this Whitney North Seymour. And I said, Whitney North Seymour, what do you know? I said, am I supposed to know who you are? He said, he said, I'm the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. He said, oh right, right, right, right, right. And he said, look at, he said, I'm calling you obviously because, you know, I'm calling you as a courtesy to ask you to, to, to, to advise your client to stop publishing these papers. And I said, I said, well, thank you very much. I said, you know, but I'm not going to do that. He said, well, you put your obliged tone, that this is an offer to, 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 K-Hope firm is. You know, and he said, well, it's a matter of 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 your obliged to do that. I said, no, I'm not. I said, so don't kid me. And he said, well, then I need to instruct you that we're going to be going over to Judge Marie Girfine 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 publishing. And I said, you're talking about a prior restraint, a prior restraint against the New York Times. He said, well, I'm not, I'm not here to quibble with you about the language. He said English with that. It's a, it's a, it's a violation of First Amendment. It's a flat out prohibition, you know, under the First Amendment. And so I said, well, you're talking about a prior restraint against the New York Times, an order prohibiting us from publishing something. And he said, I'm just not going to argue with you. He said about Samantha. She said, I'm just 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, I said, so I said, I'll, 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. No, no. So, so, so the bottom line is I wouldn't tell Floyd. And so we end up going over to, to Marie Girfine's chambers, right? The next day. And we're in chambers. And, you know, he's all robed up in chambers. And so we're, we're sitting there and they wouldn't. And our seam was there. And Floyd is there. Floyd Abrams, myself, Jean Scheinman. We had a, actually, we had Larry McKay there, who was the senior partner at the K. Hill. And, and we also, we also, we also had the First Amendment constitutional law guy, Alex Bickel, 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 our confidential news sources. Harvard, man, letting himself be seen with a Yale man? Well, I wasn't being seen. It was kind of private. The bottom line is that we were all there in chambers. And so we come in and I said, okay, so look at, 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 what you know, Sue Moore says, well, your honoree said, there's information in these papers that if it were publicly revealed, it would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. And 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're here to try to get a motion to get an injunction against New York Times, predicated on that assertion, you know, you have to be able to provide some evidence to it. So the judge, Judge Griffin says, well, what about me? He said, he said, if you're going to ask me to get an injunction against New York Times, you ought to be at least share the information with me. And if we notice him versus, 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, good, are we done here? You know, you got the burden to prove 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 New York Times. And the judge looked at me, he said, what? He said, well, we don't have any jurisdiction. I said, I said, there's no law. Well, what's the statutory authority? Where's your jurisdictional authority? You know, you're arguing as the justice department to the court that they have jurisdictional authority to enter this order against us. 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, 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 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 New York Times. And he said, well, look, he said, let me ask this. He said, since a wooden or steamer 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 acknowledging that we have a copy of these files at all. Never seen in my life. He said, 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 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 up and they 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 Murray Garfine 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. First, you're lost just coming into the firm. You know what I'm here saying? And here's Floyd going, well, I, you know, and so the judge said, well, that in any case, I'm going to enter an injunction against the New York Times. We're inhibiting 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 then your opinion against the First Amendment? Totally totally. So I said, well, we're going to be, we're going to be appealing, you know, immediately. And he said, well, look, it's only going to take a couple days for me to go through this. I say, so if you just hold up on your appeal to just give me a couple days. And so we go back to the office and we had to have the discussion as a whether we'd file an immediate appeal or we were going to let Murray Garfine and his guys go looking into the documents for a couple 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 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 bites 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 we're seeing where it 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. Said, you can go try to get an injunction if you can. So he runs upstairs. We follow him upstairs and he goes upstairs in the court, federal courthouse. We're following up the stairs when we get up and they go into the chambers. And it was who was it? Was it the judge? Anyway, the judge was there. He ends up, they make the motion to have the injunction reinstated, right? And Kaplan, his name is Judge Kaplan. Not Louis Kaplan. Yeah, Louis Kaplan. Oh my God, he's still around. So he said, they go into Kaplan and he said we'd like to have this injunction put back on and Kaplan, yeah, sure it was. He said, you know, he said, he said 25 years ago to the day, he said, 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 state of execution against the Rosenbergs and they were executed. They were allegedly Russian. 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 you know, 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 reserved seats in the in the federal courthouse just for federal judges. From out throughout the country, all flooded into Washington DC 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. They looked like, you know, there were a couple of them in there. 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 Pentagon papers. So we went from start to finish in 13 days from the day they put the one 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 precurium, 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 New York Times, they haven't meant that test in this case and so therefore we're refusing the injunction. Then every single one of the other nine judges wrote a major opinion in that case because it was one of the more 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 and sequence and you mentioned that one of them also involved setting the precedent that the government cannot ask for confidential sources to be revealed. Was that the Pentagon? No, no, no, no, this was Papis. That was the Papis case. Okay. That was decided under the case, the USV Brandsburg was the Supreme Court case that decided this. But we argued it on behalf of Paul Papis, who was an NBC television journalist in New Bedford. In that case, when all the way to the United States Supreme Court, so that case was actually literally in front of the United States Supreme Court. 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. God, it just is 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 claim 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 president of the secret of the Supreme Court? It's interesting. It's interesting that it should have, that 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 there didn't serve any purpose, leaving her in jail though. Yes, like that's wild to me. Yeah, I don't know. That was that was that particular statute. And it was interesting because Floyd Abrams was involved in that case, that in our partner. In fact, they did a they did a television dramatic series about that case. And Floyd Abrams played the judge. 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 it's the difficult dance you play with the intelligence community who's never incentivized to actually tell you the truth. Yeah. You know, like a friend of mine, Joby Warwick, who's won a couple Pulitzer's, 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 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. Oh, and they never give proof. 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 them all, guess 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. Well, it isn't really because it's bullshit, you know, I mean, really, yeah. That's like that's like that's that's like the fraternity brother who's got a $500 bet that he can go to bed with a head of tried out, right? You know, and then he tells her he really loves her. He says, you know, no, I really do. She's like, what about the bet you've got? You know, well, yeah, but that doesn't that doesn't mean anything. You know, the these guys are just a lion sack of shit. I mean, that's their job. You know, and the 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 it looked like under Berea in Stalin, you know, in Russia. You know, we know what it looked like into the shop you ran. We know what it looked like under Somosa, you know, under Noriega. We know what all those in 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, is so that 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 mortifying the embarrassing to us, you know, so it's just isn't true, you know, and so 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, wow, if there's a 1%, someone's going to die, you wouldn't want to do this, right? That's Dick Cheney's theory. Exactly. The 1% doctor. 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 one chance in a million that you've got a nuclear bomb hidden in your basement, we have to go find it, 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. Go to any magistrate. We'll give you a warrant. You know, no, we don't have time. We're going 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, like a whole, a whole ounce of marijuana and you're a dresser. Marijuana. You're just interested. You just, it just happens to be we're just going to bring that right in. You know, so it's, you know, there's, there's no doubt about what is this going on. And so the right, right from the very beginning, I cut my conscious love professor's 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. 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 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 it in a given point in time. But that just isn't true. The entire theory of our government is exactly 180 degrees opposite to 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, you know, that's too bad. 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 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 a whole UFO thing. Oh, we can't reveal it to you. The secrets, you know, because it would be catastrophic, you know, the catastrophic disclosure. That's the big, you know, the trigger word now. We can't allow the information about 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 here because I will find out. Dan she has. 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't find out. You know, you know, part of the problem is though, like, because 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 some of the wildest secrets that have happened in this country. And you shot it from the rooftops. What did that? There's so much noise around these events because that's what, you know, the people who don't want anything, anyone know about it, do they create noise with it? That like your what may be true. 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 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 we'll 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 two entire generations younger than the boomers now, who disbelieve almost everything to the government tells them, you know, and I must say we've, we've contributed to that particular state of mind, considerably down through the 50 years that I've I've been working on these cases because I've been working on these cases. 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, we have, we have examples like with Don Frazier, Don Frazier was the congressman from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't remember this. And he's sitting in a budget committee hearing in a house appropriations committee and they're reviewing the CIA budget and he says, you know, what's this, 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 so it does and he says, well, what's this item here about thumbscrews? Bango, it was over, his whole political career was over millions of dollars comes pouring in mysteriously into his congressional campaign in the next, next term and he's ousted, you know, Frank Church, who chaired the Senate's selection media intelligence, you know, very next election, people out, 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, Tennessee, which he'd had two full terms, you know, with a 70% election. All of a sudden millions of dollars comes in publicizing the fact that he supports the evil rights amendment for women and that he supports the background checks on handguns. And so he was out and we tracked that money that came out of the Nugin Hand Bank in Australia. It was money that was put in there from the Nugin 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 partnership with Wang Powell of the heroin smuggling and the share of that money was put into the Nugin Hand Bank. That money came out of the Nugin 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 Tennessee. Okay? I mean, people know this. This is dark as you can imagine, you know, the Central Intelligence Agency's operations directorate, the guy that ran that hand picked Theodore Shackley, the same guy who had the contract with the heroin smuggling in Southeast Asia, hand picked 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. You know, I mean, they're football games to be monitored, you know, and, you know, elections to be monitored and in other things that 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 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 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. 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 respect. Here's Mr. Fireman who's going to, you know, blah, blah, you know, and that these people in positions of authority that you're supposed to believe what they say. Now, there was a whole period of time in our history when we all thought 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, killing women and children and stuff and burying them with your shoot, you know, things like that. And, you know, they used up their good will of 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 it is they want to do. Here's all your rights and all that. And so that we have this opportunity here in the country still to lift up that element of our knowledge about free rights and independent liberties etc. And so our job is to try to help people to understand that and to reify those things and to do it under duress. Not just when it's comfortable or it's the cool thing to do, but to really resist, you know, the narrative of the government. And so that's why we have such a strange bedfellows. We have people all across the political spectrum, you know, from the right to the left all the way across the political spectrum who say, you know, she and, you know, we'll tell you the truth, you know, and whether you're on the right or rather you're on the left or you're in the middle of wishy-washy people, you know, listen and he'll tell you what the story is. And then we'll also give you an analysis of what your options are, you know, in light of this historical record, here's what we think it tells you. And here's what the options are you have. It's, you know, I want to jump out of a first story window or set your own hair on fire. You know, what you want to do is do something that is meaningful and not useless stuff, you know, just, you know, pick up a pick a sign and walk around in front of the white house, something all by yourself. You know, what you need to do is organize, mobilize, educate people, you know, get people to respect the rights that they have and know that they should exercise those and be willing to take some flack, you know, be willing to get resistance from your family, you know, from your friends, you know, you've got to be willing to stand up for what you believe. And you need to be careful about not believing just any time Dick and Harry, you know, that comes down the path, you know, do you get all these QAnon stuff and I mean, kind of really bizarre old stuff, you know, oh, you know, they've got hundreds and hundreds of children under the streets of New York City being kept in tiger cages and tortured and extracting, you know, I feel like that's an op. I feel like that's an op just to get people to not talk about these things because it's like, oh, yeah, the crazy people we're talking about that and then the things that might actually be really ignored. They love to raise up and identify, you know, bogus conspiracy theories, so that they suggest anything that's a conspiracy theory is untrue, you know, and that's what they, that's what they do. And we know that the operations director of the Central Intelligence Agency has an entire project that they call citizen diplomacy and what they what they do is public diplomacy and they actually engage in propaganda narratives that they plan in the newspapers and in the examples. Yeah, that, for example, the Bay of Tonkin resolution, oh, we were attacked on the high seas and here's all the stuff, you know, that the, you know, Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, you know, and he's going to be, you know, they're going to bomb the United States, you know, that they, they, one time after another, you know, that they, they just come up with these, these narratives and the thing is that you have to push back against them. And the problem is that they're extremely sophisticated, but 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, they've got a project mocking bird, you know, they got 42, we identified 42 specific national security reporters, you know, all come from a national security background is a rule. They've all been in one of the agencies or another and that's why they're there, they're at the news media because they've got good contacts. But, Danny, that would never do this today. I'm glad they've stopped. We've never, we've never done this. Besides, we don't do this anymore, you know, so, so that that is, 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 critic to start with, but of course, George Bacinier ordered the revocation of our 501(c)(3) tax exempt charter for the Christie Institute. Why would you do that? Because we're the ones that did the Iran contra case against them. We're the ones, 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 office of 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 ball amendment and we said, oh really? Okay. 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 their airplanes they were flying. We had the serial numbers on the the weapons. We had the 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 Ilapango. You know and we had gotten the photographs from the head of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, you know right right at Ilapango. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clips full podcast episode that link is in the description below or right here. And finally you can follow me on Instagram and x by using the links in my description below.