Mike Benz the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online joined Natalie Winters on The War Room on Friday evening to discuss the House vote to recertify FISA spying on American citizens.
Benz believes the FBI is the most corrupt agency, the most lawless in the country. And the only way “we will know there are checks and balances is when we see them in jail.”
So true. The more the lawless government agencies are allowed to abuse the American public with no consequence – the more the lawless government agencies will continue to abuse Americans without concern of any consequence.
Where are the good guys in the GOP?
Via the War Room.
Mike Benz: I share an identical rage that I feel emanating from you here. For him to take to the press conference like that and pivot to the border on exciting all the principles. If we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country. – This idea that, Oh, don’t worry about it, there’s checks and balances on it now. No, there’s not. It’s an empty check. It’s a blank check for the FBI to do whatever it wants, and it’s bluster instead of balances. FISA is, as Senator Mike Lee said it best, “Federal investigators stalking Americans.” And there’s something very sick and twisted about what’s happening right now with the FISA fight vis-a-vis the Republican Party. The Republican Party is in the middle of a civil war between the internationalist sect of the GOP, the blob sect of it, versus the Nationalist wing of the GOP, the populist faction. And FISA will not be used on the blob side, the internationalist side of the GOP. That side of the GOP associated with big international businesses is associated with the energy market, associated with the military.
In that empire managerial class of the GOP, FISA is not an issue to them. It won’t be used on them, but it will be used on their opposition in the GOP Civil War. Every single right wing populist, nationalist, Republican is a target of FISA.
FISA is this idea that you can get around the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and use the Department of Dirty Tricks Power that our foreign policy establishment has to spy on foreigners, to spy on Americans, if you simply use the word counterintelligence instead of intelligence. We’re not doing intelligence spying on our own people. We’re doing counterintelligence spying on our people because they might be being spied on by Russia.
The foreign policy establishment, the Blob, has an in-process plan to seize Eurasia from Russia. Anyone who is nationalist populist, who decides United States has a high-profile voice or any political power, who wants to undermine Ukraine funding, who wants to roll back the ability to carry out war in Eurasia, they are immediately a counterintelligence target of FISA. Any crooked FBI agent can make the argument that if you do not support another 60 billion this year, 100 billion later this year, a trillion over the next five years to Ukraine, then you are helping Russia. Well, why are you helping Russia? Well, we better find out to decide if you have Russian contacts.
So boom, now they can tap your WiFi device. They can listen to your phone while you’re on the toilet or while you’re making love to your spouse. This is the most corrupt agency, the most lawless. We will know there’s checks and balances when we see them in jail. Peter Strzock was the head of counterintelligence for the FBI, and he tapped dance in front of the world after saying, “We have an insurance plan to make sure that the duly elected President doesn’t become President.”
This FISA trick is a thumby war between the two sides of the GOP and using this foreign-facing, dirty power to basically do that cheap thing with the pinky finger. That’s what’s going on here, and that’s why Mike Johnson is behind it.
Natalie Winters: I’m just curious how you think FISA, taking a step back from the actual current battle at hand right now, but how FISA fits into the broader weaponization that you’ve talked about, particularly on the censorship, the misinformation, disinformation front. How important of a fight is this in the context of all the ways that they have weaponized against us?
Mike Benz: Yeah. What it is, it is the FBI’s toolkit side of when you are losing in a fair fight in terms of voters and the electorate so you need to resort to dirty tricks like censorship or like prosecution or like mass domestic spying on everything to find the crime because every minute of life you’re being monitored by the FBI.
Just like with censorship, the only faction that was ever censored were populace, which was in this country, that’s MAGA Republicans, Nationalist populist Republicans, not Dick Cheney Republicans. It’s all one side because the blob side of the GOP is losing the Civil War within the party, losing power to the populist faction. And they’re also losing in the general with all the polls now showing Trump up 5-7 points in each of the seven battleground states. So as they continue to lose harder and harder in a fair fight, they are resorting to the rigging, basically loading up the gloves with a weight to try to win it in a rigged way. And FISA is rigging it through, essentially, the tortuous process of an American secret police.
Natalie Winters: I mean, how rich is it that you have Mike Johnson standing up there thinking that, oh, well, if I just say the words border security and I loop it together with election integrity, the MAGA base, they’re going to be happy. The War Room posse, they’re not going to call. They’re going to see that we’re actually doing… No, we’ve seen through you on day one. You guys have done absolutely nothing on the Southern border except a performative impeachment of Mayorkas, which you guys couldn’t really even follow through. And it was cagey if you could even really get there. Didn’t see Mike Johnson Wilson going down to Mar-a-Lago doing press conferences on that. I didn’t see him calling conference-wide calls or meetings on that. No, it’s only been on Ukraine aid and FISA that shows you what his priorities are. Mike, I really think you are in some ways, I would say, one of the leading experts on the government censorship, this dark money that is funneled through the government to skirt the First Amendment to use these various NGOs to then go after, like you said, the MAGA movement. I’m just curious in your estimation, we’ve focused a lot on this show as of late, how they know Trump’s going to win, right? Or at least in the polls, he’s dominating. And they’ve been cutting out these various ways, whether it was reupping the ad hominem attacks. They try to pretend like they’re tough on immigration, of course, the law fare.
But do you think that this doubling down on FISA, the spying on American citizens, of course, this dovetails quite nicely, I think, with a lot of their talk about cyber security your domestic terrorist threats because you voted for President Trump. Do you think that this is a marker for how they’re going to try to start shaping the narrative ahead of the 2024 election? In other words, they’re basically treating us like foreign terrorists. It’s not even domestic ones, right? They’ve upped the level. How do you think this fits into the 2024 election narrative?
Mike Benz: Yeah. I mean, say it with me now. Russiagate now, Russiagate tomorrow, Russiagate forever. Russiagate will never die, and And FISA is the ultimate weapon to be able to skewer anybody ensnared in a RussiGate allegation because the Atlantic’s Foreign Policy Faction’s goal is to seize Eurasia from Russia and using US taxpayer funds to fund that war. And if Americans decide, you know what? We want to focus on ourselves. We want to build our own roads. We want to be able to have affordable housing, affordable health care. We want to be able to build our own beautiful kingdom. And what’s happening in Eurasia is basically for the benefit of a bunch of oil and gas companies and a bunch of military contractors and a bunch of chamber of commerce companies that don’t even have their manufacturing here anymore. And while that fragile quasi-military, quasi-political campaign is being waged, and we are in decade, I don’t know, seven of that. As long as that is the plan of the Atlantacist’s foreign policy blob, Russiagate will always be here as the ghost hanging over everyone who wants to focus on our own domestic priorities because of the dirty trick power of being able to use a FISA-type power, a foreign-facing, dirty trick power, in order to knock out a domestic political opponent who is undermining support for that Atlanta’s foreign policy blob.
And so they’re intricately interconnected. The Internet censorship apparatus in this country was established through RussiaGate. And then once RussiaGate basically temporarily died in the summer of 2019 with the Muhler probe having nothing to back it up, then they simply transitioned to a democracy predicate, which is the same foreign policy watchword used to overthrow governments. It’s the same dirty trick except FISA arms the FBI. So as soon as RussiGate 3.0 breaks out in full, FISA is going to be weaponized to try to purge the Republican Party of any dissidence to clear the way for a Nikki Haley or Dick Cheney type Republican to take the helm again.