0:01Do you ever like sit back and and think about like the ride you've been on or you still just so in the middle of it you can't >> just still in the middle of it? You know, you don't you don't have time to you we don't even get to watch the news most of the time while we're making it.
0:14>> Yeah.
0:14>> So, we just keep on going straight forward.
0:16>> Yeah. Now, one of the cases you were talking with me right before we were on camera about is the Karen Silkwood case because apparently that's coming up on >> the 50 50th anniversary of of her murder on November 13th, 1974. So that ABC and a lot of the other major networks are are now gathering around asking questions about it because we we know who murdered her. We we tried to get it put into the trial back in 1979. Uh we've won the $10.5 million judgment against the Ker McGee uh corporation, shut down the entire nuclear uh fuel reprocessing facility there. Uh and but they wouldn't do anything about who
0:56murdered 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 Shaw. So the source of the nuclear materials for both those countries came out of the Kermag facility.
1:16>> Whoa. So and and what was Karen's role over there again?
1:19>> She was a uh 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 Keri nuclear facility, the reprocessing plant outside of Oklahoma City. uh and she was uh she was trying to organize everybody like during the lunch hours and and coffee breaks and stuff. So they assigned her to the midnight shift so that she was only there from midnight until 8:00 in the morning so they could get rid of her.
1:49And so that 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 lbs of 98% pure bomb grade plutonium. Uh and she got on the telephone and called the Oil Chemical atomic workers headquarters in Washington DC and told them that she'd found these documents and unfortunately her wire her phones were wiretapped by the security department. Of course they >> uh and they realized that she was revealing this and the New York Times sent a reporter out, David Burnham, to
2:25get copies of the documents themselves and she was murdered on her way to deliver the documents to him. Uh and the and the documents were all taken out of the car and uh we ended up doing the trial uh that resulted from that uh and caught the people who who murdered her uh and tried to get it put into evidence. Uh but the uh the court ruled that uh that the count one of our complaint filed under the federal Civil Rights Act for violating her rights to privacy because they they contaminated her home. They broke into her home and and put 400,000 cintigrations per minute of radioactive plutonium on the food in
3:03her refrigerator.
3:04>> Who's there?
3:04>> This is the the security department of the Ker McGee Corporation. Uh James Reading was the head guy for that. Uh and he had previous to his being hired by the Ker 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. Uh and that he had headed up that group and they hired him to be the chief of security for their for their nuclear
3:39reprocessing plant. and uh he hired a that group, the same group that was in the unit, the special intelligence unit.
3:47He retained them to do the surveillance on Soapwood. 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. Uh 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 and killed her.
4:04>> They tried to say at the beginning that that was just a car crash, right? Which obviously it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't.
4:11>> And then when did you So that's like 1974.
4:14>> 74. November 13th, 74.
4:16>> Okay. So when did you get learn about the case and get involved with it?
4:20>> Well, I I saw the I saw the report uh uh Shoemaker uh uh ABC did a special bulletin about the fact that she'd been killed. It was so incredibly suspicious what had happened to her. Uh I saw the I saw the bulletin come in. I was out actually at Wounded Knee at the time. Uh I was legal counsel for ACLU uh during the occupation earlier in 73. So I was out there doing mopup in 1974 and I saw the I saw the bulletin come in on the television and I was with uh with Russell Means and uh and Dennis Banks and the guys and I was saying holy [ __ ] I said look at somebody's got their ass in a ringer on that one. They're not
5:01going to get away with that. Uh little did I know that I was going to end up being the one that ran the case. So we uh we got brought in very soon after that. The National Organization for Women uh had been organizing to try to get women to be much more active in the male dominated unions uh and Karen Squid 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
5:35for Women uh started a major campaign around the country to mobilize people to uh come forward uh and they reached out to me. I was chief counsel at 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. So they knew about me. So they contacted me to see if I would be willing to run the investigation in the the litigation which I did. You were also still young at this point like like like as far as like being a an attorney who hadn't been around for like 40 years or something,
6:11right? But you were in the middle of all these insanely huge cases like this.
6:15>> Turned out Yeah. Well, it happened that what happened is in 1968 at at Harvard Law School that uh I had co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Law Reviewview along with Mark Green out of New York.
6:27uh and uh that I was in charge of uh 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 reviewview. And so I ended up uh representing uh the NBC television journalist uh during the uh the April 1968 riots around the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
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7:24can join my newsletter via the link in the description below.
7:26>> Uh, and uh, bottom line is uh, we asserted for the first time the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources uh, against a grand jury up in New Bedford that was trying to get at the the sources for the NBC television journalist, Papus, his name was. And so we asserted the first amendment right of the journalist 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 secondyear law student at Harvard at the time. So I ended up getting recruited by the number
7:59one corporate litigation law firm in the country down on Wall Street that represents NBC. And so they brought me in to uh do that. Cahill Gordon Sonnet Randell and all was the name of it. Got it. So that's Floyd Abrams firm down there. And so uh I ended up uh being there to do the litigation uh 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 journalist right right from the very beginning right coming right out of Harvard Law School. And then uh because I had done not only the major briefs and chief for
8:35NBC on that issue in the Supreme Court, but I also did the amicus briefs for ABC and CBS uh and for the New York Times and the Washington Post for 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 uh later that next year uh I was the one that got the call from Jim Goodell uh and he came over to our firm to see whether we would represent them uh to protect their right to publish the papers because their law firm Lord Dan Lord threatened to turn them into the FBI if they didn't give if they didn't give the papers back. So uh
9:13so I took the call from Jim Goodell. Uh we agreed to do the the Pentagon Papers case. Uh 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. Uh, and then I got recruited by attorney F. Lee Bailey, who was the number one criminal defense attorney in the country, uh, when the Watergate burglary took place in June of 1972. And he recruited me to come over to their firm to work on the the Watergate burglary case. And so I ended up running the investigation to find out, you know, why why, you know, three uh Trafocanti gunmen were in the
9:54Watergate hotel uh as part of that burglary team.
9:57>> Sto 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 Effle Bailey turned out to be the attorney for Santos Trafocanti.
10:11And >> so so that they we were able to sit down and have that interview of Trafocanti 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. Uh but anyway, it's a that's a long story.
10:27>> Yeah, we'll come back to all this. I'm letting you go right now.
10:29>> But anyway, that was that was the that was how I got involved in all of those cases right at the very beginning. Uh 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. uh you know uh and so uh I ended up uh going back to uh to Harvard to do a PhD uh 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. uh and I was that was where I
11:06got recruited uh for the Jesuit order that that one of my professors, Professor Roger Coutur, who taught the course on the theological underpinnings of human rights uh came to me and said, "Look, the the Jesuits are looking for a general counsel and their new national headquarters in Washington DC uh in their public policy office and they want to come and interview you." So I did and ended up uh taking a leave of absence from doing my PhD work uh at Harvard.
11:34I'd already gotten my undergraduate degree from the college and studied with Henry Kissinger, foreign policy, you know, studied you know economics with John Kenneth Galbra and did uh you know my sociology with David Reeseman. All those folks were there at the time.
11:49Those were those kind of Hian days.
11:51[clears throat] say.
11:52>> And then I then I uh went on to uh I said that 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 uh 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 RWS who was the head of the department of philosophy at Harvard to discuss this with him. uh and he's the one that suggested I come back and do the the PhD on comparative social ethics. So that's where I was when I got recruited by the Jesuits. And
12:29that's where I was when I got contacted in right after President Carter got elected in uh November of 1976 when uh 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 was >> now had you were you someone who as a kid thought about that stuff, thought about life.
12:53Oh yeah. No, there wasn't any doubt about it. And I when 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 So you'd sit and look up into the stars at night. You said, "Look at that.
13:10all of those billions of planets around going around all those stars and [clears throat] 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 7 8 9 years old that, you know, that the the war was going on in Korea. Uh they had all these weird things happening all the time. And uh I kept saying look at this doesn't make any sense why we would be acting like this in light of you know where we really are uh in the galaxy here. Uh and
13:46so it all seemed rather strange to me.
13:48And so I decided that I was going to originally going to become an astronomer so I could figure out what was going on.
13:56All these and then I realized, wait a second, that's doing a lot of math and sitting [laughter] looking at old long, you know, [snorts] 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. Uh [snorts] that was prior to the launching of Splutnick and stuff. Uh, so but I was going to be an astronaut and I had 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
14:28northern 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.
14:36>> So what changed? Well, [clears throat] I when I was being interviewed by Jacob Javitz, Jacob Senator Javitz 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. I'm going to get to meet all these extraordinary other civilizations." And he looked at me, he said, "You actually believe that there's other other beings out there?"
14:58And 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 that I said that to him. And [clears throat] 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."
15:18>> There you go.
15:19>> He said, "Look at this is the way this world really works, Danny." He said, "But but [laughter] I'll but I I'll I'll give you the nom I'll give you the nomination to the Naval Academy." I said, "Wait, I'm not into boats." You're like that.
15:29>> I said I [laughter] said, "I'm not into boats. I'm into planes." So, no. He says, "You can you can become an astronaut from there." I said, "No, look it." He said, "Well, all 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 who it was.
15:46He 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 Glenn Walls, [laughter] 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 retune the government a little
16:17bit, you know, working as a as a lawyer.
16:20Uh, and then I realized that the the government wasn't just a little bit out of tune, it was playing an entirely different song.
16:28>> Yeah. you know, than we've been taught.
16:31And 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. So I've been [clears throat] at this now for 50 years. Uh and it's led to most recently my being retained to represent Lou Alzando down in the Pentagon, >> who we just had in here as well. So I I I know we'll >> we'll get to him for sure and and all the different things around disclosure.
16:56there's just so much on on the bone to to talk about and you were on a [clears throat] roll there at the beginning going through the resume. I didn't want to stop you.
17:03>> Those are just some of the early cases that that I that I got involved in.
17:07>> But those some of the early cases you got involved in were were ground shakers. I mean the these were earthquakes of cases. [clears throat] And the first one you mentioned is the Pentagon Papers, which I feel like is something that sometimes gets a little lost in our recounting of of history, but it was it involved Daniel Ellsberg, who just [clears throat] recently passed in the past couple years.
17:27>> And can you just go through exactly what happened there for people out there who are unfamiliar?
17:32>> Yeah. Well, what what happened uh is you back up and I studied 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 refer 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 and Guam and Philippines. We moved and took over huge sections of uh of southwestern United States out from Mexico. We ended up initiating the the SpanishAmerican War, you know, against
18:11Cuba, etc. 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. and France actually sent a gunboat into Vietnam and came into the harbor in what later became Saigon uh and ended up their 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 fired upon the people there and they went out and got in the boat in the ship and fired on the town and took it uh and then didn't know
18:51what to do with it and so they ended up deciding France was going to keep uh this Indo-China, 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 pineapple plants, everything. They were trying to figure out what to do. And then when the Second World War came, 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 in reasserting [clears throat] their colonial power uh in uh in in
19:28Indochina. Uh and uh the United States ended up eventually doing that. uh and so until 1954 and 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 uh surrounded them at DMB and FU back in 1954. General Gap, you know, uh, disassembled all the artillery and carried it on back all the way up the mountains and surrounded uh, the DMV and FU and then [clears throat] rain down death on on the French troops there and then had them uh, surrender.
20:09uh they set up a a treaty in 1954 uh in Geneva to agree to allow the French to withdraw bel below a certain line, the 42nd parallel uh with the understanding that they would then remove all their troops. uh in the United States under the Eisenhower Nixon administration at the time thought that that was a bad idea that uh we ought to maintain western influence in Indochina and so that we moved in uh and set up a complete public uh a puppet regime uh under Neodymium uh took him out of Colombia University as a graduate student. Actually >> this is the CIA doing >> this is the CIA CIA. [clears throat]
20:49Yep. and that they they brought in the Odin DM. They installed him and said, "Oh, there's a South Vietnamese uh Democratic Republic here, which had never existed."
20:58>> He's wearing an I love New York shirt.
21:00>> That's right. Right. [laughter] New York Yankees baseball cap, you [clears throat] know. And so so they ended up uh starting to provide massive military funding to him and political support and uh and also covert operations of the CIA being able to identify uh local citizen groups who didn't support uh this endeavor uh and that they were being kidnapped and tortured and disappeared uh by secret political police force in South Vietnam which was all supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. uh and then uh one administration after another. It started out with the uh Eisenhower uh Nixon administration. Then it went to the
21:38Kennedy administration, you know, then it went to the to the uh 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 uh that was attempting to flourish in the southern tip of uh Vietnam. You know, it was total horseshit. Uh and it was just a total fascist regime there trying to take over. Uh and so all of a sudden the Johnson administration fabricated completely fabricated a story that uh our United States warships instantly
22:16patrolling the international waters around Vietnam were fired upon by a uh by uh Vietnamese naval forces you know uh at the Bay of Tankin. 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 earnest and uh we were we were all going into college 1963, you know, that I I was the kind of one of the senior class of the baby boomers.
22:48>> Yeah.
22:49>> And uh we came out and uh and I ended up because I didn't get to go to the Air Force Academy. uh that 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.
23:14>> Bottom line is I studied about it 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 I >> in the 60s >> in the 60s. That's right. So I I did part of my junior essay on uh 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 uh against the war in Vietnam.
23:38>> Uh so I knew all about this. Uh, and so when I when I came uh 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.
24:07>> And who was Ellburg again? Like what was his role? Dan Dan was a Dan was a uh actually a gung-ho Vietnam uh military adviser in the United States Marine Corps. Uh and then he had gotten secunded to the Rand Corporation. The Rand Corporation down in in in uh in uh was it uh where are they down in the beach down there at down in LA. Anyway, [clears throat] the Malibu uh they're based down there. And so he he became nice location.
24:36>> Yeah. Right. Good territory. So he 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 uh 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
25:15uh to uh Neil Shien actually. He brought no relation. No relation but brought him to him and then uh they they brought them to Lord Day and Lord their law firm to get their agreement that they would protect them in 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 Goodell called me uh at the Cahill firm where I was because I mentioned I'd known him from doing the briefs for the New York Times in the the right of journalists to protect their confidential news sources case. So the bottom line is we agreed to represent
25:50him. I was in the meeting uh with Jim Goodell and uh Floyd Abrams and myself and Eugene Shyman. We sat in Floyd Abrams office and and Jim Goodell pulled the chair up and started telling us what they had. Uh and Jim asked what what we should do with these papers and I said publish them.
26:08>> Yeah.
26:09>> You know I said the only I said the only decision you need to decide is the size of the font on the front page.
26:14[laughter] I said I said I said and uh and he said, "Well, what's 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, [laughter] you know, that I said he'll he'll probably try to threaten you, you know, and Punch Soulsberger and the rest of the folks on the board of editors. And he said, "Like with what?
26:39What would they charge us with?" And I said I said, "Well, if we're lucky, espionage." And and he said he said lucky espionage. I said yeah yeah. I said USV Corin there's an old case USV Goran you know that they in order to prosecute you for espionage they have to prove scient have to prove an evil intent that you're actually intending to damage the national security of the 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 Avers the partner kept saying wait a second wait a second this is just a first year associate here.
27:08he's just brand here. 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 3 days and then uh I get a telephone call from Whitney Norse Seymour who was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. He calls me on the phone. He says, "Hello, Mr. Sheen." I said, "Yes."
27:32He says, "This Whitney Norse Seymour."
27:34And I said, "Uh Whitney Norse Seymour."
27:36Whitney Nor [laughter] Seymour. said, "Am I supposed to know who you are?" He said, "I'm the United States Attorney for the Senate District of New York." I said, "Oh, right, right, right, right, right." And he said, "Look at He said, "I'm calling [clears throat] 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 [laughter] said, "Well, but you're obliged to tell him that this is an offer uh to uh to avoid
28:05litigation." I said, 'I don't care.' I said, ' That's what we do over here. We do litigation. That's what the Cahill 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 you're obliged to do that. I said, no, I'm not. I said So, don't kid me. and and he said, "Well, then I I need to instruct you that we're going to be going over to Judge Marie Gerind tomorrow at 1:00 in the afternoon and to be seeking a temporary restraining order against the New York Times if you don't voluntarily
28:35agree 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."
28:46>> Say English with that. It's a it's a it's a violation of the First Amendment.
28:50It's a flatout 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, an order prohibiting us from publishing something." And he said, "I'm just not going to argue with He 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, [laughter] we 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,
29:17you 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.
29:22>> I was going to say, I felt like you were going to hang up on him. Thanks. See you.
29:26>> No. So, so, so the bottom line is I wouldn't tell Floyd. And so, uh, we end up going over to to Marie Gerine's chambers, right, the next day. Uh, and we're in Chambers and you know, he's all robed up in chambers. And so, we're we're sitting there and Whitney North Seymour is there and Floyd is there.
29:41Floyd Abrams, myself, Jean Shyman, we had uh uh actually we had Larry McCay there who was the senior partner at the at Cahill. Uh and and we also we also had uh uh the uh the first amendment uh constitutional law guy, Alex Bickl from Yale Law School, who was Floyd Abrams Klaw professor.
30:04>> Uh 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.
30:12>> Well, I wasn't being seen. It was kind of private, you know. So, so so, so, so, so the the bot the bottom line is that we were all there in chambers. And so, we we come in and and uh and uh I said, "Okay, so look at I said, it's 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."
30:30So, so uh what's your what's your argument? So, uh, Whitney 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?"
30:46And he said, "Well, I can't tell you. I can't tell you because it's classified."
30:51And 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 Griffin 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 if we say, "No, I'm sorry, your honor. We can't we can't share it with you either." Uh because you don't have the adequate security clearances. So I said, "Good. Are we done here? You know,
31:20you've got the burden of proof here. You you aren't going to offer any evidence whatsoever to support your assertion."
31:24And I said, "Moreover, let me make it clear that even if your assertion is true, uh, 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 author? Where's your jurisdictional authority? You know, that you're arguing as the Justice Department to the court that they have jurisdictional authority to enter this order against us. uh and uh and he said, "Well, uh it's kind of like an inherent authority that the
31:57government 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
32:30of free press. So it's the 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 at the New York Times." Uh, and he said, "Well, look," he said, "Let me ask this." He said uh since uh Wooden or Seymour isn't going to be providing counsel here to the court, uh Mr. Abrams, he said, "I'm assuming that your firm is in possession of a a set of these 47 volumes." I said, "Excuse me, your honor." I said, "You can you can assume anything you [laughter] want." I said, "But we're not
33:04we're not acknowledging that we have a copy of these files at all.
33:07>> Never seen it in my life."
33:08>> And so, and he said, "Yes, Mr. Sheen."
33:10He said, "But Mr. Abrams, what I want to do is I want to ask as a courtesy to the court, uh, would you please provide a copy of these 47 volumes to the court so that I and my law clerks untoured [clears throat] 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 uh impose an injunction. Uh, and uh, I said, "Absolutely not." I said, "We're not going." And Floyd Abrams said, "Excuse me." He said, "Yes, as a courtesy to the court, we'll do that." I
33:48was 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.
33:57And so then uh judge judge Marie Griffin says, you know, okay, in in further spirit of cooperation, he said, "Could you please voluntarily agree to stop publishing [snorts] uh the 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 just coming into the [laughter] firm and I'm here saying this and here's Floyd going well I uh you know and so the judge said well then in any case I'm going to enter an injunction >> uh against the New York Times
34:31prohibiting you from continuing to publish until I have an opportunity to review this with my clerks right so they ended he ended up issuing the injunction >> and in your opinion against the first amendment >> totally totally against so I said well [clears throat] we're going to be uh we're going to be appealing you know immediately [cough] and he said, "Well, [clears throat] look, it's only going to take a couple days for me to go through this." So, he said, "So, if you'd just hold up on your appeal to just give me a couple days." Uh, and so we go back to the office and we had to have the discussion as to whether we'd file an
35:03immediate appeal or we were going to let Marie Gerine and his guys go looking into the documents for a couple days.
35:08But we knew that we had extraordinary pressure on him, you know, to have to do this as rapidly as possible because there had never been anything like this, an injunction against the New York Times prohibiting us from publishing something. So they decided that given the the exigencies of the circumstances, we'd leave that pressure on him. So he'd buzz through these things. Two within two days, he calls back and invites us back over. We come back over and he said, "Look at 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
35:39documents that we think would irrevocably damage the national security of the United States. So, I'm lifting the injunction." And William Seumer says, "Your honor, we'd like to have you put a stay on that so we can go upstairs uh and and potentially get a uh get a 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." And so he runs upstairs. We follow him upstairs and [laughter] he he go he goes upstairs in the court, federal courthouse. You know, we're following him up the stairs and we get
36:11up and and they they go they go into the chambers. Uh and it was uh uh who was it was the uh uh was it uh the judge?
36:21Anyway, the judge that was there, he ends up they make the motion to have the the injunction reinstated, right? Uh, and uh, Kaplan, his name is Judge Kaplan, >> not Louis Kaplan.
36:33>> Yeah, Lewis Kaplan. Uh, >> he's [clears throat] Yeah.
36:36>> Oh my god, he's still around.
36:37>> So, so, so, so he says they they go into Kaplan. He says he said, uh, uh, we'd like to have this injunction put back on in and uh, yeah, Kaplan. Yeah, sure.
36:48Sure it was. He said, he says, you know, he said, he said, 25 years ago to the day, he said, uh uh see he's I'll tell we can figure out who the judge was here because uh he said uh 25 years ago to the day I was asked by the government to uh issue an injunction and I declined the injunction at that point. He said, "And I've often wondered about whether that was the [snorts] right thing to do.
37:12So I'm going to give this injunction.
37:14I'm going to [laughter] say he he was talking about the Rosenberg case."
37:17>> Yeah. Uh it was 53. Yeah. That it was the Rosenberg case and he refused the stay of execution against the Rosenbergs and they were executed.
37:25>> Uh and >> they were allegedly Russian Soviet spies.
37:29>> Yeah. And so so the so bottom line is we go they didn't have a three judge panel.
37:33It went right to the full panel of the of the uh second circuit court of appeals within uh 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 reserve seats in the in the federal courthouse just for federal judges >> from [snorts] out throughout the country all flooded into Washington DC to to come into the 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. [laughter] It looked like you know not Yale.
38:05>> No, [clears throat] there were a couple of them in there. But so we we were sitting there and uh so we made the argument and uh they lifted the thing and we they uh allowed us to print all 47 volumes of the Pentagon papers. So we we went from start to finish in 13 days from the day they put the moment 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 the one procurium, the one page that says whatever the burden is that the United
38:40States government might need to make, if any, to be able to get an injunction against the New York Times, uh they haven't meant that test in this case.
38:48And so therefore, we're refusing the injunction. Then every single one of the other nine judges wrote a major opinion uh 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, it also involved setting the precedent that the government cannot ask for confidential
39:24sources to be revealed. Was that the Pentagon? No paper.
39:27>> No, no, no. This was Papus. That was the Papis case that was was decided under the case of USV Bransburg. Uh was the Supreme Court case that that uh decided this. But uh we are we argued it on behalf of of Paul Papus who was an NBC television journalist in in New Bedford.
39:45>> Got it. [clears throat] >> U and that that case went all the way to 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 Bickl 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, uh we we did that case all in 13 days and [clears throat] then then later decided the case that established the right of journalists to protect their sources.
40:13>> Got it. Just as a quick aside and then we'll come back to Pentagon Papers, but I I hope I'm remembering the case right, but there was some sort of case in the late 2000s. I want to say ' 0708. It may have been the pla affair where there was a journalist who kept on being held in in jail >> for not revealing it was a New York Times journalist for not revealing her source. Wouldn't that have [clears throat] been taken care of by the president of the secret of the Supreme Court >> ruling? It's interesting. It's interesting that that it should have that what what they did, however, is they they passed a statute uh in New
40:47York at that particular time.
40:49[clears throat] What they did is they they put in a statute saying that uh that the justice department uh both in federal and state uh before they can in fact issue a subpoena to a journalist what they have to do is they have to meet a certain burden uh they have to prove that uh 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 is indispensable to
41:28the case. [clears throat] And so they had established a a statute uh that had this caveat in it that allowed them to put the put the person in jail.
41:39And as you as you recall uh they ended up releasing her. Yeah. Uh because they realized that she wasn't going to tell that the the no matter so there didn't serve any purpose.
41:50>> It's crazy that they put her in jail though.
41:52>> Yes.
41:52>> Like that's wild to me.
41:54>> Yeah. No, no, that was that was uh the that particular statue and it it was interesting because uh Floyd Abrams was involved in that case than our partner.
42:03In fact, they did a they did a television dramatic series about that case and Floyd Abrams played the judge actually [laughter] in that in that drama, you know, talking about the kind of burden that the court was under to to release the person and uh that he played the judge who released her, >> saying that, you know, that it was 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.
42:29>> Yeah. It's and and you're talking about like with 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 latigious manner and is trying to block it. That's right.
42:42>> But on a dayto-day as well, I think about this often. It's it's it's the difficult dance you play with the intelligence community who's never incentivized to actually tell you the truth. Yeah.
42:52>> You know, a friend of mine, Joby Warick, who's won a couple Pulitzers. He's been on the show a couple times. He is 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 visav, 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 cuz people are going to die." Oh,
43:29yeah.
43:29>> And they never give proof. But then Joy'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-ole guess game of like, >> are they actually telling the truth or are they just trying to obuscate so that we don't report this? And then you put it out there and you hope that they weren't telling the truth.
43:51>> Yeah.
43:51>> It's a it's a tough dance.
43:53>> Well, it it isn't really cuz it's cuz it's [ __ ] you [laughter] know.
43:58>> I mean, really. Yeah. That's that's like that's like the fraternity brother who's got a $500 bet that he can go to bed with a head of tridel, right? You know, and then he tells her that he really loves her and says, you know, no, I really do.
44:11She said, "What about the bet you've got, you know?" Well, yeah, but that's that doesn't mean anything. You know, the these guys are just a lion sack of [ __ ] I mean, that's their job, you know, and and the what what we what we're looking at here is a national security state, you know. This is 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 in Stalin, you know, [clears throat] in Russia. You know, we know what it looked like under the Sha Iran. We know what it looked like under
44:38Samosa, you know, under Noriega. you know what all those and and the bizarre part of it is that half of them we support [laughter] you know and the other half Russia supports you know or China you know and so that they've all got the same game uh and they're always trying to assert that some poor helpless spy uh 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 [clears throat] which just happens to turn out to be mortifyingly embarrassing to us you know then so this just isn't true you know then [cough]
45:14and 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 it goes to that whole that 1% kind of theory of like well if there's a 1% someone's going to die [clears throat] you wouldn't want to do this right >> that's Dick Cheneyy's theory the 1% % 1% doctrine.
45:40>> Yeah. If there's if there's a 1% chance we have to just conduct ourselves, that's the absolute authoritarian masterpiece.
45:47>> Yeah.
45:48>> You know, if there's one if there's one chance in a million that you've got a 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. [laughter] You know, you know what we don't have time for? Go any magistrate will give you a warrant. You know, no, we don't have time. We we're going to 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 a whole ounce of marijuana in your dresser, [clears throat] it just you just it just happens to be
46:18we're just going to bring that right in, you know. So it's, you know, there's there's no doubt about what is going on.
46:24And so that right right from the very beginning uh I had my conscious law professor is Lawrence Tribe you know and you but 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.
46:43>> No >> 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 at any given point in time.
46:57But that just isn't true. The entire theory of our government is exactly 180 degrees the opposite of that. you know, if if they run into trouble uh and not being able to, for example, uh secure their [clears throat] 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 an agreement at the very beginning that they're going to have to forgo some of those privileges, you know, of the sovereign. They're just not going to get to do it. They aren't going
47:29to just to 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?
47:39>> Always want to. It's part of the bureaucratic imperative of any national security state, you know, and so that's what you face all the time. And so [clears throat] 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 it to you the secrets, you know, because it would be catastrophic, you know, catastrophic disclosure. That's the big, you know, the the the trigger word now. We we can't allow the information about that we know about UFOs to be revealed to the public
48:10because 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 and I say to them, you're making a big mistake here because I will find out.
48:23>> Dance, I I will find out. You know, that's our job. We've done that historically.
48:28You've said that we can't find out. We can find out.
48:31>> Yeah.
48:32>> You know, you know what part of the problem is though, like cuz 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, but it there's so much noise around these events because that's what you know the people who don't want anything anyone to know about it do. 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.
49:03>> Yeah. You you do what you can do, you know, you you try to share with people that you we believe in the principles of the first amendment. Uh and that you know that the 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 uh and come on shows to talk to people and say, "Oh, look at you know that uh that you you need to listen. Uh there's information that you don't know." Uh and now what's happened of course is we have like
49:35probably two 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 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, uh, you
50:10know, we we have we have examples. Don Frasier for Don Frasier was the congressman from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
50:17>> I don't remember this. and he he's he's sitting in a in a [clears throat] a budget uh committee hearing [cough] in the House Appropriations Committee and they're reviewing the CIA budget and and he says uh you know what's this uh what's this item here about miscellaneous interrogation equipment?
50:35Uh and the CIA person says, "Oh, well that's you know like uh lamps and tables and chairs and stuff like this." And he says, "Well, what's what's this item here about thumb screws?" M >> bango. It was over. His whole political career was over. Millions of dollars comes pouring in mysteriously into his ca his congressional campaign in the next next term. uh and he's ousted, you know, Frank Church who chaired the S Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, you know, very next election, people out he goes [snorts] very next election after he chaired the the Church Committee, you know, because all of a
51:09sudden millions of dollars comes flowing into his campaign up in Idaho for the United States Senate, 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 Equal Rights Amendment >> for women and that he supports background checks on on handguns. Uh and so he was out and we tracked that money that came out of the Nugan Bank in Australia. It was money that was put in there from the Nugganhand uh from the purchase of uh of heroin in Southeast Asia by the Southeast Asian uh station chief uh a CIA station chief Theodore G.
51:47Shackley is a station chief in Saigon, you know, had a partnership with Vang Pow uh of the heroin smuggling and that the a share of that money was put into the Nuggan Bank. That money came out of the Nugan Bank, went through two South African banks into the campaign against Senator Church uh up in Idaho. Same same thing happened to uh same thing happened to Dick Clark in Iowa. Senator Dick Clark in Iowa who opposed the covert operations of the CIA in Africa. uh all of a sudden millions of dollars shows up in in the campaign against him and he loses his Senate seat. Okay? I mean, people know this. Uh this is this is as
52:24dark 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 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.
52:49We know these things, you know, we tell people these things. uh people don't pay a lot of attention to it because they're very busy you I mean there are football games to be monitored you know uh uh and uh you know elections uh to be monitored and uh and other things getting and spending laying waste their power uh 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 uh along with the evidence to prove that it's true. Uh so that if they're interested they can they can watch. Now one of the challenges is that the public school
53:26system that we have you know uh trains people from the time you're in preschool basically to believe whatever the people in positions of authority tell you. Yes.
53:36>> You know here's your school teacher. You have to do whatever it is they say.
53:39They're here to help you. Here's Mr.
53:40policeman. 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, uh, and you're supposed to respect. Here's Mr. Fireman who's going to, you know, blah blah, you know, and 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.
54:00>> We can depend upon these people. They're trustworthy people. you know, I was the 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 uh people, you know, and killing women and children and stuff and burying them with your shoot, you know, things like that. uh and uh you know the that uh they they used up their goodwill uh with us uh and it became clear to us that uh that the the blind trust that we had placed in the government
54:34institutions 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 [clears throat] that we have this opportunity here in the country still to lift up that element of our our knowledge about free rights and independent liberties etc. And so our job is to try to help get people to
55:08understand that uh and to rey those things and to do it under duress, not just not just when it's comfortable or it's the cool thing to do, but to to really resist, you know, the the narrative of the government. Uh and so that's that's why we have such strange bedfellows. We have people all across the political spectrum now, [clears throat] you know, from from the right to the left all the way across the political spectrum who say, you know, Shen, you know, will tell you the truth, >> you know, uh, and whether you're on the right or whether you're on the left or you're in the middle of wishy-washy
55:43people, you know, listen and he'll tell you what the story is. Uh, and then we'll also give you an analysis of what your options are. you know, in light of in light of this historical record, here's what we think that it it tells you and here's what the options are you have. It's you don't want to jump out of a first story window or set your own hair on fire, you know, uh what you want to do is do something uh that is meaningful and not 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.
56:13You know what you need to do is organize, mobilize, educate people, you know, get people to to respect the rights that they have and and know that they should exercise those and be willing to take some flak, you know, be willing to get resistance from your family, you know, from your friends, you know, you you've got to be willing to stand up for for what you believe. And you need to be careful about not believing just any Tom, Dick, and Harry, >> you know, that comes down the path. you know, do do you get you get all these Q anon stuff and I mean kind of really bizarro stuff, you know, oh, you know,
56:45they'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 cuz it's like, oh yeah, that the crazy people were talking about that and then the things that might actually be real get ignored.
57:02that they they they love they love to raise up and and identify, you know, bogus conspiracy theories so that they can suggest suggest that anything that's a conspiracy theory is untrue, >> you know, and that's what they that's what they do. And and that we know that the operations director to the Central Intelligence Agency has an entire project that they call citizen diplomacy. Uh and what they what they do is public diplomacy and they actually engage in propaganda narratives that they plant in the newspapers and in the >> examples of Yeah. that uh for example the Bay of Tankin uh resolution. Oh, we
57:40were attacked on the high seas and and here's all the stuff, you know, that [clears throat] the, you know, Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, you know, and he he's going to be, you know, that 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. Uh, and the 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
58:13that 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 uh the citizens here uh you know you've got project mockingb bird you know they got 42 we identified 42 specific national security reporters [snorts] >> you know who all come from a national security background as a rule they've all been in one of the agencies or other and that's why that they're there at the news media because they've got good contacts with >> Danny they would never do this today.
58:45I'm glad I'm glad they've stopped. We've [laughter] never we've never done this besides we don't do this anymore, >> you know. So So that that that is that is what So it's it's just a peculiar practice that I I've developed over the years because of the happen stance of the the early cases that I did. Yes.
59:02that uh that people tend to think of calling us uh you know and and I've made sure to have an institute uh 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 [cough] [clears throat] George Bioren ordered the revocation of our 501c3 taxexempt charter for the Christristic Institute.
59:27>> Why would he do that?
59:28>> Because because we're the ones that did the Iran Contra case against them. were were the ones were the ones that filed the federal criminal racketeering act charges against Oliver North and all of the people working with him in the offthe-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 B 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 the airplanes
60:00they were flying We had the the uh 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 uh and stuff and loading the cocaine onto the same airplanes at Ilango, you know, and we had gotten the the photographs from the head of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, you know, uh right right at Ilango.
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