People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they're allies of ours or whether they're enemies of ours. But again, when I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there's a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing. And oh, by the way, many of the people who were [00:00:19] receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways. You my response to that is, well, go to hell. Interesting, I wonder if he's gonna say the same thing now to Jared Kushner and Steven Wittkopf. Cuz Ryan Grimes dropsight news reporting today that [00:00:36] the Iranians sent Vance a secret note saying, hey, you gotta pull these guys from the negotiations, they're self-dealing. Here's the headline, Iran sent message to JD Vance warning that Kushner and Wittkopf were abusing their inside access to negotiations. So Ryan, before I get to some [00:00:53] of your reporting here and telling all the facts of the story, Just quickly there, that is kind of extraordinary. Have you ever seen one side give a warning to the other side in a negotiation [00:01:09] that, hey, your guys might actually not be in favor of peace? Your own negotiators might be betraying you. Well, in negotiations, people are always looking for who in their. counterparty [00:01:25] is like more willing to make a deal and who's not. And before we uh suggest that the Iranians are like these, know, upstanding virtuous uh advocates of transparency, they actually told the mediators, and we reported this in the story too, that their estimate was that kind of [00:01:42] Trump's circle, not just Witkoff and Kushner, but Trump's circle more broadly, had profited upwards of $9 billion from market manipulation. throughout this process. And then they said, and so therefore we deserve 50 % of it, uh which is pretty funny. And maybe that's their opening [00:02:03] bid. They're willing to like come back for maybe 30 % or something. But yeah, so yeah, exactly. Yeah. So look, not exactly moral high ground when you say, can I trade half of that corruption? We deserve half. And since we're actual reporters and in actually in [00:02:23] journalism, uh we look at all of it skeptically, the American side, the Israeli side and the Iranian side. Of course, everybody has an agenda. So let's tell you what uh Ryan and Jeremy Scahill reported and then we'll discuss. Because there's three different parts to their objections [00:02:40] on Kushner and Witkoff. So let's get started here. They wrote the Iranians warned Vance that the continuing presence of President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Woodkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner would undermine the chance of turning the June 17 framework into an enduring deal, a senior Iranian official told DropSite. In the message, according to the official, [00:02:59] Iran conveyed to Vance that the pair were more interested in exploiting insider knowledge of the negotiations to profit in financial markets than they were in reaching a deal. So then they explain, this is back in April, The Guardian reported. 16 bets made $100,000 each, accurately [00:03:15] predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on February 27th. Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces. On April 7th, right before Donald Trump [00:03:31] announced the temporary ceasefire with Iran, traders bet $950 million that oil prices would come down, and they did. So now that's from a different story from The Guardian. So they're not saying that Woodcoff and Kushner did all that. But someone is definitely doing all [00:03:46] of that and we're wondering if, and apparently the Iranians are wondering if Woodcoff and Kushner is part of that. So back to the drop site reporting. In the weeks leading up to the signing of the memorandum of understanding, officials said Iran presented written documentation to mediators of what it characterizes evidence that individuals close to President Trump [00:04:04] were abusing the Iran war and diplomatic developments to manipulate financial markets. An anonymous Iranian official said even before the Islamabad talks kicked off in April, we already sent multiple messages to Trump through the Pakistanis, warning them about Wicoff's overall destructive [00:04:19] role in the previous negotiation. now that's to the point of their potential corruption. Now there's a second point, which is that they're dumbasses and don't know what they're doing. And they're lying about what's happening and we're wondering, the Iranians are wondering if- they're purposely sabotaging the negotiations. So to that point, uh Ryan and Skahill uh explain, [00:04:43] Woodcoff and Kushner showed up with no subject area or nuclear experts and appeared oblivious to the technical aspects of the negotiating the nuclear issue. Iranian negotiators presented an outline of their existing stockpile of enriched uranium and assessed that their quote, unbelievable [00:04:58] level of flexibility formed the basis of what Foreign Minister Abbas- Araghchi said on February 25th could be quote a historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement. uh But Witkoff went on Fox News afterwards and said Iran's going to build nuclear weapons. They're like [00:05:15] what? So the Iranian negotiators said to us, this is according to Witkoff, with no shame that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60%. And they're aware that they could make 11 nuclear bombs and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance. Wychoff told Fox News on March 3rd [00:05:34] while defending the decision to attack Iran in the middle of negotiations. So the Iranians are like, wait, we told you we're going to give you an unprecedented offer on taking away our nuclear program. You go and tell people in America that we're building 11 nuclear weapons. [00:05:49] What the hell is this? So that's a fair question. And then you get to this third possibility and this is from Axios. Back on March 4th, interesting piece of reporting from Barack Ravid here. A US official said special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's advisor and son-in-law [00:06:08] Jared Kushner talk almost every day to Netanyahu. And to the director of Mossad David Barnea and to other Israeli officials, and that regardless of ups and downs in the past, the coordination over the last month was very close. 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What's going on here? I think it's all of those things. I think he's genuinely an idiot on that one piece of information. Because otherwise he wouldn't have paraded his ignorance publicly. [00:08:38] Let's say, because some people have said, well, that was tactical on his part. He was never serious about a deal. And so he basically lied to Trump about what the Iranians had said. [00:08:53] Why would you need to do that? If Trump was always going to go to war, then he can just go to war. He doesn't need his special envoy saying stupid things publicly that don't make any sense. And think about it. If you're the Iranians and you're offering to give up and down blend your enriched uranium and your highly enriched uranium, you're obviously going to [00:09:13] tell the other side precisely what you have. Of course, how can you offer to get rid of it if you don't tell them what you have? If they didn't tell them what they had, Witkoff would have been like they're being devious, sneaky Iranians and not sharing with us what [00:09:32] they have. So I do think that there's some genuine stupidity at play there, but I think also uh they were working obviously very closely with Netanyahu and Massad, as they say. There's no reason to think they were lying about that. And also making enormous amounts of money [00:09:51] on the timing of the different announcements that were coming. And we should never forget what kind of a deal the Iranians were offering, because you alluded to that at the very top there. At the end of February, they were basically offering to get rid of their entire nuclear [00:10:09] program, uh as well as make significant concessions on lots of other things that Trump wanted around proxies and other things. And all they wanted was some level of sanctions relief. And that [00:10:25] is a kind of thing that could be snapped back and taken away if you think that they're not abiding by the terms of the agreement. Nowhere in that notice is we're going to control and charge fees for the Strait of Hormuz. Like what was available to us on February before [00:10:43] we killed thousands of people and lost our own American service members and sent the world economy into a tailspin. is so much better than what is available to us now and which keeps getting worse probably every day. So this is a harsh question, but it really is worth [00:11:03] asking in terms of the technical definition of this word. um And I don't mean to imply any of the consequences that flow from it. But if Kushner and Witkoff are working with the Israelis and Trump actually told them go make a peace deal. and then they took orders from [00:11:23] the Israelis to kill the peace deal. Isn't that treason? So what's interesting is that this class of people, which I think is aptly referred to as the Epstein class or the other people is called the Davos class. These are people who do not actually feel any connection [00:11:46] to any particular nation state, any government. they don't feel a sense of like, oh, I am American or I am even Israeli or I'm Swiss or I'm French. these are people they belong to Davos. They belong to the Epstein class. They belong to this multinational um kind of just, you know, [00:12:08] 0.1 % um that just bounces around from London to New York to Miami um to Dubai to Tel Aviv. And so The idea of being disloyal to a country requires them to have any sense of fundamental [00:12:26] loyalty to a particular country. Now the fact that Wittkopf is literally the envoy for the White House, like it's his job to reach a deal, uh suggests that he's supposed to have some level of loyalty. Kushner's not even a, he's just a citizen. He's not even a government [00:12:44] official at this point. But I think ultimately Trump, they're doing what Trump wanted him to do. I think Trump- about these negotiations in February. He wanted to kill the Ayatollah and all the top Iranian leaders. And so I think in that sense, they were carrying out the orders [00:13:02] of the American president. So in that sense, it's not actually treasonous. It's unfortunately just doing what they were told to do by an idiot. Yeah, I want to be absolutely clear. If Trump- told him to ruin the peace negotiations, then it's definitely not treason. It's just-. [00:13:21] I think he did. I think he did. Like mid February Netanyahu tells him, makes his presentation in this situation room. And within days of that, Trump has approved the attack. And they're just kind of waiting for the opportunity. So those negotiations that happened between mid [00:13:38] February and end of February were totally fake. Yeah, last thing Ryan. So we talked about the possible Israeli connection and then there's the profiting, right? And today, coincidentally, Wall Street Journal breaks another story, Trump media to sell faster access to President's [00:13:53] social posts. So to your point about the Davos class, so you can now buy quicker access to Donald Trump's true social posts. If you're not sophisticated in the world of markets, you might think, who the hell cares if you get- Trump's dumbass posts a minute earlier than [00:14:13] anyone. But of course, the whole point of that is very literally corruption. There is no other point, because that means you could trade on the markets based on that insider information before the public gets it. So- When you combine these two stories, Woodcuff and Kushner [00:14:32] self-dealing potentially while doing the peace negotiations, and certainly Kushner's been self-dealing during both terms and getting gobs of money from the Gulf countries, etc. And now you've got Trump basically saying, if you're corrupt and want to do insider trading, here [00:14:49] ye, here ye, come here and pay me and I'll give you insider information. uh This is an impossible question, but once he's out of office, Is there any chance that these guys are gonna get prosecuted for the most brazen, over the top corruption I've ever seen in my life? They'll all be pardoned, [00:15:08] but there are still state laws on the books about corruption. So you could imagine, and maybe they get prosecuted in some other country as well, because they're committing crimes all over the world. But yeah, the charging to get Trump's truths early, is the most [00:15:29] kind of over the top and obvious admission that, yeah, he's intentionally moving markets. They've proven that you can make billions based on Trump's word, which if you really want to do the insider trading, you have to call him and um get it more directly. But [00:15:52] if you're just a regular Goldman's tax trader, then you pay the like whatever the gigantic, I don't know what they're gonna charge yet. It'll be funny to find out what it is. I'm sure, you know, they could charge in the thousands of dollars per month or more and the traders [00:16:10] would kind of have to do it. Oh yeah. It's moving billions of dollars around. Yeah, they can charge it almost anything they want. They can charge in the millions and people will still do it. Cause if you have that kind of insider information, you're gonna make tens of millions, hundreds of millions, maybe billions. you're going to lose. Yeah, or you're going [00:16:28] to lose. That's right. And so it almost forces all the markets to do insider trading. And I know you got to twist our arm. But this is corruption on steroids.