RFK Jr. Interviews BestEvidence About Justice Department Corruption by Global Banksters

Ummmm, the man doesn't pull his punches

RFK Jr. had me on his podcast recently to discuss a documentary, “All the Plenary’s Men,” that I made about how a network of global banksters got the U.S. Justice Department to refrain from prosecuting London bank HSBC for money laundering crimes in the closing days of Obama’s first term of office.

It’s a bit odd, I thought, his request for an interview, in that I released the video onto YouTube over five years ago.

So why now, Bobby? I’m wondering. I know that Catherine Austin Fitts, whom I assist every week in co-hosting and co-producing her own “Money & Markets” podcast for Solari Inc., had lobbied RFK Jr. to have me on specifically discuss that video, but I figured he’d take a pass. That he actually extended an invite to discuss the doc came as surprise. But then again, it’s clear that more and more people are waking up to who’s actually in charge of the increasingly brazen mafiacracy we live under.

So why not talk about “All the Plenary’s Men,” I thought? It’s a nifty piece of detective work, that video, and without a doubt it’s made the rounds over the last five years. Max Keiser saw it and invited and had me on the Keiser Report to talk about it, and people still ask me about it and as well about the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which plays a central role in the shameful HSBC/DOJ saga. Hell, to this day the video still plays regularly at odd hours on Cape Town, South Africa’s public access TV station—as recently as this week. I kid you not. Check out the orange highlighting…

In part the video’s staying power, however meager (it has a grand total of 115,000 views), is rooted, I'd like to imagine, in what it proves. Which is that the DOJ’s exoneration of HSBC—a foreign bank—represented the enforcement by the DOJ of “global rules” (a term explained at length in the doc) at the expense and in derogation of U.S. law, which the DOJ violated at every turn. The video explained how the outcome of the case reflected a coup d’etat in the U.S., and predicted—correctly—that the DOJ’s active participation in criminality would become a permanent feature of the U.S. political and legal landscape regardless of which party held the White House.

And here we are five years later, Obama’s vice president is now in the Oval Office, and the DOJ is spiraling ever more out of control, unconcerned to the point of pride about its open lawlessness. You wanna know how the DOJ got so out of control? Obama’s first term is a great place to start.

Below I summarize “All the Plenary’s Men” before talking about what stood out about the interview and about RFK Jr.

All the Plenary’s Men

In 2016 I started working on a zero-budget documentary (made almost entirely with computer-generated footage) about the events that led to the U.S. Department of Justice letting HSBC off the hook for helping drug dealers and terrorists launder billions of dollars. That shameful exoneration of the admittedly criminal bank took place in December 2012.

The DOJ will tell you it punished HSBC severely by levying a fine of $1.92 billion. Fortunately, after seemingly hundreds of cases of unpunished corporate crime, these days only the thickest of dupes can’t see through that hackneyed ruse—of alleged law enforcement agencies taking their cut of the lucre from corporate criminal behavior instead of punishing it or, God forbid, stopping it. It’s a great deal for everyone except the victims. For criminal corporations, it’s just a cost of doing business—to be easily recouped later with proceeds of more crime; for law enforcement agencies and agents, it’s a means of padding government budgets today, not to mention making valuable contacts for future employment in the private sector. Whenever you hear the term “public-private partnership,” this is the model to think of.

2016 was a crucial year for the HSBC story because up until then, no one really knew what happened beyond what Loretta Lynch, HSBC’s lead prosecutor (on her path to becoming Attorney General), had told a disbelieving press corps in Brooklyn one morning December of 2012: HSBC had admitted to a rash of crimes, but would walk away with a fine and without a single person being prosecuted.

But in July of 2016 Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, which had conducted an investigation of what exactly had gotten HSBC off the hook, released a report about what had gone on behind the scenes in the DOJ. Like most such reports, the appendix is where the action is, because that’s where the original documents and emails are, over 250 pages of them in this instance.

It’s very rare for congressional reports to zero in on the Department of Justice for decisions NOT to indict. In fact I’m not aware of any other report like the one from 2016. The report on HSBC strikes me as especially odd in the political tone of the report’s very title: “Inside the Obama Justice Department’s Decision Not to Hold Wall Street Accountable.”

Despite all that, there is great historical value in having a congressional investigation of any serious matter involving real crimes, because regardless of what might have motivated the investigation, the resulting report leaves a record, usually extensive, that is open to public inspection. Moreover, because congress has subpoena powers, the record almost invariably includes documents and sometimes transcripts (if there are interviews of witnesses to the events in question) that would otherwise never see the light of day. The HSBC report is no exception, and there are some real gems in the appendix.

What makes the HSBC case a good story is the sudden reversal in the DOJ’s stance towards actually prosecuting HSBC. For a long time, DOJ prosecutors working day-to-day on the case were actively planning to indict the bank, for real, as in put bankers in prison. At least such plans were being laid up through the summer of 2012, when the HSBC matter was really active. But by the end of the year, on her way to replacing Eric Holder for Obama’s second term, Loretta Lynch held that fateful press conference in Brooklyn, and all those grand and noble plans collapsed into dust.

The DOJ’s about-face between the summer and December of 2012 is trivially easy to pinpoint from the report’s documents: there are a bunch of internal DOJ emails about nailing HSBC, and then there’s this one letter that stands out like a sore thumb. It’s not from the DOJ, or from the U.S. at all, or even addressed to anyone in the DOJ. And then after that letter is sent? Well, all that internal DOJ chatter about prosecuting HSBC just stop.

The prosecution-killing letter in question (see page 43 of the report), dated September 10, 2012, was from the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (George Osborne) and is addressed to his U.S. counterpart (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner) as well as to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Ben Bernanke)—and it raised a rash of questions, starting with how Osborne was privy to what was going on in internal DOJ meetings to begin with.

As it turns out, Osborne and Geithner and Bernanke were all part of a global consortium of financial regulators who took it upon themselves to monitor developments in their respective countries that might have some impact on “financial stability.” How’s that for an amorphous remit?

Now, if the only thing that this global consortium—the Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland—had succeeded in doing was to persuade the DOJ, via Bernanke and Geithner, not to indict anyone at HSBC, then there’s at least a colorable argument to be made that nothing untoward took place.

But that’s not all that took place, not even close. The Devil, as ever, was in the details. And in the matter of the DOJ’s non-prosecution deal with HSBC, the DOJ ended up enforcing several immunities that came from the FSB’s host organization—Bank for International Settlements—and that are squarely contrary to U.S. law.

Those incriminating details are what “All the Plenary’s Men” explores in depth, as well as the very unpleasant implications of what went on inside the DOJ with respect to HSBC and other global banks.

RFK Jr.’s Interview of BestEvidence

To the depressingly huge Hoity-Toity blob of vastly over-educated Americans, who prostrate themselves before authority whenever instructed (which is every day), RFK Jr.’s resume must look a lot like that of Col. Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: for decades he’s this awesome soldier in a war (Kennedy’s war is for justice, particularly where the environment is concerned), and then WHAM!!!—he just goes insane one day and starts this unhinged jihad against vaccines. No explanation, no serious questions (e.g., is he right?) allowed, nope. RFK Jr. is heretic against America’s angry, never-to-be-questioned god (mega corporations), and that’s just that.

RFK Jr.’s stance with respect to vaccines is fine by me. It’s not only rational, it’s public-spirited as well, standing in stark contrast to admitted criminals like Pfizer pushing whatever is inside those steel-tipped vials for whatever reason. But vaccines really aren’t my beat. My thing is financial crime and, increasingly, what Alexander Del Mar dubbed monetary crimes.

So I wasn’t really sure what to expect from RFK Jr.’s interview except for this much: the man is a seasoned trial lawyer with some major notches in his belt, so I knew he’d come well-prepared with some really good questions that I didn’t anticipate even though I’ve been asked hundreds of questions on the subject he wanted to talk about. Experienced trial lawyers have a way of cutting to core issues quickly because that’s what they do for a living; a lot of judges simply don’t put up with much in the way of preliminaries.

And so it was. The one question that threw me off the most—despite its natural appeal to genuinely curious people—was what would’ve happened to Eric Holder if he’d told the global banksters to pound sand and that he was gonna override them and prosecute HSBC.

I’d thought about that, of course, but no one had ever asked me that during an interview. Since the bailouts of 2008 when I started waking up, I’ve viewed the offices of powerful people as the product of a quid pro quo: the office held is the product of a deal. With the HSBC case, it became crystal clear that the people cutting the deals are criminals; they run the show now, and have since at least as early as 2008. If you make the deal and take the office, and then turn around and break the deal while in that office—well, you’ve just crossed people who’ll commit whatever crimes they need to in order to square things up.

That’s the thing about criminals that a lot of white collar types don’t understand and that Hoity-Toities won’t even talk about: it’s ridiculous to believe (as many do, without articulating as much) that there’s some neat boundary around crimes. If a company is known for perpetrating, say, financial crimes, there’s no logical reason to believe its crimes are limited to finances and every reason to surmise that its crimes extend well outside the usual ledgers.

For Eric Holder to renege on a deal like that and make bankers in the service of a global bank like HSBC pay with their lives (in the form of prison sentences)—I’m sorry, it just doesn’t take a lot of imagination to foresee what would happen to him for a double-cross like that.

And that’s pretty much what I told RFK Jr. In my answer I get my pronouns twisted up so I’ve indicated correct phraseology with brackets. The following exchange occurs roughly at the 18:15 mark.

Q. What would’ve happened if Eric Holder had said to the Treasury Department—to Bernanke and Geithner, “I don’t care; these guys [HSBC] committed criminal acts in our country; they are facilitating terrorism, they are facilitating drugs in our country—dangerous drugs; we’re trying to put an end to that; we’re gonna criminally prosecute them; what is the sanction, what is the power that this international cartel has at that point—you know, what happens? What is the consequence if you don’t play ball?”

A. Presumably you’re gonna get ruined one way or the other. And you have to remember, if you’re dealing with powers that have criminal immunity, you know, all bets are off. Anything can happen to you. Because regardless of what the penalty is, they can just take you out: they can murder you. They can kill you. And you [sic: they] can’t be prosecuted because you’re [sic: they’re] above the law.

I mean, that’s the ugly truth of it. I hesitate to speculate about that, because that didn’t happen. And the fact is, these guys are smart and hedge their bets. Eric Holder being at the head of the DOJ, along with Lanny Breuer—that was no accident. Those guys came from a law firm in Washington, D.C., called Covington & Burling. Covington & Burling represents all of the too big to fail banks. All of them. And so, by putting white collar criminal defense guys at the head of the Justice Department—I mean, everybody knew in advance what the outcome of those cases was gonna be. There was gonna be no prosecution.

So that deal was done before Obama set foot in the White House in 2009.

RFK Jr.’s reaction to my answer stunned me. I’ve used phrases in connection with banksters in interviews before, like “they’ll kill you,” and almost every single time the “killed” or “murdered” will get muted if not edited out altogether, simply because the interviewer doesn’t want to run afoul of whatever platform, YouTube being a prime example, is hosting the interview. So I expected RFK Jr. to wince. But he didn’t wince. Not only that, he actually seemed to like my response even if I couldn’t read it exactly.

The interview was video-recorded remotely, and I was watching him the whole time. (I put a 45-degree semi-mirrored between my camera and a monitor so I can look straight at people when I do interviews via zoom and what not. It’s a technique I got from Caleb Pike that vastly improves the usual zoom experience.)

His reaction struck me as odd at the time, really odd, but it didn’t hit me until afterwards: RFK Jr.’s dad had once held the same position that Eric Holder did—as the U.S. Attorney General, and his dad had been assassinated when he was a young teenager. Granted, RFK was assassinated in 1968, four years after he’d been AG; by then when he was a U.S. senator. But still. The parallels were obvious.

As AG under his brother, RFK had made prosecution of the mob a major priority, and here I was talking to his son about how organized crime at the highest level possible wouldn’t hesitate to wax an AG. In fact, to underscore the criminality of global financiers in “All the Plenary’s Men,” I had used a particularly savage clip from De Palma’s Untouchables where Capone (played by De Niro, another vaccine opponent) beats a fellow mobster to death with a baseball bat to illustrate a point about the global financial mafia that we’re dealing with. Whoops.

But regardless of how my answer landed, good or bad, I figured there’s no way that that part of the interview makes the cut. But it did. Go listen to it for yourself.

Not that he needs it in the slightest, but RFK Jr. has my unqualified respect.

—John Titus