“The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers,” he says. “That’s not a derogatory term. It was because lawyers would uphold the rule of law and get in the way of any despots who were trying to overthrow the king.”

Henry VI. Dick the Butcher. A line from 1591 that reads, in April 2026, like a field intelligence report.

Zaid would know. He’s been on the list.

The Washington, D.C.-based national security attorney has spent three decades at the intersection of classified government and public accountability — representing intelligence community whistleblowers, Secret Service agents, Capitol Police officers, FBI analysts, and figures on every side of the post-9/11 security state. He co-founded Whistleblower Aid. He’s litigated against a sitting president. He’s walked into classified meetings about anomalous health incidents and walked out unable to say what he heard.

And for the past year-plus, he’s had his security clearance revoked — the stated reason, in his telling, being his representation of the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the first Trump impeachment.

I sat down with Zaid to pull together the threads: the Tulsi Gabbard rewrite of 2019 history, the pardoning of people who tried to kill police officers, the Kash Patel lawsuit against the press, military members consulting lawyers about potentially illegal orders regarding Iran, and a whistleblower complaint about anomalous health incidents that the Department of Defense inspector general closed without even asking a follow-up question.

It is a connected picture. Zaid connects the dots with the precision of someone who has lived inside each of them.

The press release Tulsi Gabbard issued in early 2026, purporting to declassify documents about the 2019 Ukraine whistleblower case, landed with a sharp noise in MAGA circles and nearly none elsewhere. I asked Zaid about it. He was blunt.

“The only reason that I have been given about why I lost my security clearance the first time last year was because of my representation of the intelligence community whistleblower back in 2019-2020. There were a lot of reasons why I crossed paths with Trump and his administration, numerous cases, but that was the one that was highlighted by folks as to why I was a threat.”

The Gabbard release, he argues, was structured retribution dressed as transparency.

“The release of this information is entirely to make anyone who was associated look bad and to try and refabricate the history of what we know happened the first time around.”

The historical record, Zaid points out, requires no declassification to read. The whistleblower complaint was released. The summary transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky was released. The substance of Gabbard’s so-called revelations was already public — and the documents she released weren’t classified in the first place.

“Those were inspector general protected documents, not classified. Remember, Trump declassified the whistleblower complaint. Trump declassified the summary transcript of his conversation with Zelensky. The interviews then would be collateral. They’d be derivative of the same information. So classification wasn’t the issue. It was protecting the integrity and the structure of the inspector general system.”

The inspector general system, Zaid notes with particular force, is supposed to be independent. The DNI does not control the intelligence community inspector general. The attorney general does not control the DOJ inspector general. The secretary of defense does not control the Pentagon’s inspector general.

“They are supposed to be independent individuals. And this shows they’re not, not at all.”

The most recent escalation: Gabbard has referred the whistleblower — who Zaid no longer represents — and former Inspector General Michael Atkinson for criminal prosecution. Whether Zaid and his co-counsel have themselves been referred, he says, remains unknown.

“Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

I told him I’d gone back through the Gabbard press release after writing about it myself. The items she highlighted as smoking guns appeared, on examination, in documents that had been publicly available for years. Nothing in the release was new. Nothing was secret. One of the MAGA talking points resurrected in the coverage — that the whistleblower lacked firsthand information — Zaid dispatched with barely controlled impatience.

“Nobody said the whistleblower had firsthand information. Wasn’t required. No whistleblower complaints require firsthand information. That’s a very basic function of whistleblowing. You have to have a reasonable good faith belief. And the whistleblower had been briefed as part of their official government responsibilities of the phone call.”

He walked through the mechanics of how this works — that when the president speaks with a foreign head of state, the relevant agencies are briefed afterward. Agriculture gets told about banana tariffs. Defense gets told about security agreements. It’s the process. That’s how the whistleblower learned what they learned. It wasn’t a leak. It was a briefing.

“That happens every time a president of the United States has a conversation with a foreign diplomat.”

The other claim being recycled — that Zaid conspired with then-House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff to write the complaint — he dispenses with a single fact.

“I didn’t even come into the case for five weeks. After the complaint had been filed.”

His co-counsel hadn’t seen the complaint until it was publicly released. The conspiracy theory requires him to have retroactively written a document that already existed. The math does not work. The MAGA media does not care.

And that, Zaid says, is the larger signal — the mainstream press, for the most part, gave the Gabbard release almost no scrutiny.

“Nobody in mainstream media has really focused on this. It has only been right-wing MAGA who are pushing the narrative.”

He pauses. Then adds: “Nobody contacted me from the media on either side.”

I asked Zaid to talk about January 6th. He has standing to. Within days of the attack, he began representing one of the senior intelligence officers at the Capitol Police Department. He then took on Harry Dunn — the first Capitol Police officer to speak publicly about what happened that day. He represents Sergeant Aquilino Ganel, who suffered injuries severe enough to require medical retirement. He represents the estate of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the aftermath.

“I watched what happened on January 6th live, as so many people did.”

He built the legal framework to let Dunn and Ganel speak to the media and to Congress without fear of retribution. He made sure everything they wrote was reviewed and cleared. “No one was going around or circumventing rules and regulations.”

Then Trump came back.

“President Trump, of course, ran on that he was going to pardon everybody. I think most people, including the Republicans, thought, well, he’s only going to talk about the people who were just trespassing, who just got caught up in the moment.”

If it had been limited to those cases, Zaid says, the response — even from people like him — might have been muted.

“If that had been the pardons, I think most people would have just gone, eh, okay, because they served their time. It’s not like you can take back that they were in jail.”

But it wasn’t limited.

“He pardoned everybody other than the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, including the people who literally tried to kill police officers.”

He stops himself, notes the additional fact almost as an aside: “They had a gallows to hang Mike Pence. And I wouldn’t have doubted had they found him or Nancy Pelosi that there would have been political legislative bloodshed.”

As for the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — who received commutations rather than pardons, meaning their convictions technically stand — the Justice Department has since moved to send those cases back to district court, which would erase the convictions entirely.

“Why in the world would that be done? You know, it’s dumbfounding.”

Zaid’s voice shifts here into something close to controlled disgust — the register of a man who has spent his career understanding that institutions hold because people inside them believe they must hold, and who is now watching the belief collapse.

“I don’t think there is a way to understand anyone who is a conservative Republican who in my lifetime was the party that supported the blue, that backed the blue, supported law enforcement — to think that these individuals who conspired to overthrow the U.S. government, who are part of militias who don’t even acknowledge the existence of actual government, and advocated for the harming of police officers — and yet this administration is just willing to...”

He trails off.

“I lose words every time I try and discuss this because I’m so disgusted by it.”

The Oath Keepers leadership, he notes, included people who weren’t even physically at the Capitol on January 6th — but who had organized the participants, secured weaponry, and staged an armed quick-reaction force at a Comfort Inn across the Virginia state line.

“They had at a separate site in Virginia literal actual guns and other weapons ready to go. They wanted to obey the gun laws. Because in Virginia, you can have weapons a lot easier. But in D.C., it’s very strict. But it’s well in the evidence that they did all of these things. No debate.”

He’s right about that last part. I’ve been through the evidence myself. Every frame of the documentary record sat on my desktop for months. There is no debate about what they planned.

As for some of the people who received pardons: “A lot of guys that did that, they went out and committed even more crimes after they got released and pardoned.” One attempted to argue that his pardon covered weapons charges related to threatening to kill FBI agents. He reportedly failed on that argument — but the fact that he tried tells you something about the ecosystem these pardons have created.

Kash Patel, now director of the FBI, sued The Atlantic and the reporter behind a story detailing concerns — sourced to between nine and two dozen individuals, depending on the allegation — that his drinking has interfered with his performance in office.

Zaid is not a neutral observer here. He represents a cohort of fired and targeted FBI analysts and agents, including, in one lawsuit, the former acting director of the Bureau who preceded Patel, the former special agent in charge of the Washington field office, and the former special agent in charge of Las Vegas.

“In that, there is an allegation we put that Patel had told one of them that the FBI official should file a defamation lawsuit against anyone, because that will, you know, muck up the works.”

It’s a tell. The lawsuit against The Atlantic is, in Zaid’s reading, not a serious legal proceeding. It is an instrument.

“It is nothing less than an intimidation tool. It stresses out people. It’s not fun. It costs a lot of money. It’s a resource consumption and it’s a bandwidth consumption.”

He noted an immediate effect: The Atlantic reporter was scheduled to appear on Dan Abrams’ Sirius XM show the day after the story ran. She had to cancel because of the lawsuit. That’s a chilling effect, even before a single motion is filed.

“Even though the Atlantic is standing steadfast behind her, this case will be litigated.” He noted that The Atlantic keeps re-promoting the same story, same article, multiple times since the suit was filed. “You wouldn’t see that if you didn’t believe in your sourcing.”

Patel’s odds in the litigation are, in Zaid’s assessment, essentially nonexistent.

“He’s a public figure. He’s a public official. He’s got to prove malice. There’s no way he’s going to be able to do that. The standard is just too high. There’s a reason why individuals at his stature by way of title do not bring these types of cases.”

And truth is the best defense. Zaid was characteristically direct about that.

Patel’s lawsuit uses the same law firm that handles a broader ecosystem of MAGA-sphere defamation suits — Rick Grinnell, Michael Flynn, cases formerly brought by Devin Nunes. Zaid has faced them repeatedly.

“They had organized people to go. — wait, no, that’s another quote.” He refocused. “The vast majority of cases that that firm has brought for in the MAGAsphere, they have either abandoned, lost. Every once in a while there might be a settlement, usually because there’s an insurance company that might be involved and they’re just rolling numbers and doing statistics — has nothing to do with the merits.”

The pattern: file, intimidate, drain resources, withdraw. In the Rick Grinnell case against Olivia Troy, they were on the eve of trial when the firm dismissed. A year later, they refiled. Zaid’s side defeated the case twice.

“We were on the eve of trial, and they dismissed the case. They just walk away.”

Could you imagine, I asked, James Comey suing Fox News during a previous administration?

“They would have laughed.”

That is the measure of how far the norm has moved. Senior government officials do not sue the press. They accept scrutiny as the price of public power. This administration has inverted that. The press is the target. The lawsuit is the message.

The courts, Zaid says, have been the one functioning check.

“The one shining light that exists so far is that the judiciary has continued to uphold the rule of law. That doesn’t mean every decision has gone every way that we want, because clearly they haven’t. And that’s fine. There is still a system in place.”

Roughly 70 percent of challenges to administration actions, he estimates, have been ruled against the administration — including by Trump-appointed judges. Including, occasionally, by the Supreme Court’s Trump-aligned majority.

“We’ve seen it even on the Supreme Court, which is why he lashes out at the justices who rule against him, who include his own.”

The legislative branch he dismisses in two words.

“They checked out. They’re useless right now.”

He draws a comparison that frames just how different this administration is from any in his professional memory — and he was a young lawyer during Watergate.

“Even if you look back to the Nixon administration — there were career politicians who, while one could certainly question their moral integrity on certain issues, and that they wouldn’t necessarily follow the law if it didn’t suit them — they followed norms. And that’s the difference, in my view, between this administration and past ones. This administration throws every norm out the window. There is nothing that they think they cannot do. There is nothing that they do not think they are entitled to.”

Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford pardoned him not to help his friend, Zaid argues, but because he believed it was better for the country. The instinct that held even through Watergate — the sense that there is a country beyond the immediate political contest — is what he sees as absent now.

“Whereas Nixon, the mere fact that he resigned was demonstrative of he knew what was not only better for him but better for the United States.”

I mentioned the Bush and Cheney era — how what was done to journalists and lawyers then, including to people like Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, felt like a serious violation of norms at the time. Zaid didn’t dispute it. He calibrated it.

“This is such an order of magnitude different that it’s a shit show on a shit show on top of a gaslight.”

I raised Iran. The nonstop drumbeat of potential military action. Whether any of it was showing up in the cases reaching Zaid’s desk.

“Yes, absolutely.”

He said his firm has been contacted by military members with concerns about illegal orders. Specifically, concerns about operations related to Iran that could lead to boots on the ground, or — he said this with care — “concerns of use of potentially nuclear weapons.”

Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid, which provides free legal representation to national security whistleblowers. He’s a fellow at the National Institute of Military Justice, which runs what’s called the Orders Project — legal guidance for service members trying to understand how to properly respond to an order they believe is unlawful.

Earlier in this administration’s term, he said, the inquiries were heavier around Greenland — military members saying they would resign and speak out if the U.S. moved against a NATO ally. That pressure dissipated as the administration moved on.

“Something distracted Trump and he’s moved on to, you know, the next item, which at the moment is Iran.”

He noted the Venezuela episode — the reported removal of Maduro, the apparent intent to run the country — as another example of an initiative that generated enormous noise and then simply vanished from the news cycle. No accounting. No follow-up. The attention span of the crisis doesn’t match the gravity of the action.

The anomalous health incidents — still widely called Havana Syndrome, though the term is insufficient, since cases have been reported far beyond Cuba — have been Zaid’s most operationally active classified legal work. He attends classified meetings on the topic regularly. He does not say what is discussed.

What he will say is this: his firm represents a whistleblower at the Department of Defense who filed a detailed ten-page complaint about waste, fraud, abuse, and national security threats related to AHI. The complaint went to the Department of Defense inspector general’s office last month. Last week, they received an email informing them the case had been closed.

“No action, no warning, no interview. They didn’t even ask for additional information. They just shut the case completely down.”

The bureaucratic burial of a whistleblower complaint — without a meeting, without a request for more information, without any apparent inquiry at all — is exactly the behavior Zaid identified at the top of our conversation as the consequence of an inspector general system that has ceased to function as independent.

On the underlying substance of what these incidents are and where they come from, Zaid was as direct as he could be.

“I think we are moving closer and closer towards identifying who the culprit is. The unit you mentioned, it’s Russia.”

He used the iceberg image deliberately. The classified picture, he said, is vastly larger than what is publicly known. The real damage runs beneath the surface. “That’s what sank the Titanic. It hit the iceberg beneath the waterline.”

The classification layer protecting that information sits primarily within the CIA. Zaid said he believes it is the CIA that has been “keeping the cover-up going.”

His security clearance — the one revoked as apparent retribution for his 2019 whistleblower work — he uses most heavily on AHI cases. The revocation, which he has since recovered pending an appeal with arguments scheduled next month, was targeted precisely at the cases where his access matters most.

“The case that I use my security clearance the most is about AHIs. I go through, I participate in classified meetings all the time about AHIs.”

He stopped just short of saying what those meetings contain. But the implication was explicit: “I will tell you that were that information to be known, people would have different opinions about the topic.”

Near the end of our conversation, Zaid said something about the press that felt worth holding onto — not because it was sentimental, but because it was precise.

He contrasted outlets that have capitulated — CBS, ABC, law firms that settled rather than fight — with outlets that have held.

“Unlike CBS, unlike ABC, unlike the law firms who settled and capitulated, because all of those decisions are, frankly, not substantive. They’re not concerned about the facts. They were concerned about money. They were concerned about mergers. They were concerned about FCC issues.”

The Atlantic, he said, has become one of the leading outlets holding this administration’s feet to the fire. He added, with some surprise in his voice, the Wall Street Journal.

“Which is fantastic to see, because it’s not about being part of it.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center is now facing a DOJ investigation over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups — the same basic investigative methodology that law enforcement has used for decades. I asked Zaid what he made of the juxtaposition: an organization that once partnered with the FBI to track domestic extremists now being criminally investigated by an administration that has freed those extremists.

“If I were O’Keefe and Project Veritas, I would be really concerned because I’m not sure they can make a distinction other than partisan favor. And that’s not a lawful distinction.”

He sat with that for a moment. The law, applied selectively. The distinction not legal but political.

That’s the condition Zaid operates in. Not the collapse of the system — at least not yet. The judiciary still functions. Cases are still being won. The rule of law has not been extinguished. But the inspector generals are compromised. The legislature has abdicated. The executive branch is pursuing its critics through litigation, through clearance revocation, through criminal referrals of whistleblowers and their lawyers.

“There is nothing that they think they cannot do. There is nothing that they do not think they are entitled to.”

We’ll be covering more between now and whenever this ends. Zaid said as much at the close.

What he didn’t say — what he didn’t need to say — is whether it ends.

He got out. He corrected, as he puts it, a flawed version of the facts of that struggle, piece by piece, across years. Now he lives in Lincoln County, Montana — once the heart of Oath Keepers country — and is running for state legislature on a platform of housing affordability, civil rights, and the abolition of ICE. He is the kind of witness history rarely produces: the insider who survived intact, with his moral reasoning sharpened rather than destroyed by proximity to the thing he is now opposing.

We spoke for nearly two hours on The Wire Tap. What follows is a comprehensive account of that conversation — Dakota’s own words, at length, on the man who raised him, the organization he built and degraded, the DOJ that convicted him and is now trying to erase that conviction, and the fight ahead in Montana and nationally. Dakota did not ask me to soften anything. I did not try.

The Philosophical Zombie

Before we could talk about Oath Keepers as an organization, we had to talk about the man at its center. Not as a public figure — Stuart Rhodes has been analyzed to death in a thousand news cycles — but as a household presence. As a father. As a performance.

Dakota had been thinking about this for a long time. He came to the conversation with a framework that is precise and unsentimental.

Stuart has had very few original thoughts, I think, in his entire life. But what he is amazing at is copying. This was true even of his art career, where he was fantastic at copying — intricate photorealistic sculptures and art styles from references in art books — but he never had his own independently derived art style in painting or in sculpture. He could only replicate, and he could replicate very, very well and seamlessly. And he did the exact same thing with his persona. He was always always on, even in the home, even when it was just us and there was no other audience to perform for. He was portraying a character with traits that he had picked up from somewhere else.

The implication of this, as Dakota traces it, is that the patriotism and the honor and the integrity that the child received were not real. They were copied behaviors, performed consistently enough to be transmitted — but not believed by the performer.

What was transmitted to me was the perfect mimicry of patriotism, integrity, honor. And once I understood that Stuart was always portraying a character and never believed in it, it was easier to reconcile the contradictions of my childhood, and made it not very surprising to see what became of Stuart when — like with so much of the rest of the country — Trump allowed him to let that facade fall. And he was really, all along, on the inside... the great permission.

He describes growing up in a household with what he calls “almost a philosophical zombie” — a concept from academic philosophy describing an entity that mimics human behavior so completely that the difference from genuine consciousness is undetectable. Stuart Rhodes could perform patriotism, perform honor, perform fatherhood. But the performance was never grounded in conviction.

He was so able to mimic human behavior that you generally can’t tell the difference.

This framework — the copy without original, the performance without belief — would come to define not just Dakota’s understanding of his father but his analysis of Oath Keepers as an institution, and ultimately of Trumpism itself. The authoritarian follower dynamic, the grievance fundraising model, the cult mechanics — Dakota reads them all through the same lens, because he watched the template get built in real time, in his own house.

Inside the Household

Stuart Rhodes grew up poor, working-class, in New Mexico and Nevada. His family were originally migrant farmworkers. His mother married and divorced, by Dakota’s count, upwards of ten times. There was no stable father figure. There was a great deal of generational trauma.

Stuart grew up in this semi-criminal, deeply, deeply traumatized and highly dysfunctional family environment with no stability whatsoever. And as much as I hold sympathy for the child that Stuart was, he would go on to use this traumatic childhood as an excuse for all of his worst behaviors throughout his entire life without ever, ever trying to be better, and would use his traumatic childhood as a cudgel to beat people down — like in particular me — if we had any arguments or conflict and guilt trip... like, “how could you trigger me like that by arguing with me, or by squaring up when I challenged you to a fight in the driveway, or like by getting mad when I slapped you.”

The physical abuse, Dakota says, was calibrated. Stuart knew that going over a certain line would endanger his control over Dakota’s mother, so he stayed just below it.

The majority of Stuart’s abuse in itself was psychological, because he knew that going over the line into regular physical abuse would endanger his control over my mother. So we were not physically abused to the extent that Stuart very likely was. There was just a lot of beatings with hairbrushes and belts in that family. But it was the guilt tripping over making Stewart angry enough to explode at us that would last for weeks. And that was the majority of the impact — just having to hear about Stewart’s traumatic, neglectful childhood and how he didn’t have a father, all the time, anytime Stewart did something wrong, until I became the bad guy, or whichever sibling was being targeted became the bad guy.

The book that helped Dakota understand this most clearly was Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That — the standard reference work on the psychology of domestic abusers. It gave him language for something he had watched without being able to name.

It is in that book, Why Does He Do That, that taking refuge in childhood abuse is a very common excuse for domestic abusers, because it sounds right. And it can, in many cases, hold weight — allow professionals and allow them to go through couples counseling and court-mandated counseling programs — without taking full ownership of what they have done, because they can displace that responsibility. And it really helped me put into context that Stewart absolutely did not have to be the man that he was. He just reaped many benefits in his personal life from being this person. Didn’t want to change because he thought he was great the way that he was.

But the book gave Dakota something else too. One of his greatest fears, growing up, was that he might carry the pattern forward — that whatever made Stuart Stuart was heritable, inevitable.

One of the books that was most useful to me was Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That — where it was invaluable for me in understanding that there was nothing inside me that would make me inherently like Stuart, which was one of my greatest fears as a teenager and a young man. Which is that these domestic abusers have the same basic psychology as a right-wing authoritarian. They have the same basic psychological underpinnings as somebody who joins a secret police force, or a sexual predator on the street. In fact, they’re very often the same people. The Venn diagram is an enormous overlap of white van molester and kidnapper, and secret policemen.

The link Dakota draws between domestic abuse psychology and authoritarian politics is not rhetorical. He means it analytically. The abusive family is a small cult. The mechanisms of control — fear, guilt, loyalty enforcement, the displacement of blame — are the same mechanisms that run militia movements, that run Trumpism.

An abusive relationship is a very small cult. The abusive family dynamic is a very small cult. And we are now seeing domestic abuser dynamics carried out on a nationwide level. Which is why people who grew up in these environments — that’s why we’ve been able to navigate Trump world while other people who are allegedly experts are falling behind.

The Origin of Oath Keepers: Bundy Ranch and the Peak of Human Capital

Oath Keepers was founded in 2009, during the first wave of Obama-era anti-government paranoia, the blogtalk-radio-and-Ron-Paul moment when the militia right was reconstructing itself for a new media environment. Stuart was well-suited to that moment. Dakota’s mother ran the back-end operations — the memberships, the logistics, the communications — while Stuart performed the brand.

The organizational peak, Dakota says, came at Bundy Ranch in 2014.

Oath Keepers rolled up to Bundy Ranch with very serious men. Oath Keepers rolled up with army infantry veterans, Marine Force Recon, with a logistics tail, with a medical trailer, communications trailer — pulling on all of these connections, especially from Montana and Idaho, to turn up with... they were the only people who showed up with organizational capacity. They showed up with logistics, backing, infrastructure. Everybody else was just a pickup football game of guys getting into their car, walking away from their jobs at the Walmart to go camp out at Bundyville. And only Oath Keepers showed up as a professional, organized force, to my knowledge.

That moment also marked the beginning of the organizational decline. Bundy Ranch worked as a fundraising event, and Stuart saw it. He pivoted Oath Keepers toward a traveling-preacher model — showing up at standoffs, generating urgency, keeping the donations flowing.

Bundy Ranch kicked off this kind of traveling preacher era of the history of Oath Keepers, where Stewart figured out that all of these organizational foundational necessities that had been neglected — because everything was being routed through him — he could compensate for by doing a kind of traveling show. Standoffs with federal agencies to keep the donations coming in, keep numbers up. And that kept the numbers stable even as many old-guard members — what I call the digital vanguard, the guy who’s out here like, “I’m at the barricade of freedom for you, Bobby” — were bleeding out.

The quality of personnel followed the trajectory of the mission. As serious men with actual skill sets grew disillusioned and left, they were replaced by a lower grade of true believer.

Stuart was losing these career-level men in exchange for lower-level true believers. He was increasingly surrounding himself just with... and yes, sounds just like the Trump administration... fascism always ends up purging all first-rate talents from government and replacing them with flunkies. Stuart eventually accomplished degrading the quality of the men around him, because he was creating an environment where only docile, very zealous, gullible people would be in it with him. And people who did not like the direction of the organization and saw no way to meaningfully change it left. And by the time of the insurrection, even the very hardcore from Bundy Ranch — all those competent militants who were willing to go to the arms standoff against federal agents — had bled from the organization, and he was down to dregs.

Stuart’s personal management style accelerated the rot. He has never, Dakota says, maintained a stable peer group. He runs on hierarchy, not friendship. He needs a favorite — someone who can do no wrong, who will inevitably fall from favor — and he uses that dynamic to keep everyone off-balance.

Stuart has never been able to keep a consistent peer group of men in his own age or social status. He’s never been able to maintain a group of guy friends, ever. He thrives in very hierarchical environments where he can have a pedestal boy that always dramatically falls from favor — who can do no wrong — kind of like the king’s favorite in early modern Europe. Whether they were complete crackpots or not — like stolen valor [individual] — everybody tried to warn him about that guy for months before he would stop bringing him to things. They got matching tattoos and all of it.

The financial structure of Oath Keepers reflected this same logic. Opacity was by design.

Stewart created a burdensome, inefficient, complicated organizational structure — in my opinion, to facilitate graft. And it very much got in the way of the mission. But it was opaque and blurred lines, very much the same way that Trump’s campaign and the Trump organization had no true distinction between them. With Stewart, Stewart the person and Oath Keepers were always enmeshed and overlapping, deliberately, so you could not have Oath Keepers without Stewart in any way.

The financial records that survived tell part of the story. The Oath Keepers EPIC server — which Dakota has archived on his desktop — documents the pattern.

In the surviving financial records for Oath Keepers, there was a lot of cash withdrawals at the times of all these major standoffs, that were never fully accounted for. A lot of gear purchases that ended up in weird caches or in people’s houses, intermixed with Stewart’s personal belongings. The Oath Keepers’ financials were kept deliberately opaque and incredibly complicated.

The Eye, the Army, and the Character

A viewer question surfaced the question of Stuart’s military background. Dakota answered it carefully and with evident precision.

Stuart was enlisted in the 82nd Airborne, and he spent a lot of time in the hospital. While he was in the army — I, from his personality later on in life, suspect a lot of malingering, just from what I saw as a child in the household and how he conducted himself later in life. I can’t prove that, but it’s a suspicious amount of hospitalization that very much fits the pattern he would establish later: of malingering on injuries and milking injuries and personal life tragedy for sympathy to cover for professional failings.

The signature physical feature — the missing eye — has its own story, and it is not the story most media outlets have run with.

He fell from a tree during a night jump training exercise, a parachute drop, got entangled in a tree, dropped 80 feet, broke his back, had to have his back reconstructed with metal rods. And he did blind himself. That was much later while he was in Las Vegas. He claims to have dropped a pistol that he was giving to a friend who was being threatened by gang members. My mom’s personal theory is that he was very likely trying to run security for this friend who was also a known crack dealer and pimp in the time that they were buddies, and was trying to run security for him on some kind of shady business, and got shot — with an unregistered firearm — either with his own gun or somebody else’s.

The glass eye that replaced the socket eventually got infected and was rejected. Now there is just the socket. Dakota describes, without particular affect, having seen his father without the prosthetic many times.

I have seen Stuart with his prosthetic eye removed. There has been, for my entire childhood, very much an empty eye socket that was for a long time held in shape by a prosthetic eye — a glass eye that was eventually rejected when it got infected. And so now he’s just rocking with the collapsed, with the collapsed empty socket. Smells like, last I interacted with him, smells abhorrent at close range. I don’t imagine it’s gotten any better.

Stuart’s relationship with his own military record tracked his relationship with everything else: he inflated it, performed it, and used it to order around men who actually outranked him.

Stewart definitely conducted himself as a field general and got off on the authority of ordering around men in his own age group who would have outranked him in the real military. And the way that Trump — he says it with tears in his eyes and you know that he’s lying — Stewart, telling people that people kept calling him General Rhodes and you wish they would stop. I never heard anybody say that. I heard Stewart complain about all the people calling him General Rhodes. I never heard it firsthand, ever. So he was just trying to get that going. He was just trying to workshop it and see if we could make “General Rhodes” catch on.

Trump, the Great Permission, and the Collapse

Before Trump, Oath Keepers existed in a specific political ecology — Obama as existential threat, the black Muslim Communist antichrist — that suited Stuart’s operational model perfectly.

Stuart had this brief heyday where he was able to operate at 100% efficiency as a grifter under the administration of a president that a bunch of people thought was going to be the antichrist — the black Muslim Communist antichrist. And being able to call upon his past criticism of the Bush surveillance state and the overreaches of the Bush administration as a fig leaf against being called racist. He was able to exist in the best of both worlds, and borrow a kind of cloak of concealment from back in the day when the Ron Paul Republican wing and the Tea Party had significant overlap on opposing foreign wars with like occupied Democrats.

Trump changed the ecology. An anti-government militia whose enemy suddenly controlled the government had nowhere to stand.

Part of what changed when Trump took office is that they were no longer dictating that environment. They were no longer creating the instability to their advantage. And they were having to play in the same landscape of instability as everybody else.

The organizational collapse, Dakota argues, had multiple causes that converged. Stuart’s mother had modeled a specific form of personal-brand reinvention — moving through circles, reinventing identity whenever necessary — and Stuart had built his entire career on that mobility. When he tried to plant roots in Montana, he lost the escape hatch.

Because he was stuck in the same area for upwards of five years, which it turns out he was not capable of sustaining... And then the third factor was very much something that we’re seeing play out now in Trump too: a combination of the fear of what will happen if a vengeful Democrat administration retakes control of the United States government. Coupled with Trump and Trumpism taking oxygen out of the room for anti-government right-wing militants. Obama and Hillary Clinton were a heck of a lot better for fundraising than Trump was.

By 2020, without Dakota’s mother running the back end — she had finally escaped — and without the Obama-era fundraising environment, and without the ability to relocate and reinvent, Stuart had degraded his own organization to the point where the January 6 operation was mounted with, in Dakota’s assessment, the dregs of what had once been a coherent paramilitary force.

By the time of the insurrection, even the very hardcore from Bundy Ranch — all those competent militants who were willing to go to the arms standoff against federal agents — had bled from the organization, and he was down to dregs. That’s why he had just a bunch of weirdos, mostly from an Oath Keepers affiliate militia in Ohio, instead of a team of like former special operators.

January 6 itself, in Dakota’s reading, was not a triumph for Oath Keepers. It was the moment the operation spent them.

Oath Keepers got tasked with the dirty work and failed to accomplish their objectives on the day of January 6th — of going for the Speaker of the House, and the ballot boxes, as I see it. And they were expended and were burnt. And Stuart has just not been useful. The Proud Boys were Trump’s favorite. They’re the ones who got the shout out. Oath Keepers got the dirty work.

The DOJ Reversal and What It Means

The conversation turned to what brought Dakota onto the program in the first place: the Department of Justice’s current effort to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions that put Stuart Rhodes away for 18 years. The sentence was commuted by Trump early in the second term. A pardon was not issued. Stuart has been on supervised release, showing up at the Capitol repeatedly to beg for the pardon that hasn’t come.

Dakota watches this with a particular kind of cold attention.

You should know that the brown shirts get knifed. I really don’t know what else to say. Stewart’s — again, this is why I think that Stuart doesn’t actually learn anything instead of just copying and replaying stuff. If he were capable of fully internalizing lessons of history, he would know that he was going to get long-knifed at some point, or at the very least hung out to dry.

The vacating of the convictions is something distinct from a pardon, and Dakota is precise about why that distinction matters.

Although it doesn’t erase that they were convicted, what it does is essentially just remove all consequence of those actions in the end. And the judge that has it back, from my understanding, can decide no, and then send it to the appeals court for reprocessing — which is possible from what I understand from Glenn Kirshner’s last reports. That’s a prerogative that the judge can do, but also might not do — considering essentially, if the executive branch comes up and says, well, we’re not interested in holding on to it anymore, there is also a court precedent that shows that the court has gone along with such requests, just not in this context that I know of.

The financial dimension compounds the legal question. The DOJ move would not merely vacate consequences — it would potentially trigger cash settlements. This is where Dakota’s personal stake in the matter becomes concrete.

If Stewart gets a significant cash payout — like with something on the order of the settlement that was awarded to General Flynn — then overnight millionaire Stewart, running around with a gun legally for the first time since his conviction, is a problem for me. Where up until now, Stewart did not receive his pardon. He got his sentence commuted. So up this whole time, he’s been on supervised release.

Stuart has already attempted to use the current political environment for cash extraction. He filed a lawsuit against Dakota’s mother and USA Today — representing himself, attempting to force a quick settlement in the same wave of capitulations that had swept through universities and media organizations.

He thought he could get in on that train, and they refused. And he was, I believe, too broke to afford a process server. So right off the bat, getting back his $500 in restitution plus processing fees means that he might be able to pay a process server to finally serve this pending lawsuit that’s been hanging in purgatory in the Texas court system for about a year now. And a cash settlement from the Department of Justice opens the door to an entire world of vexatious lawsuits and harassment that he’ll be able to levy against us.

The systemic failure is not just about Stuart. It is about the architecture of accountability that was supposed to hold.

There are a lot of people who did not game plan what does it look like when the highest levels of power are fully taken over by a fractious criminal enterprise. Only because evil people tend to be stupid have we made it this far. And that’s where we’re kind of leading out into the present day.

The witness protection question came up — the DOJ had raised it before the loyalty purge. Dakota’s assessment of its value in the current environment is characteristically direct.

I told my mom that if anybody offered witness protection, it probably wouldn’t be worth it, because — well, for one thing, that’s a little bit extreme, but like, that’s my own threshold for danger being blown way out the window where other people in this situation would probably be freaking out. But also, who’s to say that people on witness protection are safe if, like, who is going to stop the Attorney General of the United States — or acting Attorney General now — and the director of the FBI, if they show up at a secure storage site with a pry bar and start breaking into document storage on witness protection? Is anybody going to arrest them? Probably not. So there’s a bunch of safeguards in the system that really unwisely do not account for having a completely criminal administration in charge of the White House and with criminal appointees in federal law enforcement and the justice system.

The Paramilitaries Trump Chose Not to Use

One of the sharper analytical threads in the conversation was Dakota’s argument that Trump made a strategic error by going the uniformed secret police route — ICE operations, Homeland Security, the masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles — rather than continuing to outsource violence to deniable paramilitary assets like Oath Keepers.

The Trump administration has decided to go the prestige route and do a uniformed, masked secret police officially under Homeland Security, instead of outsourcing their violence against immigrants and dissidents to deniable gray area paramilitaries like the Oath Keepers, which would have been — I think would have been the better strategy and would have provoked less backlash upon the administration itself, because ultimately you can... they’re deniable assets. You can hang them out to dry and expend them without damaging yourself. That’s why autocrats love them.

The practical result of choosing the official route over the paramilitary route has been to create ideological fissures within the very constituency Trump needs.

This grotesque overreach by ICE has resulted in cracks with right-wing dissonance — can’t show up at a rally with guns. I can’t show up at a rally with guns. Which means that all the Three Percenter protests I went to as a teenager — especially the one where we went up on the courthouse steps somewhere, I can’t remember where, with Mike Vanderboegh, in body armor, with our full plate carriers and our slung ARs, with range flags in, but that was more to underscore the threat than anything else, on radios on our squad frequencies, waving at cops looking down at us from the courthouse roof and roofs of adjoining buildings — by the logic of these Trump defenders now, we should have all been gunned down on the steps of that courthouse.

He draws the logical extension clearly.

You can’t say that the ICE killings in Minneapolis were justified without it being the same as saying that the Obama administration should have hit Bundy Ranch with a drone strike. Because to believe one is to believe the other. Which very few people — except, again, Ammon Bundy — seem to have realized even a little bit.

The Cult Language and the Way Out

Finding the language to describe what he had been living in was, Dakota says, not straightforward. He found it eventually in an unlikely place: the memoirs of people who had left high-control religions.

It was very useful to find the language to describe what I’d been dealing with. And I found a lot of the most useful language in the memoirs of people who had left high-control religions, had left cults and other extremist political movements. Because the U.S. Patriot militia movement has so much overlap and in common with the religious evangelical movement — that is also the foundation of Trumpism alongside the more secular militant conspiracy theory aspect of it — there is a commonality where you are just directly trained to not examine the contradictions and the hypocrisy. There are not very many people like — again, survivors of cults around the world would be able to identify with it. But in contemporary America, it has mostly been former evangelicals who have offered the language that was the most useful to me, in untangling my own past, despite the fact that my upbringing was largely secular and non-religious, and theirs was extraordinarily religious. But the authoritarian right-wing culture underlying it was very much the same, and the mechanisms were the same.

The breaking point, when it came, was a foreign policy question — of all things.

My personal experience breaking point was a very odd, very niche interest for me, which was being a foreign policy wonk on the internet. And I, in particular, had been following the fight of the Syrian Kurds for autonomy and independence very closely. And our complete betrayal and abandonment of the Syrian Democratic Forces to Turkey, and then to the advantage of Russia, it made no sense to me. It was the most boneheaded foreign policy decision in the history of the United States up until that point. We have well surpassed that by now, but that point will be different for everybody.

The mechanism of that collapse — one support beam pulled loose, the structure beginning to buckle — is something he generalizes outward, as a model for how people leave these movements.

From that one single support being weakened and undermined, the weight of my personal moral convictions, crushing down on the belief system that had been standing up to them, became unbearable. It began to buckle. The structure of falsehoods could no longer sustain itself once that one flaw began.

He cites Steven Hassan’s formulation — once you know Dear Leader can lie, what else did he lie about — as a parallel. The entry point varies. The mechanism is the same.

Where right now for a lot of people, if it was not the Epstein files — because it was possible to just not think about it, or to ignore it — it was this war in Iran, which has been getting to a lot of diehard conservatives that I know who don’t understand why we would be doing something like this, what the point is and for what possible reason.

Running for Office in Oath Keepers Country

Dakota is running for House District 1 of the Montana State Legislature in Lincoln County. He is explicit about what that means geographically and historically.

I am running for state legislature here in Montana, in Lincoln County — what was once the heart of Oath Keepers country. And I am running for House District 1 of the Montana State Legislature for my second run — the “I know what I’m doing this time” edition — on the platform of fixing the housing crisis and property tax crisis in Montana, of protecting civil rights and restoring community autonomy, and of building a functioning and workable, livable state for the working class and the middle class in the last best place, instead of being run over — as Montana is now — by this tide of out-of-state money that is coming into our politics and buying up, frankly, all of the desirable land.

The opponent he expects to face in the general — assuming he wins the primary — is a Trump-aligned transplant whose entire platform, Dakota summarizes with some precision, is enthusiasm for Trump and enthusiasm for logging.

She likes Trump and she likes logging. And that running with the correct letter next to her name will be enough to win. And maybe it will be. Because there are a lot of people who — I believe there was one contractor who saw one of my debates with my opponent in the last time around — who said the performance of my incumbent opponent was embarrassing, and that I was the one who came prepared and read and educated for the debate. And he was not. But he still had to vote for my opponent in the last round, because correct party — party loyalty stayed paramount.

The logging issue is not dismissible; it represents a real cultural anchor in that corner of Montana. But Dakota’s analysis of what it would actually require to restore a functional logging industry illustrates the gap between his opponent’s slogan and the underlying material reality.

A lot of our sawmills shut down because they couldn’t keep workers because workers couldn’t afford to live here. So affordability and housing are way back on the priority list before opening up those forests and getting logs going again. Logs going where? Without workers, without sawmills, without processing, it’s not going to do anything. It’s effectively an empty platitude when the basis of it is protecting civil rights, keeping people being able to live in this state instead of being forced out and forced to go somewhere else where they can make a living, instead of fighting as hard as they can just to tread water. And you can’t get there by saying, “just bring back logging,” even though it sounds good and simple as a slogan.

Montana’s resource wealth is real. The question is who captures the value.

Montana has, to begin with, some of the best wind power potential in the entire country. We have also a great deal of geothermal power potential. We have some of the most advantageous green energy potential in the continental United States, especially in the Western states. And we have, frankly, some of the most beautiful and desirable landscapes in all of the Western United States — world famous, in fact — on top of endless tracks of timber and quite a bit in the way of fossil fuels. And what we’re seeing now is a mass kickback scheme to thank the fossil fuel industry for supporting right-wing causes, by subsidizing the failing coal industry and attempting to expand it in Montana — over potentially very profitable and advantageous alternate energy — and to help keep our economy centered on resource extraction and on catering to luxury homes for the wealthy.

The Yellowstone TV show comes up, and it is worth noting that this appears to be one of the few points of bipartisan consensus in Lincoln County.

There is one thing I can agree with even the most diehard right-wing Montanan on, which is: fuck Yellowstone. Right. Fuck that TV show. If anybody in this audience ever visits Montana, do not wear Yellowstone — the TV show — merchandise out of the airport. They will spit in your food. Nobody here likes that show.

The deeper issue is what that show represents: a marketing campaign that imported a specific vision of Montana as billionaire fantasy territory, which translated into real estate pressure and cultural displacement.

Dakota connects his personal journey — from the inside of Oath Keepers to running against its heirs in the same county — to a specific political capacity. He understands both what it looks like to come into a community to seize power and what it looks like to represent one.

When my family moved to Northwestern Montana, it was as part of a planned and orchestrated far-right takeover of politics in Northwestern Montana. And the wave that we were in did not succeed, but later waves did. And we came in under the strategy of taking over local institutions, local politics, and establishing ourselves — in Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — in local communities to seize influence and control and pave a way for a post-American, survivalist state. And being on that side of it, and then later, after leaving Oath Keepers, going into volunteer emergency services, becoming part of the community outside of militia world — I understand the difference between going in to represent people and fight for them in the halls of power, and being a transplanted outsider who is coming in to seize control of a low-population state for the sake of gaining political influence.

Abolish ICE, Ukraine, and the Opposition Party Question

Dakota is backing a candidate named Russell Cleveland — the only abolish-ICE candidate in the Montana Democratic primary — for the congressional race, and his argument for why this matters is not a soft one.

What turns lawless and criminal elements within law enforcement into a secret police is the feeling of impunity. And we can’t abide that. And ICE is barely old enough to rent a car in its own name in the United States. We can get rid of it as easily as we made it. And it has to be done.

The framework he applies to the Democratic Party is similarly unsparing. The choice, as he sees it, is between an opposition party and a junior partner in an authoritarian state.

The time is now to decide whether we have a junior partner party in an authoritarian state, or an opposition party. And that is one of the lessons I took from studying the fight against authoritarianism from other countries — that having an opposition that is willing to fight and oppose is necessary for the critical moment when the lawmakers are climbing over the barriers.

On Ukraine — knowing that his interlocutor lives in Kyiv and holds Ukrainian press accreditation — Dakota is direct. He holds two positions simultaneously that the American left has until recently treated as incompatible.

We have unlimited resources for a war of choice going in on behalf of a genocidal ethnostate, but none for a country that we are treaty obligated to defend in exchange for their nuclear disarmament. Which is again — get in your primaries and support a candidate who has the common sense opinion of no more stupid wars in the Middle East, but also hold to our word on supporting Ukraine. Because it was not that long ago that you couldn’t find anybody capable of holding those two truths simultaneously, especially not in the DSA with us. Like it’s a leftover weird, a Stalinist hangover — Russophile baggage that we’re finally, finally dropping.

The Muscle You Practice For

At the end of the conversation, Dakota talks about what he has learned from watching the current wave of intimidation — the neo-Nazi street gang operating in his county, the Proud Boys agitating at No Kings protests, the Groypers in the state legislature, the MAGA transplants running in primaries. And from watching himself be tempted, at various points, to simply not make himself a target.

I got a little bit of a slap in the face from your piece on the retrospective from our 2023 conversation, where I had felt the temptation to not attack Stewart publicly anymore and just avoid the conflict. Just like a lot of people feel the temptation to stay quiet and not make themselves a target. And I got hit in the face with my own words from 2023. And I had to hold up to my own past ideals. And I had to be consistent in what I am publicly and what I do.

The argument he makes for resistance is not primarily moral. It is functional.

It is one thing to oppose the resurgent, uniformed, neo-Nazi street gang that we have going in my county right now, that attempted to infiltrate my fire department very recently. It is one thing to oppose out-of-state transplant politicians serving the MAGA agenda. It’s one thing to oppose Groypers in the state legislature and everything else, and to get in between self-described Christian nationalist and Proud Boy — card-carrying, dues-paying Proud Boys — trying to agitate fights at No Kings protests. But it is also important to practice taking the risk of saying out loud, that guy — that guy who is trying to control my life or my country through systems of coercion, violence, and intimidation and fear — and to practice saying: fuck you, fuck your secret police, fuck your thugs, fuck Stuart Rhodes, fuck the Proud Boys. Because you want to practice flexing that muscle for the day when you really need it.

Dakota Adams can be found on Substack and across the internet at Dakota V Adams. His campaign for Montana House District 1 is underway in Lincoln County. The DOJ effort to vacate the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy convictions remains before the courts.

The Wire Tap is published on Substack by Chris Sampson, an investigative journalist and war correspondent reporting from Kyiv since January 2022.

• The Philosophical Zombie — Dakota’s core framework for understanding Stuart: a man who copies rather than originates, whose performance of patriotism and honor was never grounded in conviction

• Inside the Household — The abuse dynamics, Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That, and Dakota’s fear that the pattern was heritable

• Oath Keepers at Peak: Bundy Ranch — The organizational high-water mark, the turn toward traveling-preacher grift, and the deliberate degradation of human capital

• The Eye, the Army, and the Character — Stuart’s military record, the missing eye (and the real story behind it), the “General Rhodes” self-promotion that never caught on

• Trump, the Great Permission, and the Collapse — How Trump changed the political ecology for anti-government militias and accelerated Oath Keepers’ implosion

• The DOJ Reversal — The vacated convictions, the cash settlement threat, witness protection in a compromised system, and what it means for Dakota’s family personally

• The Paramilitaries Trump Chose Not to Use — Why the uniformed secret police route was a strategic error, and what ICE has cost among the right’s own base

• The Cult Language and the Way Out — Ex-evangelical memoirs, the Syrian Kurdish betrayal as breaking point, the single load-bearing beam that collapses the structure

• Running in Oath Keepers Country / Abolish ICE / The Muscle — The Montana campaign, the opposition party question, Ukraine, and the closing argument about practicing resistance

Both men were tracking extremist networks before the insurrection, warning publicly that violence was coming. In this conversation, they break down:

• The early warning signs in 2020

• How extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys mobilized

• The role of disinformation and “call-and-response” radicalization

• Why seditious conspiracy cases mattered—and what happens if they’re erased

• The collapse of deterrence when accountability disappears

• The growing pressure on journalists, prosecutors, and investigators

• What this moment means for the future of democracy

Broadcast live from Ukraine and America—under the shadow of ongoing war—Sampson offers a stark perspective: a country under bombardment watching another drift toward instability from within. Frank Figliuzzi offers personal experience on the stress the institutions are undergoing because of the corruption of Donald Trump and his associates.

This is not just a retrospective. It’s a warning.

Get more from Chris Sampson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

They break down:

• How cult thinking actually works

• Why people fall into movements like MAGA or extremist groups

• The psychology behind recruitment, “love bombing,” and identity control

• Why arguing with facts often makes it worse

• Practical ways to reach people trapped in ideological bubbles

Broadcasting from Ukraine during wartime, Sampson connects these ideas to information warfare, Russian propaganda, and real-world consequences.

This is not theory — it’s a survival guide for understanding how minds get captured in the modern era.

👉 Topics include:

• The BITE model of authoritarian control

• ISIS-style recruitment tactics applied to politics

• How disinformation ecosystems operate

• Why polarization is intentional

• What actually works to break the cycle

📍 Live from Kyiv
📅 April 2026
🎙 Voices From The Front & The Wire Tap

Get more from Chris Sampson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Broadcast live from Kyiv at 5AM, Chris reflects on nearly four years on the ground covering the war — from witnessing the aftermath in Bucha to navigating daily drone threats and shifting geopolitical narratives.

This conversation goes beyond headlines:

• What it actually means to live through war in Ukraine

• The disconnect between American political discourse and battlefield reality

• Immigration, identity, and what changes when you become “the outsider”

• Language, culture, and the psychology of belonging

• Media, misinformation, and the responsibility of independent journalism

Egberto and Chris also dive into personal stories — from Houston roots to multilingual experiences — exploring how culture, race, and class shape worldview and reporting.

📍 Recorded live across Kyiv and Houston
🎙️ Featuring: Chris Sampson (The Wire Tap / NatSecMedia) & Egberto Willies

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00:00 – Live from Kyiv: April snow, war context
02:00 – Why being on the ground matters
05:00 – Yanukovych, influence & narrative framing
10:00 – Shaun Pinner joins (Dnipro)
12:00 – Has the war slowed down? Reality check
15:00 – Shift to terror tactics against civilians
20:00 – Infrastructure strikes & daily life disruption
25:00 – Russia’s struggle to sustain invasion forces
30:00 – Drones, adaptation & battlefield limits
40:00 – Energy war, blackouts & survival
50:00 – Civilian vs frontline reality gap
58:00 – Hardship vs actual combat conditions

1:05:00 – Psychological impact of long-term war
1:15:00 – Western perception vs Ukrainian reality
1:25:00 – “Just give up territory” argument
1:35:00 – Occupation reality: filtration, coercion, control
1:45:00 – Shaun’s capture & 2022 encirclement
1:55:00 – Personal cost: Mariupol, Crimea, displacement

2:00:00 (End) – Why concessions don’t end the war

The Men in the Room Where It Happened

Two hours with Shaun Pinner — on convergent actors, Budapest betrayals, and what it means to fight from inside the story

It is April 10th. Kyiv has had snow. We thought winter was done.

That minor betrayal of the calendar feels appropriate for a week in which every diplomatic headline has arrived as a variation on the same theme: things that were supposed to be settled are not settled. Rules that were supposed to hold are not holding. Men who were supposed to be on one side are sitting in rooms with the other side.

Shaun Pinner joined us from Dnipro. He is a former Royal Marine. He fought in the Azov battalion during the siege of Mariupol. He was captured in April 2022, held in Russian captivity for over two years, tortured, tried in a Russian kangaroo court, and sentenced to death. He was released in a prisoner exchange brokered in part by Roman Abramovich and Saudi Arabia. He now lives in Ukraine, files legal proceedings against the Russian state in the British High Court, and joins The Wire Tap most Fridays to give an account of where things actually stand.

Sixty people were watching live. We are not Timothy Snyder. We are also not interested in pretending that reach is the same as accuracy.

Convergent Actors

Before Shaun came on, I was working through a piece I had just published — triggered, as often happens, by watching a friend get into an argument online with a disinformation account.

The account had pushed the old line on Viktor Yanukovych: that he was forced from power, that his pivot away from the EU association agreement was somehow ambiguous, that “Kremlin puppet” was too simple a framing. My friend used the term. There is nothing wrong with the term. But it sent me back into the archive.

I have been on the Yanukovych case for over a decade. I live in Kyiv, a few kilometers from where these events actually happened. I work daily through hacked and exfiltrated email archives from the Ukraine Cyber Alliance. The record is not ambiguous. November 9, 2013: Yanukovych flew to Moscow for a meeting with Putin. He came back within days and reversed course on the EU agreement — against the expressed will of the Ukrainian public, which had been polling strongly in favor of European integration. Nobody here asks for him back. Nobody.

But the term I have been working with is not “puppet.” It is convergent actor.

The distinction matters. A puppet implies a hand inside moving the limb. A convergent actor is something more dangerous: a figure whose personal ambitions align so completely with the needs of another power that coercion becomes unnecessary. Yanukovych was not simply executing Kremlin orders. He was a product of the post-Soviet criminal oligarchy — driven by his own appetites, his own survival calculus, his own fear of losing what he had accumulated. He converged with Russian interests because Russian interests happened to protect him.

The same analytical frame applies to the current American moment. The arguments about whether Donald Trump is a Russian “asset,” a “useful idiot,” or a “fellow traveler” have been running for nearly a decade. They share a common deficiency: they all presuppose a discrete relationship — handler and handled — that is cleaner than the reality. Trump, like Yanukovych, appears to operate primarily from personal survival and personal ambition. He happens to converge with what Moscow needs. They happened to share the same campaign manager: Paul Manafort, now a convicted criminal.

The convergence is the point. The personal motive makes it more durable, not less.

The Week That Was

When Shaun came on, we moved quickly into the operational picture — which is the only honest place to start.

He lives in Dnipro. He said it has been unusually quiet since he returned from a UK trip earlier this month. One jet drone into an apartment block. Otherwise, outskirts. But he was careful to separate the local weather from the broader pattern.

The terror campaign has not slowed. It has expanded. Since the Iranian war theater began absorbing Western attention, Russian strikes have gone after trains, buses, apartment blocks — civilian infrastructure with no residual military logic, pure pressure. The UN has not said an absolute thing about it. The Red Cross has not said an absolute thing about it. The international monitoring architecture that supposedly regulates this conduct has gone quiet in exactly the moment it is most needed.

Part of the calculus here, Shaun argued, is that political attrition can serve the same function as military breakthrough. You do not need to take territory if you can stop Western support from reaching Ukraine. You do not need a front-line advance if you can create enough instability in Budapest, Bratislava, and Washington to freeze the pipeline. The terror campaign is not irrational. It is a component of a strategy that understands politics better than the people supposed to be countering it.

On Russian mobilization: Shaun cited Minister Fedorov’s assessment that for the past four months, Ukraine has been generating Russian casualties faster than Russia can recruit replacements. That is the direction the curve is moving. But Russia is also raising recruitment bonuses — which suggests external financing, possibly Chinese, filling a federal budget deficit that the official numbers do not fully reflect. Ukraine’s continuing strikes on Russian oil infrastructure mean the high oil price windfall from sanctions relief is being partially neutralized before it lands.

The headline I wrote this week — Zelensky Deals Russia Couldn’t Stop — makes the argument that is easiest to miss when you are focused on Washington. While Trump administered chaos across the Middle East, Zelensky was building a Gulf defense architecture: ten security agreements with Arab states, a Japanese initiative developing interceptor drone technology in the Kharkiv region, Moldova exiting the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Japanese ambassador to Russia has since been summoned to the Kremlin for an explanation. That is how you read the map. When the aggressor starts calling in envoys, the deals are working.

Shaun put it plainly: Putin’s only friends in the Middle East are now designated terrorist organizations. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar — these countries have real leverage over Russia, over the Caucasus, over the entire southern exposure. The exchange that brought Shaun home was brokered in part by Saudi intermediaries and by Roman Abramovich. Shaun holds a view about Abramovich that some of his supporters find uncomfortable: whatever Abramovich’s history, he went out on a limb and got 150 Ukrainians home. In a world where most wealthy men with leverage use it only for themselves, that is not nothing. Pragmatic diplomacy means dealing with people you would not choose to deal with. The Trump administration, by contrast, has inverted this principle — applying maximum pressure to the invaded party while extending de facto accommodation to the invader.

Lost in Budapest

The most significant analytical thread of the week was Hungary.

On April 7th and 8th, JD Vance appeared at a stadium event in Budapest — a Hungarian-American friendship spectacle that was presented as organic and came off as precisely scripted at nation-state level. I processed all three transcripts: the stadium speech, the press conference, the interview. Combined running time was close to ninety minutes. I stripped the transcripts to bullet points, identified the repeated themes, then watched the video to read visual cues. The resulting piece was called Lost in Budapest: The Vice President of the United States Just Campaigned for the Kremlin’s Best Asset in Europe.

What struck Shaun — who had visited Budapest himself — was the media failure that surrounded the event. CNN, BBC, none of the major outlets stopped to note that the entire thing was scripted under conditions of near-total media control. Orban controls roughly 80% of Hungarian media. There was no opposition press in the room, no adversarial questioning, no moment that had not been pre-arranged. The Western correspondents who filed on the event treated it as a diplomatic visit. It was a production.

The week also brought the Michael Weiss story: transcripts of conversations between the Hungarian Foreign Minister and Sergei Lavrov in which EU-confidential documents were passed to Russia in real time to help orchestrate responses to aid flows into Ukraine. This is not a soft allegation. This is documentary evidence of a NATO and EU member state acting as an intelligence conduit for the adversary. The EU has begun to respond. Whether Hungary’s Sunday election — where opposition polling was running around 70% — produces a change of government will determine whether that response has a counterpart on the other side.

Shaun made the historical observation that is easy to dismiss and wrong to dismiss: the arc of European conflict often runs through Hungary. The mechanisms are different now. The logic is not entirely different. A Russian-aligned government in Budapest, with access to EU decision-making, sitting at the intersection of multiple security arrangements, is a structural problem with consequences well beyond the bilateral.

I raised the NATO withdrawal question that keeps circulating in our comments. The answer is more precise than the panic: Section 1250A of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 — co-sponsored in the Senate by one Marco Rubio — prohibits the President from withdrawing the United States from NATO without Senate approval or an act of Congress requiring a two-thirds supermajority. The NDAA also prohibits the use of federal funds to support such a withdrawal. Trump can damage NATO. He has been damaging NATO. He cannot unilaterally exit. What he has managed to do, as Czech President Petr Pavel — former NATO military commander — put it directly: Trump has done more to reduce NATO’s credibility than Vladimir Putin managed over many years.

We talked for a while about whether the MAGA dissent of recent weeks — Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a few others — represents a genuine fracture or a pressure release valve. Shaun’s read, which I share: it is the valve. Trump will massage the egos, the dissenters will fall back in line, the base will consolidate. Putin used the same mechanism — managed protest, controlled ventilation, the appearance of internal debate without any structural challenge to the center. The “No Kings” rallies are not the same as Maidan. Maidan happened when the regime started shooting at protesters. Until that threshold is crossed, the protests are noise that the system absorbs.

The Intelligence Failure and What It Costs

In the final stretch of our conversation, we moved into the intelligence degradation question — which is the thing I find most alarming about the current American moment.

Putin went into Ukraine in February 2022 with parade uniforms packed in the BMPs headed for Kyiv. The FSB had ample intelligence about Ukrainian resistance capabilities and public sentiment. What it did not have was a culture that permitted anyone to tell Putin the truth. The intelligence was there. The institutional pathway to deliver it was not. That is a cultural failure inside an authoritarian system.

Trump’s version is structurally different and in some ways worse. He has actively gutted the machinery that would tell him the truth. The counterintelligence units covering Iranian operations were decimated under Kash Patel. Tulsi Gabbard at the top of the intelligence community cannot tell the truth about fundamental operational realities. Pete Hegseth’s tenure at Defense has been a cascade of departures, leaked Signal chats, and diminishing credibility. What you are left with is a leader who wants to hear what confirms his narrative, surrounded by people who have been selected for their willingness to provide it. This is the same failure mode as Putin, reached through a different mechanism.

When JD Vance walked into Budapest, the Americans would have had copies of those Lavrov-Hungarian foreign minister transcripts. Either they did not read them, or they read them and went anyway. The second possibility is worse.

What We’re Actually Watching

Shaun said something toward the end that I want to put on the record cleanly.

We noted that we had spent a substantial part of a two-hour conversation about Ukraine talking about Trump. Not Putin. Trump.

That is not an accident. It is the operational function of the current American posture: it absorbs the oxygen. An ICC-indicted war criminal conducting the largest land war in Europe since 1945 — with six million forcibly displaced people inside Ukraine alone, and 1.3 million of his own citizens killed or wounded — is generating less analytical bandwidth than the trade and diplomatic dysfunction of an American administration that has not fired a single shot.

Trump shields Putin. Not necessarily by intent. By effect. The attention economy of the Western media follows Washington. Washington is generating maximum chaos. Putin continues his war under reduced scrutiny while his primary adversarial alliance — NATO — is being damaged from the inside by a head of state who has the personal incentive structure, and perhaps the personal leverage exposure, to do exactly this.

Russia have something on him, Shaun said. And if Russia has it, Mossad has it. And if Mossad has it, China has it. That is an assessment, not a documented fact. But it is the assessment of a man who spent over two years inside Russian captivity and has spent his time since studying how these systems work.

Coming Exchanges

We are watching for an Easter prisoner exchange.

April 12th is a significant date in the calendar of the Mariupol siege — the window in which the largest wave of captures began. Three years on, Shaun has been working for three years on legal proceedings that would be the first case of an individual suing a state before the British High Court for war crimes committed against them in a foreign country’s territory. If the case succeeds, it sets precedent for Ukrainians to pursue claims against the Russian state. The paperwork is now in the High Court. A press release is expected in the UK national papers this weekend.

He is heading to Canada next week — talks with the Ukrainian Canadian community in Edmonton, and at the University of Toronto, where Timothy Snyder is based. He is hoping Snyder drops in.

Moldova has broken from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ukraine intercepted at a high rate this week. Territorial gains in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions totaling 480 square kilometers. 160 daily combat engagements in the past 24 hours. The front is active and the situation is not what it was in the final months of Biden’s first term, when we were burning smoke signals instead of artillery and I was telling people in Kyiv to think about whether they needed to leave.

We are not in that place. We are in a different, more complicated place — where the war is being won on the ground faster than it is being won in the information space, and where the most consequential battles this spring may be decided in Budapest on Sunday and in Washington in the months ahead.

The Wire Tap publishes weekly on Substack. Shaun Pinner’s account can be found at @ShaunPinner. Paid subscriptions support his ongoing legal proceedings against the Russian state in the UK High Courts.

Slava Ukraini.

They dive into:

• Ukraine’s shifting advantage and the failure of Russia’s spring offensive

• The rise of drone warfare and the collapse of traditional front lines

• InformNapalm’s 12-year legacy exposing Russia’s war machine

• The real impact of sanctions — and why efforts to weaken them matter

• U.S. policy decisions, aid disruptions, and their direct consequences on the ground

• Russia’s tightening information control and the return of a digital Iron Curtain

• Civilian targeting, escalation patterns, and the changing tempo of attacks

This is not studio analysis — it’s ground truth from Kyiv and Dnipro, where policy decisions translate into survival, casualties, and daily life under fire.

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• Record Russian drone barrages across Ukraine, including attacks on civilian infrastructure

• Frontline realities from Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Dnipro

• The impact of wavering U.S. sanctions and shifting aid policies

• The geopolitical consequences of U.S. actions in Iran and their effect on Ukraine

• Kremlin influence networks across Europe and Washington

• Why Ukraine’s “oil sanctions” strategy is outperforming Western policy

Broadcasting from the war itself, this is not theory—it’s reality from the ground.

Subscribe for frontline reporting, analysis, and weekly broadcasts.

TODAY’S HEADLINE COVERAGE:

Four years ago this week, Sean Pinner was preparing to die.

Not metaphorically. Not in the abstract language of sacrifice that gets deployed at memorial ceremonies and then washed clean by the next news cycle. Literally preparing — burning documents, mapping escape routes, rationing ammunition, watching the 501st Battalion disappear around him as Russian forces blew holes in the walls of the Azovstal steelworks and sent infantry through. Flash burns on his face. Cream on his skin. The 36th Marines were cut off. The Russians were closing from two directions, threading through the gap between the plants. Every man for himself was becoming the only available operational plan.

He didn’t surrender. He broke out.

That was Mariupol. That was the spring of 2022. That was what Ukrainian resistance looked like at its most compressed and its most desperate — not slogans on a banner, but a British soldier who had chosen Ukraine as his home refusing to go into Russian captivity, and fighting his way clear.

Tonight, on March 27, 2026, Sean Pinner sat in the Prevail HQ in Kyiv — the same charity he helped build, now training Ukrainians in combat lifesaving — and joined Voices From the Front to talk about what four years has produced. Fresh UK press credentials. A lawsuit filed against the Russian Federation for the Mariupol apartment they stole from his wife. A CLS medic course, because he decided it was no longer acceptable to not know how to save a life on the front lines.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Marco Rubio accused Volodymyr Zelensky of lying.

The gap between those two images is the story of this war in 2026.

The Pressure That Flows in One Direction

Rubio’s accusation is worth examining precisely, because the Trump administration rarely does anything without a purpose. The charge is that Zelensky is misrepresenting the state of negotiations. The implicit demand is that Ukraine move faster toward a deal. The pressure is public, sustained, and one-directional.

Russia has received no equivalent public pressure from Washington. Not once. Not even approximately.

This matters because the architecture of any negotiation reflects the priorities of the people conducting it. When one party to a conflict is publicly accused of obstruction and the other is not, the signal to all observers — including Moscow — is clear. The United States is not a neutral broker. It is an impatient party applying force selectively, and the force is being applied to Ukraine.

We have documented the paper trail. Steve Witkoff’s statements on territorial concessions. JD Vance’s framing of what Ukraine should realistically accept. These are matters of public record. Officials in the Trump administration said, in open forum, that occupied Ukrainian land is negotiable. Now the same administration accuses Zelensky of lying when he pushes back.

The law, as we wrote this week in “The Law They Cannot Give Away,” is actually clearer than the diplomatic noise. Congress has already constrained U.S. recognition of Russia’s stolen Ukrainian lands. That is not an on-off switch — but it is a constraint, and it exists because legislators understood that what this administration might attempt to do in the name of deal-making could produce something that no lawful interpretation of U.S. policy could endorse. The constraint matters. What matters equally is that the Trump administration operates in the information gap between what is constrained and what is free for all — and that gap, historically, closes only when pressure is applied.

Which is exactly why we apply it.

The $750 Million Question

The Washington Post reported this week — sourced to Mark Rudy — that the Trump administration is considering redirecting Pearl funds, effectively NATO money, toward its own Middle East war. Rudy subsequently appeared at a NATO conference to say everything was fine and moving along. We are siding with the Washington Post on this one.

The reason is pattern. This administration has consistently played in the space between what’s announced and what’s implemented. USAID collapsed overnight. Humanitarian workers across Ukraine lost their jobs in the space of two to three weeks — including Sean Pinner’s wife, who had worked for HALO Trust, and whom the Russian state has now branded a terrorist because of her association with demining work. Demining. An organization that keeps children from picking up cluster munitions on their way to school.

Every one of those humanitarian losses benefits Russia. Not incidentally. Not as a side effect. Russia does not have to pay to destabilize a society if someone else is cutting off the glue that holds it together. The USAID collapse removed demining capacity, trauma support networks, the organizational infrastructure of civilian resilience. Trump knew what he was doing. The stop-start of intelligence sharing came after. Then the suspension of direct military support. Then the public accusation that Ukraine’s president is a liar.

Meanwhile, Trump waived sanctions on Russia — roughly $150 million per day in additional revenue flow, by some estimates, though figures in the Times now suggest it runs considerably higher. Russia, which has openly acknowledged its military support to Iran in weaponry and intelligence, is now better funded. Iran, which is currently engaged in combat operations against U.S. forces, is better supplied. The drones Iran fires at American service personnel in the region have Russian fingerprints. The intelligence enabling those operations has Russian provenance.

The logic of what has been constructed is not subtle once you accept its premises. American sanctions money is flowing to Russia. Russian money and weapons are flowing to Iran. Iran is using them against Americans. This is not a chain of events that requires conspiratorial imagination. It is documented. It is the sequential outcome of policy decisions made in Washington, and it is happening while Rubio accuses the president of Ukraine of lying.

When does the American public go nuts about this? Probably, as Sean put it tonight, when it takes a Chinook full of American soldiers going down before somebody on a front page asks the question out loud.

We hope not. But that’s where we are.

The Drone Barrage and What Russia Is Actually Telling You

Russia launched approximately 1,000 drones over Ukrainian airspace during a single episode this week. I was across town from my apartment — on the Right Bank while I live on the Left Bank — doing interview work when the air raid went off and the map filled up with incoming. I stayed stranded until five in the afternoon. The airspace was effectively closed for hours.

The culminating strikes hit Lviv — specifically the St. Andrew’s Church Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is no military logic to hitting Lviv. There is no ammunition depot in a Baroque church. There is no command and control node in a monastery. The target was chosen for its visual impact, its resonance with Western media, and its symbolic value to Russia’s information campaign.

What Russia is broadcasting with every strike on a cultural site is not strength. It is frustration. The winter campaign failed. The campaign before that failed. The Fortress Belt in Donetsk is holding against a spring offensive that, as ISW assessed this week, has involved 619 Russian ground attacks in four days at a cost of more than 6,000 Russian casualties in the same window. Russia is throwing men at fortified Ukrainian positions and not breaking through. It is running out of options on the battlefield and substituting spectacular violence against civilians as a messaging substitute for military success.

The Ust-Luga port is burning. The Kirishi refinery was hit. Transneft-Primorsk suspended operations. Reuters confirmed at least 40 percent of Russia’s Baltic oil export capacity was offline as of March 25. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air called it the most serious threat to Russian oil exports since the invasion began. Ukraine did that. Without American weapons redirected to the Middle East, without the intelligence sharing that was suspended and never fully restored, working with European partners and its own deep-strike drone capability.

Russia is also begging its oligarchs for money. The ruble has no return on investment. The financial architecture of the Russian war machine is under sustained pressure. Trump waived sanctions precisely at the moment Russia was struggling. Every time Russia loses ground financially, strategically, or operationally, there is one ally waiting with a lifeline.

It’s Trump. It’s Trump every time.

How many coincidences before you call it something else?

Sean Pinner vs. the Russian Federation

It is worth pausing on the lawsuit, because it is the kind of thing that gets lost in the scroll.

Sean Pinner versus the Russian Federation. That is what the paperwork says. Not a government. Not a coalition. One man, a former soldier who survived Mariupol, who chose Ukraine, whose wife’s apartment in that city was stolen by the occupying force that branded her a terrorist, now suing the state that did it in a British court — using the same legal system Russia itself used when it had assets it wanted protected.

A Ukrainian court already issued a verdict in their favor last year. They are now attempting to enforce that verdict through the UK courts. Pro bono lawyers. A crowdfunder to cover the £10,000 court fees. Travel costs. A passport application for their co-plaintiff Brahim.

This is what accountability looks like when governments won’t provide it. One person at a time. Using every available legal mechanism. Taking on a nuclear state with a filing fee and a principle.

If the case succeeds, it sets precedent for every Ukrainian whose property was stolen, whose family was displaced, whose home is now under occupation. The Russian state used international legal systems when those systems served it. Now those systems may be used against it.

We are with this man to the last of our breath.

The Children and the UXO

There is a generation of Ukrainian children who were born into the full-scale war. Their neural wiring has been formed by air raid sirens, by the low moped sound of a Shahed drone overhead, by an older sibling aged five or six explaining to a toddler which sound means which kind of danger.

In Mykolaiv. In Chernihiv. In Kharkiv and Pokrovsk and every city where the schools have UXO awareness training alongside the regular curriculum. The signs on the classroom walls show what cluster munitions look like. What not to touch. What to do if you find one on the way to the playground. Russia scattered this ordnance everywhere it operated. If this war ended tomorrow — it won’t, but if it did — the mine clearance alone would take more than a generation’s worth of lifetimes to complete.

Meanwhile, Russian Duma members walked the corridors of Capitol Hill this week. An indicted ICC war criminal — wanted for the abduction of Ukrainian children — has a regime whose representatives are now welcomed into American centers of power. Someone on that side of the building ought to explain to the people in the occupied zones of Ukraine, to the families of the 8,669 prisoners of war who have come home, to Svetlana — whose 30th birthday was today and whose fiancé Leonid of the 501st Battalion and 36th Marines is still in Russian captivity — what it means that the people who did this to them now have an open door in Washington.

They know it’s not all Americans. Ukrainian people are, as Sean says, being polite. When things go right, it’s America. When things go wrong, it’s Trump. Somewhere in between is the Biden era, which had its own failures and its own moral compromises. But the distinction is becoming harder to maintain when the pattern is this consistent and the results this predictable.

Budanov’s Hope and What Comes Next

General Kyrylo Budanov — now the de facto chief negotiator on prisoner exchanges — announced this week his hope for a major exchange by Easter. Hope, not announcement. The distinction matters. Two exchanges have already occurred in March: 200 on one occasion, 300 on another, bringing the total number of Ukrainians returned since the full-scale invasion began to 8,669.

There are people we know personally in those numbers. People still waiting to be in those numbers.

The exchange process — sustained through more than 70 rounds of negotiations, coordinated through U.S. and UAE channels even as U.S. policy on everything else has become hostile to Ukrainian interests — is one of the few functional elements of the diplomatic space. Budanov has built something durable in that lane. We hope it holds. We hope Leonid comes home before Svetlana has to celebrate another birthday without him.

But the structural reality of what comes back with these men deserves saying out loud. Soldiers who went into Russian captivity believing the United States was an ally of the country they were defending. Coming home to find that the homes they fought for are in occupied territory and that America is in the business of asking Ukraine to formally accept that fact. That is not the America those men went into captivity knowing.

Ukrainians are being careful to say it’s Trump, not America. They’re right. But at some point, the country and its leadership become harder to separate — not because Americans are complicit in spirit, but because the institutions that are supposed to hold the line are failing to do so, and the man at the top is making it worse every week.

What We Do From Here

The strategy, as best we can identify it from inside Kyiv, is delay. Allies in the United States — officials, legislators, coalition partners — are working to slow the momentum of each impulsive or actively harmful decision long enough for pressure to accumulate and position to shift. We’ve seen NATO and the UN move him back from the edge when the international noise got loud enough. France, Germany, and the UK have limited but real ability to get a phone call returned. The midterms are coming. Trump cannot run again. Two more years of this damage is not nothing — but it has a terminal date.

In the meantime: apply pressure. Document everything. Do not let the information gap do its work unchallenged. Call out what Witkoff says. Record what Rubio accuses. Track every sanction waiver and follow the money to where it ends up. Be wrong in the right direction rather than silent in the comfortable one.

That’s what The Wire Tap is for. That’s why we broadcast from Kyiv.

The war is not over. Ukraine is not losing. Russia is running out of money and options and is torching UNESCO sites because it cannot take the Fortress Belt. Ukraine struck 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity in a single week’s operation and is still at the table — on its own terms, not Witkoff’s. Sean Pinner is in a medic course because he intends to keep going forward, not back.

The gap between that — between what Ukrainians are doing and what Washington is doing — is the story of this war right now.

We’re going to keep telling it.

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From Trump’s inner circle and decision-making breakdowns to the geopolitical consequences of conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, this conversation exposes how power, corruption, and disinformation are reshaping global reality.

They also explore the collapse of traditional media, the rise of independent journalism, and why truth itself is now contested terrain.

This is not just analysis—it’s a warning.

📍 Recorded live from Kyiv
🎙 The Wire Tap | NatSecMedia

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Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi joins Chris Sampson for a deep dive into the legacy of Robert Mueller, the Mueller Report, and what really happened behind the scenes of one of the most consequential investigations in modern U.S. history.

From the transformation of the FBI after 9/11 to the internal battles over surveillance, civil liberties, and presidential power — this conversation pulls back the curtain on how institutions work (and fail) under pressure.

They break down:

• The real story behind the Mueller investigation

• Russian interference and what was actually proven

• Why Trump was never indicted

• The role of Bill Barr and the DOJ

• FBI reforms, past abuses, and modern threats

• Epstein, intelligence operations, and unanswered questions

• The dangerous normalization of power in modern politics

This is not surface-level commentary — this is a full counterintelligence and national security perspective from inside the system.

Veteran White House reporter Brian Karem, who has covered the press room since the Reagan era, joins Chris Sampson from Kyiv to discuss the escalating confrontation between political power and the American press.

From threats against media outlets to the weaponization of information, the conversation explores how the relationship between the White House and journalists has changed — and why it matters now more than ever.

Topics covered in this conversation include:

• Trump’s attacks on journalists and accusations of “treason” against the press
• The growing pressure campaign against major news organizations
• The role of corporate media consolidation and media monopolies
• Why independent journalism is becoming essential to democratic accountability
• The risks of escalating war with Iran and the broader geopolitical consequences
• The connection between information warfare, propaganda, and modern conflict
• Lessons from decades inside the White House briefing room

Brian Karem has covered the White House since 1985 and has repeatedly fought legal battles to defend press access and press freedom. In this conversation he shares firsthand experience covering administrations from Reagan through Trump.

Chris Sampson reports from Kyiv, Ukraine, where the realities of war and disinformation campaigns make the stakes for journalism painfully clear. As Russian drones strike Ukrainian cities and global tensions escalate, the battle over information is no longer theoretical — it is part of the war itself.

This episode of The Wire Tap explores what happens when governments begin labeling journalists enemies — and why the survival of independent reporting may determine the future of democratic societies.

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Broadcast from Kyiv, Sampson opens with a reflection on what it means to report from a country at war and why firsthand reporting matters. Having lived in Ukraine continuously since before the full-scale invasion, he emphasizes the importance of journalists who are deeply rooted in the country rather than the “passerby journalism” often produced by international outlets that cycle correspondents through conflict zones. The war, he argues, cannot be understood from hotel rooms and brief visits—it requires immersion in Ukrainian society, politics, and history.

Tim White brings a longer historical perspective. Having worked in Ukraine since the early 2010s and contributed to the pioneering disinformation-monitoring project StopFake, he explains how Russian propaganda evolved alongside the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine beginning in 2013–2014. StopFake was created by Ukrainian journalists and academics to debunk Russian disinformation narratives during the annexation of Crimea and the appearance of the so-called “little green men.” According to White, it was one of the first organized efforts to systematically dismantle Kremlin propaganda in real time.

The conversation then shifts to a broader question: what does responsible journalism look like during wartime?

White argues that the traditional idea of strict neutrality can become misleading when one side is clearly committing crimes and spreading disinformation. For him, journalism is not about artificially balancing narratives but about representing the truth as accurately as possible. That means acknowledging both Ukraine’s successes and its challenges on the battlefield, while also exposing Russian war crimes and propaganda campaigns.

Sampson expands on this idea by describing how independent journalists can offer perspectives that differ from both state messaging and partisan narratives. He notes that Ukrainian outlets such as Ukrainska Pravda often play an adversarial role toward the government—something that can confuse international audiences who assume wartime media should be uniformly supportive of leadership. In reality, Ukraine’s media landscape has evolved into a vibrant and often contentious environment where investigative reporting and criticism remain essential parts of democratic life.

White places this development in historical context. Ukraine, he explains, emerged from decades of Soviet rule with virtually no tradition of independent journalism. Under communism, media existed primarily to repeat official state messaging. Since independence in 1991, Ukraine’s press has undergone a dramatic transformation—from oligarch-controlled outlets and political influence to a more pluralistic environment that increasingly embraces investigative reporting and accountability.

The two journalists also examine how oligarch ownership shaped Ukraine’s media ecosystem in the early decades after independence. Television networks and newspapers were frequently aligned with powerful political and business figures, creating an environment where editorial lines often reflected the interests of wealthy patrons. Despite those structural challenges, independent voices gradually emerged and helped expose corruption and challenge political power.

Another major theme of the conversation is the global decline of traditional media institutions. Both Sampson and White note the layoffs and restructuring across major Western outlets, including the erosion of newsroom staff and the consolidation of local journalism. Sampson recounts his early experience covering media ownership battles in the United States during the mid-2000s, where critics warned that corporate consolidation would hollow out local news coverage. Two decades later, those predictions appear to have largely come true.

In this environment, platforms like Substack have created a new model for journalists—one where writers can build direct relationships with audiences rather than relying on traditional media institutions. The ability to publish independently allows journalists to maintain editorial control while also creating a community around their reporting.

The discussion also explores the geopolitical implications of Russia’s invasion. White argues that Ukraine’s resistance has demonstrated that even a smaller nation can hold off a much larger aggressor if it receives sufficient support. That lesson has reverberated globally, influencing how other countries view their own security and the potential threat posed by authoritarian powers.

At the same time, both journalists warn that global attention is beginning to shift away from Ukraine as new crises emerge. White notes that humanitarian and financial support for Ukraine has already begun to decline in some areas, including donations to frontline medical units and aid organizations. Maintaining international awareness, he says, is one of the most important tasks facing journalists who cover the war.

The conversation also touches on the corrosive influence of corruption and disinformation as tools of geopolitical control. Sampson describes how Russia’s system of kleptocracy has spread beyond its borders, seeking to pull other states into networks of corruption and influence. White adds that corruption has historically been used by occupying powers as a way to maintain long-term control—creating systems so deeply compromised that reform becomes extremely difficult.

Throughout the discussion, both journalists return to a central idea: information itself has become a battlefield.

The war in Ukraine is not only fought with artillery and drones, but also through narratives, propaganda campaigns, and the struggle to maintain credible sources of information. Independent journalism plays a crucial role in that fight by documenting events, challenging misinformation, and preserving a factual record of the war.

For Sampson and White, the stakes could not be higher. If truthful reporting disappears, the space will inevitably be filled by propaganda and manipulation. In an era where authoritarian regimes actively weaponize information, maintaining trustworthy journalism is not simply a professional obligation—it is a pillar of democratic survival.

This conversation is a reflection on that responsibility and on the journalists who continue to carry it forward in the midst of war.

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Aziza is known for her striking visual artwork and powerful voice as a performer. In this discussion she speaks about her creative journey, the role of culture during war, and what it means to preserve identity while Ukraine continues its fight for survival.

The conversation explores the intersection of Crimean Tatar culture, music, visual art, and resilience, as well as the responsibility artists feel when their homeland is under occupation.

Topics discussed include:

• Aziza Eskender’s journey as a Crimean artist and musician
• The influence of Crimean Tatar culture on her work
• Art as resistance during war
• The role of artists in times of conflict
• Ukraine’s cultural identity under Russian aggression
• Music, voice, and storytelling as forms of survival

Through music, art, and conversation, this episode highlights how culture becomes a form of resistance and remembrance during war.

Host: Chris Sampson — The Wire Tap / NatSecMedia
Guest: Aziza Eskender — Crimean artist and musician

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In this episode of The Wire Tap, journalist Chris Sampson speaks with Shaun Pinner, a British-Ukrainian marine and veteran who was captured during the battle for Mariupol in 2022 and later released in a prisoner exchange.

Pinner describes the brutal realities of capture, interrogation, and survival under Russian forces — including electrocution, psychological pressure, and the moment he realized that survival depended on controlling his mindset.

Drawing on his SERE training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) and years of military experience, Pinner explains the stages of captivity, how prisoners survive interrogation, and the mental techniques that helped him endure.

The conversation also examines the broader context of the war in Ukraine, Russian tactics against prisoners, and why understanding captivity matters for soldiers, civilians, and anyone facing extreme stress.

Topics discussed include:

• The fall of Mariupol and Pinner’s capture
• Russian interrogation and torture methods
• Survival psychology and resistance training
• Lessons from SERE training
• Propaganda, prisoners of war, and psychological warfare
• Why resilience matters in both war and everyday life

This is one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of Russian captivity during the war in Ukraine.

Host: Chris Sampson — The Wire Tap / NatSecMedia
Guest: Shaun Pinner — Voices From The Front

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From the brutal tunnel fight inside the Capitol to the long aftermath of injuries, testimony, and political fallout, Hodges walks us through the reality behind one of the most consequential days in modern American history. This is not a retelling from a distance—this is a firsthand account from the front line.

We discuss:

• The buildup to January 6 and warning signs that were missed

• What it was like to be outnumbered and under attack

• The now-famous tunnel fight and the moment he thought he might die

• The physical and psychological aftermath

• Why many officers stayed silent—and why he didn’t

• Congressional hearings, trials, and accountability

• Trump’s return to power and the impact of mass pardons

• What defending democracy actually looks like in practice

This is a conversation about memory, truth, and the cost of standing your ground when it matters most.

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In this powerful interview, Ukrainian journalist Chris Sampson speaks with Leniie Umerova, a Crimean Tatar activist who spent nearly two years in Russian captivity after attempting to visit her sick father in occupied Crimea.

Detained at the Russian border, falsely accused of espionage, and held in multiple prisons—including Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison—Umerova endured interrogation, isolation, and psychological pressure before finally being released in a prisoner exchange.

In this conversation she shares:

• The history of the Crimean Tatar people and the legacy of Stalin’s deportations
• What happened during Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014
• Her arrest and interrogation by Russian security forces
• Life inside Russian detention centers and political prisons
• Stories of other Ukrainian civilians still imprisoned by Russia
• Why Crimea is about people, not territory
• How letters from strangers around the world kept prisoners alive with hope

Umerova’s story is not only about survival—it is a reminder that thousands of Ukrainians remain in Russian prisons today.

Crimea is not negotiable.

That safe, beautiful Mayberry suburb of St. Louis — the kind of town where kids ride bikes after dark and nobody worries, where the streets are clean and the yards are mowed and the American Dream still looks like it might be keepable — sent one of its sons north to West Point in 1983, and Fred Wellman didn’t look back.

Not for twenty-two years.

What followed was the kind of biography that sounds invented when you read it in a campaign bio but lands differently when the man sits across from you on a live broadcast and tells it himself in the unpolished present tense of someone who actually lived it. Four combat tours. Desert Storm. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Blackhawk helicopters and Scout birds over the desert. Harvard Kennedy School squeezed in between deployments, because Fred Wellman is constitutionally incapable of doing anything halfway. A Master of Public Administration with honors. Ranger school. The tab. Twenty-two years as an Army aviator and public affairs officer, including stints as spokesman for two of the most consequential military commanders of his generation — Generals David Petraeus and Martin Dempsey — in the middle of the longest war America has fought since Vietnam.

He retired a Lieutenant Colonel.

Then he built a veterans advocacy firm from scratch, won national awards, ran it for a decade, watched the pandemic kill it, got a call from an old colleague, and went to war one more time — this time in the information space, running veteran outreach for the Lincoln Project during the 2020 campaign.

He came back to Missouri five years ago for his fiancée Heather.

He looked around at the district he grew up in — at the working families and the five rivers and the limestone hills and the 750,000 people who deserved a Congress member — and saw a woman who hadn’t held a single town hall in thirteen years.

Not recently. Not just since it got complicated.

Never.

So I asked him about all of it on The Wire Tap, broadcasting live from Kyiv at seven in the evening on a night when the world was already on fire. American soldiers had just been killed in Kuwait by Iranian drones — the same Shahad drones I’ve watched Ukraine fight for four years from a hundred meters away. An undeclared war was burning across the Persian Gulf. Congress had voted down its own authority to even ask why. And a man who had spent his entire adult life serving in uniform, then fighting to preserve the democratic institutions that uniform was supposed to protect, was running for Congress in one of the most competitive Trump-won districts in the country.

I wanted to hear it all.

He gave it to me.

We the People. Before There Was a Country.

You have to start with the lineage, because Fred Wellman’s relationship to service isn’t political. It’s ancestral. It’s cellular. It predates the republic.

“My dad was World War Two,” he said. “Granddad was World War One. Great-granddad by two was a Civil War sailor. We had a Minuteman from Mansfield. We’ve been serving in this country as long as there’s been a country — before there was a country.”

Third generation military veteran is the shorthand. But the truth goes deeper than a bumper sticker. The Wellmans have shown up for every American war since before America had a name, passed the obligation down like a family heirloom — not because they were ordered to, but because they understood, in some bone-deep way, that citizenship is not a spectator sport.

Fred raised his right hand for the first time at seventeen. West Point, 1983. A kid from Kirkwood going up the Hudson to learn how to lead soldiers.

“I swore an oath to the Constitution,” he told our audience — and there was nothing performative about it. “I did it my whole life. The first time I was just a kid.”

Four years later he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in International Relations. He flew helicopters. He went to war. He came back and went to war again. He earned his Ranger tab in the winter of 1993. He flew into Desert Storm as a young lieutenant commanding a platoon, and he never forgot the two men he lost there.

Hal Reichel. Mike Downs.

“My first soldiers who got killed were 35 years ago in Operation Desert Storm,” he said, his voice carrying something that doesn’t go away with time. “I’ve lived with that for 35 years. I know the price of war. I know the price of having the wrong equipment. The price of sending men into combat untrained and unprepared.”

Between wars, he went to Harvard. Not as a reward. Not as a comfortable sabbatical from service. He attended the Harvard Kennedy School as a Presidential Scholar and Public Service Fellow in the class of 2007, squeezing graduate school into the gap between deployments in a country that was bleeding out in the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah. He graduated with honors. The Lucius N. Littauer Fellow award — given for outstanding academic achievement, public service, and future leadership potential.

He flew Scout helicopters and Blackhawks across four combat tours. He served as public affairs officer at senior levels — which means he was the man at the intersection of military operations and public accountability for some of the most consequential decisions of the Global War on Terror. He briefed journalists. He handled Petraeus’s press. He stood in front of cameras in the middle of a war and tried to tell the truth about what was happening.

He retired in 2009.

And then, because Fred Wellman apparently doesn’t know what rest is, he built ScoutComms — his own veterans advocacy and public relations firm, nationally recognized, winning the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil Award twice, selected by HillVets as one of the hundred most impactful veterans in Washington two years running.

Then COVID hit.

New York Presbyterian needed a field hospital in the Ryan Larkin building. They needed it fast, and they needed people who could build command-and-control structures under pressure and not fall apart when things went sideways. Fred led a team of Special Operations medical veterans that built the facility and ran it. Because that is who he is. Because that is what twenty-two years in the Army produces — someone who, when the emergency calls, doesn’t wait to be asked twice.

All of that. Before the Lincoln Project. Before the congressional race. Before tonight.

The Bannon Line

Steve Schmidt knew Fred from Iraq.

When Schmidt — the Republican strategist who had helped run John McCain’s 2008 campaign — founded the Lincoln Project in late 2019 with a group of anti-Trump Republicans, he knew the veteran community was a potential pressure point. Trump had cultivated the military vote aggressively. The flags, the flyovers, the gold star families on stage. The imagery was powerful and the reality was rotten, and Schmidt knew that if anyone could communicate the gap between those two things to an audience that actually cared, it was someone who’d lived the reality.

He called Fred in the summer of 2020.

“I had closed my firm that I’d run for ten years — the pandemic got me,” Fred explained. “Steve said, hey, look, come work for us. One of our target audiences is veterans. And what we were saying is, look — Donald Trump should not be commander-in-chief. If you voted for him in 2016, my job was to create a permission structure that they wouldn’t vote for him a second time. That was my mission.”

The concept was precise. Not to convert hardline Trump supporters — those were gone. The target was the Republican veteran who’d voted for Trump in 2016 as a gamble, who’d watched four years of chaos and cruelty and military budget theater, and who needed someone to tell them it was okay to make a different choice. The permission structure. A credentialed, decorated combat veteran telling other veterans: you can do this. No one will know. Just walk in and vote for somebody else.

What made it remarkable was the coalition Fred assembled around that mission. He worked with VoteVets, Veterans for Responsible Leadership, and a half-dozen other organizations, building a coordinated ground operation that the Lincoln Project’s advertising budget was designed to amplify. He organized Facebook lives. He set up canvassing operations. He coordinated messaging down to the precinct level in states that mattered.

And then he made ads.

“I did ads with Sully Sullenberger,” he said, with something that sounded like quiet pride. “I did ads with Mark Hamill. I did ads with the Vindmans — Alex and Rachel — trying to reach people and say, look, you deserve better.”

The Sullenberger spot won two Campaigns & Elections Reed Awards and two more POLLIE Awards. Ad Age named the Lincoln Project the number four Marketer of the Year for 2020. The campaign featuring Captain Sully — the man who landed a powerless commercial aircraft in the Hudson River and walked away with every soul aboard alive — talking about what actual leadership looks like, was the kind of work that cuts through the noise.

But the number that mattered most came after the election.

Steve Bannon had done the Lincoln Project the unintentional favor of defining their goal for them. In a speech during the campaign, Bannon warned his own people: “These Lincoln Project guys — you shouldn’t dismiss them. If they can peel off 3% to 4% of Republicans who voted for us last time, it’s over.”

Fred’s team printed that quote on a poster. They called it the Bannon Line. Four percent.

They beat it.

“We found out after that election that about six percent of military and veteran community members who’d voted for Trump the first time didn’t the second time,” Fred said. “That was my job. And it worked.”

Executive Director. On the Worst Day.

Then came the hard part.

On the day the New York Times published its investigation into alleged sexual misconduct by Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver — the story that threatened to consume the entire organization — Fred Wellman became Executive Director.

Not after the crisis stabilized. Not after the lawyers had sorted it out. On the day it broke. While the story was still developing. While the phones were ringing and the media was circling and the institution that had just won one of the most significant advocacy campaigns in recent political history was teetering.

He doesn’t make a production of this. He mentions it the way combat veterans mention hard things — as fact, not drama.

“I took the helm the day the New York Times article broke detailing alleged improprieties of a former founder of LP, followed by a series of further accusations against the organization’s founders,” he told us. “I successfully led the investigations of those accusations and created resolutions for organizational change to address the failures. I managed the organization’s mission and staff through a transition to a permanent organization and professional political action committee.”

That’s the official version. What it actually means is that a man who’d already spent twenty-two years carrying other people’s burdens — military, political, institutional — stepped into the middle of a dumpster fire and put it out. Because someone had to. Because he was there. Because walking away from hard things has never been part of his operating system.

He departed when the transition was complete, then went back to advising campaigns, to podcasting, to building the “On Democracy” show on the MeidasTouch network, to accumulating a million followers across social media and figuring out what to do with them.

The answer, it turned out, was run for Congress.

Why Ann Wagner Has to Go

Let me tell you about Ann Wagner.

She has represented Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District since 2013. Thirteen years. Before that she was ambassador to Luxembourg for George W. Bush, before that an executive at Hallmark. She is wealthy — having quadrupled her net worth to an estimated $26 million while serving in Congress. She is, by the numbers, a successful politician who has held a safe Republican seat in a Republican state by doing exactly what Republican politicians in safe Republican states do.

She has never held a town hall.

Not since the district got difficult. Not since Trump changed the party. Not since COVID, not since January 6th, not since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Not ever. Not a single public event in thirteen years where constituents could show up, ask questions, and demand answers from the person drawing a congressional salary to represent them.

Fred has a phrase for her. Two, actually.

Absent Anne. Photo-op Anne.

“She’ll go into the district for a single day,” he explained, “and her campaign will set up multiple visits to businesses that are friendly to her. And she’ll wear the same outfit but a different jacket — she changes her jacket or sweater at each stop. They parcel out those visits over five or six days, making it look like she’s out and about in the district. And a lot of us know she’s wearing the same clothes. She does it all in one day. It’s like a safari into the district. And then she disappears.”

She disappeared for two weeks once. Then a photo appeared of her visiting sailors in Japan.

The imam at a mosque in Fred’s district told him they’d invited Wagner to visit — twice. She never replied. Labor leaders invited her to see their apprenticeship training facility. Never heard back. Elected officials across the district — including Republicans — have called her office and not gotten calls returned.

“I talked to a city official — a Republican,” Fred said, “and I asked him: if you had the perfect member of Congress, what would that look like? He said: I just need them to answer my calls and help me get some money.”

That’s the bar. Answer the phone. Help get federal dollars for the flood control projects, the road repairs through limestone hills that require federal funding to build, the abandoned landfill in Franklin County that is leaching illegal chemicals into a creek that feeds the Meramec River, which feeds the Mississippi.

“It’s going to be their problem,” Fred said, about the EPA’s current posture toward that landfill. “When I get to Congress, it’s going to be their problem. If they don’t want to come before a committee, no problem. I will knock on your door.”

Meanwhile, Missouri had the highest energy cost increase in the nation this year. Thirty-seven percent. A 60-year-old couple in Fred’s district saw their ACA health insurance premiums jump 299 percent after Republicans let the subsidies expire. Missouri is 49th in teacher pay. 39th in maternal mortality — having fallen from the top ten to the bottom ten in that category over the course of two decades of Republican governance.

“Why are we 49th in teacher pay?” Fred asked. “Why are we 39th in maternal mortality? When we started off two decades ago in the top ten to fifteen — now in the bottom ten to fifteen in every category. Is this working for you? So maybe it’s time to get a dude. Try me.”

Health Care Is Not a Stock Option

The health insurance story Fred told is one of those moments in a conversation where you stop thinking about the broadcast and just listen.

He’s a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel. Ranger tab. Twenty-two years of physical abuse that the human body doesn’t forget — four combat tours, helicopter vibrations, hard landings, the accumulated punishment of two decades doing things that bodies were not designed for.

“I have the most jacked-up back you can imagine,” he said. “No discs in the lower spine. I mean, it’s a mess. We knew my back was jacked since 1989. I’ve got fake knees. I’ve got a rebuilt left foot. So I finally gave out. I was having shooting pains in my legs. I could no longer walk. I go to my doctor — we know what we have. We know we have stenosis. Let’s get an MRI. Let’s see what the status is right now.”

The health insurance company said no.

Not to treatment. Not to surgery. To the diagnostic scan that would tell the surgeon what needed to be fixed.

“The health insurance company wouldn’t approve an MRI until I did physical therapy,” he said. “Because that’s cheaper. I went to physical therapy — we couldn’t do physical therapy. It was too painful. The poor woman basically had me sit on a heating pad for an hour. We paid for it. And finally, only because the doctor knew I needed an MRI, they gave in.”

He let that sit for a second. Then he said the thing that landed.

“Our health right now is dictated by shareholder value. Think about that. The health insurance companies decide what you’ll get treatment for based on cost first. If they can wait another month, that means the money you pay stays in the bank another month. When you do that a million times, it’s a lot of money. The goal is always to postpone care as long as they can.”

He’s running on expanding healthcare access. A public option. Allowing people to buy into Medicare before sixty-five. The math, he argues, is not complicated.

“States that have expanded Medicaid have had their economies improve, because healthy people work,” he said. “Healthy people don’t draw from the public dime. Healthy insured people don’t clog emergency rooms with bills that can’t be paid. We’ve forgotten how to invest in our people. Public education is an investment in the future of our country. Healthcare is an investment in the future of our country. Yes, it’s a public dollar — but that public dollar should be invested to improve the lives of the public.”

I’ve heard this argument dismissed as socialism so many times it has become a reflex on the American right. Fred has an answer for that too.

“We get this argument: I don’t want to pay taxes. Great. Then get off the roads. When your house burns down, don’t you dare call the fire department. When it floods, don’t call me. When your house burns down — you paid for it, it’s on you. That’s what pays for it.”

What Iran Taught Us. What We Refused to Learn.

I have to say this plainly, from here in Kyiv.

I’ve been watching Ukrainian defenders fight Iranian Shahad drones since 2022. I have walked through damage sites. I have sat with defenders who’ve lost colleagues to these things. I know what they do to unprotected positions. I know the tactics that have evolved to counter them — at enormous cost, through painful trial and error, over four years of learning paid for in blood.

The drone that killed American soldiers in Kuwait was the same weapon. The same Shahad-136. The same design. The same flight profile. The same vulnerabilities that Ukrainian defenders had been studying and adapting to counter for years.

So when Fred Wellman — Army aviator, four combat tours, former spokesman for the generals running these wars — said what he said, it wasn’t political commentary. It was professional military judgment from someone who knows the difference between what happened and what should have happened.

“How on earth have we watched what’s unfolded in Ukraine for four years,” he asked, “and we haven’t developed effective defenses for command posts to stop a Shahad drone? How is that possible? How did we watch the Iranian drones pummel our friends in Ukraine — watch that unfold — and then place service members in an unprotected command post as we launched a war with the maker of the drone?”

He paused.

I said, “I have an abacus. The abacus says: here’s what happened because we were chasing transgenders and making macho military again.”

The week before the strikes on Iran, he laid out exactly what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been doing with his time. Hegseth had been posting gym content. He had attacked the Boy Scouts. He had gone after Ivy League schools. He had amplified a culture war inside the Pentagon that produced press releases about wokeness while the actual work of coalition coordination — telling allied air forces which transponders to look for before launching air operations — apparently didn’t get done.

The result: a Kuwaiti F-18 shot down three American F-15s.

“The F-15 has never been shot down in the history of America,” Fred said. “Never. And so — instead of worrying about DEI and the Boy Scouts, maybe Hegseth and his leadership should have been worried about not having enough Patriot batteries, not having a defense against Shahad drones, and not having coordination with our allies so they don’t shoot our asses down.”

He has buried soldiers. He knows what it costs when leadership fails. His first soldiers — Hal Reichel, Mike Downs — died in Desert Storm thirty-five years ago, and he has carried their names ever since. When he talks about soldiers dying in an unprotected command post because their Secretary of Defense was too busy performing masculinity for social media to do his actual job, the weight of it is real. It is not an abstraction.

“I am crying about my soldiers getting killed,” he said. “That’s what I’m crying about.”

The War Powers question is connected to this directly. Congress had the chance to assert its constitutional authority — to demand that the administration explain the legal basis for an undeclared war, to require a vote before treasure and lives are committed. It voted the authority down.

“Look — we can agree that Iran’s bad. I don’t have a problem with that. I went to Iraq. I went to Desert Storm. Both President Bushes made their case. At least Bush went through the effort of sending Colin Powell to the Security Council. He held up a vial. This isn’t even bothering with that. The truth keeps changing. And so I’m just saying — make your case. The American public deserves to know why I have to bury my sons and daughters.”

The Republican Doormat Congress

Harry Truman kept coming up.

It makes sense. Fred is from Missouri — born in Buchanan County, raised in Kirkwood — and Truman is Missouri’s man. The haberdasher from Independence who became president by accident, ran the wartime Senate committee that bore his name, went after corruption and waste in military contracting with the ferociousness of a man who actually cared whether the soldiers had the right equipment, and who George Marshall later credited — with complete sincerity — as being as important to winning World War II as the soldiers in the field.

“I’m a big Harry Truman fan,” Fred said. “Truman used to say he had the Republican do-nothing Congress. I call it the Republican Doormat Congress. We’ve got a Congress that has given up so much of their power they’re nothing more than a doormat in front of the door that Trump and billionaires just walk across and wipe their feet on. And they just say, thank you, sir, and I’ll have another.”

He’s right. And the evidence is everywhere.

The authorization for use of military force — the basic constitutional mechanism by which Congress maintains any pretense of oversight over the executive’s war-making authority — failed. An undeclared war is burning in the Persian Gulf. Soldiers are dying. Congress shrugged.

The Epstein files landed with names in them. Real names. Documented connections. The Treasury Secretary’s name appeared in the same context as a convicted child sex trafficker’s island. And Congress — the body that has subpoena power, that has the constitutional authority to drag appointed officials before a committee and demand answers under oath — is using its hearing time to drag out the Clintons.

“I would like to know why the Treasury Secretary was on the island with the fucking pedophile,” Fred said, with the bluntness of a man who has decided that the moment for polite phrasing has passed. “He is an appointed government official. I want to know his association with the pedophile. And I’m angry that my opponent, Ann Wagner — who made her bones on ending sex trafficking — has no courage to say: if your name’s in this file multiple times, you should come before Congress and explain that.”

The cowardice, he argued, has a structure. Republicans have spent fifteen years feeding their base red meat — grievance, culture war, fear — and now they’re trapped by the monster they made.

“They’re terrified of their own followers,” I said to his comment. “They created the followers by throwing red meat, and now they have to answer to them. You can see this: John Cornyn suddenly had to go America First on us. That’s the only way he can stay ahead. They’re afraid of Trump. They’re afraid of not getting reelected. And so again and again we see this cowardice.”

Kash Patel. The CI-12 unit dismantled. The FITF shut down. Career counterintelligence professionals — the people who spent decades building the institutional knowledge to detect and counter Russian, Chinese, and Iranian intelligence operations inside American institutions — fired or forced out for political reasons. The systematic politicization of every tool the American government has to protect itself.

“They politicized the entire United States government in ways we cannot imagine,” Fred said. “And that is hurting our national security. It’s hurting everybody. There’s no question.”

He gets briefed on some of this. Not officially — he’s a candidate, not a member of Congress. But he has contacts. He built those relationships over twenty-two years in the Army and a decade in Washington. “I’ve been very fortunate,” he said. “I have great contacts within the FBI and the Pentagon and the VA who are keeping us informed. I get messages daily from folks inside who are keeping us informed.”

When he gets to Congress, he laid out what he intends to do.

Subpoenas. Committee hearings. Investigations with teeth. But also something that the usual playbook misses entirely — the camera.

“I could drag a camera crew over to the Department of Justice and knock on the door and say, what are you doing? It’s like shining light. We don’t use that power enough. We all know — when you shine the light on the cockroaches, they scatter. It’s not enough to get your two minutes in committee and walk out with your clip. You need to do more. You need to show up.”

He gave the Franklin County landfill as a specific example. Chemicals leaching into the Meramec River. EPA won’t act. State won’t act. County doesn’t have money.

“When I get to Congress, it’s going to be their problem. I will knock on their door. I will sit down with the administrator and say: what are you doing for the people in my district who have chemicals leaching into their groundwater? Because that’s your damn job. Not fighting wokeness. Not fighting a fake battle against climate change. Your job is to make sure my constituents aren’t drinking chemicals in their water.”

Mike Flynn Sued Me for $150 Million

This story needs to be told in full.

After the Lincoln Project, after years of public commentary and activism and putting his name on the line in ways that drew targets, Michael Flynn — Trump’s disgraced former National Security Advisor, the man who pled guilty to lying to the FBI and then received a presidential pardon — sued Fred Wellman for $150 million.

Over three tweets.

“I was literally sitting in my rented house with my used car,” Fred said, “getting sued for $150 million. Over three tweets.”

Flynn filed the lawsuit in a way that included Fred’s home address in the court documents. His own address was not included. The strategy was transparent: not to win in court, but to make Fred’s physical location available to anyone motivated to act on it. To scare him. To silence him. To make the cost of speaking out feel potentially mortal.

“That was the goal,” Fred said. “The goal was to scare me. The goal was to make me cower.”

Mark Zaid took the case. They won.

Fred has been doxed five times. The most recent was the week we spoke.

He grew up in a quarry town. His father — a Marine, World War Two veteran — put a .357 Magnum in his hands when he was seven years old and made sure he understood it wasn’t a toy. He trained as a Ranger. He flew combat missions. He buried soldiers.

“I ain’t scared,” he said. “I ain’t scared of you. I know how to use a gun. I’m a soldier. And bring it. You guys don’t scare me.”

He extended this directly to the Senator Sheehy incident — the former Navy SEAL-turned-Republican-Senator who physically grabbed and injured a constituent protester in the gallery, then claimed he was “de-escalating.”

“For the life of me, I cannot understand why a sitting United States Senator felt it was his duty to step off the podium and grab a citizen and try to pull him out of there,” Fred said. “He stood up. He yelled out. That’s allowed. That’s his right. And it’s the Capitol Police’s job to have him exit. It was no one’s job to brutally assault him. And then to lie — to say I was de-escalating. Bro, we can see the video. You ran up and grabbed him by the legs and yanked him until he broke his hand.”

He turned it back to the larger point.

“I’m a tough guy. I went to Rangers. I’m an Army Ranger. But I don’t walk around with my chest puffed up talking about what a badass I am. You know why? Real tough guys don’t have to. I don’t have to prove shit to anybody. Can we just have leaders that respect the office and respect the citizens they’re supposed to represent?”

The Defense Industrial Base. Jim Jordan. Lima, Ohio.

I do this work too. That’s the part of this conversation that connected with me personally — beyond the politics, beyond the campaign.

I built a site called uamission.com as part of my work at NatSecMedia. The premise was simple: when someone tells you that arming Ukraine is a waste of American money, show them the map. Show them the congressional districts where the factories are. Show them the jobs. Show them who voted yes and who voted no on the Ukraine supplemental, and then show them whether they have a weapons plant in their backyard.

Fred knows this data cold.

“The defense industrial sector is really grassroots America,” he said. “These aren’t abstract corporations. These are real plants in real communities. And the members who voted against the Ukraine supplemental — voted against funding that would have gone straight back into American factories, American paychecks, American communities — need to be held accountable for that.”

Jim Jordan. Lima, Ohio. The only facility in the western hemisphere that produces Abrams tanks. Jordan voted against the Ukraine assistance package.

“There’s a tank factory there,” Fred said. “Lima, Ohio. Jim Jordan’s that guy. Voted no.”

This connects to the broader argument Fred makes about Trump’s lie on munitions readiness — the claim that Biden depleted the arsenal and Trump has rebuilt it.

“Donald Trump said, well, Joe Biden depleted our arsenal and we did it. But it’s better than ever. It’s never been better.” Fred shook his head. “How on earth have we watched four years of war in Ukraine and not increased production of Patriots? Not developed countermeasures for Shahad drones? The answer is we allowed consolidation in the defense sector. We allowed focus to drift. We spent a year chasing wokeness in the military instead of building warfighting capacity. And now six soldiers are dead in Kuwait because we didn’t learn the lesson that Ukraine paid for in blood.”

This is the through-line between the foreign policy commentary and the domestic agenda. It isn’t abstract. The $57.9 billion in Ukraine security assistance — the money Trump’s allies claimed was wasted overseas — went into American factories, American workers, American communities, and American readiness. Every artillery shell produced for Ukraine is a shell produced by an American worker in a district that needs those jobs. Every Patriot battery sent forward is one that American engineers had to design, build, and maintain — and the skills developed doing that don’t disappear when the contract ends.

“We’ve allowed things to get out of control,” Fred said. “And now, thanks to an unplanned war in Iran, our gas is going up. Average Missourians are facing the pinch more than everybody else. And the people who did this — who voted against the defense industrial base, who defunded the capabilities we needed, who spent the readiness budget on culture war — are the same people who are now chest-bumping and sharing hype videos about the war they started.”

Citizens. Ukraine. The Thunderstorm.

I live here. I have to say this part.

Zelensky once tried to make a minor change — a structural tweak involving two anti-corruption bureaus. Within seven days, the Ukrainian public had reversed it. Not because of a vote. Not because of an institution. Because people showed up and made clear it was unacceptable. Because here, citizenship is not theoretical.

Everyone in Ukraine has skin in the game. Everyone carries something. The woman who runs the pharmacy on the corner, the teacher who stays to keep the school open during air raids, the grandmother who volunteers at the humanitarian distribution point — they are all part of it. Mobilization is wider than the soldiers at the front. It always has been.

America doesn’t have that.

I told Fred this directly. I asked him: how do you take people who doom-scroll, who silo in their comfort zones, who are exhausted and burned-out and convinced that their participation changes nothing — and turn them into citizens again?

He had been waiting for the question.

“The effort I saw at that No Kings Day,” he said, “that’s when I knew.”

He’d been organizing rallies before anyone called them No Kings Day — a Unite for Veterans demonstration on the National Mall that brought him together with the Dropkick Murphys’ Ken Casey, who would later give him a shout-out from the stage in his own district that went viral with a quarter-million views. He was out there. He was watching the energy build.

And then the thunderstorm rally happened.

Seven thousand people on the side of one of the busiest roads in Missouri’s second congressional district. Not inside a venue. Not on a nice day. In a raging, lightning-cracking thunderstorm. Senior citizens who had never held a sign in their lives. Working people who had never thought of themselves as political. All of them standing in the rain because something had finally broken through.

“If I can take the energy that put 7,000 people out in a thunderstorm,” he said, “and get them to knock doors, get them to volunteer for my campaign, get them to talk to their neighbors — and then, by God, get out and vote — if we take that energy of the population and turn that into the electorate, we will win.”

He brought up Ronald Speirs at Bastogne. The scene from Band of Brothers that is actually true history — Easy Company pinned down in the snow, the commander frozen, replacements terrified, the men scattered and unable to move. Speirs arriving. Assessment: we’re stuck. Response: you go left, you go right, follow me.

Then he ran through fire.

“What I think people need right now,” Fred said, “are leaders who are willing to step up and say: I will take the barbs and arrows. I will take the shots. Because I’ve been taking MAGA shots for six years. I’ve been doxed five times. I got sued by Mike Flynn. Hit pieces have been written about me. I’ve been through all of it. And I’m still here. Bring it. That’s what we need. People who have been knocked down and gotten back up and gone back into the battle.”

He acknowledged the part of this that doesn’t come naturally to him.

“It’s been very weird for me to go up and say: me, follow me. Because in the Army, you say we. You say the mission. A real leader defers to the mission, not themselves. But there is that moment — that young lieutenant moment — where you have to say: build rapport, build trust, and then say: follow me. Let’s go.”

He was a butter bar once. He led his third platoon into Desert Storm at twenty-four years old and learned, the hard way, what leadership actually requires. Not the chest-puffing. Not the noise. The quiet, consistent, under-fire presence that makes people trust you enough to move.

67% Paycheck to Paycheck

The number that stopped me cold.

October 2025 study. 67 percent of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

Not lower-income Americans. Not working poor. Sixty-seven percent. Two thirds. Upper-middle class. People with good jobs and nice neighborhoods and kids in decent schools. Everyone teetering on the edge of a single cancer diagnosis, a single layoff, a single piece of bad luck.

“One lost job,” Fred said. “One cancer diagnosis, and you’ve seen it — the house goes into foreclosure. The family falls apart. We are so many Americans right now, hungry for somebody to acknowledge — just to acknowledge — hey, I see it. And this isn’t political. I get that you’re worried.”

His own kids. He talks about them on the campaign trail because they are the argument made human.

His oldest daughter is married to a National Guardsman. His oldest son works for a major corporation and is stuck in a starter home he can’t afford to upgrade. His youngest daughter owns a small business that’s been bleeding under tariffs and the government shutdown. His youngest son works in healthcare.

“You couldn’t have a more perfect storm,” he said. “My kids represent the exact people I’m running for — every one of them feeling the effects of this moment.”

He put the housing crisis in terms that cut:

“We have the highest percentage of 18 to 24-year-old men living at home in the history of America. That’s not because they’re not ready to launch. It’s not because of avocado toast. It’s because the cost of living has become too high for our next generation to live in our country. That should terrify every American.”

My hometown of Kirkwood, he said. The safe Mayberry suburb where he rode his bike as a kid. Beautiful little town. Multiple people had told him directly: my kids cannot live in Kirkwood. They cannot afford it.

“What are we handing to our next generation if they can’t afford a home anymore? If a first-time home buyer can’t get started until they’re forty years old? If rent is beyond their means? What are we doing?”

He’s running to do something about it. Hard things, he said. The kind of hard things that might get you fired. The kind that anger corporate PACs and lobbyists and make you a target in two years. He’s sixty years old, has his retirement pay, has TRICARE, has a fiancée who runs a successful business. He’s not going to Washington to protect himself. He’s going because the job needs doing.

“I’m not going to be a backbencher,” he said. “It’s just not who I am.”

We the People. Not They the Oligarchs.

Near the end of our conversation, I told a story.

Years ago, in Houston, I had a friend. Just a musician — a bass player, good enough, moved through the local jazz and fusion scene. I knew him from the jams. He was never political. And then, gradually, he became political — but not in the way that produces action. In the way that produces resentment. AM radio every day. Us against the government. The world is rigged. Nobody can do anything.

I asked him once: what does the Constitution actually say?

He didn’t know. He knew the Second Amendment. He thought he knew the First. But the Preamble — the actual founding statement of what the American experiment is supposed to be — was gone.

I gave it to him simple: We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Not they the corporations. Not they the tech bros. Not they the oligarchs.

We the people.

“They are afraid of us,” I said. “They are petrified of us. Now, we can make it to where they’re not — by being mollified, by being satiated, if our bellies are full we go home. Or we can say: we are hungry for information. We are hungry for change. We are hungry for results.”

He talked about what it means to weaponize outrage into paralysis — the corporate and political interests that don’t want citizens, they want audience. They want you consuming, not organizing. Scrolling, not knocking on doors. Angry, but at the wrong things, in ways that produce no change.

Fred picked it up immediately. “You are the one who can change this. And if you feel like by yourself you’re nothing — I totally understand. But if we can take 7,000 people in a thunderstorm and turn them into an organized, coordinated, voting, door-knocking force — we win.”

The research now shows that flipping Missouri’s second congressional district — alone — would also flip six state house seats on the same ballot. Break the Republican supermajority in Jefferson City. Force the Missouri legislature to actually negotiate instead of governing by fiat.

“We have real power in this district,” he said. “750,000 people. 75 miles end to end. We can change the state and the country.”

He has raised $429,000 from more than 14,000 individual donors in three months. He has 450 volunteers. He is running in every corner of the district — rural, suburban, labor halls, iftar dinners, synagogues, union halls, cornfields. The districts that Democrats have conceded, he is contesting. The voters that Democratic strategists have written off, he is talking to.

“I started my campaign with several philosophies that haven’t changed,” he said. “We’re going to run everywhere. There are Democrats there. I need them to vote. I need them to know I exist. And there are independents who are frustrated with the way the world is going. We’re running in every corner of this district for everyone.”

The Vote Count That Mattered

He told one more story before we wrapped. There’s a plan for Missouri.

Not to win on ideology. Not to out-spend Ann Wagner — she has the PAC money, the corporate connections, the thirteen-year incumbent infrastructure. He’s going to win by showing up. By being in every corner of every county. By looking at every voter and saying: I know your district. I know your rivers. I know your roads and your floods and your landfill and your healthcare premiums and your kids who can’t afford to stay in the town where they grew up. I know it because I grew up there too. And I came back.

“I just want to go there and be a person that respects all 750,000 people in my district,” he said. “Respects the people who voted for me and respects the people who didn’t. Go there as what I call myself: a Missouri Democrat. I’m not running for the National Democrats. I’m running for this district. To listen and make a difference.”

The Mission

He left Kirkwood at seventeen.

The quarry where his Marine father taught him to shoot a .357 at age seven. The bike lanes he used to ride. The Mayberry streets that now price out the next generation.

He carried that place through Desert Storm, through Iraq, through Harvard, through the Lincoln Project, through Mike Flynn’s lawsuit, through five doxings, through a COVID field hospital in New York City, through a million followers on social media who were looking for someone to tell them the truth.

He came home.

He looked at the district. He looked at the energy of 7,000 people in a thunderstorm. He looked at the kids who couldn’t afford to stay. He looked at the Congress member who had never held a single town hall. He looked at the soldiers dying in Kuwait from the same Iranian drones his friends in Ukraine have been fighting for four years while the Secretary of Defense was posting gym content.

He decided.

Flipping Missouri is a mission.

Not a slogan. Not a campaign talking point. A mission — the way a Ranger understands the word. A thing with a clear objective, a plan, a team, and a commander willing to run through the fire first.

“I ran this race because my opponent is vulnerable,” he said. “There’s time for change. And we’re going to do it. I didn’t run this race to take second.”

He hasn’t.

Support Fred Wellman’s campaign for Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District at WellmanforMO.com. The Democratic primary is August 4, 2026.

The Wire Tap broadcasts live on Substack. Subscribe at ChrisSampson.com for regular dispatches from Kyiv and original investigative journalism on the national security crisis unfolding in Washington.

Fred Wellman: Service, Democracy, and the Fight for America’s Future

From Kyiv, journalist Chris Sampson speaks with retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, a four-tour combat veteran, former Lincoln Project strategist, and current congressional candidate in Missouri’s 2nd District.

The conversation ranges from the cost-of-living crisis facing working Americans to the lessons the United States still refuses to learn from Ukraine’s war against Russia. Wellman argues that Congress has abandoned its constitutional responsibilities, that corruption and corporate influence dominate American politics, and that veterans understand something too many politicians do not: leadership carries consequences measured in lives.

Broadcast from Ukraine during wartime, this episode of The Wire Tap explores what service, accountability, and democratic leadership should look like in a moment of global instability.

TRANSCRIPT: Tonight we’re joined by someone I’ve wanted to talk to for a while — Fred Wellman. Fred has been doing some remarkable work in political advocacy and now he’s running for Congress in Missouri.

Fred, thanks for joining us.

Fred Wellman:
Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Sampson:
For people who don’t know your story yet, tell them a little bit about who you are and why you decided to run.

Fred Wellman:
Sure. I’m running for Congress in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District, just outside St. Louis — my hometown. I grew up in Kirkwood. I left when I was 17 to attend West Point and spent more than 20 years in the Army.

I served four combat tours, flew helicopters, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. After the military I ran a veterans advocacy firm, helped run a COVID field hospital during the pandemic, and worked with the Lincoln Project.

I moved back to Missouri five years ago. As I watched what was happening in Washington and here in my district, I realized our representative simply wasn’t doing the job.

Our incumbent has been in office for thirteen years and has never held a town hall — not once. Local officials say she doesn’t answer their calls. She hasn’t brought meaningful investment into the district.

Meanwhile her personal wealth has quadrupled while she’s been in Congress.

I don’t have a problem with people being wealthy. But when you pull the ladder up behind you and stop representing the people who sent you to Washington, that’s a problem.

So I decided to run.

Chris Sampson:
One of the things that stands out about your background is that you come from a long line of military service.

Fred Wellman:
That’s right. My father was a World War II veteran. My grandfather served in World War I. We’ve had family members serving going all the way back to the Civil War.

Service to the country is something that runs deep in my family.

And when you’ve worn the uniform, you understand something very clearly: leadership carries consequences.

Decisions made in Washington can lead directly to soldiers losing their lives. They can determine whether families have healthcare. They can determine whether communities survive economic crises.

People in leadership should feel the burden of those decisions.

Chris Sampson:
And that’s a point I think many Americans miss. I’m speaking to you from Kyiv right now. Ukraine has spent four years fighting Iranian-designed drones launched by Russia.

Yet the United States is now suddenly discovering the threat of drone warfare as if it’s brand new.

Fred Wellman:
Exactly.

We’ve watched what has happened in Ukraine. We’ve seen how effective these drones are. And yet American forces were placed in command posts without adequate overhead protection.

That’s not a technological problem — it’s a leadership problem.

If we spent less time fighting cultural battles about “wokeness” and more time preparing for modern warfare, we would be better prepared.

Chris Sampson:
You’ve also talked a lot about the economic pressures facing Americans right now — healthcare, housing, energy.

Fred Wellman:
Yes, because that’s what people talk about when you meet them face to face.

In Missouri this year, energy costs rose 37 percent — the highest increase in the country.

Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. A couple in my district saw their insurance premiums increase nearly 300 percent.

Young people can’t afford homes in the towns they grew up in. Many are moving back in with their parents simply because the cost of living has become impossible.

This is what voters are worried about.

And yet Washington keeps focusing on culture wars while ignoring the economic reality facing working Americans.

Chris Sampson:
Healthcare is one of the issues you highlight frequently.

Fred Wellman:
Because the system is broken.

Right now, healthcare decisions in the United States are dictated by shareholder value.

Insurance companies decide when you receive treatment based on what costs them the least money.

I experienced this myself. My back is severely damaged from years in the Army. My doctor knew I needed an MRI.

The insurance company refused until I completed physical therapy first — because therapy was cheaper.

Of course the therapy couldn’t even be done because the injury was too severe.

This happens millions of times across the country.

Our healthcare system delays treatment because delays increase profits.

Chris Sampson:
You also spent time working with the Lincoln Project, which played a major role during the 2020 election.

Fred Wellman:
Yes. My role there focused on outreach to veterans and military families.

The goal was simple: create a permission structure for Republicans who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 to feel comfortable voting against him in 2020.

We knew that if even three or four percent of those voters changed their vote, the election outcome could change.

In the end, about six percent of veterans who voted for Trump the first time did not vote for him again.

That mattered.

Chris Sampson:
There’s also the issue of corruption and congressional power. Congress seems to have surrendered enormous authority to the executive branch.

Fred Wellman:
That’s absolutely true.

Members of Congress swear an oath to the Constitution, yet they constantly abdicate their responsibilities.

The Constitution requires Congress to authorize war. Yet we’ve seen military operations launched without serious debate or oversight.

Congress has effectively turned itself into a doormat.

They allow powerful figures to wipe their feet on the institution rather than defend it.

Chris Sampson:
From where I sit in Ukraine, one of the most striking things is how often Americans accuse Ukraine of corruption while ignoring corruption at home.

Fred Wellman:
Exactly.

If we’re going to talk about corruption, we need to talk about corruption everywhere — including the United States.

Transparency and accountability are essential to democracy.

And right now, too many politicians are afraid to challenge powerful interests because they fear losing elections.

That fear is destroying the integrity of our political system.

Chris Sampson:
And ultimately the question becomes: what kind of country are we leaving to the next generation?

Fred Wellman:
That’s the question I hear everywhere.

Parents tell me their kids can’t afford homes in the communities they grew up in.

Young adults are working hard, but the system feels stacked against them.

If we continue down this path, we risk creating a country where opportunity no longer exists for the next generation.

That’s why I’m running.

Chris Sampson:
Fred Wellman, thanks for joining us tonight.

Fred Wellman:
Thanks for having me, Chris.