1:03:37 greatest champions in the whole realm of decentralization. And advocating for peer to peer cryptocurrency usage and just teaching people, empowering people with this message that really is the empowerment of human civilization, in my view, is none other than Roger Ver. Roger Ver, known as Bitcoin Jesus, although he's not necessarily a huge fan of that name. But it kind of stuck because he's been so giving and in his knowledge and also in the early days of a lot of Bitcoin. Hope those people held on to it. And he is, of course, facing extreme prosecution by the United States government because, I believe, because they want to silence him because he's such an advocate for decentralization. He is currently in Spain facing the risk of, well, an extradition order from the United States. And potentially facing over 100 years in prison in the United States if he is convicted.
1:04:35 And he joins us with a censored tag over his mouth at the moment. And beside him, Tracey Thurman. Tracey and Roger, it's an honor to have you both on the show today. Thank you for joining us from Spain. Thank you, Mike. We're very pleased to be able to join you. We're both huge fans of this show and it's an honor to tell Roger's story here on InfoWars. Well, thank you both for taking the time. I know the time zones, you know, it's made it a little bit difficult. And I hope we can get Roger to say something here during this segment. But Tracy, let's start with you.
1:05:11 Keep it in a summary format here because of the just the compactness of today's broadcast here. But tell us the full story to the extent you can of what Roger Ver is facing and why they are trying to silence him. Sure. This story really goes back in a quarter century. That's how long the lawfare against Roger has been going on. So, 25 years ago, Roger ran for office as a young man in California as a libertarian and in a debate there when he was speaking with the Republican and the Democratic candidates.
1:05:46 He was talking about what happened in Waco, Texas. Because one of the things Rogers cares about most is human freedom and ending human suffering, especially the suffering of children. And he talked about how the ATF had murdered children in Waco, Texas. That's true. They did. He called them jackbooted child murdering thugs, which is what they are. It's what they did in Waco. But the ATF decided that day to take offense and to begin lawfare against Roger. And so they played the old Stalinist trick of show me the man, I'll find you the crime. And what they found was that Roger had sold fireworks on eBay. Now he was one of hundreds of people who had done this. He was buying them from Cabela's catalog and reselling them there as retail arbitrage. Nobody had a license to do this. Cabela's didn't have a license to do it. But they picked one man and one man only to punish for not having a license for selling these fireworks, and that was Roger.
1:06:36 And so Roger ended up spending ten months in federal prison because the ATF wanted him silenced. And what year was this? What was that? What year did this take place? It started in 1999. His prison sentence was 2002 to 2003. Okay, but they didn't send anybody else to prison for the same behavior. Not one person, in fact, and if you're wondering for a moment, are you sure this was lawfare? We know it was lawfare because in a meeting between the ATF, the prosecutor, and Roger's attorney, Roger's attorney was making the case. Look, this is normally something where you would give the guy maybe a fine or you just tell him to go get a license, right? Everybody else, that's what you're doing. And the ATF agent pounded his fist on the table and said, you didn't hear what he said about us.
1:07:24 Right, so because they did not like his speech, they selectively persecuted him. Now, we're all familiar with that here at InfoWars and myself as well. We've all been targeted because of our speech. But clearly what you're describing now is long before the arrival of Bitcoin, right? So this is long before the arrival of Bitcoin. Who else were the victims of lawfare going back that far other than perhaps Roger Ver and Alex Jones? This is something they have in common, is that they were both canaries in the coal mine of lawfare. Yes. These two men. And so by the time Roger got out, it was very clear to him the US government was not done with him. The US government would probably never be done with him. And so he decided, tragically, that he had to leave the country in order to be safe. And so that's what he did. He left the US.
1:08:14 And in the end, he had to give up his US citizenship to get citizenship elsewhere because of the threat he felt from the US government. That may have sounded insane to other people a decade ago. I think today most of your listeners will be nodding their heads and saying, I understand that now. I've watched so many of my heroes go down, go to prison, be silenced, be debanked. And Roger was one of the first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to confirm that today, I mean, how many Americans are thinking, especially before the election, conservatives were thinking about, well, should I go to Panama? Should I go to Chile? Where should I go? Thailand. Now, it's a lot of the Democrats, but they wanna flee because they committed crimes against the American people such as censorship and malicious prosecution. Which I think is this case here also malicious prosecution. And I do wanna mention before you continue Tracy, that I am personally advocating for President Trump
1:09:13 consider a pardon for Roger Ver. Because a pardon of Roger Ver would send a very powerful message to the pro-freedom, pro-America, pro-crypto community that Donald Trump, that you understand their plight. And you are not going to allow the Department of Justice of this government to be weaponized against advocates of decentralized finance. So that's my view. I think I can say with certainty that Roger is very grateful for that as well. Well, please continue Tracy. We're grateful for everything that he has done over the years, but please continue.
1:09:52 Yeah, so he left this country and then in 2011 he discovered Bitcoin. And if I know the story correctly, he was so intrigued by it, so excited by it, that he stayed up for days reading about it to the point of actually needing medical care due to being sleep deprived. But what he saw in Bitcoin was the opportunity for a permissionless free exchange between people. Because if you've already been the target of the government, and again, at this point many of your listeners have been, You know that the government has the ability to turn off your money. That's right. And as long as the government has the ability to turn off your money, they have the ability to control you. Yep, yep. And central bank digital currencies would only exacerbate that manipulation and threat against all of us. This is a primary theme here at InfoWars, is alerting people to the dangers of CBDCs
1:10:43 And so it seems to me that one of the reasons why the US government, at least the pre-Trump government here, wants to prosecute Roger is because, this is just my opinion, but I believe that Roger's education and empowerment of people would tend to help people realize the dangers of CBDCs. And so do you agree with this assessment, Tracy? I do. I do. I do. I think that that is a huge piece of why he's being targeted. Anyone who is building the ecosystem of freedom that allows us to have you know to have our own food to have our own medical care to make all these choices but above all to make our own choices about our our finances to be able to transact together. That is critical to absolutely every piece. And few people have done more to
1:11:31 to enable that than Roger has. And I do think that is a huge piece of why this last administration would had it out for him. And-. No, I understand, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a petition that people can sign, I believe. Is it freerogernow.org, is that it? Freerogernow.org, we encourage everybody, please go there, please sign it. It will take literally less than 15 seconds of your time. We don't ask you to put in all your personal information. But we need to be able to show President Trump and his incoming administration that there is support for this, there is support for Roger. And I can tell you, if you have ever put your money into any cryptocurrency,
1:12:11 If you have ever benefited from the anti-lockdown movement, the medical freedom movement, from any of these things, even the anti-war movement, you've benefited from Roger's work. You just don't know about it. Yeah, true. And so please give 15 seconds of your time to pay back to the man who has done so much for all of us. Okay, and that petition, I mean, that's not a commercial effort. People who sign that, they're not gonna get spammed with, hey, buy this meme coin or anything like that. It's not that at all. It's just- You might get the occasional email saying, hey, here's something new in our campaign. That would be it. We would never dream of doing anything like that with this list. This is solely for people who want to support Roger being free again and being able to return to the US. Absolutely.
1:12:56 He gave up his citizenship because he was too afraid to be here anymore and no longer felt safe. And frankly, the conduct of our government since then has done nothing to dissuade him of that. He would love nothing more than to be a free man again, to be able to return to the US as a free man, welcomed back by us as Americans, and be able to see the people he loves again. He's been kept away from them for nearly a decade. It's horrible. Well, Roger is the kind of person who's a great innovator, the kind of person that makes this country great. And if you wanna make America great again, you need people like Roger here. Now, it's a little weird actually having Roger sitting there unable to speak. Roger, can you give me a thumbs up that if you come to the US, will you come here to the Infowars studios?
1:13:43 join us for an interview. Can you at least, can you, okay, we got a double thumbs up on that. All right, so thank you. Thank you for all you're doing, Roger. I know the reason you're not speaking, I would imagine is on attorney's advice because of the persecution, the case that you're facing and we understand that. I just want you to know that all of us in America are rooting for you and Tracy, you have been an incredible advocate. You flew to my studio and did an interview with me a couple of weeks ago. Thank you for doing that. Your office obviously putting a lot of air miles in on this. What, I just have to ask you honestly, like what?
1:14:24 What is driving you to do this? This has taken your whole time and passion. My entire life has gone home to get this done. You're right, Mike. I've spent years away from my own family against my will. I have my family back now. Roger has a right to have his loved ones back in his life too. And in order to do that, he has to be able to return to America as a free man. And so You know, when I first agreed to take on this case, I was ideologically aligned. I was very concerned about the legal precedent that's being set. You know, they're attempting to destroy attorney-client privilege here. They're attempting to destroy reliance on counsel defense. Those are, you know, you can go look those up, but those are a really big deal for all Americans if those go down. So that's what I was initially motivated by. But I've worked with a lot of
1:15:12 high net worth clients and generally they're very difficult people to be totally honest with you. And I didn't expect to get along with Roger as a human being, but he's a really wonderful person. He's a kind person, he's compassionate. I've never seen him treat anyone with anything other than respect. And so I feel personally that he should have a right as a human being to return to his loved ones. His loved ones who are here in the United States, who are in the United States. He should be able to return as an American to America. Yes. And be reunited with them. And that's what motivates me about all of this. I know the pain of being separated from your loved ones. Also, Attorney Roger Barnes has also chimed in on this. And I don't think we have that clip available. But guys, if you could find that clip, we would like to play it. I think it's short, maybe a minute. But Barnes is correct in pointing out the legal importance of this. Because as I understand it, Tracey,
1:16:05 The federal government even raided the law offices of Rogers' attorney and confiscated private privileged communications. Attorney-client privilege has been thrown out the window. And that just speaks to the kind of lawfare that has been waged against Donald Trump, against Alex Jones, and so many of us in the pro-freedom, pro-liberty, pro-America space. Am I correct, is my understanding correct on what they did? Yes, the armed federal agents raided his attorney's office. And they timed it by the way to be done at the same time they were raiding Roger's office and his accountant's office. That way, Roger was essentially denied legal protection because he couldn't call his attorneys. They were a little busy at that moment. Right.
1:16:52 And they interrogated his attorneys, they took reams of documents they had absolutely no right to. And it's a horrifying precedent if this is allowed to stand. Imagine any one of you who's ever dependent on an attorney, that your attorney could be forced to turn over data and be questioned about you. That you're no longer able to depend on your accountant to do your taxes and be able to say, look, I turned over all the information to them. I asked them to do it right. They're qualified. It's called a reliance on counsel defense because without it, we're all screwed. The tax code is essentially 70,000 pages. None of us can possibly memorize that. And so Roger hired some of the best attorneys in the world to help him understand that and to take care of it for him. And they're trying to use his case to take away that right for all of us in the same way they used Alex Jones to try to take away the rights of many Americans. And many people like you and me, Mike, we stood up and we said, look, if you don't stand up for Alex Jones,