Robert Barnes
speaker
166 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Robert Barnes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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He'd been talking about it for years, about how the various intelligence communities around the world are trying to suppress our opportunity of ordinary people to have financial freedom. And all of a sudden, two weeks after that book is published, he is suddenly indicted. And an indictment is later unsealed. He's arrested. He's being held with extradition in Spain.
He was originally jailed in the same place they jailed John McAfee, also on tax charges. And he ended up dead in Spain. So he does get bail pending the challenge of the extradition. And he filed a motion to dismiss that revealed extraordinary government malfeasance and misconduct in his case.
So I was a suspect of his case from day one because I was like, why are they targeting this guy that's a high profile political critic over an eclectic tax theory? I do a lot of criminal tax law. They're trying to take criminal tax cases now and use them to create new tax law. For example, the exit tax has always been considered constitutionally questionable.
It says if you give up your citizenship, suddenly all your property gets treated as income. That's not a legally credible approach. And yet he still went forward and paid all that and did all that, and they just decided to retroactively prosecute him for money he'd made outside the United States while he was not a U.S. citizen from non-U.S. sources.
It's never been done in American history, the prosecution of Roger Ver. The theory that you can use an exit tax to criminally prosecute someone when the tax itself is likely unconstitutional and they want to impose a national property tax on us. I mean, Warren is smart. She calls it a wealth tax. It's a property tax. That's unconstitutional.
We require apportionment for direct taxes unless it's an income tax in America. And property taxes by the Supreme Court's ruling are excluded from the definition of income. So they're trying to redefine the word income. They're trying to target this high-profile political critic of their system. They're trying to create novel interpretation of tax law.
And they're all doing this by trying to imprison him for 109 years. That's what he's looking at. Roger Ver is looking at 109 years for filing tax returns, according to what his own accountants and attorneys told him to. And it turned out the government lied. Our own U.S.
attorneys lied to the Spanish courts and now may be under criminal investigation in Spain based on this motion to dismiss that Roger Ver just filed. That is a legal team just filed. And what because what it revealed was that the they knew that his own attorneys had told him to file the way he filed.
And they lied to the Spanish courts and said, oh, no, his attorneys told him to do the exact opposite of what he did. So they knew they were lying because they had actually broken attorney-client privilege. This case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. They stole a bunch of his attorney-client file records. They executed a search warrant, unheard of also, in the tax arena.
You're supposed to have attorney-client privilege protection. They got all of his information. But what it showed was he had followed their advice all the way through. He said, whatever we do, I want to make sure I do it correctly. Because I know how the government harasses people that are going to be critical.
And I'm not going to keep my mouth shut about how they're trying to abuse the power and control of Bitcoin or the benefit of central planners and intelligence agencies and not ordinary people. And that's why he's being targeted. And he's been quiet until he did an interview with Tucker Carlson that was published yesterday.
And credit to him, there's a bunch of people in the Bitcoin space that have been very, I've been very concerned about his case from day one. Same with Ross Ulbricht, the buddy of mine was his, that was the Silk Road case. Joshua Dratel was a buddy of mine, his lawyer, who documented all kinds of government misconduct. In that case, it turned out IRS agents were stealing money.
And yet these are the people that prosecuted him. So it's a terrifying case. It's another political case. And I'm trying to get it on the radar of the Trump world because Roger Ver is a guy that we cannot afford to be prosecuted if we're serious about protecting Bitcoin and if we're serious about depoliticizing the Department of Justice.
Well, I'm going to bring Aaron Day in here in a minute to talk about the topic of Bitcoin more generally and sort of contextualize this for us. Caleb, you put up a couple of tweets. I think one was Aaron, maybe both were Aaron's. We couldn't read them. Could you maybe read them to us?
And there was another one also before you put, yeah.
Got it. And again, before we go to break here, Robert, how do you understand Bitcoin generally? Are you sort of an advocate? Do you see it as something challenging central banks? How do you understand it? And then I'll let Aaron explain more to us when he gets in here after the break.
So I'm definitely more aligned with Roger's perspective on Bitcoin. I was a big believer in Satoshi's initial proposal. I think he's a genius, whoever he was. His goal was, how do we give people the tools and power? Exactly, that's correct.
To give people the individual tools and techniques to challenge the state and be independent and separate from the state, whether it's central banks or central planners. And I mean, like what Bitcoin can do in places like Africa and other places is extraordinary. And we've seen it. We've seen it grow dramatically just since Trump got elected. It's, you know, Bitcoin is over 100,000 thereabouts.
So I think it has the potential that Roger identifies. But it depends on people exercising that potential to give it that fulfillment. Otherwise, the intelligence apparatus and the rest will co-opt it, try to make it into a central bank digital currency. And then we get a social credit score that makes China's look like a walk in the park.
All right, we will get more into that after the break with Aaron Day. Again, entrepreneur, investor, advisor with three decades of experience across e-commerce, healthcare, blockchain, AI, clean technologies. He's a Duke and Harvard graduate. He is the author of The Final Countdown, Crypto, Gold, Silver, and People's Last Stand Against Tyranny by Central Bank Digital Currencies.
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