e advantage of living next to the wealthiest country know. we will be brazil with the very, very pour 80 or 90% is heartbreaking not only the freest country that ever existed but what sets america apart a and in california was our enorm burris and prosperous middle class. enormous. . .

i suppose suppose please send my kids can apply for affirmative action. >> it works for those and then it was gone. so, what we do aside from serving as a warning to others at this point - >> that is a good question. this is not an encouraging

pause. [laughter] >> i'm thinking. i think that it is a warning for others. [laughter] i don't see anything else that can be done. alert the rest of us. but also i wonder - i want it to be as difficult to get into the united states as it is to get out of east germany. [applause] schooley says just don't work. they can come untied. i know that human spirit. [laughter] my long-term plan which would be fantastic for israel is to move

them down to the northern portion of mexico. i have a chapter why can't we have the policy on immigration. that is a country that knows how to defend its borders. that would be good for them and good for us fantastic. they would have us right next to them on one whole side. >> we have to get rid of the policy i don't think we would have to repeal. in the news now is this biggest drug cartel leader who couple of years ago flew back to give birth to her own news anchor babies and as soon she flew right back to join to replace

the fbi's most wanted list. how did he escape because in mexico they own the prison. forget california. that is your future america. as i described in my book the policy was a footnote in the opinion in 1982. this doesn't go back to the reconstruction amendments. again utterly insulting to black americans come into the 18th amendment why would would the past? so that one day they could usher across image of a baby and say you didn't catch me. people don't put trap doors and a constitution. a secret trap door. this will surprise them. [laughter] to get an amendment passed you need a feeling about a big thing that we just thought a civil war

to stop enslaving blacks. the 14th amendment is absolutely exclusively about black americans. that's what it's about. here we are talking about people but never set foot playing a game of red rover with our border patrol for the most precious possession in the universe, citizenship in this country. that isn't how you get american citizenship. [applause] dot justice brennan - this only came in 1982 justice brennan slipped it in a footnote of a 1982 opinion. it is utterly outrageous fraudulent. the judge as you can't attest very smart, not a friend of social conservatives.

this isn't me speaking. a few years ago i quoted in the book and he conquered for the sole purpose of adding the conference said what you end this policy it is not in the constitution. pass the past the wall tomorrow and end it. not only does it have to be ended and this would save california, i want a retroactive [applause] what if we had a mentally devotionals agreement with justice - [laughter] not that hard to imagine who says all of america or all of the world is a citizen of america or are we all going to honor that? because that's what has happened with the anchor baby policy. >> make sure kennedy takes his drugs this morning. [laughter]

yes, what if we had a. so the anchor policy the wall the moratorium. we need a complete integration memorial so this isn't just about - this isn't just about latin america or mexico. i don't want european immigrants coming. no marriage no refugees, just shut it down for ten years and you will see and i explain in the end of the book my original idea was let's go back to before 1970 and try it again. people are better than us rather than worse than us but that won't work because we have all of these nonprofits. we have hundreds of migrant rights groups and george soros open society institute and while raza. we have hundreds of pieces and i do a paragraph that goes on for

a full-page and those are all the ones that become the immigration judges and work at the ins. until they are out of business and vacationing in cuba and fighting with peru until they are gone america can't be safe so we need to shut down immigration altogether for a decade, dust off the books, some only the ones already here and we can start it up again totally cheap. i can do it all before breakfast. [laughter] just send me the photos. i would be right 99% of the time better than we are getting right now 100% of the time. >> 11 times "new york times" best-selling author. thank you. [applause]

speaketh the story with two of his friends on a $3 million contract to supply ammunition to the u.s. military when they were in their early 20s. in an effort to maximize its profit they used chinese munitions to fulfill the contract violation of u.s. law.

good evening and welcome to all belonged books and music. i'm susanna susan and we are pleased to bring you author guy lawson the best-selling author and award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in rolling stone, "new york times" magazine on the gq and harper to name a few. his latest book, "arms and the dudes" health restorers from miami beach became the most unlikely gunrunners in history is out now from simon and schuster. please join me in welcoming guy lawson. [applause] >> thank you suzanne. there are some kids in the crowd so there's going to be a few words that start with the letter f. and i apologize in advance.

so please forgive me. >> torture, massive illegal government surveillance, the cover-up of the murder of civilians in iraq by american forces come at the contractor fraud. these are the kinds of 21st century in the so-called global war on terror. each of the crimes relates to actions taken by the government policies that were implemented in secret without public debate each part of the voice the united states took to it cheney called the dark side in the aftermath of 9/11. so, who's been punished for these crimes? who are the ones held accountable for these changes in the way the united states conducts itself? torture of a prison guard in abu ghraib. the nsa global surveillance of course that is all edward snowden's fault. for the civilians in the covered up by the army a whistleblower is currently in prison. and for the private contractor

fraud and the loss of tens of billions of dollars as well as the war in iraq and afghanistan for fraud it was three starters for miami beach, but for the three those are the three that i've written a book about. of course no politician or general or diplomat has been held accountable not one. this is the age of the scapegoat it's a story that perfectly captures its reality in which politicians and bureaucrats and soldiers are never held accountable, not by congress, not by prosecutors and bought by the press. this is the age when whistleblowers and the journalists to speak truth to power are in danger of the officials breaking the law and silencing the public debate. so with that cheerful beginning, arms and the dude is a story from miami beach to turn

themselves into the most unlikely in history. on one level the story is comical which is why it is now being turned into a movie. we finished troubleshooting the other day that sterlings jonah hill with an extremely famous movie star cannot mean that it's directed by todd phillips who made the hangover movies. i've read the script and i've been on the set and it's with all due respect pretty much what you would expect comic drama and a stoner movie. it's american hustle means pineapple express which is all good. that's entertainment, that's hollywood. but there's another level to the story, and as i've written in the book and as i believe as a reporter contains important facts. it's not just a joke it's a story with serious implications and real importance. to skip ahead to blow the ending

here your little but in the end they were indicted for fraud by the federal government and the crime was supplying chinese been factored ammunition when such were banned by the pentagon. like 99% of the people convicted of federal crimes they pled guilty. it's virtually impossible to fight the department of justice. in this country you are innocent until indicted but the truth is the kids didn't defraud the government not in any way that the crime is commonly understood. what really happened is a political and legal matter is the opposite of the public version of the events. court and congress and court and congress and in the press as i think the book shows. so the story begins in 2004 when an 18-year-old kid in miami beach when is his first federal defense contract for 900,000 rounds of small caliber ammo which sounds really big but that's actually tiny, miniscule to the context of the pentagon

contracts. there is no bigger consumer in the world than the pentagon by the magnitude of numbers. he was living in a tiny studio apartment in miami beach and have a connection. he was a big stoner and people ask me about that time characterizing him or not, and i'm not he really did wake up, hit the bong and then the internet. at the same time he was an in currently sharp, ambitious and ruthless. the millennial. then now all are posted online. if you want to be a gunrunner go there when you get home sign on to give some licenses and do it. the reason this existed is that in the early days after the invasion of iraq and afghanistan, the bush

administration awarded no contracts to companies like alberton and blackwater as you might recall that caused an enormous on the controversy. so the administration decided the best thing to do with for the tip these contracts online and favor small businesses. and what business could be smaller than an 18-year-old sitting in a studio apartment in miami beach. before long he was doing millions of dollars of business with the pentagon most of it by winning contracts for things like how much and boots and an ak-47. the business model was brilliant. he had no overhead, none of it was his rent. he just was a very astute and capable businessman who understood his advantages and weaknesses of his adversaries. the time they were trying to stand up and these are new terms we learned in this new decade the iraqi army and private

contractors were to chase down the soviet bloc weapons the cheap kind that both nato standard weapons standard and nonstandard, nonstandard as the russian or soviet bloc find that's much less expensive. even though he was a kid he was really good at it. he dropped yes sir and no sir and no one thought they were dealing with an 18-year-old. he would pretend to be a general indicator price on something and call it the officers and just for the. he treated them like fools. even though she was only 18-years-old he was able if you could imagine to get connected with serious gunrunners in eastern europe. he was like a genius hacker that had no respect for the boundary authority and what was expected of him he just what he had was

an appetite for money, drugs and girls. he realized that he got through about $7 million of business by the second year it was much bigger than he could handle on his own working 18 hours a day so he recruited one of his buddies and they were all orthodox jewish kids who have grown up in miami beach at this particular and they were like the dropout kids to smoke dope and just ran around. weirdly enough and they pointed this out there training is orthodox kids really help them master because reading with all of its complicated contradictory and trilingual kind of references historical and legal

gave them the skill set to not mastered this challenging will do so this other guy was attracted by the money he asked him how much money do you have and he said i don't want to brag and he said i'm only saying this to encourage you that $1.8 million. he simply couldn't be beat his ears so he thought it over and then decided it was worth taking a shot to make millions of bucks. so as he said it was almost like he was pulling him into a movie which is ironic but he really was living this fantasy of becoming a real-life relentless

billionaire gunrunner and you have to admit it wasn't a fantasy was becoming a reality. then in 2006 contract appeared online but astonished. they wanted 100 million rounds of ammo, 100,000 grenades, literally enough to build an army which is what they were trying to do of course in afghanistan. the solicitations that there would be a single winner. it would be awarded to one company and that one company would be in charge of delivering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ammunition. and the reason for the contract was that that time in 2006 and seven they had searched the troops into iraq as you might

recall leaving as noted no resources to put into afghanistan. no american soldiers and so the solution was let's get a bunch of ammo and try to create an army on the fly. david was a licensed the sewer and a part time student at college. david was in ninth grade dropout and a third one was a pot dealers of these were three dudes. he had ambitions. he wanted to be a rock star committee was working on an album and wanted to travel the world and so he dove into the world and then scabbard them for this contract to try to find the cheapest price for 100,000

grenades. the cheapest one of emphasizing saying the cheapest because that is what the pentagon wanted the cheapest, not the best. there was no quality obligation except it have to be serviceable to the arms dealing world means it goes out the barrel of the gun and that's it. so they were looking for the cheapest. the one rule was they couldn't buy from the russians or the chinese. those were the two countries in the world that could actually survive this and they knew a at a great price especially the chinese simple logistics but the bush administration banned them from dealing with the united states government largely due to the neoconservative politics and also iran so rather than do business with them they said you can't buy from russia and china

so they got their quotes together and on the day that they were supposed to put it in the afternoon they had to get to the post office and they would have a 10% profit margin 9% with what everyone else be doing so they were smoking and going back and forth and finally they said okay with over 8% created a fluid in and throw in and it's $291 million. they are betting against companies like general dynamics and raytheon. these are the companies they are coming up against and the one. they could hardly believe their luck. january 26 2007 david was parking his protégé in the apartment building when his cell

phone rang. i have good news and bad news he said what do you want first? what is the bad news companies have? the first first order is over $680,000. scenic so we won the contract and he said yeah. an upscale restaurant was the site for the celebration. multiple bottles of crystal were consumed as they toasted their incredible good fortune. the two friends already stoned from the joint peace joint peace will come away to dinnerware numbers puzzle for one of the central elements of the bush administration's foreign policy. his cell phone rang and a client wanted to make an appointment. he said he retired as a masseur. [laughter] as they age, the past the plastic cooking bullet come he kept his cocaine and in a little plastic bullet around his neck. back and forth under the table using their napkins to pretend to blow their nose as they wiped away the residual white powder. you and me buddy diveroli

said. we are going to take over this industry. he said i can see it being a 10 billion company in a few years. the fat cats in board rooms running fortune 500 companies are worried about their stock price. they have no idea what it's about to hit them. general dynamics isn't going to be too happy right now packouz agreed. arranging a line of coke on the dashboard of the new audi in the parking lot after dinner the president, efraim diveroli reminded his colleague of their precarious position. they won the day that they were not convinced that they won the contract for sure. they were still afraid it would be taken away from them and so excuse my language he said you've got the bitch's panties off but you haven't f'ed her yet. so that will give you a flavor of how they were acting at this time. not with a bunch of fear and

respect. so how i heard about this story is that appeared in the front page of "the new york times". the story appeared in "the new york times" and essentially betrayed the story as a group of sleazy teenage kids who instead of providing quality ammunition they'd gone ahead and defrauded the government by providing faulty ammunition. what followed after this that this is where the plot thickens and here's what follows. you have swiss armed dealers politics, covert sabotage on the runway come ammunition explosion that killed 28 people, an unsolved murder of a federal

indictment and that's just the short list. i'm going to read a little bit from the introductions introduction to the book and give you a flavor of that story and how i came across this story incredibly, at least according to the official events instead of supplying them bishop to the mountain of the cheapest possible rounds from the arms caches in the balkans. the story that appeared on "the new york times" in march of 2008 reported they had the audacity to scam the federal government supplying faulty admissions cheating the the army and endangering the lives of innocent afghan soldiers. the times article made them celebrities of a kind. you know that internet celebrity. but also a serious question how could three so obviously unqualified and kids be trusted with such a massive defense contract? how would the fools of many people for so long? was the contract typical of the

way the world's superpower was fighting the war in afghanistan and iraq? what did the debacle say about the ability to triumph in the war on terror? so at the time i was a reporter for the rolling stone magazine and i knew what the magazine was looking for to use the words of my editor, stories about kids doing f'ed things. that is a pretty good grief, right clicks so this really seemed to qualify. i knew from experience that the right time to approach people who are facing from all proceedings is after they put guilty and have been sentenced roger they've been convicted. so i waited and when david and alex were sentenced, i went down to miami and i spoke to david and he agreed to come he has story. so in court, the government portrayed the kids as lowlife fraudsters who would do anything to make money and in the times

the qualifications as a massage therapist played prominently with details and a personal history like violence with girlfriends and, you know, alcohol related problems. "the new york times" ran mugshots of these kids on the front page. they don't run mugshots of anybody. he hadn't been indicted or charged if anything. with anything. they ran mugshots of fugitives not regular citizens. so they were perjury as these heart of criminals but when i met david packouz was like this nice smart kid. he had a keen memory ironic love and appreciation of the craziness of what he lived through. unlike the hollywood image again, hollywood within arms dealer and merchandising he was the kind of kid that could have easily started a.com in silicon valley were invented a killer application. he was a bright guy.

the rolling stone article i wrote attracted more attention than any other piece i'd recommend putting the movie deal that happened very quickly. it seems like somehow it had captured the craziness of the last decade that we lived through, the insanity. kids, guns come it just seemed to grab people. and i was happy with the article but i knew that there was a lot more that was available. a federal judge has placed a significant amount of documents involved in the case under seal and so i didn't give up. i continued to pursue and it became like a hobby. anybody that's been an investigation you get these things and don't want to let them go so i started drafting information requests, tried to get interviews and figure out how to get to the documents and then load and behold i got them.

then efraim diveroli began talking to me and they'll begin talking to me and i realized the story as it had been per trade in "the new york times" and even in my rolling stone article didn't capture the textures and the hard truth underneath it. they have taken a wild incredible trip into the innermost reaches of international arms dealing. i truly be beat but he's been in this world in quite that way that faded. but it was also important politically and legally. i discovered during the war in iraq and afghanistan the government of the united states turned itself into the biggest gunrunning organization on the planet. it sounds kooky but when you think about it they needed an ocean of munitions. where can you get those munitions? cubana russians and the chinese you've got one place to go, the balkans and eastern europe.

he wants nonstandard ammunition and guess whose they are? gunrunners people who sell weapons to drug dealers and african warlords. that was the reality that confronted the pentagon. so what the government did was they used private contractors brokers and companies like them to go in and basically go do the dirty work go deal with the sleazy politicians tape drives, go look the other way about the quality and the way that these people operate. so they have no clue but from the outset they were were supposed to be the scapegoats if anything ever went wrong. the story i think illustrates what went wrong in afghanistan and iraq, how failure happens and you probably won't be surprised to know the government did everything they could to

hide the story every level, state, justice defense, all these elements of government have done everything they could to hide what truly transpired and so i say this with a little hyperbole but not a ton this is a story you were not meant to read. it was never meant to come out and i'm really glad i got the chance to do it. but here's another element. what i described is the establishment of the government but there's another kind of establishment of the press. "the new york times" framed the story in an entirely different way to read "the new york times" portrayed as these sleazy kids cheating the pentagon. and that still persists. i've been doing interviews in this book launch and everyone says so they were sending faulty ammunition and peace kids and it's like no. stop. i don't do that to be polite. but that's what i want to say.

the times ran these mugshots and also a subgraph on the front page of the paper with a box of ammunition that was by implication meant to represent what the story was about which is about 100 million rounds of chinese manufacturing. it has been had been shipped from china to albania for ancient cold war reasons and had been in albania for 50 or 60 years under the state department rules any ammunition or munitions that have been in another country they changed nationality because alliances change in the politics change. the pentagon didn't have that rule so this photograph really by implication showed this was what they were shipping and the fact of the matter is it was completely and totally wrong. it was as misleading as an image can be.

the rounds that they shipped and as i said there was hundreds of millions. they got to about 100 million rounds that they shipped to cobble. there were never any complaints. it worked. it was strategically vital. as a result of "the new york times" story and how bad the government looked with these kids on the front page, the shipments were stopped. the result, the afghans ran out of ammo in the summer of 2008 which was a crucial time in that war as barack obama kept saying over and over again on the campaign trail these were the times when that war was lost and none of this in the department of justice, the state, the pentagon none of it has ever been reported until now.

so, one of the great pleasures of my kind of journalism is you get the chance from time to time which i guess you would call not afraid to burn a few bridges the variety in journalism is that you get to speak truth to power. so i'm going to give david a chance to speak directly but in the book he is quoted and this is a particular delight for me because it is hard to counter the kind of narrative that appeared in the papers of this paper so this is what david has to say in the book. there were so many factual errors in the article like the picture of the ammo and this is what i was referring to before today they they took the absolute worst rounds that have been rejected as was typical of what we shipped and it seemed like the reporter was trying to discredit us. how could they award a huge contract to a kid and a vice president? in his book the reporter's name is cj and he's a very prominent

and super accomplished and i admire greatly reporter. he wrote a book called the gun and wrote about the durability of the ak-47 and how you can still find them in afghanistan that worked perfectly but he didn't apply the same standard to the ammunition. he applied to the nato standard which is absurd because that wasn't part of the pentagon contract stipulation. he made no mention of the fact that the majority of the ammo that we supplied was functional including the chinese round from albania. the surplus ammo is old and we haven't done the rigorous testing that the contract didn't require those things. he focused on making the government looked incompetent instead of realizing they made a calculated decision to get the cheapest possible and go as quickly as possible. in truth we were being paid to do with the army couldn't do for itself. it was impossible to send them

to buy the ammo. they would get caught up in the correction for sure just like we did but he never wrote about that with the story or put the story in the larger context how they were using private contractors like ours on their behalf. so the response to this article was profound and immediate. they were terrified that they would connect them which of course they were deeply connected to and so the peace plan that midnight in toronto and i have a e-mail from a senior officer in the embassy just 12 minutes past city read the article and he writes no mentioning of the embassy involvement.

so this is a little quote from the book and this is the aftermath of the times article. they were no longer the only ones. in the days that followed it would emerge they were now diplomats and military officials taking deep hits the bone of power. the justice department was not hell-bent on bringing indictments against as many of them as possible. the pentagon was determined to defend its honor and avoid looking foolish even as it dissembled the truth that this contract was is a good representation of how they were - for the timid system operated and they also hid the fact that there were serious shortages in afghanistan because of the case and likewise the state department was terrified that it's knowledge of what the company was doing would emerge along with evidence of possible american complicity and.

and the times story the most proximate cause was a series of overlapping attempts in spite of the government to shift blame and evidence like teenagers afraid that their stash of weed would be found. so, what was the result of this case? what were the lessons learned? the answer is nothing. no one was ever held accountable for any of this. no one was punished for creating the system to enable the american military to do business in the balkans. in fact the system persists to this day. the same munitions i wrote about being proliferated into serious and other countries in afghanistan to contemplate this. half of the guns that were shipped to iraq and afghanistan

during the time in the 2000, half of the guns disappeared. that is half of 5 million? no one, not one person has ever been disciplined or prosecuted for any of that. there have been reports and inventive wrist slapping going on but the people behind the story no one had any consequence whatsoever which is one of the most depressing things about the last eight years of this administration if you ask me. in the age of the scape goat officials scapegoat officials used a fall guy to take the blame and then continue on and they do nothing to bring the truth to light. with that i will do a final reading. i hope i'm not getting it all

giving it all away. there's a lot of fun stuff. [laughter] lots of bombs and stuff like that. so the kids put guilty as you know and the government never alleged that there was an issue to quality. that's one of the first things they stipulated. only based on one long quote from one afghan soldier it might have even been - he was named. anyway there was no allegation other than this case about whether it was chinese or not. but that didn't stop them from issuing press releases. prosecutors prosecutors and politicians and here's what they said. wendy is a contractors cut corners to line their own pockets they risk the safety of our men and women in uniform the united states attorney for the district of florida. such callousness and disregard for the soldiers and allies will not be tolerated and will be

vigorously prosecuted. in this day when our soldiers and coalition partners are keeping us safe it is reprehensible that the disregard for human safety have resulted in such dangerous fraud. in fact the opposite was true. the greatest peril to the afghan security forces was the u.s. government itself. the pentagon set out to circumvent the domestic and international law by creating its own protocol to speed up getting into afghanistan and then their own law-enforcement agency thwarted the effort. no one responsible would be held accountable for from the fall guys. the case case vividly illustrated the kaleidoscope nature of the disaster of the effort in afghanistan. the major was a logistics person in charge of receiving this ammo when it arrived on the tarmac

and guess how much training he had for that task zero. in the aftermath of the whole thing he left afghanistan and returned to the united states to work on a master's thesis and the subject was failure. the epigraph for the thesis was taken from a german writer and his book the logic of failure. it doesn't strike it develops gradually according to its own logic. when we watch individuals attempt to solve problems we see the cupcake at situations elicit habits of thought from the beginning. so it ended and so the war in afghanistan was lost. not in any great battle but in the quiet desperation. i would be happy to answer any

questions. [applause] what is the best order to read or watch? hispanic read it. >> than the movie. >> if you really want to commit to this it might be interesting to read the story then read the book. the movie is really on a different tangent it isn't too explain or discuss this stuff but yes as i wrote the book come as i worked on the book it occurred to me more than once that this was an interesting study in journalism and how journalism happens and of course it's different from what the book represents because i had two years and they had been

turning things over every day. i'm also aware of having someone come back and report on something that i've done. anybody in this business knows that isn't going to feel great so i hope that this was done with a great respect. i know that it was done in great respect and i hope the times knows that but also as the great institutions have to be open to criticism just like all of us, so i think the book is an interesting voyage into how you read newspapers as well. >> question for you. in the event that when they put the bed in if they went for 9.5% what happens in that alternate universe? because whoever it is is still

supplying a huge amount of afghanistan. would there be a scandal or would we just never hear about that? >> they have different criteria that they have to apply to determine the winner of the contract. one is price and then another one is a small business. but another thing "the new york times" focused on and the congress when they researched this is the past performance they said it's terrible they defaulted on 12 or 14 contracts. everybody was defaulting on every contract in 2004. they shipped 100-dollar bills and they were handing them out like footballs. the truth of the matter is a new when you line up the test performance with competitors it

was $200 million higher so one of the ironies about this whole thing is that the government for the first time ever was getting a great deal and be caught up in a different competitors. so it's true that they were defiant and they enraged people in law enforcement and politics that this is still going on. it's just being done by adults and i read in the book perhaps the biggest thing the reason why it broke is that they didn't spend - the billions of dollars. they did in tiger to case law

firm or lobbyist or get a general to sit on the board. they try to do something in the pentagon. they freaked out and said we have to get this up to the general who is the head of the entire middle east because east because he will know you can't stop this. they are saying you can't do this. this is going to cause severe shortages. this is a strategic disaster. it's all documented in the book and these prosecutors and these authorities were actually inside of the pentagon. they imagined themselves and this is a statement on how pathetic things really are in government.

they imagine themselves to be solving a great case in the global war on terrorism getting three kids in miami beach stopping them from shipping him them out of afghanistan was then winning the global war on terrorism and that is literally how it was discussed inside the government government side of the the what to say except they were right try to hide it because who wants this stuff out but i hope people will engage with it and see. and as for what's going on now she said i don't write about this some more but no one covers this. it's to get a day plan on an aircraft carrier or an interview with donald rumsfeld were secretary gates or something like that. it's to have a seat at the press conference. i'm not getting a seat at the press conference.

i'm not getting invited in the to the bathroom to see the technical plans and be treated like half a body. so that is the failure of reporting i think. >> being that they took the fall for this and put guilty and are doing time for this i'm curious what happened to the funds the money they receive from the contract after the fact? >> the united states government received 70 million rounds of ak-47 from china. they accepted and issued it all then when the story rand refused to pay for it so he just got out of prison and is suing for like 20 million bucks. you can't take something, use it and then say it works and then

say poor me. it's kind of a good way of sampling the insanity of all of this but in terms of what happened to the dudes as i say come he just got out of prison. the others didn't get prison time in the end. one of them as david packouz has gone on and i noted in the introduction he's a bright guy that invented the world's first drumbeat guitar pedal machine. basically you can play the guitar and drums at the same time for solo performance that he's filling it. it's interesting. the other is more like a shake of era and doing things wrong he never made a dime out of it and he wants to be a political activist and the federal felony offense is a big obstacle in your life when you're in your 20s and so it's easy to forget

the wound that this puts on people for these political purposes. these are real people and it has real consequences. another thing i would like to mention is ralph maryland and older utah businessman that was their financier. he's still in prison. he spent a million - he refused to plead guilty guilty so they tried him, had hung jury and tried him again. this is what happens when the department of justice decides to go after you. it's only going one way because it costs them nothing. they get up in the morning, they are not spending a dime. he spent his personal fortune and he is still continuing to serve prison time away from his family. it's like the most straightlaced person that the government. >> we have time for one or two more questions if anyone has one. >> he got four years for this

crime but he has the misfortune of being a heedless kind of guy so while he was awaiting his time in prison, he continued even though he was now a convicted federal felon to be involved in the edges of the arms business and he was trying to go right up to the edge without actually breaking the law and basically they stumbled into the fact that they were doing that and they had this high-profile potential target on their hands and so she kept saying i can do this and that and they got more and more frustrated and in the the entity through a gun at him and he caught it and that was breaking the law as well so another two years for that. so he's saying look at all of my

weapons here and he opens the trunk of the car and his favorite line was once a gunrunner always a gun runner so that's how the book ends. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask numbers of congress what they are reading this summer. >> writenow i'm reading a book called half broke.

very interesting book she describes it as a true life model. it's about her grandmother that she tells it in a novel format. has it changed how you read others'? >> in the sense that it gives me a greater appreciation when i read another book about how much work and effort had to go into writing it regardless of whether we are talking about fiction or nonfiction it's hard work to write a book and there's been a lot of appreciation for those that can do that and consistently turn out good material. >> can you give the readers a brief synopsis of the book? spin it as i like to say that it's a lot like 50 shades of grey gray only if there were more constitution seems that it's a book that covers half a dozen or so provisions of the constitution that have been neglected or overlooked or lost as i say in the book and it's a book that tells the stories behind those provisions of the

constitution and how the language in question came to be. why it was included in the constitution and how it has been neglected and how we can restore it. >> booktv wants to know what you are reading this summer. send us your answer or you can post on the facebook page facebook.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some books written by the declared candidates for president. in his book immigration wars

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