Lincoln's Assassination: The Shocking Truth

Posted by Ben McClintock, Thursday, 01 Aug 2024.

TRANSCRIPT

Generated using A.I.; please forgive any mistakes.

So newly digitized records shed groundbreaking new light on the Lincoln assassination. That provides details that I think will shock a lot of you. The story of Lincoln's assassination is full of intrigue, red herrings and hidden motives that are now brought to light. I think much of it for the first time in James Perloff's new book, Exploding the Official Myths of the Lincoln Assassination on today's Tree of Liberty Society. Thank you for having me on, Ben, and I should just mention that a lot of the things I discuss in this book, the book is new, but a lot of the things were actually known to Americans. Back in 1937, an author named Otto Eisenshimmel wrote, it's just a reprint, but he wrote a book called Why Was Lincoln Murdered? I read that back in the 90s. I was just wowed by it. The scholarship, the depth of his research, the archival research, his ability to find memoirs that nobody else could have found, and then he pulled that up with a book in 1940. You can't see the title. I can only get it in hardbound, but it was called In the Shadow of Lincoln's Death. And just to elaborate, this early this year, I was thinking what my next blog post should be. And I, back in the 90s, I read Eisenshimmel's book, but I never wrote anything about it. I said, you know, this man's great points still stay with me today. I mean, he just dismantled the whole mainstream narrative.

And then I found another author, Don Thomas, who's written a couple of books, The Reason Lincoln Had to Die and The Reason Booth Had to Die. And I've been in touch with him, and he's been a tremendous help to me. He pointed out so much of what Eisenshimmel had to find in in library collections and on paper in the 1930s, now available in digitized format. You know, you can find the Lincoln assassination trial, but all the associated trials, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, the trial of John Surratt, one of John Wilkes Booth's accomplices, so many books and memoirs, even in magazines written in the 19th century are now available in digital format. You can actually word search them digitally, looking for a certain name, you know, just amazing. And it accelerated the research a great deal. But... I can't imagine being an old time researcher where you actually had to like dig through libraries and go through and have to read the whole thing to find the key details.

Right. That's what I used to do. Yeah. With my first book, The Shadows of Power, which came out in 1988, I had to do that. There was no internet. And so I went to libraries. And if the library didn't have a book, I'd get it into a library loan, you know, and it was a slow process. And I made photocopies of pages that were interesting to me. But I didn't have a word processor yet that was just kind of coming on board. I didn't get my first home PC until 1989, after I'd written that book. So yeah, it was much more laborious process back then. But what I want to stress is a lot of what I'm saying was known to Americans in the 1930s, when Isaac Shepard's book became a Book of the Month Club selection. And, you know, by World War II, they had almost a million members in that club. And then 1971, NBC television aired a documentary, it was an Emmy nominated documentary on the Lincoln assassination, which also blew holes in the official story. I'm sure largely drawing on Eisen Shimmel. And that was a first class production made by Wolper Productions, which made North and South and Ritz and other miniseries. I'm surprised that they were willing to put that out there to the mainstream public. They did. But then more information came out that Eisen Shimmel didn't have access to the FBI's investigation of John Wilkes Booth's diary by the forensic laboratory, a lost confession, actually a destroyed confession that turned up in an attorney's papers by his descendants 110 years, 112 years after the trial, there was more information was out there that Don Thomas, the other guy I mentioned, had come across. And so my book is, it's new to this generation. But I say much of the information would have been known to folks in older generation, but now there's a really an unprecedented campaign to erase information, not just as relates to current issues, like some things I'm not going to mention on the air, because it gets you get your red strikes and your video erased, but your things like climate change, other things that are presented as new normals, but also history. I found that there's been a concerted attack, a coordinated attack on Eisen Shimmel in his work, even though he was a magnificent scholar, he's now being ridiculed. And I said, you know, as I was writing this, what was going to be a blog post turned into a book was too long to be a blog post. The fact that truth seekers of the past were being now being ruthlessly attacked, this goes along with the melting down of Confederate statues, the banning of the Confederate flag, they're erasing history.

And part of the history of the ration is what really happened to Abraham Lincoln. I want to bring that back to the public. Let me let's I think this is a great teaser for what we're going to be getting into. But I want to first kind of, you know, what you said right there of the, you know, the danger of getting strikes on YouTube. So what we'll do is I want to make sure you are not concerned of, you know, holding anything back. I want everybody to know what you know. And so what we'll do is if there is something like that, that happens that you say, I'm like, okay, that might give me a strike on YouTube, we'll do an unedited version that'll be at the tree of liberty society.com. And so that way, make sure that our viewers go there to watch the video, if anything needs to be edited out for, you know, the reasons why they would cut you out, because there are definitely pushes to get channels deleted for saying certain things. But I've been reading your books for over 20 years now. I love them. I want to give a little bit of a background for anybody that hasn't read any of your books. James Perloff has been a journalist since 1986, when he began writing for the New American magazine. And some of your previous books include the shadows of power, which I love tornado in a junkyard about evolution, which is fantastic. Truth is a lonely warrior, 13 pieces of the jigsaw and missing saints, missing miracles, which I read that last one a few months ago, fabulous book, encourage anybody to read it. And you're a much sought after podcast guest, and you've been appeared on hundreds of radio shows and podcasts. So thank you so much, James Perloff for coming on today to talk about your new book. I have a copy as well, encourage folks to get it. The link will be in the description of this video and at the tree of Liberty society dot com. So in so there's a balance, right? What I want to do with going through this book of getting people interested enough to know why, why it's important to read this book without just giving so much information. Now they feel like there's no need to write because I want folks to read the book. But I think the this first paragraph in chapter 10 of the book is a really good teaser. It says, um, it's, it asks questions, right? And I think really asking questions is just so vital to being able to come to the truth and weed through the propaganda that's out there. It says, why were prisoners hooded, denied the ability to communicate and then by a kangaroo court either hanged or sentenced to imprisonment on a desolate Island. Why was Booth's diary concealed for two years? Then many of its pages destroyed when subpoenaed by Congress. What was Stanton so desperately trying to hide? It could only be evidence that would incriminate himself, the war department and or the radical Republicans they represented. I just love those questions that you propose there. Um, the, and, um, for a lot of our, um, viewers, the, and just people in modern society today in general, um, they, when you say the word radical Republican there, they think you're giving an epithet, you're, you're criticizing Republicans and you're calling them radicals. But, um, I'd like you to kind of just, before we get into things, explain what a radical Republican was that it's not what we, it's not a, you weren't name calling Republicans that it was actually a group of early Republicans. Uh, correct. And, uh, it's interesting. And this is an important point. And it's one that I, um, mentioned early in the book, um, because people will get confused in Lincoln's time. It was the Republicans, especially what they called radical Republicans, uh, people like Thaddeus Stevens, uh, Samuel Chase, um, um, uh, Ben Wade, um, a number of others who were, um, quite left wing actually, and showed very little respect for the constitution. And it was actually the Democrats in those days who were conservative. Now over many decades, their positions have flipped. And so today, when you think of Republican, you, uh, might think of, was it Marjorie Taylor Greene or Rand Paul, people like that and say, well, why are you criticizing the Republicans? Well, it was very different in those days. The people who represent what we call the deep state and the left wing in those days were the Republicans that changed places. And that's just something to understand by the context of the, of the Lincoln assassination. Yeah, that's really good. Um, it's really, yeah, we have to really understand the Marxist beginnings of the Republican party that really people don't understand. Um, another thing that I think is important for folks to understand about, uh, about your book too, is especially in the Liberty camp, you have people that are so staunchly in favor, you know, love Lincoln and just revere him. And then on the other side in, within the Liberty movement, you have people that consider him to be a tyrant. Um, and there are some books that will put in that by Thomas de Lorenzo that I highly recommend that explain what Lincoln was really all about. And I think that it's one of those rare books that people from both perspectives will enjoy and appreciate because you're not, it's not this typical thing. Well, you know, the deep state was trying to kill Lincoln because he was turning against them. Like is common amongst like what we've heard recently with, with Trump or with Reagan or with JFK as the, the so-called reasons behind it. The reasons behind it are much, um, more complicated than that.

Yeah. Um, actually, um, I think, uh, it might be good for the audience that we just quickly reviewed what happened in Lincoln assassination, the mainstream account. I'll, I'll, I'll give a very condensed version because it won't be fresh in a lot of people's minds, minds. Um, uh, April the 9th, 1865, uh, General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the forces of Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox courthouse, very famous event. Uh, he surrendered to General Elizabeth S. Grant, future president. And, uh, five days after that, the president of United States, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford's theater in Washington, DC, accompanied by his wife. And, uh, uh, they're watching a play called "Our American Cousin." And, um, at about 10, 15 that night during the third act, a very famous actor, John Wilkes Booth, Southern sympathizer, came into the box, shot Lincoln in the back of the head, mortally wounded him. He was never regained consciousness. And, uh, Booth, uh, jumped onto the stage, but he caught his spur on the American flag, ironically, which was decorating the ledge and broke his leg. And, uh, but that didn't stop him from yelling the state motto of Virginia, "Sixth Semper Tyrannus," which means it does always to tyrants and also the South is avenged. And then he split for the, um, uh, rear wrenches at the theater, was able to get away on a horse. And he rode off South with a riding companion, an accomplice named David Herald. Now, something a lot of people won't remember is there was a simultaneous assassination attempt on the secretary of state, uh, William Seward at his home. Now, Seward was bedridden from a recent serious carriage accident, but one of Booth's accomplices named Louis Powell entered the home, stabbed Seward several times in his bed and, uh, very bloody scene. He stabbed several other people trying to restrain him, including two of, uh, Seward's sons. Um, now the doctors didn't think Seward was going to live, but he did.

In the meantime, Booth is riding South, but that broken leg is really killing him. So he rides off his course several miles to the West and he goes to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd. This is in Southern Maryland. Um, he knows Mudd slightly. Mudd reduces the fracture, makes a homemade cast and has a neighbor make some, um, crude crutches for Booth to rest for a while, continues on, but he's really slowed down now by that leg. Can't walk on it really. Um, although it uses his crutches. And finally, 12 days after the assassination, April the 26th, Booth is cornered in a barn with Harold by a Union cavalry detachment. Harold surrendered, but Booth refused to come out. They set the barn on fire and against orders, their orders to bring Booth back for trial, one of the soldiers fired through an opening in the barn, uh, mortally wounding Booth. Um, he lived for two to three hours after that. After this, eight alleged Booth accomplices were tried by a military court and all were found guilty. Four were hung and four were sentenced to, um, prison at hard labor, three, three for life. Um, and, uh, they were sent to the remotest prison in Madgeville, it was, um, Fort Jefferson on Dry Tortugas, which is an set of islands West of Key West. I didn't even know there were islands West of Key West until I read this, but they were like out of the reach of the public or where anybody could talk to them. So either they were hung or they were, uh, placed out of reach and again, they, while they were, um, awaiting trial and when they went back to their prison cells in solitary confinement during the trial, they had to wear hoods over their head in addition to being shackled and handcuffed. Um, so that's kind of the basic mainstream account, but in the book, we ask all kinds of questions about this, pointing out many holes in the official story, um, questions that, um, sometimes I can only ask and sometimes I can answer. I could actually go through a list of those questions if you'd like.

Yeah, that'd be great. But so, but before we get into that, I wanted to kind of, you talked about the, the mainstream account of what happened. What's the mainstream reason? Like what's the motive you would say that they would, they would say that Booth, Booth was doing this either out of vengeance, um, because angry about the South losing the war, or he thought that since not all Confederate troops had yet surrendered that perhaps, um, you know, it's alleged that he was actually going to try and wipe out the entire Lincoln cabinet and building Lincoln and Seward, um, that perhaps his hope was to wipe out the, the, uh, Lincoln cabinet, throw the North into such confusion that the remaining Confederate forces in the field, uh, would rally. Um, these are the two mainstream reasons that are given. And the book, I think does a great job of showing why those don't make a whole lot of sense. Um, yeah, I think this is a good time.

Let's go into some of the questions that you think that, you know, that are, are brought up are important that you can answer. And then some ones that you're like, these are questions that need to be answered. Right. Um, so I'm just going to read off a list. It's actually my, my blog, James Perloff.net. Um, why on a dishonest pretext did war secretary Edwin Stanton deny Abraham Lincoln the protection requested at Ford's theater? Why was Lincoln assigned a disreputable bodyguard who deserted his post shortly before the assassination? Why was the bodyguard not even reprimanded and his name virtually erased from history books? How did John Wilkes Booth know he only needed a one-shot Derringer to dispose of the president? Although many mainstream historians claim Booth and his accomplices intended to kill Lincoln's whole cabinet, why were the only actual assassination attempts made against the only two prominent men in the administration, Lincoln and Seward, who stood in the way of the brutal plan of reconstruction for the South, which had been devised by Stanton and the radical Republicans? What ways was the presidential box at Ford's theater modified to facilitate the murder? Why did Washington's telegraph wires shut down right after the assassination? Why did war secretary Stanton take charge of the investigation, which more probably fell under the attorney general's jurisdiction? How did Booth and Harold escape Washington so easily via the guarded Navy Yard Bridge, even though there was an order to let no unauthorized person cross after 9 p.m., a curfew that had been in effect for more than two years that Booth surely knew about, as he often lived in Washington. Why was the sergeant who let the two men pass in violation of orders reprimanded?

Why was the road that Booth and Harold took the only road that Stanton left unpatrolled? What did Booth tell Southerners was his real reason for leaving a card at the residence of Lincoln's new vice president, Andrew Johnson, on the day of the assassination? Secretary Seward's would-be assassin, Lewis Pell, gained access to the home by pretending to be a pharmacy delivery boy. He knew the name of Seward's physician, where the staircase was, where Seward's bedroom was on the third floor. He knew the exact layout of the house. Where did he get this inside information? Why were the soldiers closest to capturing Booth ordered to halt? Well, at the cost of an extra day's time, a select detachment was organized by Stanton and Washington, including two commanders who were trusted associates of his right-hand man, Lafayette Baker. Why was the court-martial sergeant, Boston Corbett, who, against orders, allegedly shot Booth, canceled? Why was Booth's diary recovered from his body never introduced in evidence at the conspiracy trial? Why was it kept a secret for two years and when finally exposed, were 43 sheets or 86 pages missing? Why were Booth's alleged accomplices denied a jury trial and disallowed defense counsel until approximately the proceedings began, depending on the individual at that time? I would kind of touch on this, but why were they continually shackled with hoods over their heads before either being hanged or sentenced to the remote prison of dry Tortugas? Why was Mary Surratt hanged the very day after her sentence was pronounced? Who was the snitch who lived in Mrs. Surratt's boarding house while simultaneously working in the War Department and why did a court stenographer call him a perjurer?

What demand did Stanton make of Mrs. Surratt's priesthood as a condition for being allowed to give her his final sacraments? What close friend of Booth, an actor who performed at Ford's Theater on the night of assassination, was also old friends with William P. Wood, Stanton's intelligence chief? Booth was well known to carry a swagger stick in which he posed in 11 different photographs. Wood inscription, perhaps relevant to the assassination, was engraved on its gold-plated handle. And finally, when Edwin Stanton was on his deathbed, visions of what person did he say haunted him day and night such that he said he could not live under the pressure that he was buried? Now there's other questions asked by the book, but these are some of them. A lot of questions that don't, yeah, fewer raised, fewer raised, doesn't put together, right? Yeah. Few of these questions are raised by mainstream historians.

Yeah. Wow. So kind of getting back to some of the, the, the motives that are out there, right? That people talk about. One motive that I've heard that I don't subscribe to, but I wanted to get your response to was that he was trying to, you know, get rid of the national bank. I mean, not get rid of, get rid of like a, make it a national bank where the, it was instead of a, like a federal reserve that was going on, he was just trying to do a debt-free notes. And that's why the insiders wanted to get rid of them. Yeah. I've, that is one of the theories about this. Actually the Rothschilds had a, their top financial agent in the North at the time was named August Belmont. And he did offer according to reports, loans to Lincoln to finance the war at high interest. And there's even a story and it may be apocryphal. I don't know if it's true or not that Lincoln literally had him thrown out of the White House at this demand. The South had its Rothschild people too, particularly Judah P. Benjamin was said to be, he held several cabinet positions during the war and he fled to Europe after the war. And he was said to be a Rothschild agent too. But Lincoln, rather than taking loans, he created what they call greenbacks, which was government created money, which would be the constitutional way to make money. And the advantage of greenbacks is although they generated inflation by printing money, they did not come with the cost of debt. There was no debt on them.

Whereas the Federal Reserve notes still to this day- But it still wasn't constitutional because it wasn't backed by gold or silver. Right. And the greenbacks, the contrast was the Federal Reserve today, it creates money out of nothing causing inflation. But in addition to that, it exchanges those Federal Reserve created dollars for Federal Treasury notes, which are then sold on the open market and that puts us further and further into debt. So Lincoln was creating a system of creating money that caused inflation, but not debt. But some people have also criticized Lincoln for creating the greenbacks in as much as they feel that it created the possibility of creating money out of nothing. And that in turn could be taken advantage of by war profiteers, who now had access to funds that normally would not be granted them through taxation. Some people also think that even the greenbacks were sort of a banker's plot. But yeah, that's definitely been said. And I have seen a quotation, I have to go back, I haven't seen it for a long time, I have to go back and find it, that there was some banker who swore vengeance or implied as much on Lincoln for not accepting loans. But whether or not that would be the reason for the assassination, I don't know. My book is more of a forensic examination of the assassination, as well as the people in the US government were closest to the people carrying out the assassination. But without a doubt, those people in turn did represent a deep state that was in existence at that time. And of course, the connections, you not find them in writing, but you can draw some logical, educated guesses about them. And so I think that that kind of creates this contradiction in people's minds that have studied into Lincoln in his tyrannical tenure as president of the United States, why would the conspiracy want to get rid of him if he was a part of the radical Republicans? He was definitely, you know, Marxists for decades to come up even in the 1900s. You have the Marxist Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Why would they want to get rid of him if he was basically a part of their team and, you know, was making sure that declarations of independence could never happen again within the United States? Why would the conspiracy want to get rid of him? Right. And the short answer to that is he was the lesser of the evils. As I touched on, Lincoln was opposed to the brutal plan of reconstruction of the South and really been devastated by the Civil War.

You've heard of Sherman's march to the sea, and they burned down Atlanta, they burned down Charleston, they burned down Savannah, they just destroyed Petersburg and Richmond up in Virginia, and they stole crops. What they didn't steal, they burned. And the South was just devastated. But there were people who wanted now to treat the South as the radical Republicans wanted to treat it as a conquered country. They themselves would use that phrase. And Lincoln was against that. Lincoln felt that enough bloodshed, more than half a million soldiers had been killed during the war. So many people widowed or orphaned by it. And he felt the South had been punished enough. He did not want economic exploitation, which is what happened. You know, the carpet beggars from the North came down, they placed onerous taxation on Southern properties, thousands of people lost their homes. And you might remember him going with Win Win, Sculler Hara goes to Rutland to beg him for the money she needs to pay taxes on her property, Tara. That kind of thing was really happening. Cotton, countless bales of cotton were stolen.

And the South is just brutally treated and they were under military occupation. They couldn't vote for their own governors. For 12 years, they were called reconstruction. They were ruled by the war departments appointed military governors, they could not vote for their own leaders. And this is one reason, all this brutal reconstruction period, many women were raped, black and white alike. And you know, this is one reason why the Southerners resented the Yankees for so long was the treatment they got under reconstruction. They're already defeated and now things were made even worse. But Lincoln didn't want to do that. Lincoln wanted the Southern states to be voting again. He wanted them to be restored to Congress. And the Radical Republicans were against that because they knew that the combination of Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats would outvote them in Congress. They would then lose their power as would the deep state who was behind them. So Lincoln wanted a very gentle reconciliation. And again, it was a saying, the only prominent member of his cabinet who agreed with him on this was Seward. And it was only Lincoln and Seward that were assassination attempts were made on that night. Now they tried to say they were going to have to grant Johnson and Stanton and others, but somehow those all fell through. The case I make in my book is no, they got the two they wanted. They got the two they wanted. And this opened the door for the reconstruction and the subjugation of the South.

This is really what they were after. I do, as a matter of fact, we'll do this. I just want to quote some things. The South was not happy about Lincoln's death because they knew that it meant that they were now going to be subject to what they called reconstruction. And Jefferson Davis said, quote, "It will be disastrous for our people." He's talking about the assassination.

The assassination was condemned by Robert E. Lee, by the Southern newspapers. And many years ago, I had to go back and find this book. Back in the 90s, I read a book by Sarah Morgan Dawson, lived down in New Orleans. She wrote a book, it was called "A Confederate Girl's Diary," 440 pages long. I never forgot the closing words and went back to make sure that I got them right. She said, quote, "Our Confederacy is gone with one crash. The report of the pistol fired at Lincoln," end quote. Now, down South, people understood that they were going to be blamed for the assassination and that reconstruction would be made even worse by it. But listen to what radical Congressman George Julian said in his diary. Now, he wrote this on April the 15th. Lincoln died on the morning of the 15th, and now they're already holding a political caucus. And here's what he wrote in his diary, quote, "I like the radicalism of the members of this caucus, but not in a long time have I heard so much profanity. It became intolerably disgusting.

Their hostility towards Lincoln's policy of conciliation and contempt for his weakness were undisguised. And the universal feeling among radical men here is that his death is a godsend. It really seems so, for among the last acts of his official life was an invitation to some of the chief rebel conspirators to meet in Richmond and confer with us on the subject of peace," end quote. So, here you see the radical Republicans virtually celebrating Lincoln's death while on the South, they are very terrified as to what the assassination means. This is quite a contrast to the common conception, but it was the reality at that time. Yep. So, was Andrew Johnson more in favor of just the, just mowing down the South or is that why he wasn't kind of a part of the overall plot or? Yes, and, but he evolved over time. He originally was in favor of the radical Republican plan, and that's why he, they allowed him to become vice president and he was not assassinated.

Over time, however, he had increasing conflicts with Stanton, whom he ultimately fired. And actually, the reason for his impeachment trial was that he fired Stanton. Stanton refused to be fired. He actually barricaded himself in the War Department for months. He actually lived there behind barricades, behind soldiers, while his radical Republican friends in Congress tried to impeach Johnson. They failed by one vote and that was the end of Stanton. But in the beginning, he went along with the radical Republican plan of reconstruction, but he gradually softened over time. He saw the kind of people he was dealing with. He was actually a Democrat from the South. He was a new vice president for Lincoln. He had not been Lincoln's first vice president during his first term, but because Lincoln was getting unpopular in 1864, people were sick of the war. There was a real concern that his opponent, the Democrat, former General George McClellan was going to win. So they needed a Democrat on the ticket and they picked Johnson. Gradually, he turned against the plan of reconstruction. He wanted to, he started vetoing the more severe measures and they wanted to get rid of him. He started out in coherence with their plan, but eventually turned against it and then they turned on him. So they had already changed, right? Because in the original days of the union, it was the person that won second place for president, became vice president. But by this time, the presidents had a running mate.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. But yeah, he was his running mate. He did not run for president and win second place. That actually would be a kind of interesting way to do things. It kind of makes, you know, that way you were speaking would make it a situation where compromises would have to work, that kind of a balance of power thing, really. In retrospect, I'm just thinking of it now. I haven't thought of it, but it sounds like it was a pretty good plan to start with. But yeah, Johnson was actually Lincoln's running mate, but he really couldn't run for re-election in 1868, because after all, he was a Democrat and he couldn't, he could hardly stand as the Republican nominee at that time. So why do you think that when, instead of assassinating Johnson, why did they go, why did they try the impeachment route instead? Again, because he had fired Stanton. The reason he fired Stanton was, well, there were a couple of things that happened. One thing he found that Stanton was spying on him. And the other reason was that the woman who was hung, Mary Surratt, the judges did not want to hang her. The military commissioners did not want to hang her. But Joseph Holt was working for Stanton, said very slyly, "We'll tell you what, let's give her the death penalty, but we'll send Andrew Johnson an appeal for mercy." Well, Johnson never saw that appeal. Now there's always been controversy about this. Stanton insisted he did see it, and Johnson said he never did. During this trial of Mary Surratt's son, two years later, Johnson himself read the newspapers about this appeal for mercy. He said, "I've never seen that."

So he sent for the findings of the original trial. And when he saw that he had not seen the appeal for mercy and that an innocent woman had been hung as a result, he was enraged with Stanton. He sent him a one-sentence letter of dismissal. Again, Stanton refused to be dismissed, and he insisted that his friends in Congress try to impeach Johnson so he could stay in power. This is really what was going on at that time. So that's the basic explanation was he found out that he was supposed to give her a potential appeal for mercy, and he was not shown that the judges at the trial wanted him to receive the appeal. He said he never saw it.

Great. Okay. So I really don't want to get away too much. And so I want to just go into just one last story and then encourage everyone to read your book. Go get your book on Amazon. Is it the best place to go, or would you rather go to your website?

They can get it at Amazon. I only have the time to pack up a lot of individual orders and build them myself. So I prefer people to go to the Amazon, even though Amazon is problematic in of itself. But people can also buy it, by the way, there's a ministry down in Texas called Power of Prophecy. It's a truth ministry. They have the book in stock. People don't want to go to Amazon. And there's another ministry that's going to start stocking it too, but they don't have it yet at this time.

Gotcha.

But yeah, go ahead with that.

I'll put links in the description. But as we wrap up, what is a story that's in the book that you think is just like, is something that people haven't heard and just something that just kind of blew you away as you wanted to add it to the book?

I think the most powerful thing is the destruction of and hiding of John Wilkes Booth's diary.

Yeah.

All this stuff that they found on John Wilkes Booth, they entered into evidence at the conspiracy trial of his eight alleged accomplices, including his knife, his pistols, his bells, his holsters, files, his compass, his spurs, tobacco pipe, his carbon cartridges and bills of exchange. But what about his diary? I mean, when there's a mass shooting, don't they print the manifesto of the alleged shooter, right? So this diary, which is found on Booth, which is given directly to Stanton, Lafayette Baker is head of the Secret Service, also flipped through it before handing it over to Stanton, but it's kept secret for two years and not introduced at the trial. And the only reason that the diary even became known about was that Stanton had a break with the head of the Secret Service and fired him, that was Lafayette Baker. So Lafayette Baker went rogue, he published his own book called "The History of the Secret Service." And for the first time, public and the Congress learned that John Wilkes Booth had a diary, people were shocked.

And they asked the chief prosecutor, Joseph Holt, who knew all about the diary, "Why didn't you introduce this in evidence?" He said, "Well, I didn't think it was relevant, which is ridiculous, pure obstruction of justice, pure obstruction of justice." So Congress subpoenaed that diary. And what they found was, well, I'm just going to quote Congressman Benjamin Butler, they found that many pages were missing. Here's what he said in 1867, he said, "That diary is now produced as 18 pages cut out, the pages prior to the time when Abraham Lincoln was massacred, although the edges show they'd been written over. Who spoliated that book? Who caused an innocent woman to be hung?" And there's more I can give you, Butler, but that's kind of satisfactory. But here's the thing that's really mind blowing is that in 1977, 110 years after he made those remarks, the FBI's forensic laboratory was asked by the National Park Service to do a thorough exam of the diary. And what they found was it wasn't 18 pages missing, it was 43 sheets or 86 pages had been removed, including the immediate 27 pages before the day of the assassination.

And you could tell these were not blank pages, because on the edges, you could still see fragments of Booth's handwriting. So these were not blank pages. And also, the pages from the time after the assassination, they found had been unbound, then select pages reinserted. And that's what you see when you go online, read John Wilkes Booth diary, you're looking at a tiny fragment of what was originally in it. The pages were glued back in and rebound. Well, to be rebound, it has to be unbound. Obviously, John Wilkes Booth fleeing in a swamp did not do this. This is done in the War Department. It's obvious that the people who kept the diary a secret for two years are also the ones who removed the vital contents before handing it over to Congress. And that's the War Department, that's Stanton. I think that's obstruction of justice is the most powerful piece of evidence against the War Department, which we now call the Defense Department, right?

But not say that our Defense Department guys have anything to do with Lincoln. But that is, I think, the single thing that is most undeniable in terms of guilt. Just the concealment of vital, vital information as Congressman Butler asked, how can Booth's tobacco bite be considered relevant to introduce as evidence and not as diary? It makes no sense. The official mainstream and narrative, they'll try to tell you Booth himself took out those pages. He couldn't have done it and put select pages back in. He couldn't have. So the story is that, yeah, the government had a lot to do with it. And it's obviously not the only time we've been lied to by the government in many scenarios, whether they're talking about the Spanish-American War or the Second Lusitania or the Korean War or Tonkin Gulf or the Iraq War. We've been lied to many in weapons of mass destruction, right? We've been lied to many times by the government. But does Lincoln assassination, because the facts have been forgotten over the years, I really felt this generation needs to hear about the Lincoln assassination again. There are other books that deal with it. But for my money, the books that best deal with it prior to mine are Don Thomas's books and Otto Eisenshimel's. But they don't get much attention these days. So I'm just trying to bring back to the public awareness some of these forgotten facts, as well as some new ones that people have not heard of or thought about. That's wonderful. It's an interesting thing, too, because of the so-called co-conspirators that were tried and convicted. They weren't allowed to have a trial by jury. And then others that were likely actual would-be co-conspirators, nothing ever happened to them. And so I like that you bring that information out in the book, as well, that folks can read if they get a copy, if they order their copy of the exploding, the official myths of the Lincoln assassination. I appreciate you joining us, Mr. Perloff. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Ben, for having me on. It's a pleasure. And you've asked some great questions and great opportunity to elaborate on this crime that was it was a crime to kill Lincoln, but there were a lot of other concealed crimes that people didn't know about associated with it.

And we'll put a link to your website in the description of the video and on our website at TreeofLibertySociety.com. But until I appreciate that, I hope to be able to have you on again soon. We'll see you next time. Okay, thanks so much.

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