The Secret Plot to Assassinate George Washington that You NEVER Heard About!

[00:00:00]And I want to talk to you. I'm going to bring I'm going to bring this. I'm going to talk to you. This is next week I'm doing a whole thing on the show about this document. This is the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson's own hand and it is a remarkable document and the story behind it is incredible. And the reason why we have to learn it is I want to play this. Now, these are girls from OnlyFans. So, you know, that the sharpest knife in the drawer is not something that I would say we're dealing with here.

[00:00:31]But I think this is not just not just them. I think this is Well, you listen.

[00:00:38]Listen to this.

[00:00:41]>> What country did the United States gain its independence from?

[00:00:45]>> Europe.

[00:00:48]>> I can't.

[00:00:49]>> Who was the first president of the USA?

[00:00:53]>> Oh. Oh. Uh uh He had a top hat. Yeah.

[00:00:58]>> [laughter] >> What's his What's his name? What's his name?

[00:01:02]>> Abraham Lincoln?

[00:01:03]>> Okay. What do you think?

[00:01:04]>> Yeah. Lincoln.

[00:01:06]>> I agree. I think it's Lincoln, too. The guy in that top hat.

[00:01:09]>> Lincoln? What country is the Great Wall of China in?

[00:01:14]>> Tokyo.

[00:01:15]>> What language do the people in Idaho speak?

[00:01:18]Someone blurt it out.

[00:01:19]>> Idahoan.

[00:01:20]>> How many years are in a decade, Gemma?

[00:01:24]>> 12.

[00:01:25]>> How many are in a century?

[00:01:27]>> 500.

[00:01:28]>> What is the closest star to Earth?

[00:01:33]Okay, relax, Fido. What the >> The North Star.

[00:01:38]>> The sun.

[00:01:39]>> Oh, the sun.

[00:01:41]>> The Lone Star.

[00:01:43]>> What country is the Panama Canal in?

[00:01:45]>> Yeah, Portugal.

[00:01:48]>> Okay, so >> [clears throat and cough] >> they've got to be incredibly hot, right?

[00:01:53]I mean, that's what you're thinking.

[00:01:54]They've got to be incredibly hot.

[00:01:57]Um because how do they make it out of their house?

[00:02:00]Um but uh I personally, Ricky, I would like you to get a hold of them. I would like to give them I I honestly, I would love to give them a uh free pass to Torch and see if we can educate them.

[00:02:14]I mean, it would be a great It would be a great thing to, you know, 6 months from now be able to ask those questions and have them know those answers.

[00:02:22]So, can you see if you can get a hold of them for me?

[00:02:24]>> Oh, yeah. It would be a great thing and a great challenge after hearing that. It wouldn't >> [laughter] >> I think it would be >> But I think they can do it. I think they can do it. I really do. It's not that hard.

[00:02:35]You know, look all of us celebrate 4th of July.

[00:02:38]Everybody does. But nobody knows what's happening at you know, happening the days before uh the 4th of July, you know? The week of of June 17th.

[00:02:51]This is This is when this country was being born in two cities at the same time and on two completely different tracks. And those two tracks slammed together uh on one morning and that morning is a week from Monday, okay? This week is really important. Let me tell you a story they didn't teach you.

[00:03:09]Picture Philadelphia mid-June 1776.

[00:03:13]Abraham Lincoln is not born yet.

[00:03:16]There's a There's a 33-year-old red-headed Virginian. He's holed up in a couple of rented rooms at the house of a bricklayer named Jake Jacob Graff.

[00:03:25]And um this redhead, his name is Thomas Jefferson.

[00:03:30]Few days earlier, June 11th, Congress had handed five men a job and those five men had quietly handed it to him.

[00:03:38]Uh write down Write down why we're doing this. Write down what we believe. And so, he sits there and he's writing this document day after day, little folding writing box that he had designed himself and he's scratching out and crossing things out and reaching for words big enough to hold a new kind of nation.

[00:03:55]We hold these truths to be self-evident.

[00:03:58]He's not carving it in mar- marble. He is a young man sweating over a draft, second-guessing himself on every word, getting edits back from from uh Adams and Franklin in the margins.

[00:04:10]The most important sentence in the history of self-government is being workshopped in a rented room over a bricklayer shop in Philadelphia, and it is boiling up. Now, hold that picture.

[00:04:22]Travel 90 mi north to New York, because while Jefferson is writing this week what kind of men we could be, George Washington is discovering the kind of men that we already have among us.

[00:04:36]The British fleet are coming. Everybody in New York can feel it. It's the largest invasion force Britain had ever sent across an ocean, and it was about to appear in the harbor.

[00:04:47]In the middle of that, cuz we're already at war. Most people don't know this.

[00:04:50]We're already at war.

[00:04:52]Washington's people uncover something that would have ended the entire experiment before it even had a name. Declaration hasn't even been written yet. There was a plot, a real one.

[00:05:03]Loyalists and money flowing from the royal governor William Tryon, who had who had who was hiding out on a ship because, you know, he's out in the harbor because he couldn't safely set foot on land and the sitting mayor of New York City, David Matthews.

[00:05:21]He's accused of bankrolling this whole thing, this plan.

[00:05:25]What they're What are they doing? They are quietly buying off Continental soldiers, paying them to switch sides the moment the British land, okay?

[00:05:34]So, you're wearing a blue uniform the minute the British land, they're to turn their guns around and blow the powder magazines, seize the bridge at the north end of Manhattan, so Washington's whole army is trapped on that island like fish in a barrel.

[00:05:51]One of the men in the plot isn't just any soldier. His name was Thomas Hickey.

[00:05:56]It's a name you should know, but we don't know.

[00:05:58]He's Irish. He's a former British deserter and handpicked for Washington's lifeguard.

[00:06:04]That's like the Secret Service, the elite handful of men whose entire job is to stand closest to the commander-in-chief and keep him alive, called lifeguards.

[00:06:15]The enemy wasn't at the gate. The enemy was already inside the tent, close enough to touch the man who the whole revolution depended on.

[00:06:22]How did they catch this?

[00:06:24]It was almost by accident.

[00:06:27]Hickey gets himself thrown in jail for passing counterfeit money.

[00:06:31]And he couldn't keep his mouth shut.

[00:06:33]He bragged to another prisoner about the conspiracy, about the soldiers that he had paid off that were getting ready to defect.

[00:06:41]Well, that prisoner talked.

[00:06:43]And it landed in front of a secret committee tasked with sniffing out exactly this kind of treason. Committee led by the New York a young New Yorker named John Jay.

[00:06:54]Yes, that John Jay, the future author of the Federalist Papers, future Chief Justice of the United States. Historians have called this little operation that he put together the first American intelligence agency.

[00:07:09]So, America's [clears throat] counterintelligence service born in a backroom June 1776 because we discovered in the very first month as an idea that some of us would sell the rest of us out.

[00:07:25]So, the plan, we're not sure. Was it to kidnap Washington, kill him, sabotage the army?

[00:07:31]Historians are still arguing about it.

[00:07:33]The mayor himself later claimed he only meant to kidnap George Washington and his guard, not to murder him.

[00:07:40]And there is an old legend, and I want you to find this one yourself. I mean, hopefully it is it's my goal over the next year to give you some things that I say on the air that hopefully you go, I got to check that out. What?

[00:07:53]So, let me just give you this.

[00:07:54]There's a story, check it out for yourself, about a dish of poisoned peas and a housekeeper who supposedly warned the general in time, don't eat the peas. Probably a tavern myth, some of these things, but it's worth looking up. Here's what's not a myth.

[00:08:11]What's in the course court-martial record in black and white? Member of George Washington's own Secret Service, the lifeguard, stood trial for treason in the same days that Thomas Jefferson was holed up in a room writing this. We think that this is what started the war.

[00:08:29]No, the war was already on, and there was there were people already trying to kill George Washington. Now, watch these two tracks come together. June 26th, Thomas Hickey is convicted of mutiny and sedition.

[00:08:44]June 27th, Washington signs off on the sentence. And the morning of June 28th, that's next Monday, 1776, 11:00, they march Hickey into a field and they hang him in front of a crowd of 20,000 people. This is the first soldier this country ever executed for treason.

[00:09:08]Before we were a country, we hadn't even Thomas Jefferson is standing up that morning in Independence Hall with this document and saying, okay, go ahead and read this out loud, okay?

[00:09:22]Before we had declared independence, we had already buried a traitor from inside the general's own guard. That same day, the same June 28th.

[00:09:33]Down in Philadelphia, Congress, Jefferson's committee walks in, lays a draft of the Declaration of Independence down on the table to be read for the first time. I'm going to tell you the story of this. It was killing Thomas Jefferson. Killing him.

[00:09:48]He didn't say a word during the reading.

[00:09:50]He didn't read it himself. He couldn't.

[00:09:52]He didn't look at anybody. He kept his head down.

[00:09:55]Wait until I tell you the story. It's an amazing story. But, one single morning in one young nation that didn't legally even exist yet, in one city the words of who we wanted it to become were first being read into the record, and another city just up the road, a man was being hung by a rope for trying to strangle that nation in its cradle.

[00:10:20]The promise and the betrayal in the same hour, 90 miles apart.

[00:10:25]Four days later, July 2nd, Congress votes for independence, and the British fleet sails into New York Harbor. The ink isn't even dry, and the enemy is already in the water.

[00:10:38]So, here's what I can't stop thinking about this week, and what I want to bring to you this week.

[00:10:44]It would have been so easy in that moment of terror, invasion coming, traitors in the ranks, the mayor himself in on it, for Washington to become the very thing that they were fighting.

[00:10:58]I mean, this is what everybody says Donald Trump is doing, but you have absolutely in fact not no evidence, you have the opposite in evidence. Everybody says, "He's just trying to just round up everybody who betrayed him."

[00:11:13]Really?

[00:11:14]Cuz I I'm not really sure about what happened in Butler.

[00:11:19]I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure that that guy, uh, you know, is going to be deemed guilty if he had to stand trial. Are you positive he would have gone to jail for the rest of his life?

[00:11:31]I mean, here's the future president of the United States in both cases.

[00:11:37]Neither of them are saying, "Round everybody up and kill them."

[00:11:42]They didn't settle it with a sword in the dark.

[00:11:47]Fear gives men permission to do almost anything.

[00:11:51]Back in 1776, they didn't. They convened a committee. They gathered testimony.

[00:11:57]They held a trial in the middle of the most dangerous month of their life with a knife already at the Republic's throat. They chose process over panic, law over vengeance. And in the same breath, in the same week, they put their names down on this document that said power has to answer to something higher than its own power.

[00:12:18]That's who we are. That's who we were.

[00:12:20]That's who we can be every day going forward. Not because we're surrounded by saints. We weren't. Hickey proved that.

[00:12:28]But But because even when we're betrayed from the inside, we reached for the rule of law instead of the rope without trial.

[00:12:37]The founding wasn't clean.

[00:12:40]It was a young man rewriting sentences in a rented room while his country's own bodyguards were being bought off down the road. And it held anyway.

[00:12:50]So, this year before the fireworks, will you do me a favor?

[00:12:54]I want you to look up the poison peas. I want you to look up Thomas Hickey.

[00:13:03]I want you to look up John Jay's secret committee.

[00:13:07]Look up what really happened in New York Harbor in the last days of June 1776.

[00:13:12]Pull the thread. Pull the thread.

[00:13:15]Because the story they gave you that ends on July 4th with a clean signature and a bell, that's not the real story. The real story, the one that will keep you up at night and have you texting your friends at midnight saying, "You're not going to believe what I just read."

[00:13:31]The real story begins this week when we were almost lost before we ever began and we chose the right path.

[00:13:41]>> Thank you for thinking for [music] yourself and being part of a movement because that's really what all of this is. [music] If you want the full story, you want to go deeper, go to blaze.tv.com/glenn.

[00:13:51]Go there right now, sign up, no interruptions, [music] just the truth uncensored and unfiltered. Don't just watch, take a stand. I'll see you over there in a minute.