Tucker Carlson interviews investigator Matt into the death of Navy SEAL commander Job Price and related military corruption
Tucker Carlson interviews Matt, a former police officer and Army veteran, about his seven-year investigation into the death of Navy SEAL commander Job Price, alleged criminal activity within the SEAL teams, and the disputed legacy of Air Force combat controller John Chapman.
Summary
Tucker Carlson speaks with Matt, a former 30-year police officer and Army veteran from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, who has spent seven years investigating the 2012 death of Navy SEAL commander Job Price — officially ruled a suicide — after Price's father handed him a 356-page military death report and asked him to take a look. Matt concludes, supported by forensic investigators and forensic criminologist Brent Turvey, that Price was murdered and the crime scene was deliberately compromised. Matt also describes a broader pattern of criminal activity within the SEAL teams, including drug trafficking, the killing of a fellow American soldier in Mali, and the rape of an Afghan teenager — none of which resulted in lasting accountability. The episode also covers the disputed Medal of Honor case of Air Force combat controller John Chapman, whose legacy Matt says is being actively undermined by members of SEAL Team Six, and whose autopsy Matt claims contains unexplained small-caliber bullet wounds inconsistent with enemy fire and potentially consistent with handgun calibers carried only by US personnel — a finding Matt says may reveal the true motive behind the cover-up. The episode also includes Matt's account of Pete Hegseth reviewing his evidence in 2022, agreeing that the evidence was inconsistent with suicide, and text messages from Hegseth to that effect that Matt says were published by the Washington Post.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Job Price: Background and Official Account
Tucker Carlson: You've had a really varied life, and you have devoted the last several — maybe seven — years of it to a man called Job Price and his memory, and discovering the truth about how his life ended. Who was he?
Matt: It's an interesting story. He and I were classmates at Pottstown High School. We graduated together in 1989. But we weren't friends.
Tucker Carlson: Philadelphia.
Matt: Yes, outside of Philadelphia. We knew each other, we were in the same classes, but we didn't socialize outside of school. He was the bar — academically, athletically, he was the bar everybody was trying to reach. He was brilliant. He was a three-sport star in school. For me personally, he was my academic rival. At one point I was on track to go to a military academy, and he ended up going to the Air Force Academy. He graduated from there and then transferred his commission to the Navy because he wanted to be a Navy SEAL. But he was kind of a goofy guy. He wasn't tough. He didn't have a hard edge to him — kind of boy-scoutish. Everybody was drawn to him. He just had that kind of personality. So going Navy SEAL was actually not anything I would have had on my bingo card. You would think Navy SEAL, there would be a whole lot more hard-edge personality, and he just wasn't that.
Tucker Carlson: Did he make a good career out of it? So he graduates the Air Force Academy — what happens to his life after that?
Matt: He transfers his commission to the Navy, which I didn't even know you could do. Goes to BUD/S, which is the first thing you have to do when you go to become a Navy SEAL. He spent 19 and a half years in before he died and was six months away from his pension, and by all accounts was on the admiral track. He was supposed to go to school up in Rhode Island in June of 2013, because that's a prerequisite for — I guess a college for command-level officers.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Matt: He excelled at every level, which is not surprising. In the SEALs, if you're an officer, you have to fill certain billets — certain roles on your trajectory upward. There are certain boxes you've got to check: you serve in this role, you serve in that role, and then if you're going to become an admiral, you have to run a team. So he became the commander of SEAL Team 4, which is one of the East Coast, Virginia Beach SEAL teams. The even numbers are East Coast, the odds are West. Right after he got command, they got deployed to Afghanistan in 2012. And then he died December 22nd, 2012, in Afghanistan.
Tucker Carlson: After how many months in the country?
Matt: I believe they got there in September. So roughly three months.
Tucker Carlson: Did he have a family?
Matt: Yes. He had a daughter who was nine, and his wife. He loved his wife and his child very much. He died three days before Christmas.
Tucker Carlson: Give us the Wikipedia version of how he died. What's the official version?
Matt: The official version is suicide. They say the deployment was in the middle of the GWOT era — 2012 was smack dab in the middle — and he had a couple of guys get killed, SEALs, and then a couple of Army guys get killed in separate incidents. They said he struggled a little bit with that and was depressed. I've been depressed and we're sitting here talking. I didn't kill myself, so there's not a direct link between depression and suicide. But he was found in his bunk with a gunshot wound to his head and a gun still in his hand. To a layman, that may look like suicide. And for a lot of years, that's just what it was.
Tucker Carlson: How many deployments had he had?
Matt: I want to say 14 total, but not all to war zones. Deployments have a mission, but it's not necessarily a wartime mission — they'll do a boarding of a commercial vessel that pirates are on, or whatever. He had done one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, but this was his first command-level deployment. So they just said he was depressed and decided to take his life.
Tucker Carlson: How old was he?
Matt: 42.
Tucker Carlson: Career naval officer, commander of SEAL Team 4, kills himself. Is that a common profile? It's never happened, right?
Matt: The guys that kill themselves in the military — it's like some PFC who's drunk. There's a lot of suicide in the military, obviously.
Tucker Carlson: Not many in theater, though.
Matt: And of command-level officers — zero. In the entire GWOT era, he would have been the only one. When I heard it was suicide, I didn't have an emotional connection to Job. We weren't tight. It was sad, obviously, but I didn't have this visceral response where I felt like I needed to mourn or anything like that. It just was what it was. And I went on with my life until 2019 when this happened.
Tucker Carlson: Did he have a psychiatric history?
Matt: None. Zero. There were no notes, no conversations, no forewarnings of any type that he had any inclination to kill himself.
Tucker Carlson: Was he intoxicated when he died?
Matt: He was vehemently against medicines — he just didn't like taking them. But apparently he had Valium, Benadryl, and Tramadol in his system. Totally not normal for him. And only one of them was actually on the books as prescribed. So we don't know where the others came from. The Valium was because he wasn't sleeping — very low dose. Over there it's not like a CVS here, but there is a tracking mechanism for who gets issued what. Job would not want it unrecorded. He's the commander. He sets the tone. He follows all the rules. So I'm not 100% sure if those were all prescribed to him or not.
Tucker Carlson: Why was his name Job?
Matt: I didn't ask his dad this, but knowing his dad — he died two years ago, unfortunately, but I got to really know him, he was a great man — and knowing their faith and the family-knit nature of their family, it's just Job, his sister, mom and dad. He was named after the biblical character Job. If you knew Job and you read the story of Job, you'd be like, "That's that guy."
Tucker Carlson: Patient. Faithful.
Matt: Yes. Quite a name.
The Investigation Begins
Tucker Carlson: So you hear at some point that your high school classmate, who you admired but were not intimately close with, dies after this impressive career — he kills himself in Afghanistan as a leader of SEAL Team 4. At what point do you decide maybe that's not true?
Matt: I immediately didn't think it was true, only because it didn't fit who he was. It just made no sense to me. But again, I didn't have a reason to spend a lot of time on it. In 2019, I had a podcast at the time and I wanted to have his sister on to basically say who Job was to her — not a bio thing, but just "my brother was this person." I wrote a book about my brother because I wanted my brother's name to be remembered forever. I wanted her to have that ability, to have a recording of her telling her brother's story. She said to me, "Can we meet with my dad first?" So I go over there and he hands me a three-ring binder with 356 pages of military reports and says, "This is Job's death book. I don't think he committed suicide." I said, "Okay." He said, "You take a look at it." I was still a cop at the time. I said, "Certainly. But I need to be real honest with you — if I think it's suicide, I'm going to tell you it's suicide." He said, "That's fair enough. I just want somebody I trust to look at it."
So I looked at it for about a week. It's pretty common, as you know as a cop, to hear from surviving family members of someone who commits suicide that they don't think it was suicide.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, everybody. Yeah, I've heard it a million times.
Matt: I reviewed it for about a week, and what I realized was that the death book was like a puzzle. The box on the cover has a picture, and the pages in between were supposed to make me believe that Job killed himself — but what I got was a thousand-piece puzzle set with 250 pieces. I couldn't create the picture that Job killed himself. So I told his dad, "I can't say it's suicide based on the information in this book. I would need to dig more." He said, "Do you mind doing that?" I said no. He asked if I wanted to be paid. I said, "I don't sell hope. I don't need any money. I'll just do this." At the time I wasn't expecting seven years of my life devoted to it. I thought I was just going to do a little digging, search the internet, find some information.
Tucker Carlson: Thankfully, we don't have a clear picture of the path before us.
Matt: Yes. Would have been a hard stop, probably. So it began this journey for truth into finding out what happened to Job. The more I got exposed to sources — there's a group of people that have been investigating Navy SEAL corruption, former members of the community, intelligence agencies, federal and state law enforcement, all in this little network of people that have been doing this for three decades since Marcinko, who was the creator of SEAL Team 6, famed SEAL — dirty as the day is long. Once I got into that network, I was exposed to everything.
Tucker Carlson: I don't want to sidetrack you, but could you just give us the Marcinko overview, the Wikipedia version?
Matt: He was the creator of SEAL Team 6, which is DEVGRU — the elite tier-one element of Navy SEALs. He created the brand of the Navy SEALs, wrote books. But he was in the Epstein files. It's well known that he was running drugs and women for the cartels, which is a common theme with special operations guys — whether it's guns for hire or training cartels in tactics, techniques, and procedures, which you would think is probably counterproductive to the sovereignty of our country. But Dick Marcinko was the creator of the Navy SEAL brand.
Tucker Carlson: And you believe it's been established that he was corrupt in a deep way.
Matt: Very much so. Having spoken to people who were firsthand witnesses, it's very clear that he was the godfather of all of it. He had a very deep and influential control over a lot of pieces of the Navy SEAL brand and then also our government. He was just very wily, conniving, and smart.
Tucker Carlson: He's gone.
Matt: He passed a couple of years ago. But up until his death, he was still very much an integral part — things didn't happen without his blessing.
Tucker Carlson: Interesting. I think most people are totally unaware of that.
Matt: I wish I was unaware of it. So you basically got pulled into this story because the father of your classmate asked you to take a closer look at what happened.
Tucker Carlson: Yep.
Matt: Once I reviewed it and told him I'd start digging, I said, "Here's what I can promise you — I'll find the answer. And I won't stop until I do."
Forensic Evidence of Murder
Tucker Carlson: With that said, what do you think now, having spent seven years looking at this? What do you think happened to Job Price?
Matt: I know with 100% certainty he did not kill himself. Once we get to the actual details of the crime, you'll see it clearly. Forensics — there are certain things you can do to make a scene look a certain way and still screw it up. Job's body was staged. Nobody heard a gunshot in an occupied building overnight, where there was an operations center that was 24/7 right on the other side of the wall of his bedroom, in a war zone. Nobody heard a gunshot. The gun Job was holding was not suppressed. It was unable to be suppressed — it didn't have a threaded barrel. It was a SIG 226, 9mm.
He was shot in the same position that he slept in every night. He was naked, which is how he slept — on his left side with a pillow in the crook of his left arm. That's how he was shot. I've been on a lot of suicides in my career. A vast majority of suicides have some immediate reactionary element — like you walk in on your wife having an affair and you go out and kill yourself. But most of the time, if there's pre-planning involved, you wouldn't pre-plan it to do it while you're sleeping. The scene didn't make sense. That was the first thing that stuck out to me when I saw the crime scene photos.
He was shot on his left side, shot from right to left, downward at a 45-degree angle. But he was found laying on his back with the gun still in his hand across his chest and his head facing to the right — the opposite of the direction his head was in when he was shot. I couldn't figure out, just from physics, how his body could have gotten there.
And then there were missing pieces. There were no ballistics reports in the documents given to me by the father, no gunshot residue testing lab results, no DNA trace evidence — blood, skin, hair testing. At least I didn't have the reports for it. That took me almost four years to get, because you keep getting kicked down the lane when you do FOIAs, and if you're not FOIAing the exact right department of the exact right agency, you're not going to get the answer you're looking for.
Finally I was able to get those reports, and those reports told me that Job didn't kill himself. There was no gunshot residue testing done on his hands — which is the only place you really need to do GSR testing to prove whether somebody shot a gun or not. There was no proof that Job fired a gun, which is vital to concluding whether someone did or did not kill himself.
There was no testing done — not to get graphic — but when you commit suicide with a contact wound, there's going to be a reverse explosion coming outward. Blood, hair, skin, brain, bone is going to come back because of the gases. As they hit a solid contact, it just spreads out, and the impact and velocity of the bullet creates blood and everything coming back at you. So there was very little blood on Job's right hand. And the gun was never tested for any of those trace evidence things. Why wouldn't you test it? How would you not want to know that that was the gun?
Then the ballistics — the only thing the ballistics showed was that the gun, the bullet, and the casing found came from that gun. But there was no proof that that gun was ever used in that room. They had a place where you could pull your trigger and make sure your gun was cleared so you weren't going into the building with a loaded weapon. Very easily you could empty that, take that gun, fire it somewhere else, retrieve the bullet, retrieve the casing, and put it in the room. Yes, they go together, but that doesn't mean they were ever used in the commission of any violent act.
Those were things that really started to shape things up for me. But let me back up. One thing that will just astound you — I understand NCIS on TV is not NCIS in real life. When Job was found dead at around 9:30 in the morning by the same guy who had last seen him alive, everybody agreed Job was dead. They brought in the NCIS agent who just happened to be in the building, and the doc to pronounce him dead. Typically in law enforcement, when you find somebody dead, it's a crime scene until it's proven not to be a crime.
Tucker Carlson: Right.
Matt: They all agree he's dead. They leave. The NCIS agent locks the door and gives the key to the guy that found him dead — who was a SEAL — and says, "Don't let anybody in this room. We'll be back with more guys." And nine hours later, NCIS came back. So for nine hours, Job's body laid in his bed in his room with all of the suspects having access to that room. In law enforcement, once it's a crime scene, it's your crime scene. There's no relinquishing it to non-law enforcement until properly relieved. Law enforcement must be in control of it at all times. Otherwise, any evidence — if a crime had occurred — you wouldn't be able to prove anything because it would all be fruit of the poisonous tree. There was no crime scene integrity, no chain of custody of evidence. Nothing could ever be proven. Knowing now that it was a homicide, the greatest thing they did was create a scenario where evidence could never point to them.
And then immediately after relinquishing the body, after they did the crime scene investigation itself nine hours later, they bagged his hands in the room to preserve evidence — which is standard. The NCIS agent told the command master chief, his name was Jeff Peeler — and I say "was" for a reason — not to touch Job's body. Job's body gets taken out by the medical people, and the NCIS agent forgot to put a bloody bed sheet in with his belongings to go into the body bag so it could all get tested when it went back to the medical examiner. When he walked in, they were washing Job's entire body from head to toe. They took the bags off his hands, scrubbed his hands, washed every part of his body — literally all evidence down the drain.
Tucker Carlson: Who was "they"?
Matt: The medical people, at the direction of Jeff Peeler. And Jeff's excuse was that he wanted Job to have a dignified return flight home. The problem is they put new evidence bags back on his hands — which is a deceitful thing. If you remove evidence bags, wash somebody's hands, and put new evidence bags on, you want whoever is receiving that body to think they've never been touched.
Tucker Carlson: Right. That's the assumption when the evidence bags are sealed.
Matt: In 2024, I started to get some traction on some podcasts and people were learning more about Job. Forensic people who follow the vet-bro podcast world started to reach out to me and ask if they could take a look at everything I had. Once I vetted who they were, I had no problem doing that — more eyes the better. I'm not a forensics guy, I'm just a cop. I had five forensic investigators — guys that actually work crime scenes — and then a forensic criminologist. His name is Brent Turvey, who was recently on the Idaho four college kids case that were murdered. He worked for the defense as one of their forensic experts. He reviewed it too. Every single one of them — the four investigators and the doctor — all concluded that it was murder.
All of the things I knew from gut instinct and experience, I now knew were true. I hadn't been convincing myself of something that wasn't true. And then I've spent the last two years trying to get the United States government to care and reopen the case. I've had congresspeople write letters to the Navy, and the Navy keeps coming back: "We're satisfied with our investigation. If he wants to send in any information, he can send it through the tip line."
Tucker Carlson: The unmonitored tip line.
Matt: Yeah.
Motive: Crimes on the Deployment
Tucker Carlson: What you're describing, if true, would be a fairly complex operation. It would require motive. Why go to the trouble to murder a man, cover it up, take the risk — without a real reason? What would the reason be?
Matt: It's evolved. Initially I was looking at it from an individual-moment perspective — this happened which caused this, this happened which caused that. There were multiple things that happened on that deployment that could have played a role in someone or some group of people wanting to hurt Job.
Before he deployed as commander of SEAL Team 4, he went to the same area because SEAL Team 2 was the team they were relieving. He was there getting the lay of the land, meeting with their commander, meeting the locals, meeting the police chief of the province — who was a terrorist — just getting to understand what was going on. In June of 2012, there was an Afghan detainee who was killed by four SEALs while detained.
Tucker Carlson: While detained. Tortured and killed.
Matt: Job was brought in to look over the evidence and make his recommendation. Not officially, but the commander of SEAL Team 2 wanted his input. Job recommended court-martial for all of them. During the same period, there was a signals intercept of Taliban chatter about wanting to get retribution against the SEALs for what they did to one of their villagers.
Tucker Carlson: Why was the detainee killed?
Matt: They thought he was a suspect in a bombing. But it turned out he wasn't. They ended up letting him go, and he died two hours after they let him go back to his village, from his injuries.
Fast forward to November, when Job is now commander of SEAL Team 4 and they've relieved SEAL Team 2. They moved the forward operating base about 60 kilometers away, but still within the operating area of the local Taliban. One of his guys was killed in an ambush — that was the retribution for what happened with their villager under SEAL Team 2. Job was unaware of the signals intelligence that had been intercepted indicating that type of event could happen.
Also at this period of time — it's 2012, winning hearts and minds was important — village stability operations were happening all the time. They're trying to help these villagers sustain themselves, interfacing with local mullahs and things of that nature. Job had to deal with a guy named Mullah Khan, who was the local police chief in the Uruzgan province. Very powerful man, former drug smuggler and human trafficker before he became the police chief, quote unquote. One of the things Job really struggled with was having to deal with this guy because he knew that underage kids were being trafficked, and that drugs — I think you had John Kiriakou on, talking about the poppy fields and how the CIA paid farmers in Afghanistan to grow poppies. By 2012, 93% of the heroin in the world was coming out of the poppy fields of Afghanistan. It's a very well-known fact that the SEALs, as part of their responsibility, were to protect those poppy fields.
Tucker Carlson: Can I ask you to pause? I've never understood the reasoning there. Why would the US government promote heroin?
Matt: That's a deep conversation, but it's similar to Vietnam. There's always been a desire to neuter people — whether it's their will to thrive or whatever — and drugs are a very good way to do that. I'm seeing it in our own country. We're being neutered by drugs on purpose. Whether it was intended for Americans to be neutered, or the enemy in Russia or China, or wherever that 93% was going around the world — it wasn't just coming to America. There probably is some strategic element to it.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it's probably that simple. If you seek to dominate people, get them on drugs.
Matt: That's Occam's razor, I guess.
Tucker Carlson: I think that's right.
Matt: So Job struggled with that. And I think ultimately the thing that got him killed — while there was an incident where one of the guys in his unit had raped an Afghan teen, and another guy who was a former SEAL Team Six operator who had been attached to SEAL Team 2 and then given to Job as well was stealing ASOT money, which is the CIA money that special operations would use to pay off tribal leaders.
Tucker Carlson: The famous pallets of $100 bills.
Matt: Three days before he died, Job talked with his wife. She asked how he was doing. He said, "There are a lot of things happening that I'm going to have to deal with when I get back." She knew not to ask specific questions — she's the wife of a SEAL commander. Roughly two weeks before he died, the entire hierarchy of Group Two, which is the overseeing entity of the East Coast SEALs — Tim Samansky, who was the admiral, and two other high-level people within Group Two — came to Afghanistan and met with Job for a very short trip. I have witness statements stating that there was a heated argument between Tim Samansky and Job about ten to fourteen days before his death.
If I had to guess what that conversation was about — and I don't have specific proof — it was about Job wanting to report everything: the rape, the stolen money, the mullah trafficking drugs and kids, the poppy fields. I think he was told — because he was on the admiral track — "If you want to have a career, you're going to keep your mouth shut. You're going to get your next gig after you're done being commander of SEAL Team 4, you'll go to college in June, and you'll become an admiral."
Tucker Carlson: So big picture, what we're seeing is eleven years into the Afghan war, order and discipline are starting to break down. People are getting cynical. It's just what happens if a war goes on long enough — it's not really about what it started as.
Matt: I am not critical in the sense that I understand war. I understand the mechanics of it. I'm not necessarily criticizing the SEALs for doing their jobs in battle. You may go over the line a couple of times. But after eleven years, things are likely to fall apart.
Tucker Carlson: And if you send people out enough times to do animal stuff, they become animals.
Matt: That's the truest thing ever said. Having the luxury of being exposed to many events that have occurred over the last 20 years within the SEAL community, that's the most logical cause and effect. And then there's a sinister side to it — a mafia-level hierarchy within the Navy SEALs on the corrupt side that will use guys. I had a SEAL Team Six guy bare his soul to me, telling me how on ops they were told to kill everybody — women, children, everybody on a target. And after they did that, they were asked to do things like take this to this mullah. When they said they didn't want to do that unless they knew what they were taking, they were told: "Well, then you're going to be written up as a war criminal for killing all those people, because you did that on your own — even though it was a direct order from the higher-ups." So they would use all of those mechanisms of manipulation and keeping a thumb on guys.
Tucker Carlson: It's an initiation.
Matt: Very much so. In the '80s, the people they were recruiting to be Navy SEALs — when there was no war going on — were more of the military-bearing, rule-following, traditional leader type. Once the GWOT started, they were recruiting the high school wrestler with an anger issue, maybe got in some trouble with the law, has no dad. That was the profile they started to recruit, because they knew those guys were looking for something to belong to, something with a greater purpose that allowed them to use their anger and rage in a legal, quote unquote productive way.
Tucker Carlson: Started recruiting emotionally stunted guys.
Matt: Yes, very much so. It really shows.
Tim Samansky and the SEAL Hierarchy
Tucker Carlson: Tim Samansky — admiral commanding Group Two at that time. Who is he exactly?
Matt: He is an acolyte of Dick Marcinko. I've never met the man, but his reputation precedes him. Everything I've been told about him from the community I'm now part of — this SEAL corruption exposure group — is that he's the queen bee. He's the one that runs the show. Always the one that creates the brand while SEALs are in, and then after they're done being SEALs. There are plenty of vertical markets that the SEALs are in that make a lot of money. Just like a multi-level marketing scheme, money gets kicked up the chain — kind of like the mob. From what I'm told, Tim Samansky is the leader of that.
Tucker Carlson: Is he a civilian at this point?
Matt: Yeah, he's retired. Retired admiral. I only care about Job. But in order for people to care about Job other than me, I had to be exposed to all the other stuff, because there was nobody front-facing their work. It was all behind the scenes, all surreptitiously investigated, because a lot of these SEALs don't want to go against the brand. They don't want to come out. It pisses me off, because I'm out here — Joe small-town cop from Pottstown, Pennsylvania — taking the arrows, doing the heavy lifting. I would love them to come out and defend and fight for the community that they love and the country that they love. But they needed me to be the face and the voice for the things they were investigating.
So I had the opportunity to interview Rob O'Neill for six hours. That interview — on the J. Slay USA podcast — covered the Bin Laden raid, Job's case, Extortion 17, and Marcus Luttrell with Lone Survivor. Rob actually admitted that he believed Job's death was a cover-up and that it wasn't suicide. I give him credit for saying that. While he has faults and while many people don't believe he's the one who shot Bin Laden first — which everybody I've talked to leads me to believe is true, though I wasn't there — to his credit, he isn't afraid to say things about other things within his community. Those interviews created the opportunity for me to expand on podcasts, get Job's name out more, and get those forensics people to reach out to me.
Dr. Turvey wrote his findings when he reviewed the case. Job's body was moved twice after he was dead. There are three distinct dried blood flow patterns on his head, which can't happen in an instantaneous death — the bullet enters the brain, it slides out immediately, you can't move two more times. The casing was found under Job's tailbone area — impossible to have happened in the position in which he was shot. The bullet wound up in the upper left corner by the head of the bed. If you're standing at the foot of the bed, upper left corner — under his bed were Pelican boxes, and the only place that didn't have a Pelican box was the upper left corner. The blood from Job's head had pooled under there, and the bullet was found in that pool of blood. They didn't test that bullet for anything other than the DNA of the blood — no testing for brain matter, skin, skull fragments, nothing.
The bullet was crushed down but intact enough to identify it as a 9mm ball round of the type they were issued. But the one thing I don't have a complete answer to yet — during his autopsy, there are photos of his head where there is a distinct semicircle, the same diameter as the face of a suppressor. I was introduced to Pete Hegseth in 2022 when he was still at Fox, and asked him for help getting exposure. He reviewed everything I had at the time and agreed. I have text messages that I released to the Washington Post for the article written in June — on the front page — where he says there's no way anybody would commit suicide in the position Job was found in, and that it was clearly a suppressor that was used to kill him.
Job's gun was unsuppressed. So we have a problem. How do we justify a suicide when there's potential evidence of a different gun being used to kill him? That alone is a huge issue. Nobody heard a gunshot — which would explain why nobody heard a gunshot. It could have been a pillow and a suppressor. It could have been many things that muted the sound of that gun going off.
The forensics were what I needed to validate everything I'd done for the last five or six years before I got those findings — to know I wasn't on a ghost-chasing mission. It gave me the peace of mind to know I didn't have to go out anymore and convince people that Job was murdered. I know Job was murdered. I'm 99% sure he was killed by people who had access to that building. Do I know if it was SEALs? No. But I do know that Jeff Peeler — the command master chief, the top enlisted guy, who found him and then ordered his body washed and had control over the crime scene — I named him publicly on Clayton Morris's show, Redacted, as the one who orchestrated the cover-up of Job's death. Ten days later, he was found dead of a heart attack.
Tucker Carlson: At what age?
Matt: 62, maybe. By all accounts, in great shape. I'm not insinuating anything happened — though it is very odd timing that I name him publicly on a rather large platform and he's found dead ten days later.
Who Killed Job Price?
Tucker Carlson: Have you come across any evidence that Peeler was involved in things he'd want to cover up?
Matt: No. I have suspects on who I think were involved. I know Jeff Peeler knew exactly what happened to Job. He's a cleanup guy — the top enlisted guy, he interfaces with the command-level guys every day, and protects the integrity of the brand.
Tucker Carlson: Sketch out for us — without naming names if you don't care to, since you can't prove it — what do you believe happened? Who do you believe the people who did kill him were? Were they command-level people?
Matt: I believe the SEAL Team Six guy who stole the money — because Job confronted him two days before he died and told him that money had to be returned — I believe he was involved. I believe there were a couple of guys involved in the rape of the child. I think there were guys who hated Job because two of their buddies had died. The active participants in the murder was a small number of people. The conspiracy to cover it up was a large group of people. And honestly — how do I say this without getting myself sued or killed — I believe that another entity is the one that actually executed Job. A non-military government entity.
Tucker Carlson: Hmm.
Matt: Because of the poppy field, heroin thing.
Tucker Carlson: Another government agency that works closely with the SEALs.
Matt: Yes. And I believe the SEAL Team Six guys — an entity that a lot of SEALs go to work for when they leave.
Tucker Carlson: You're talking about the Department of Transportation.
Matt: Yeah. FAA. The "Forgotten About Agency." That's what we used to call it when I was an air marshal — nobody paid attention to you. But then they created Homeland Security and ruined everything. But I digress. I think there is definitely a thread to pull there that I don't want to pull. I really only want Job's case to be changed from suicide to something not suicide.
Because when Job died, he had a million-dollar life insurance policy he had gotten on his own. The military gives a $400,000 death benefit if you die in combat that automatically gets paid to the family. But he had a million-dollar life insurance policy, plus his six months from getting his pension, plus any promotions he would have gotten to admiral and whatever that pay would have been — because that's what his pension would have been based on. We're looking at $3 million minimum in benefits that his wife and daughter didn't get.
Tucker Carlson: Because none of that is triggered by suicide.
Matt: Correct. You get none of those things when you commit suicide. There's nothing they can do about the life insurance policy because it's already expired. But the government should stroke a check for all of that to make her whole, and then do a computer keystroke change — go from suicide to undetermined. I know I'm never going to get homicide. I know that.
Tucker Carlson: Let's test your theory. You've described a number of crimes already. You described the murder of a detainee — beaten and tortured to death. You've described the rape of a local teenage girl. And you've described the theft of US government funds meant for tribal chiefs. Were any of those investigated and resulted in court-martials?
Matt: Zero.
Tucker Carlson: And nobody was investigated for destroying evidence and tampering with evidence?
Matt: Absolutely zero accountability for anything that happened on that deployment.
Tucker Carlson: But you're pretty confident that those other three crimes — the rape, the killing of the detainee, and the theft of those funds — those happened?
Matt: 100%.
Tucker Carlson: And no one was ever held accountable in any way.
Matt: Nobody. The ones that killed the detainee did get court-martialed and were sentenced to jail. They ended up having all their charges dropped later on.
Tucker Carlson: Why?
Matt: And all got promoted.
Tucker Carlson: Wait — they were court-martialed, convicted, and then overturned, and then they got promoted?
Matt: Yes, they did.
Tucker Carlson: Is that normal?
Matt: Not in my world. But apparently in that world it is. You fail forward in the Navy SEALs.
Drug Trafficking and the SEAL Criminal Network
Tucker Carlson: I want to go back to something you said a while ago. You said there are all kinds of business verticals that the SEAL teams benefit from. What does that mean?
Matt: Some are legal, some are illegal. I have sources who have told me that a lot of the ASOT money was used to buy drugs, and they were getting shipped back in military cargo to the United States and then sold on the open market at a 350% profit — because they didn't spend any of their own money. They used the taxpayer dollar from that ASOT money, bought drugs, had them shipped back, and those drugs were sold to MS-13 and other gangs to distribute on the streets.
Tucker Carlson: Do you believe that happened?
Matt: 100%.
Tucker Carlson: Everyone — I mean, it's hard to think of a more appalling crime than that, a greater betrayal of our country than our own military importing drugs into our nation to kill our kids. I can't think of anything worse than that.
Matt: Greed and power.
Tucker Carlson: But you really believe that happened?
Matt: 100%. Because that's the — have you spoken to people who saw it?
Matt: Yes. I've spoken to people who didn't participate but were in the circles of knowledge and were present when that was happening.
Tucker Carlson: Present for the shipping to the States?
Matt: Yes. There's a guy named Staff Sergeant Melgar who was a Special Forces guy who was killed by two SEAL Team Six guys and two Marine Raiders in Mali in 2018. He had caught the SEAL Team Six guys stealing ASOT money and buying drugs and diamonds in Mali. And they killed him. They said it was roughhousing during MMA, but they actually broke his hyoid bone. And then they did a tracheotomy on him after he died to try to make it look like they were trying to save his life — but they were just trying to cover up the fact that they broke that bone in his neck.
Tucker Carlson: Did they get away with it?
Matt: They did and they didn't. They went to jail, but then their sentences were reduced. And they got promoted too, oddly enough.
Matt: One got promoted while he was in jail.
Tucker Carlson: Okay. Well, you're describing an organization that's completely out of control.
Matt: Very much so.
Tucker Carlson: Because they killed an American — another soldier.
Matt: Yes. Job was 2012, that was 2018. And I don't know how many other instances — I have on very good authority from many sources that what they called "strap-hangers," so the SEALs would look at anybody attached to them going out on missions — whether it's a CCT combat controller from the Air Force, a PJ, a TACP, or Special Forces guys — if somebody was going to upset the brand of the Navy SEALs, if they were going to rat them out for doing whatever it is they were doing illegally, they would kill them on the spot. That was commonplace. There were a lot of guys who died who were not killed by enemy fire — they were killed by their own men. Because it's war, and because there are no forensics taken on bullets and trajectories and things of that nature, nobody looks into it. It's just: yes, he got killed by a rifle round, he's dead, he was a hero because he was at war — when in reality, very many times it was at the hands of the wrong men.
That is the part that haunts me at night — knowing that there is a group of people who are supposed to be the good guys. We're supposed to be the good guys. We set the standard. We don't stoop to the level of barbarianism like our enemy does. The fact that that's not what's happening is very disheartening to me as a veteran. I was in the Army for four years and a cop for 30 years, and I bleed red, white, and blue. I'm as conservative as the day is long. It haunts me to think that that's what's happening.
Tucker Carlson: Does it shock you, though? I mean, you spend 20 years prosecuting a totally pointless war. There was no one in charge from the president on down who could ever articulate what the point of the Afghan occupation was. No one could ever explain the strategy. There were tactics, but what's the point? And so you take guys — normal, decent Americans — and you put them in a world where killing is kind of what you do, and there's no oversight at all, and there's no purpose or meaning or redemptive mission. Of course people are going to become evil, right?
Matt: Yeah. And you don't want to look behind that curtain, because it's uncomfortable. As an American, if I didn't have access to the information I had, I would just be as dumb and blind as everyone else. That's by design, because the media — on a bipartisan basis, left-wing NBC, right-wing Fox News, both of them — promote the military as the best thing this country has, the only really noble institution in the nation. The only thing you can't criticize. You can criticize everybody else, but you can't criticize the military.
Tucker Carlson: Why is that? You would think — I used to say when I was at Fox, they always said the left hates the military. Well, I don't notice that. I notice the left promoting the military, actually. Have you noticed that?
Matt: Yeah. I don't think there is a left and right anymore. I think it's all one big thing, and they just pick their side for the topic of the day for theater. I spent 34 years of my life serving and protecting in some capacity, doing it with honor. I was in the Persian Gulf War. There weren't many wars going on growing up in the '70s and '80s after Vietnam. The military was — you went and served to get college money or learn a trade. You weren't going to fight a 20-year war. You have to really widen your focus to see the greater picture of what happened since 2002 in order to truly understand the magnitude of the exposure these guys were placed under. I have nothing but the utmost respect for all the good and honorable men who serve our country. There's a small handful that are ruining it for everybody. While I take no pride in exposing this stuff, I also know that the best medicine is probably sunlight in this case.
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's also — they don't own it. They don't own the US military. I respect people's service. I certainly respect their bravery. Even the bad guys are brave. They're all brave. But it's not their country. It's not their military. They're doing this on our behalf with our money. So who do you think you are? You can't act like that. It's like I feel this way about our political class too — this doesn't belong to you. You don't get to wreck it.
Matt: We've allowed ourselves to distance ourselves from the very fabric of what makes us ourselves. America is unique more than any other country ever created. The things that made us unique, we now just complacently accept the opposite of. The greatness, the first to do things, the place where people come from other countries to find the American dream — we just sort of accept all that is just going to be, and then we don't care to know what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq for 20 years. We care to not want to know what's going on in our government since, I would say, the early 1900s — how our government has become what it is today. You follow those patterns and you see how it got here. And it scares the hell out of me. Sometimes I think the Amish had it all figured out and we've just been duped into thinking something else.
Tucker Carlson: They don't have a lot of autism problems in the community.
Matt: No.
Tucker Carlson: So we know — you believe, based on years of reporting — that there really are, it's not just an urban legend, criminal cartels at work within the US military.
Matt: Yes. And then they end up going to work for PMCs, which are just a different kind of cartel, right? The Blackwaters, there are plenty of PMCs doing contract work with ex-special operations guys that are doing things that aren't moral. There's always a pathway for them to take what they did in their time in service and monetize it outside — whether it's starting training companies, starting a firearms company, MMA gyms. The rise of MMA within the special operations community, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu specifically, was the first vertical that was created. There's always money to prop people up. Whether it's buying somebody who screws up while they're in the military — but they stay loyal to the brand, then they get out and get a book deal and write a book about leadership, and all of a sudden it's a New York Times bestseller. Not because the book's good, but because there was money behind it — book purchases to spike the sales. All that happens. This is how all these guys end up staying quiet for decades, because that gravy train — through the SEAL Foundation, through other organizations — is how they stay part of the Brotherhood and financially okay. Nobody wants to take that leap and go against the grain and risk all of that.
You have to ask yourself: what would cause someone to kill their commander? What would cause somebody to keep quiet about war crimes for 30, 40, 50, 60 years? What would keep you quiet? I know I couldn't be quiet. My soul would get eaten to death. Money, power, community — all those things keep these guys toeing the line. And it's not all of them. I have so many SEALs that are supporting me and quietly telling me to just blow it all up, because it's the only way it's going to get fixed.
Tucker Carlson: Have you had any luck getting the attention of elected officials, the ones who appropriate the money for all of this?
Matt: I've had yes, but not of any consequence. My representative in the House out of Missouri wrote a letter requesting they take a look at the case — got the "go pound sand" letter back. Senator McCormack out of Pennsylvania wrote a letter — got the same response. I have no faith in the government doing their job. Pete Hegseth — the last thing he texted me in April 2023 before he ghosted me was, "If I'm ever in a position to help, I will."
Tucker Carlson: Did he wind up in a position to help?
Matt: He kind of did — Secretary of Defense. He controls everything within our military-industrial complex. There have been plenty of conversations with people in his sphere who have, on my behalf, spoken and given off-ramps for Job's case. Up until last week there were negotiations happening. I told them Tucker's coming, and if there's going to be a resolution to this in a quiet way, let's get it done — because if not, I'm going with Tucker, and that's just happening. Didn't get done. So here we are. Again, it's just a matter of getting his manner of death changed from suicide to something else so that it releases the funds that his family deserves.
Tucker Carlson: Have you spoken to any of his team — people who served under him from that deployment?
Matt: Only a couple. Most of them won't talk to me. Luckily I have all their statements, and they're all scripted. Everybody said basically the same thing in every one of those statements. Even words like "aloof" — that he was aloof. I can count on one finger the number of times I've used "aloof" in a sentence. I certainly don't think Navy SEALs collectively use the word "aloof" when describing another person.
Tucker Carlson: Also, describing a commanding officer as aloof is not evidence that he killed himself.
Matt: No. And I've had hateful emails and threats telling me that the man I thought I knew is not the man who killed himself — he was changed, he was depressed, he was withdrawn. Okay. I stipulate to that. And the evidence shows he was murdered. So anything you tell me about this contextual Job Price sadness thing has no bearing, because actual evidence shows he was murdered. There is absolutely zero — not a single stitch of evidence — that Job committed suicide.
Tucker Carlson: Well, given the context you've laid out, I don't think it sounds crazy that he was killed.
Matt: I appreciate that, because I've been called that a lot.
John Chapman and Roberts Ridge
Tucker Carlson: John Chapman — you made reference to his story, his case. What is it? What happened?
Matt: Early in the war, the first major offensive in Afghanistan was called Operation Anaconda. There was a mountain called Takur Ghar. Tim Samansky was the operations officer who planned that mission — you'll see the connectivity there. He got his team, SEAL Team Six, to take this mission where they were going to put a recon team, a sniper team, on this mountain. But Delta Force — Pete Blaber, who has since turned into a complete fraud — he was the ground force commander of the whole area. He knew there were enemy on that mountain. They'd seen their movement. They decided to do the mission anyway and land on top of the mountain. The original plan was to land lower and make their way up by foot to get the element of surprise. They chose not to do that — they decided to land right on top of the mountain due to time constraints, I'm told.
They get hit by an RPG. One of the SEALs on that six-man team — plus John Chapman, who was the Air Force combat controller — Neil Roberts, his name was, fell out the back of the helicopter. The helicopter was going to crash, so the pilot, Alan Mack, navigated it to a safe area and crash-landed. They got picked up, went back to base, got another helicopter, and were supposed to land lower again. They decided not to do that and landed exactly in the same spot they'd just been shot down in, in order to go rescue Neil Roberts.
Tucker Carlson: Did they believe he was alive?
Matt: The assumption you always go with is that he's alive. Turns out he wasn't. He fought valiantly — I've seen the footage of it. They nearly decapitated him and took all his gear. Savages.
They land and they're under heavy fire from multiple angles. John was the second one off the helicopter. Slabinski, who was the team leader, was the first one off and fell — it was deep snow, so that first step's a doozy if you don't know what's underneath you. John's job as a CCT is to establish communications with assets overhead and coordinate whatever they need. So he went up the hill first through the snow towards gunfire. It's called Bunker One and Bunker Two in the Medal of Honor packet. He assaulted Bunker One by himself, killed two bad guys. Slabinski followed him up, entered Bunker One with him, killed the donkey apparently that was in there, and then they started addressing Bunker Two, which had a PKM machine gun — a heavy-duty 7.62mm machine gun. John gets hit and falls right outside Bunker One.
So now it's Slabinski. Neil Roberts — after the bad guys captured him, they brought him up to a rock outcropping right by Bunker One and essentially beheaded him. He was laying there. Two other SEALs who had made their way up were fighting multiple positions. They determined it was untenable and slid down the side of the mountain, leaving Neil and John on the mountain.
Tucker Carlson: Neil had been killed.
Matt: Yes. But John had been shot.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. They — according to their account — believed he was dead.
Matt: Nobody is questioning the decision for self-preservation and coming up with a better plan. The problem is what happened after, for the next 24 years — not necessarily what happened on the mountain that day. Fog of war is real. Things happen. No one's really criticizing Slabinski or SEAL Team Six for the mission execution — just for how they handled it afterwards.
John ends up coming to and proceeds to fight by himself as the QRF — Army Rangers — were coming in to rescue everybody. He was drawing fire away from the helicopter bringing the Rangers in and ultimately saved 18 of the 23 with his actions. He was killed. He actually earned two Medals of Honor in reality. He was only given one because the second half of the story — the part where he comes to and fights by himself — they ended up classifying, because the Navy didn't want that out there.
Immediately afterwards, he's put on the SEAL Team Six Hall of Fame — the only non-SEAL up there. He gets put in for an Air Force Cross, which is right below the Medal of Honor, the highest medal you can get in the Air Force. Slabinski, Kyle Soltoff, and Randy Lowry — guys on SEAL Team Six — all wrote statements of facts for that medal about what John did, up until the point where they left the mountain. The second half they didn't witness — that was witnessed overhead by the ISR and the AC-130 feed.
So John gets his Air Force Cross, and for the first few years everything is "John's a hero, John's a hero." Until about 2015 or 2016, when the Air Force decided to look at all valorous medals that had been given out, because there are very few Air Force Medals of Honor. The Secretary of the Air Force said, "Let's take a look and see if anybody qualifies for a Medal of Honor." John's name came up. They reviewed it — he definitely deserved a Medal of Honor. A packet was created and researched — tens of thousands of hours of imagery analysis, video pixel tracking, all kinds of stuff. It's not some casual upgrade. You have to prove that everything that happened is factual and that it's worthy of the highest medal in our military.
The Navy — SEAL Team Six — decided they were going to try to block it, because their guy Slabinski had been put in for the Medal of Honor three times and it was denied. So John's was getting traction. They created this narrative called the "Redbeard theory" — some Chechen or Uzbek fighter who was actually on the ISR feed doing what John was doing. They're saying it was this red-bearded guy, that it was actually red-on-red fighting — bad guys fighting bad guys in daylight, who live on that mountain together for weeks and months at a time and know where every fighting position is on that ridge line. Their version is that John didn't come to — that John died in the first three to four minutes after taking Bunker One, when he fell. He was dead from PKM fire. What happened afterwards was this bad guy shooting at his other bad-guy buddies.
That got debunked. The video evidence — they were able to track everybody on the mountain, say who was who and where they were. Good thing is, John didn't leave that area. Where he went down, he was fighting in basically a phone booth in that spot, and that's where he ultimately died as well, a few feet away from where he initially went down.
But the Navy kept pressing and pressing to block John's Medal of Honor until a deal was struck between the Air Force Secretary and the Navy Secretary: they would attach Slabinski's Medal of Honor to John Chapman's Medal of Honor, and they would both get the Medal of Honor. So in 2018, they both got their medals — except Slabinski got his first. So the dead guy didn't get his first. The alive guy got his first, because that was one of the agreements the Navy had requested. It looks like first place — the one getting your medal first means you did the most.
On a surface level, you think they probably don't want the narrative of "we left a man behind," because that's counter to their narrative every time: "We never leave a man behind." For a long time, up until the last three or four weeks, I just assumed that was the reasoning. Why would you go to this length to stop merit being given to somebody who clearly deserved it? Why would you try to run his name through the mud all these years later?
John gets his Medal of Honor and everything's fine. The family came to terms with the fact that John was never going to get his full just due, but there was enough. As long as nobody was rubbing their face in it or trying to besmirch him in any way, they were fine.
The National Medal of Honor Museum Dispute
Matt: Then the National Medal of Honor Museum opened. There was a grand opening. Leading up to that, members of the board had called the Chapman family and said they wanted to honor John and have him prominently displayed in the museum. They were getting artifacts together for a big display, and then a couple of months before the grand opening, Lori Chapman — John's sister — finds out that there was a change in plans. Nobody notified them. John was not getting a prominent display, but Slabinski was. That turned into a major event within the Chapman family, reopened the wound, pissed them off. The museum just kept pushing them away and deflecting.
I went with her to the grand opening down in Arlington, Texas in March of 2025. When you walk into the museum — it's a very nice museum — John has a plaque the size of that screen hanging on the wall in a timeline of Medal of Honor winners. And Slabinski has a room half the size of this, an area full of artifacts about how awesome Slabinski is. The guy who's alive because of the actions of John Chapman is being celebrated as the hero in that story, because the dead guy can't talk.
That pissed me off, and it pissed the family off. It put what was in the bed and pulled the covers off and exposed everything again. Over the years I had known that there's a guy named Mitch Hall, a SEAL Team Six guy who wants to be famous in Hollywood, who was tasked by Tim Samansky to create a documentary based off of the Redbeard theory. For years it was just in the talking phase. There was no real public movement with the documentary until recently. For a long time, Mitch had been trying to get Lori, a guy named Rob Harrison — who was the second guy on the AC-130 overhead and eyewitnessed everything through the television screens they were watching — and me to come on and be interviewed for this documentary. We respectfully declined. He can't handle that. So he badgers and does all this stuff trying to get us to come on, under the guise of "we're just trying to find the truth." The documentary is called "The Ground Truth." We call it "The Ground Spoof."
Recently, Mitch and a guy named Brian Bloom — a video game voice actor and bit actor in a soap opera, his business partner in this documentary — went on Andy Stumpf's podcast, Cleared Hot. Andy was a Navy SEAL, a SEAL Team Six guy. Mitch spent the better part of ten hours over the course of three different episodes — when asked by Andy whether John Chapman deserved the Medal of Honor — saying no. Running John's name through the mud, running Lori's name through the mud, John's family through the mud. Produced no evidence — very similar to Job's case, where there's no evidence to show what they're saying, but they want you to believe that's what happened.
Lori and a guy named Dan Schilling, who was an Air Force combat controller, wrote a bestselling book called Alone at Dawn, which is the true account of what happened to John Chapman. She autographed this book for you.
Tucker Carlson: Thank you.
Matt: And then also wrote a memoir about John that she also wanted to give you. Because they're bullies, and because they picked on the dead man and his family, I decided to start digging about three weeks ago. Through the relationships I've built over the last seven years, I was able to obtain all the necessary evidence I need to review — the ISR feed, uncut, the AC-130 feeds, everything the Air Force used to prove what John did is what John did.
New Forensic Questions in the Chapman Case
Matt: I was looking at the autopsy the other day. I'm pretty well versed in what the enemy uses as their primary weapons — AK-47s, AK-74s, PKM machine guns. Not a lot of 9mm or .38 specials during combat for al-Qaeda.
Tucker Carlson: They're not carrying the .38.
Matt: No wheel guns. I noticed that John had nine bullet wounds. Seven of them were non-lethal, and forensically show that for at least an hour his body was still pumping blood — because the wounds presented in a way that showed there was blood pressure at the time of the wounds for an extended period, which means he wasn't dead. He was alive for at least an hour. That correlates with him getting up and fighting again, and then receiving the fatal wounds from the PKM machine gun, which blew up his aorta. You don't get shot in the aorta four minutes in and then get up and fight again.
Then I was looking at the bullets recovered from him. There's a lot of shrapnel — they dropped bombs all around him, the AC-130 did. Two of the bullets recovered were completely different in size, shape, and alloy than the copper-based 7.62mm rounds recovered from his body. They were small caliber. The only people carrying small calibers on that mountain were the good guys. There's no reference anywhere in any report of any handguns recovered from the bad guys who were killed on that mountain. So there are a couple of bullets in John that I have some questions about. How did they get there? How did a small handgun caliber round wind up in John Chapman's body?
Tucker Carlson: What's your thought?
Matt: I will show grace and say that there was probably a lot of things happening all at once. People are moving all over the place, gunfire's coming from everywhere. The SEALs — once they exfilled off the side of the mountain — never went back into the fight. They had guys that were wounded and they exfilled. They never re-engaged the enemy. So their vantage point is only four, maybe four and a half minutes. During that four and a half minutes, John was shot by his own guys — is what I believe. I'm going to say not intentionally, because based on where the wounds were — in his legs, the back of his legs — they have to have been unintentional.
Tucker Carlson: Well, they're in a bunker, in 20 to 22 inches of snow, and automatic weapons are going to malfunction. Maybe they had to transition to a sidearm. They carry SIG 226s.
Matt: I've spoken to several people who were involved in the pre-deployment workup where conversations were had between trainers and Slabinski and John Chapman. Slabinski told John Chapman not to carry a handgun because of the weight of everything he was going to have to carry — the radios and all that stuff. John didn't think that was tactically sound. So he went and talked to the trainers and said, "What are your thoughts? Should I or shouldn't I?" They said, "Yes, you definitely should always have a handgun with you just in case something malfunctions." Then Slabinski entered the conversation and was arguing as to why handguns aren't needed. When he was told about the Vietnam-era SEALs carrying wheel guns — I think it was the Model 66, a Taurus in .357 and .38 — he was enamored by the idea of doing what the old-school SEALs did. Tactically speaking, a wheel gun is going to work in pretty much any environment. As long as you can pull the trigger, it's going to go bang if there's a bullet in there.
So it would make sense that maybe he carried it. I don't have any direct knowledge that he did carry a .38 or .357, but I do know he was carrying a SIG 226 at least, because that's what they were issued. John Chapman is an American hero. Ron Howard is putting out a movie in December of 2027 called Alone at Dawn, featuring Adam Driver as John Chapman.
You have to ask yourself: why would a group of people be so hell-bent, 24 years later, to destroy the Chapman family and the legacy of John Chapman? What could have happened so egregious that would cause that much ire and anger for someone to want to do that again and again? This wound has been reopened five or six times over the course of 24 years. Initially I thought it's because they left a man behind and they're just too egotistical and narcissistic to allow that to be their identifying action from that mission. But now that I've found these bullets in John Chapman, maybe that's what they're covering up. I don't know. I'm going to find out, though.
Tucker Carlson: Why would they shoot him?
Matt: I don't think it was intentional. I just think it happened. And I think the fact that — as far as I know, based on everybody I've talked to — nobody's looked at his autopsy trying to figure anything out. But it's very clear to me that something doesn't fit. That's how I started with Job. Something didn't look right. Something didn't feel right. My gut says something doesn't look right with that autopsy. There's no justification as to how those handgun rounds ended up in John's body, because he was being shot at by a 7.62 machine gun, and the guys in the bunker had AK-47s. Where did these rounds come from?
That's the thing I think they're scared about. That's why it's worth it for them to ruin their own reputation in order to protect that information from coming out. That's what it seems like to me.
Slabinski's Conduct and the Medal of Honor Society
Tucker Carlson: How long are you going to continue on the trail of corruption in elite military units?
Matt: I don't want to do it at all. I'm going to see Job's case through. And now that I'm directly involved in the Chapman case, I'm going to see that one through. But there is zero interest for me to go after anyone else. I'm not investigating anybody else. I never did. I didn't investigate Rob O'Neill or any other SEAL for any potential crime or cover-up. And I don't want to. But I don't like bullies. I don't like liars. I don't like people who hurt other people intentionally in order to serve their own best interests.
Slabinski is on the board of the National Medal of Honor Museum and is the president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. A Medal of Honor recipient who is at the top of the food chain of an organization meant to protect the integrity of the Medal of Honor and its recipients is publicly saying that the guy who saved his life on that mountain — who also received the Medal of Honor — did not earn it. Publicly. How does somebody remain on the board?
Charlotte Jones — Jerry Jones's daughter — is the president or CEO of the museum down in Arlington. She should demand that Slabinski step down from any role within that organization. The Medal of Honor Society should have him step down and be stripped of his title of president. He's also the president of a nonprofit called Turbo Vets.
There was a recent incident between him and a guy named Eric Deming, who was a SEAL — a great guy, we've become very good friends. It was a vet influencer type conference, and Slabinski was speaking on the topic of how we honor our dead. Eric went and recorded an exchange with Slabinski where he stood up, introduced himself, and said, "While we're on the topic of honoring our dead, can you name off the seven guys that died that day on the mountain — the Rangers, John Chapman, and Neil Roberts?" And he couldn't. And then he lost his mind, screaming, got in Eric's face. It's all on video.
Then Jason Redmond — another Navy SEAL who was there with Slabinski — Eric's wife was wearing one of those badge lanyards as an attendee, and her name was facing inward so he couldn't see who she was. So he grabbed her chest and the lanyard badge and flipped it around and said, "Now I know who you are." Slabinski is unstable. I think he has a lot of guilt, and I think he's unraveling. If I were his handler, I would make sure he goes into treatment and gets the help that he needs. I would certainly have no affiliation with anything to do with the Medal of Honor.
The fact that no one is calling for that yet — there are a lot of people in Congress who are very unhappy with what's happened in the last three weeks with this documentary and with Slabinski losing his composure with Eric Deming. They're very unhappy because it's bringing a negative light to the Medal of Honor itself. Every Medal of Honor from here on out is now going to have an asterisk — like Barry Bonds with steroids. That's unfortunate, and it was avoidable. Had they just done the right thing — museums are meant for the people who can't talk anymore, meant to remember those who are no longer here. If they would have just given John his display as promised, I would guarantee we wouldn't be sitting here.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Well, when everything becomes corrupt, everything becomes corrupt.
Matt: It's a fact.
Tucker Carlson: Matt, thank you for that.
Matt: You're welcome.
Tucker Carlson: Painful topic. I think you handled it responsibly, and I'm grateful that you did.