Benjamin Dichter
Benjamin Dichter spoke 481 times across 1 day of testimony.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Religious document.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
You have Torah? Yeah, please.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Torah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Thank you.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Benjamin Dichter, b-e-n-j- a-m-i-n, Dichter, d-i-c-h-t-e-r.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Good morning.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Good morning.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Hi, John.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I grew up in Toronto in a middleclass, Bayview, North Mills. I grew up in a Jewish home. I was adopted and I hit the jackpot with my family. And later in life, I found out from my biological siblings who found me, I am the descendent or the grandson of Brigadier General Denis Whittaker. So yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I’m a trucker and I produce podcasts.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Several years, about four years, approximately, and I’ve been an owner/operator for a couple of years.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. I drive to the United States, mainly, and as we call it, the upper-right corner, so Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, all that sort of stuff. With the carrier I work with, predominately commodities, paper, that sort of stuff.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
A variety of stuff, so Professor Stephen Hicks, we produce a podcast called "Open College". I do a legal podcast called "Not on Record" with a couple of lawyers and a really well-known legal researcher, so I've been learning a lot over the past couple of years, so a wide range of stuff. And we've changed some of the stuff that we've had on this little -- it started as a hobby, and we're slowly growing it into a small little side business.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
There's a few of them. There's -- we did for a while, "You Too" with Mike Bullard. We're not doing that any more. "UnTrue Crime", Diana Davison; "One Godless Woman" -- she's a Saudi activist; "The Quiggin Report"; and at the most, I think a total I've produced and created seven different podcasts with different creators.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
We have "Possibly Correct".
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
A little tongue in cheek humour.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. It was a little bit slow. Things were, you know, if you're coming off the new year and it kind of ebbs and flows. There's different times where it's busier depending on what my creators are sending me. They'll do their scripts, they'll do the recordings and send it to me, and depending on their availability, that’s when I'll upload content.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I went to school for gemology and I was a diamond grader, was my specialty. I patented a product for motorcycles many years ago and moved that to Canada when my girlfriend at the time was diagnosed with cancer. And I had a printing business on Ryerson University's campus -- well, adjacent to Ryerson University's campus for several years, yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Ran for city council in 2014 and also ultimately ran for federal politics for the Conservatives.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
In 2015, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. LGB Tory was basically a community organization for friends of mine who were Conservative, and in the gay community, there was a lot of tension that was building up, and they felt very -- I don't know, I would say alienated. And where my business was was adjacent to the gay -- because I have a lot of gay friends -- and so we decided let's put together an advocacy group, a meeting group, whatever, just to allow people to come out and you know, just to talk to a friend. It was me always says it was easier to come out as gay than it was to come out as a Conservative in the gay community when we started.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Periodically. We actually -- we had a meeting a couple of months ago and looking at moving forward in the near future. I'm so busy with so many other things at this point, so they just kind of meet with me for my ideas, advice, messaging, that sort of stuff.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Tamara Lich called me on January 15th and yeah, I knew Tamara -- it seems to be, from I'm learning in testimony, I knew her the longest, and she reached out to me. She said, "We've started a GoFundMe campaign within the past couple of days. It seems to be taking off. If you could come on board, help me with messaging, pressers, press releases, all that sort of stuff?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." So I decided to get involved with her.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I met her 2017 or 2018. I was in Alberta. I was connected to her through some other people. I went to Medicine Hat and that’s where I met her. I stayed at her house, actually.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
People that were fans of one of the podcasts that I was doing, and so they invited the podcast around, and I just kind of tagged along and got to see Medicine Hat and Grande Prairie for the first time in my life.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
"The Quiggin Report".
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, '17, '18, somewhere there.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Pretty frequently, actually. We would -- sometimes it was every couple of weeks, sometimes once a month, just, "Hey, catching up, how are you?" that sort of thing. Me and her really bonded on the whole -- I think I made fun of positivity sort of woo woo, good energy, sort of thing. We really connected when we first met each other, and she had interests in politics, and so we would discuss politics in general. And there were a lot of concerns from people in rural Alberta what had been going on in Canada from the perspective of people in her community.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
When I was in Medicine Hat, I didn’t know that she had been involved politically and knew people in politics out there. I thought she was just, you know, just a fan, sort of thing. And I just kind of, okay, fine. She knows people in politics. Great. I just didn’t really delve all that much into it at that point.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. That’s one of the things we would talk about. She'd call me and you know, just general, "What do you think about what's happening?"
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
You know what? I don't know. It's really interesting because she's totally practical and I wouldn't call her extreme to any side. I would say she's -- I don’t like the labels; it's the problem, so the political spectrum thing, I would call her maybe very centre right, if we're going to use that antiquated definition, which I don’t think is accurate. She's very, very pro -- you know, she knows I'm libertarian on social issues and she's the same way, so we passed over a lot of that stuff.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don't know. I know she -- like, she ended up with this Maverick Party and which I tried to explain to her, like, Jay Hill, who's leading the Maverick Party, is a Conservative Party MP. "Like, that’s establishment, it's not a real party, Tamara," is what I told her. "What are you spinning your wheels with this for?" But she said, "No, I'm going to give it a chance. You never know, like, you know, we need to have more voices for people in Alberta." I'm like, "Okay." And actually, leading up to prior to the convoy, the conversation, I guess before Christmas, if I'm remembering correctly, and she seemed to be coming around. She said to me, "Yeah, I think you're right all this time. I think I'm just getting frustrated," because she knew this was all people tied to the Conservative Party in Maverick. I don't know the details. That’s just what she was communicating to me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, it's kind of the deceptive tactic that if you're the Conservative Party, then just be part of the Conservative Party, don’t make fake parties. Like, just -- you see a lot of that going on lately, and I just find it's deceptive to the voter base who may not understand this is the sort of thing that goes on in politics. I just don’t support that. Just be who you are, right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
You know, I still -- I have some people in that party who love me and I have some people in that party who hate me because I will call the Conservative Party out when I think they're doing something wrong. So I don't know, it shifts, depends on the month and what's going on and who's leader, and I personally just, leading up to the convoy, I just feel like I'm done with politics, just, it's not for me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
In the downtown, middle class -- I grew up middle class -- Canadian, fiscal conservative, libertarian on social issues, let’s all get along, let’s all talk to one another and let’s not get into these different echo chambers and siloes which is something that I’ve see worsen over the years. And I saw this particularly on the university campus when I had my business there.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was very uncomfortable with the mandates and the ArriveCan app and the data tracking. I know lots of truckers that were being affected by it. I'm vaccinated myself but I saw the amount of stress that it was causing on people and I figured if I can -- I know where her frame is in terms of being very positive. And I figured we might work well together to get a positive message out there -- peace, love, unity, and freedom, which are the four words I kept repeating over and over again.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
January 28th.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I drove.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I drove my car. I never -- because of the nature of my contract with my owner operator I only have insurance when I'm hooked up to a load. So I -- and I had no desire to bring my truck here.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, because my -- I was there to be messaging, right? And I figured I'm going to be spending all my time doing interviews and talking. I’m not -- I’ll try to get out on the street but I wanted to just get maximum exposure and again convey that message of peace, love, unity, and freedom.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I hoped we would help to convey -- we would effect some positive change and help bring some people together. And I've got to tell you, on the 28th it’s amazing. We’re in front of the Chateau Laurier. I see thousands of people walking across from into Quebec because we know how strict the regulations were in Quebec, with Canadian and Fleur de Lys together, signs that said “Liberty and Freedom”. And they came up, and they were on Parliament Hill and they’re hugging these Albertan truckers and Saskatchewan truckers. Like, everybody is finally getting along. And so this division of, you know, Quebec doesn't like Alberta, that was gone. Everybody was getting along. And you know, Keith stole one of my experiences. And I’m glad he conveyed it yesterday with these two truckers in Tim Hortons. One was from Saskatchewan, and the other on was from Quebec. And they were communicating via Google translate. They were hanging out, they were joking. It was amazing. It was absolutely beautiful.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, we ultimately had a team of three people working with me as well in my hotel suite. And we were the ones putting out most of the press releases and messaging and all that sort of stuff.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Scheduling lots of interviews. My email and Twitter threads -- sorry, DMs, social media, direct messages -- I was getting requests from all over the world from every news agency imaginable. And I was trying to figure out who can we go to where I know we’ll get fair representation and compared with who’s going to have enough engagement and enough views that it will allow us to be effective.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Many.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Tucker Carlson, Hannity, NewsMax. I did a lot of podcasts, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, like just -- I looked for what is -- what I believe is current media.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I did.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. So media that has been successfully able to leverage alternative media platforms. So we’re not doing an interview with a media organization that’s going to have 30,000 people watch at night and then it’s not going to be uploaded so there’s no archival of it. So it’s kind of a balance of those newer platforms, and I actually -- with Russia Today I explained that they’re one of the -- like them, or not, they were one of the platforms that was able to leverage both online media as well as alternative media.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right; that would be the most effective, yeah for sure.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, for example, the Toronto Star put out a meme and I can’t remember the exact cartoon but it was completely defamatory of the truckers. You already saw some narratives coming out from established Canadian media trying to tie us to January 6th which has nothing to do with this protest. And we saw in testimony here that there were text messages coming from the Prime Minister’s office which proved exactly that. So I was right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
So on February 4th somebody came into my room and said, “The lawyers just did a video that’s the complete opposite of our messaging.” We call it the War of the Worlds video now. And I looked at it and I was horrified. It was “Come to Ottawa; your freedoms are dying. Canada is dying.” Like doom and gloom, not peace, love, unity, and freedom which built the movement. So I went over to the ARC Hotel to explain my sentiments and maybe a little aggressively, but you know, there were so many problems going on at that time, it was just another wrench that was thrown into the spokes of the wheel. And so I went back after a 20- or 30-minute long meeting about a few issues, a number of issues which I’m sure we’ll get into. I was presented with the class action suit and a retainer. “Here, we’re going to give you free legal advice if you guys sign it.” Soi that was the nature of the meeting. And I went back to the Sheridan and I realize I left my laptop. I was so heated I didn’t even pull it out. So I went back and I slipped, the first time I was going back and forth. And finally, in a panic, going to get my computer -- my laptop which is my life -- I slipped on this massive thing of ice in front of the EDC Building and I slipped on the ice. And I remember the exact moment. I still picture it. It was nine o'clock, 9:30 at night on the 4th approximately, and there were a couple of trucks in the parking lane, a bunch of cars; the driving lanes were completely open. A couple of cars were parked in front of the Sheridan dropping people off. And it was silent. There was no one around. And that’s when people were honking, and it was dead silent. I felt very alone and secluded. It was weird. So I tried to get up. I heard a crack. I’ve never broken anything but I'm wiggling my toes and I’m like, “It’s not broken.” But I couldn’t get up. And I hear from the distance, in front of the ARC Hotel, a trucker, a red suit, a big beard, says, “You need help?” And I'm like, “I think so.” So he comes over and he says, “You need help?” I’m like, “Yeah. And he puts his hand on my ankle and he says, “Jesus, Lord, God bless this ankle. Heal it now, thy Father.” And I was, “I love you, man, but I just need a paramedic.” And other guys were like, “Do you need help?” I’m like, “Yeah, this time send a medic, please.” And it was amazing, because there was -- you know, in just an hour, there was so much friction, but -- and this was a common thing. There was friction and then we'd get together, friction, we get -- so we were able to work out our differences when we needed to. They carried me onto the -- into the ARC Hotel lobby. They put me on the couch. They called the paramedics. And everybody just -- it was a serious moment. Everybody came back to help me. Chad was by my side. Miranda was pumping me with drugs. I don't know what she's giving me. Brigitte was there. The doctors came down to look at me, to say that that is broken. So it was amazing -- and then the paramedics got there in, I don't know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. And they said, "Yeah, it's broken. You need to go to the hospital." So I said, "Okay, should I call an ambulance?" They said, "Well, the problem is, you're not an important case. You're just a broken ankle. There's other people that have more serious cases. If you can call one, it might take about an hour or so." So I asked the -- our volunteers, and they said, "Yeah, we can -- one of us can drive you to the hospital." And Ottawa General, I'm telling -- Ottawa Hospital, 20 minutes from the hotel to having a doctor cutting up my new jeans. It was crazy. It was great.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I was, the day before.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
In -- but there were other things on my mind. My mind was the messaging, we need to keep everybody happy and peaceful and all that sort of stuff, but yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
M'hm.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, it wasn't a press conference.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Somebody came in and said the lawyers put up a video that's doom and gloom, the opposite of our messaging. And I said, "What lawyers? Who -- what lawyers are you talking about?" And that's when I went across to find out who these people were.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I did. They showed it to me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Keith Wilson.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That's right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Because that's where they were.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
So I -- we had three different hotels, so the Sheraton became messaging. My team was dealing with that. The ARC Hotel was doing I guess logistics, that sort of -- there was always conflict there. And the Swiss Hotel I think was security, communicating with the police, emergency lanes, all that sort of stuff. They actually had a -- it took a while, but they got it pretty well organized. So I was told that they're at the ARC Hotel now, go and see them. That's why they sent the video, so I went there.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Keith, Andre, Eva and Chad. I met him for the first time. There was a couple other people. I think Brigitte came. Tamara came in about 15 minutes after I had my heated exchange. There was maybe 10 people there.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, and there was a couple other people from the Board. I don't remember who.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I might have used some trucker words with Keith to explain my discontent, that I just spent almost three weeks of my life getting everybody on a message of peace, love, unity and freedom, and it worked. People are here with hippy tie dies. There's people left-wing, right-wing, all wings just hanging out together, and you just -- I said to him, "Do you understand what you just did?" Knowing - - I have a brother in policing, two nephews in policing, like, I understand that world a little bit. Mood and behaviour is what they're monitoring. They don't care what we say. It's mood and behaviour. The mood and behaviour was positive until right now. You just undid all of that. And he seemed concerned. And he said, "Oh, oh, I'm sorry." Well, and you should have thought of that before. Anyways, that was it. And then the next thing was, "Well, you've just been served, congratulation, with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit." And I said, "What are you talking about? A class- action lawsuit for what?" "For honking." I said, "What honking?" This is the same night that it was -- I broke my ankle.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, it seemed to be on the same trajectory, and I felt like -- one of the things that -- to look at the convoy and stuff, when people talked about the convoy organizers, there were many different groups; right? It wasn't just one group. And every different group had their own idea, but we were all converging on the idea of ArriveCan and the mandates, but he seemed to be representing another group that wanted to go in a different direction.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That it was counter to peace, love, unity and freedom, and it was weird. It was -- it seemed to be coming from -- you know, I started to put the pieces together after a couple days that these people were politically connected in some way, shape or form. And, you know, you just -- within a couple days, we have -- or a few days later, we have Keith Wilson and Randy Hillier's buddy Tom Marazzo and Doug Ford's buddy Dean French setting up meetings with people in the city, pretending to be negotiating some sort of deal, and what was shocking is nobody in the Ottawa Police, in the Mayor's office, in the City Council did the most basic due diligence to see if these people possessed the position of moral persuasion that they could speak on our behalf. It was just really weird.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I didn't -- I don't think so.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Just because, firstly, for -- up until that point, on the GoFundMe was myself and Tamara, and that's why we were getting so much attention, so many people were reaching out, so many people knew who we were. I'm a trucker, so it's a little bit of a -- you know, there's a culture amongst truckers as well. These were lawyers that, I don't know, they seemed to have some ulterior motive, or they seemed to know people in politics that I don't know that they had our -- like, they may have been organizing a deal with the City, but maybe they're structuring a deal for Doug Ford, but it wasn't for the truckers, if that makes sense.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, and it's one of those things you can't put your finger on it. You kind of -- you realize there's something going on and these people are well connected.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I don't think so. I think their goals were ending the protest and getting everybody out of the city as quickly as possible, because when I first met Tom Marazzo, he said to me -- I thought we got somewhere. He said, "Listen, I'm just going to be here dealing with the trucks." I don't know who put him there. I don't -- you know, there was very fluid all the time. Okay, fine. He said, "I'm going to be dealing with the trucks. I'm going to be a ghost. Nobody's going to know I was here. I will be invisible." And I thought, great, perfect. So finally, because every day we were dealing with different people setting up their own press conferences, we finally got that under control. Like, great. So I'll deal with the messaging. The trucks are parked, so I don't know what you want to do. You want to move trucks. That was a little suspect to me in the back of my head, but I just kind of left it there. And then the next morning, somebody comes to my hotel to tell me, "Tom Marazzo, guess what he's doing?" I'm, like, "What?" "A press conference." I'm, like, it's less than 12 hours ago he told me he's not going to -- what is going on? And that's the cats we were trying to herd.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. Yes, many times. To everybody. I spoke to Tamara about it and Tamara agreed with me. And she put out a number of messages to people. She was typing messages with me to tell people. She got on the phone, because this happened numerous times, telling people no comms or no communications goes out unless it's approved by Benjamin and his team.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That's right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn't say it to him directly, because I'm going to go to him and say you're trying to sabotage the protest? I mean, then it's a little bit jumping the gun. The indicators seemed to be there, but I couldn't prove it.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
What I wanted to do was just to control the messaging first, stop going out and doing press conferences. I remember when Keith said to me, "Yeah, we're going to try and reach out to the City", and I remember saying, "What are you reaching out to the City for? Just wait. Dance parties, barbeques, we're feeding the homeless. Just wait." "We have to have a press conference every day." It's not a hostage negotiation, and you're the ones", because they agreed with me that the legacy media just lies, "so you're telling me the legacy media lies, yet you want to run to the legacy media to do a press conference every day?" I'm like, "Just calm down. Everybody relax. We'll do a press conference at the end of every week, except for if something materialises and we need to do a press conference when the government brings some sort of representative who is going to speak with us." I can't hear, they're talking.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, sorry. Slow down a bit?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
My apologies. Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I'm passionate.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Will do. My apologies.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
M'hm.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
With Tamara for sure. And Tamara and I spoke all the time. There was a day-and-a-half that I had to leave from the -- when I left on the 30th, came back on the 2nd, ended up being the 3rd because of the car accident, I must have talked to her 25 times that day. Like we were in constant communication. Me and Tamara had great communication during the entire time.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
"I'll handle it. We'll take care of it. I'll talk to them." The primary thing was the messaging, of course, but when this whole idea of "let's move trucks to Wellington", I don't understand what is the goal of that. I mean, I was just in some of these -- the streets in the middle of downtown that only have a few trucks on it. I didn't see these residential streets, and I'm sure people will tell -- give me some, you know, anecdotes of a street here and there that might have had a truck on it. Okay, that might be the case, but that was not my experience. I just -- the whole idea of let's consolidate everything into Wellington, the cops told us where to park. Chris Garrah was here for a week. He got maps from the Ottawa Police saying "Park your trucks here" because we wanted to have safety routes so safety vehicles could get through during the protests, emergency vehicles, and people could just generally drive around. And I was driven around a couple of times, so I was in a car when I came in and out of the city, like I got in and out of the city no problem.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. I didn't know that she got into that agreement until -- like during the convoy I don't even remember seeing that. It was really opaque. So it was "we're doing a deal." "What?" "We're taking care of it." "Okay. Well, that's the inverse of the way it's supposed to work. You got to tell the messaging people first so we can communicate it people because all that would do is that would heighten, potentially, conflict and anxiety of the protesters who have been sitting out there freezing all day. You need to be able to tell them what's happening." But they wouldn't do that no much how much I tried.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don't remember seeing it during the convoy. I might have, and just amongst the thousands of messages it just in and out, "Okay, great", and forgot about it because I was dealing with so much other stuff.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. I haven't spoken to Ms. Lich since I gave her a hug in my hotel room the night before she was arrested, and -- because I didn't want to put her at any risk, and I knew the slightest misstep that she would be targeted.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I was -- because I was so focussed on messaging. I just had done -- that was when I did the statement on Jordan Peterson's podcast to clarify that "We are not here to overthrow the government. We are -- that's what elections are for. We hope that our parliamentarians and our media tone down the rhetoric." She was really stressed. So Tamara was coming in infrequently, different days, two, three times, sometimes once a day, sometimes not at all. She would disappear. And it's because she was under tremendous amount of stress, not only this class action suit that we were all given, we didn't know what to do, everybody was scared, and we were being told we had to behave in a certain way or else we're going to lose our free legal advice, but at the same time, every three seconds she was getting hounded with another problem here, another problem there. And I did communicate to her, and I said, "Tamara, we need to get you a handler." And she didn't want to. She wanted to deal with people directly, which I get, that's her strength, she really communicates well with people. But she -- I mean, you know what decision fatigue is? She had decision fatigue by early morning. She was just burnt out because there was so many demands being put on her. I put a little bit of a moat around me. I had the three people in the COMS team working with me, and I said, "Everything send it to us, and we'll filter it; otherwise, we won't be able to deal with a million problems all at once." But her management structure or system is different than mine, I guess. And just to further that. So she would come into my room to give her a hug, and to relax and calm down, the world's not falling, everything's going to work. The government's not evil. They're problematic, but we have a lot of love around us. And I don't know, I just remember we did a bunch of those little sessions where we focussed on all the good things.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, one of them.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
One of them as well, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, one of them as well.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
There's so many people that I wouldn't even know because there was so many... I remember I went to a road captain meeting. I went and crunched in the snow over to the ark because no one would come over to me. I'm like okay, let me just go down sit down with all them. There were 40 people in the room. I had no idea who half of those people were, but they were leading different convoys from around the country. They're amazing people from all over, different cultures of Canada. So it's not a group of two or three people, there were hundreds of people, and then there were all these other little groups as well. It was a very, you know, the parallels to bitcoin, very decentralised. And -- but I think we had the greatest, what I mentioned before, position of moral persuasion that we could help influence people more, but that's not a guarantee. And that actually came up on the 18th when the road captains came into my hotel after a trucker had guns drawn at him, they smashed his windows, the police pulled guns on him, arrested him in the snow. Tamara had been arrested, Chris had been arrested. The road captains came into my room. There seemed to be, I don't know if a lack of leadership but maybe a lack of decision-making, or they needed just another head to bounce ideas off of. And they told me the story, and I said, "Okay. Well, I'll support what you guys want to do, but if you're asking me if the police are getting violent maybe it's time to leave." And to my surprise, the first person to pipe up was Brigitte, and she said, "We can't let people get hurt. We need to leave." And then Joe did the same thing and all the other road captains that were sitting on my bed, and standing up, and Johnny and everybody said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Okay. Call your Police Liaison Officers right now. Don’t argue. Just tell them we’re going to leave, we’re going to go, we’re going to communicate the message to everybody that we’re going to leave.” And then I went on to social media and I did echo that sentiment in a Twitter message. I probably should have done a thread to clarify it better, but little bit of a panic. And then Keith Wilson called me and said, “You need to leave.” I said, “Well I need to -- I’m in a wheelchair with a broken ankle. What do you think -- going to bust down the doors of the hotel and arrest me?” And he said they just might. I’m like, “Keith, don’t be so dramatic. That’s not -- I’m not on the street.” But he argued with me for 20 minutes and he convinced me, he said to me, I’ll always remember, he said, “Somebody needs to be able to speak up for freedom and if you get arrested too and end up getting subject to a gag order, then you can’t speak.” I thought, like, all right. And so I had a friend in Ottawa and I called an Uber, I got out of the hotel, the red zone, which is what the police wanted to clear out, and I went to stay with my friend until I could get my cast off.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
January 24th or 25th, the first day that Tamara left Ottawa, my social media lights up and I see some videos from this guy, Pat King. Never heard of him. I called Tamara, I said, “Who is this guy?” She said, “Oh, he’s some blogger from --” wherever he was. I said, “Okay. He’s got to go. We can’t have this sort of rhetoric. Peace, love -- no, no. This is not for here. So I don’t know who he is. Tell him he's got to go.” And there was a lot of -- there was some back and forth, a follow up call, she confirmed the videos. She ended up telling him -- she told me she told him to leave and he was very upset, but he said, “Fine. If I’m not welcome here, I’ll go home.” And I said, “Great. Nothing personal, but we can’t have that sort of rhetoric here.” And then the next day or two, I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes, because they were driving across the country. I was in Ontario preparing, doing messaging. And she had said to me, “Yeah, he said he was going to leave, and then he showed up at the next trucker stop.” I’m like, “Well, you’ve got to deal with this. I don’t know what to tell you.” So.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t know if he was trying to be comedic, I don’t know if he was serious, but some offensive rhetoric to myself and -- well, not to me personally, but to certain ethnic groups, Indigenous ethnic groups, Jewish groups, whatever. And then I saw -- first I saw bullets -- I don’t know who -- I just stopped in the middle. Too much. Get rid of this.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I did.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I personally don’t get offended very easily. I’ve got thick skin. And I think people who say silly things should be able to say silly things and we should be able to respond to them. I didn’t really care about that. I really cared that he would negatively impact the tenor of the Convoy, the mood of the people. He might cause -- I was worried that he would cause some unnecessary anxiety. You know, when I was thinking about how are we going to envision this protest, maybe a little too -- well, personal, but I thought of -- don’t laugh at me. I thought of when I was younger, going to Grateful Dead concerts, or Fish concerts, or Allman Brothers, or Bob Dylan. That vibe of peace and love, especially the Grateful Dead. Without the drugs, because I’m not into drugs. And I thought that’s the feeling that we need for this protest, to bring everybody together. And I was worried that these sorts -- this sort of rhetoric, which is completely inappropriate, just did not marry to what we were trying to achieve.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The Globe and Mail, I don’t remember, it’s been a few years, but yes. In general, yeah, I do.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. And I entered my testimony in the Ontario Legislature into evidence in this hearing, where I quoted numerous Imams that were quite extreme in their rhetoric about Jews and the gay community. And amongst LGBTory, there were a lot of people that supported us that were part of our group that were really concerned about that sort of rhetoric. So I stand by those statements.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. No, I didn’t.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, in the Ontario Legislature.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. I mean, I look at during the -- I mean, my skepticism for legacy media is quite high. I saw during the Convoy a headline from the same newspaper that the truckers are weaponizing freedom in the name of white supremacy or something like that, and I just kind of -- at this point, I dismiss it all. I really don’t care what they write.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t even know what James Bauder looks like. I’ve never seen him before. I -- he had some MOU thing that was written in 2019. I thought it was a meme, it was a joke. Like, that’s not how people are serious about litigation and political change; right? So I just dismissed him. There was the other guy, Jeremy Mackenzie, who has been my personal troll because I’m a Jew for the past several years. These are all people that have almost zero following, but the legacy media seems to be wanting to make these people who have very little or nothing to do with the Convoy into celebrities. That’s why I was really concerned that in the case of Mackenzie, that he’s being asked to testify here. Why? Nothing to do -- not a trucker, had nothing to do with the Convoy. There’s just rhetoric. Do we want to make him famous? I don’t get it. It makes no sense to me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, he has made several comments throughout the years about Jewish conspiracy units. He -- I laughingly say he makes Mel Gibson look like a rabbi. He is really, really aggressive towards Jews. Whatever. That’s fine. I don’t really care. And while I was producing a podcast several years ago, this woman who is a Saudi refugee who grew up under extremism, she was a doctor and moved to Canada, and he was harassing her online, he was harassing me online. Like, that’s what he does. Apparently that’s comedy. Whatever. Fine.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I think we’re living in this era where people, they -- when they want to -- when they say something that is extreme rhetoric, then they say, “Oh, it’s just comedy,” but when it’s, you know, digestible, then they say, “Oh, I’m -- this is serious.” They want it both ways. And I think he kind of -- he goes in that category. And that’s why these people have such small followings. But again, there are personalities in the media that want to elevate these individuals. It just makes no sense. When people say, “Oh, they have, you know 20,000 followers.” Firstly, that’s not very much. And secondly, yeah, he would have two if it weren’t for you. Keep talking about him. The Streisand effect; right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
From the original time that I was told by Keith that he’s going to reach out the City, I mentioned before, and I said, “Why? Just wait for the government to -- you know, they will come to us.” But no, just went over my head, went over -- my sense from the rest of the board is that they felt the same way. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they told him differently but that was not my sense. So throughout that week, I would, yeah, maybe tease Keith a little bit. We actually had a pretty good working relationship, which is why I was shocked yesterday, and I would say to him, “So, Keith” -- I’d say, “Keith, how’s the deal going?” And he would say, “Oh, well, not great.” And on February the 13th, I did the same thing. I said to Keith, “How’s the deal going?” And he says, “Not great.” So either he was lying to me or he was lying in this scenario; I don’t know. And then that night, I went onto -- I was starting to go into Twitter spaces to communicate with people and I just got destroyed -- sorry, I got attacked by a couple of thousand people in a Twitter space, “You’re a bunch of sellouts.” Randy Hillier put out a tweet. So I don’t know, if you can’t convince Randy Hillier, Tom Marazzo’s buddy, that we have a deal, then how will convince the City or anybody else there’s a deal. But okay, fine. And so I sent a message to Keith the following morning and I said, “Keith, I just got attacked last night. I think I got everybody calmed down and whatever. What’s the status of this deal so I can put an end to it?” I can’t remember how I worded it exactly. And he said, “Neither Eva nor myself have drafted anything for the City. More rumours.” Okay, so everything is the same as I have been told the entire way throughout. Fine.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Signal, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, just out of time, being overwhelmed with stuff and, you know, I already communicated my skepticism on legacy media. And I’m getting it directly from the source; I’m getting it from our lawyers who’s telling me, “No deal.” I mean I know the ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, no, no, when I say -- I spoke to him on the 13th as well ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- before. So during that, I did another, “So how’s that deal going,” and he says, “Not so good.” I thought, “Okay, fine.” And when -- late at night, into the Twitter space and then had to reconfirm it again the next day.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, face to face. I think it was in my hotel room if I’m not mistaken, or the adjacent room. We were always in and out. I would sometimes go to the other hotel rooms, Tamara’s and the others, or they would come to me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, from the very beginning. Yeah, she asked me to take over. She didn’t know Twitter very much. She did Facebook. She said, “You deal with Twitter.”
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, and it was very important because what was happening, this -- remember I explained earlier I was trying to go for peace, love, unity, and whatever, and there seemed to be another counter-narrative that was creating anxiety and people were starting to attack Tamara, myself, everybody, “You’re a sellout. I never got my money for gas. What are you doing?” You could see the tenor already of frustration was building up. So I needed to communicate to everybody that, “No. Relax. Nothing has changed. If it is, we’ll let you know,” kind of was my thought, but you could already see the anxiety being ramped up. And I think the last thing we could have was any sort of conflict and violence and that’s why I was trying to echo that statement until we get something substantive. If we go a deal in writing and it said, “Hey, we are” -- okay, fine, that’s a different story. But that never materialized.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, yeah, for sure.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Because we had a communication team of myself and two other people, so all the comms were amongst us on the Twitter, which became a primary platform that we were using. And, you know, if we were doing that on every little tweet, then we would get nothing done. And Tamara didn’t have much interest in Twitter. I noticed -- was it that day? Around that time, like, she would do a positive good morning message. I saw those would pop up periodically, so she had access to the account as well, right? And -- but that’s about it. And I guess because she was overloaded, she was dealing with so many other things, and she was, I think, primarily on Facebook, if I’m not mistaken, which I was not.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
This was a communication to the Premier’s office, was my understanding. It’s that they were going to be drafting something for Doug Ford. They’re making some headway with him. And that’s how it was communicated. Okay fine, good to me. If we get a response, they want -- they’re finally going to talk to us on a provincial level. That’s progress.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
In terms of the mayor’s arrangement, I don’t know. I don’t know the details because again, everything was opaque. I wasn’t told any specific sort of details whatsoever.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. What I was trying to do was explain what the messaging, not step on everybody’s toes. This is the drafting or the legal committee. Okay, fine. You're going to do what you can. If you have something signed, whatever, send it to me when you have something prepared and whatever, and let me know.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. Well, there was one caveat which I started to -- you know, people say things and you put the red flag up in the back of your head. So with the class action suit there were the injunctions, motions put forward and whatever. Okay, we already signed off with him and the JCCF; turns out our retainer was with the JCCF. They were going to -- okay, fine. And he came back and he said to me, to all of us individually. But I remember him saying to me, “Okay, so I have good news. We’ve got a number of items that the class action suit wanted, the people on the -- the complainants wanted. And they’ve all been rejected with one exception. The one exception is the horn honking has to be limited in scope and to one designated area.” And I said to him, “Who cares about the horn honking? That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here for mandates, whatever.” And that’s how he communicated it to me. And that was it. So then, what I didn’t tell him is I took that document and I sent it to a friend of mine who is a legal researcher at a firm. And I said, “This is what I was told this document says. I don’t read legalese. Can you just interpret it because he’s saying that the media is lying that we actually won. What is your interpretation?” And she said to me, “I don't know who’s telling you you won. They wanted the horns stopped or whatever that was, the part of the injunction. And they won. So whoever is telling you you won is not being honest with you.” And I thought, is he just overselling it because he’s trying to be compassionate and he knows we’re under a lot of stress? Or was it just dishonest? I don’t know. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt at that time; maybe he’s just trying to be supportive in some sort of way.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Thank you very much.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Commissioner, sorry?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Would I be able to submit my application for Rule 59 to have some more leading testimony from my lawyer?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I do. That is one of the group chats in signal where we were communicating -- myself, Tamara, the lawyers, the Board.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Like I said, most of the Board that were involved, Chad, Keith Wilson, Eva, Tamara, Chris Garrah. Like, all of us were in it. And this echoes the same sentiment of the other text message.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, from Tamara. “I haven’t seen any statement yet so don’t worry about meeting at 9:00. If I hear anything I will let you know.”
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The Sheraton.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
In the Sheraton.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The 16th floor.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I think the 14th, but I might have that wrong.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Frequently. There were a couple of days where she wasn’t around, but frequently.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, and if she did, I've forgotten it, but I don't think I would forget that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
"Hence, the drafting committee will keep working on the broader document for review by the Board tomorrow, but in the meantime, below is a draft communication for the captains, truckers, specific to the mayor's arrangement to allow us to advance into Wellington Street and Elgin while at the same time, taking away the excuse that Trudeau wants to unleash the police goons and seize trucks."
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Not that I'm aware of, no.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. Well, that was my whole point. There's no witness, signature, date, nothing. It's just a letter.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Public relations.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
M'hm.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I have.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, and he's ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
He is Doug Ford's former chief of staff and friends since the 1990s.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
He resigned in disgrace.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, and was confused when he thought he was a credible person that he could reach out to. And the other problem is, how do you have somebody negotiating on behalf of the truckers who's not a trucker, who's connected to the premier's office, who's critical of the trucking protest?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s where you saw some of the conflict, and I can understand where Chief Sloly might have interpreted the powder keg issue, because again, I said before, the mixed messages, you want to go to a trucker and say, "Hey, yeah, the guy who brought in your provincial mandates, he's negotiating a deal for you guys to leave," which is not a deal, that’s capitulation. A deal's both sides get something, and we would have gotten nothing. That would have -- these are the sorts of things that were causing so much anxiety and division. Furthermore, you know, the first week was really stressful. We were overloaded, we had far more people than we imagined would be here, and it took about a week to get everybody finally, on the organizational side of all the different groups, slowly to talk together, or at least decide, go your separate ways, in some scenarios, and then this started. And the level of distrust all of a sudden came back again.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, we had a team of three other people and myself, and I led the team.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I was.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I don't have a degree in communications, but I worked for companies previously that basically taught me general media communications, owned a business for many years, had to deal with it, so I've been in media -- in and out of media for business purposes for quite some time.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, actually, I wrote that book with a friend of mine, who was an investigative journalist for the Toronto Star for 30 years and a published author. And I said to John, I said, "I don't know how to write a book, but can you teach me, and can we do this project together?" And it was amazing to have somebody in my life who understood the process of investigative journalism to build a framework, a timeline, all that sort of stuff, so we could get the story out factually as it was, and not just my story, the story of other people involved in the convoy.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That was the attempt. So there were many other ancillary groups that were attached and whatnot. You know, you can't speak for everybody. You do your best to find a message that will resonate with all sorts of people. And as you know, as you've seen by some of the people here, they're quite enthusiastic. Sometimes they were upset that the tenure was -- it was not as enthusiastic as they wanted, so there was a balancing act with the different personalities involved.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, I think we were in a position, and primarily because of the success of the GoFundMe and the subsequent GiveSendGo, where we had the highest degree of moral persuasion. So if there was a representative of the government that came to speak with us, we would be in a unique position that would be easier for us to sell whatever settlement idea that -- agreement we would come to with the government. It might take a little bit of time. And for example, I mentioned on February 18th, when the road captains were in my room, and they agreed with me, saying, "Yeah, it's time to leave, the government is getting violent." And Miranda piped up, and she said, "Yeah, but Ben, some of these people are not going to want to leave." And I said, "That's your job as a road captain to convince them and persuade them to leave. If you need me to help, we'll try and get everybody to get onboard with us."
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, control and moral persuasion are two different things.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Nobody controls anybody, of course.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Sure, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I've skimmed through most -- as much as I could in the past 24 hours ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- and it's been hard.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
From what I've seen so far, no.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I think what we all agreed on was ArriveCAN and the mandates. Everybody has all sorts of grievances with the government, but we had one unifying grievance, which was the ArriveCAN and the mandates, which is what we are here for, and everybody kind of understood that. Right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Again, not in the convoy. There is -- people might have said things incorrectly, people might have given that impression. There is always fringe elements in these sorts of events, and -- but that's not what we were about from the very beginning.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, there was the board, but everybody, you know, you could see as evidence online that everybody saw themselves as participants of the Freedom Convoy, that that's how they viewed all of this. And the board itself, the name we settled on was Freedom 2022 Human Rights Freedom Organisation.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, Mr. King has a very small social media following. I heard some of the numbers he threw out, and I went online and I know analytics and he has nowhere that sort of -- I think he's got 3,000 followers online. Which is why it's odd that we keep focussing on him, when on the 25th of January, I said to Tamara, 25th, 24th, whichever day she left, I can't remember, "He's got to go", and we had that back and forth, and she ultimately agreed with me. And then we released a press release, it was our first update to the GoFundMe, and it stated that Pat King represents only himself, he does not represent the Freedom Convoy, and that stayed up there for quite sometime.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
To get people in the framework of peace, love, unity and freedom, yes, we needed to ensure that people didn't get confused, that the government didn't get confused and the government could understand that we were reasonable people that they could speak with, and they wouldn't get that impression with that sort of rhetoric, which is why we all were quite concerned about it and wanted it not to be -- well, not to be involved.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, of course. Yeah, of course.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, this was produced by Tom Quiggin ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- who is the intelligence analyst. But the reason we needed to put these messages out, to answer your question, it wasn't because of the people, it was because of the legacy media that was putting out a narrative that was completely false about these phantom violent people that I never saw, and so we had to put these things out. And we saw by the text message in this testimony from the Prime Minister's Office that they were doing exactly what I thought they were doing.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
These -- the Daily Safety Reports, no that was Tom.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. It also has the word "potential".
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Federal mandates?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, we knew if the Federal Government lifted their mandates then the provinces would follow. And in fact the opposite happened. The province dropped all their mandates and the Federal Government held onto it until last month.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I think it was a good educated guess, understanding how government works, yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Ask that again. I'm confused.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, there's definitely people in society who need some education in civics, there's no question, but in terms of people who are leading organisations and groups, and within our board we understood that it was the federal mandate because that’s the mandate that were destroying truckers’ careers, their businesses, and their jobs because they couldn’t cross the border.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was to remove the federal mandates, for sure, and the federal mandates would lead would to all mandates. That was out optimistic assumption. And I think evidenced by what happened on the provincial levels, that was probably a good assumption.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, but the ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
They came here first and the US never enforced it.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was -- no, it was announced after. It was the Canadian mandates that were announced first, from what I remember.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay, could be.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was reflecting the sentiment of the truckers that were coming here. It wasn’t, “BJ’s decided we’re going to stay here permanently.” It’s the truckers that assembled their convoys -- and there were so many convoys, we couldn’t keep track -- they all agreed and that was their sentiment. I was trying to reflect the sentiment of them for the government so they would understand, which was odd that there are people in the City of Ottawa that said, “Oh, they’re going to be here for two days.” “Okay.”
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, I think at least, if we start with somebody from the government who would hear them - - because what this protest was, this was a cry for help, and they felt completely alienated and abandoned and they were losing everything they had. And this was an act of desperation.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
From what I understand, there was attempts to communicate. I didn’t know at the time; nobody told me that people connected to Doug Ford’s Office were involved in that communication.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, Mr. Wilson told me it was that we were his client but the retainer was with the JCCF. I didn’t say anything because my mother is a paralegal so I know some of the basics and I knew that retainer was not legitimate but I didn’t even bother to pursue because there were so many other things on our problem and we needed -- we were desperate for free legal advice and it just became a nuance argument that, “Maybe we’ll figure it out in the future.”
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, no, now I have, yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, no, that was my understanding with Tom Marazzo where he said, “I’m going to deal with the truck,” and I said, “Great, I’ll deal with the messaging,” and the next day, he’s doing a press conference. But I -- I didn’t want -- there’s so many things I had to deal with and I didn’t want to step on other people’s toes. That’s what I was trying to do.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, no, if that -- anything came out under the Freedom Corp logo, I was completely circumvented in that and not told about it.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I’ve been watching you for a few weeks. Nice to meet you.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Sure.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I ended up in a ditch and a tree on February 3rd ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- and 45 minutes later, I was in Tim Hortons doing an interview on Steven Crowder.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Kemptville.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, February 3rd.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, I was picked up by a friend who came to rescue me after the interview to get back into Ottawa.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The 4th.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I got out of the hospital the next morning at seven o’clock in the morning. I don’t remember much of that day because of Dilaudid and all the medication, but midway through the day, I started to at least become aware and got back to slowly working through media and stuff like that.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, no, no, I was out of the hospital on February -- yeah, sorry, February 5th, yeah, the morning of February 5th.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It still hurts so much.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, for 24 hours.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Dilaudid.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, just Advil ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- sadly.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I tried to go out every Sunday, and I did, to -- when Pastor Hildebrandt did his service. There was the Lebovich Jewish community that wanted to see me for whatever reason so I would go every Sunday. The pastors would give their service. And the start of the first weekend, Me, Tamara, and Chris were on stage and my idea was, “We have to be here every Sunday to thank everybody for coming out and supporting us and all that,” so I did that.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was confined to the hotel. I did go -- manage to go to one meeting at the Arc when my leg was broken. That was the meeting with all the road captains. There was like 40 of them in there. One of the people working with me said it would be a good sentiment even though you can’t. So I did, yeah, for sure.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, but I had -- the person who was assisting me on messaging -- she was going to the ARC Hotel and the Swiss Hotel meetings every morning, keeping me up to date. I was in communication with Tamara and the group over Signal. So there was no lack of communication there. And then I had two friends that had come up -- well, one is a reporter and another friend who came up to Ottawa -- were staying, sleeping over in the adjacent suite. And they were going out to the groups, talking to people, brining people back to the hotel.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Like, that’s how I managed the ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
His name is Salman Sima. He is an activist from Iran.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
There were a few days that she disappeared. I remember one day I couldn’t get a hold of her all day, and you had to see the stress that she was under. I really sympathized with her.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
So she went to Quebec, for example, a day and she got back to me at six or seven o'clock. That happened a few times. But whenever she was in the hotel we would see each other fairly frequently.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. I wouldn’t agree.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I saw her at -- my promo video is her giving me a hug the day that she was arrested. So yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t remember it that way but it could be because ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- so much was going on all that time.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I know there was a lot of jockeying around with hotel rooms because we were getting death threats. We went to the ARC, to the Sheridan, and I know she left -- did she leave the Sheridan to Swiss? It might be. But everybody was around. And I know Dagny was there with them every morning and telling me what was going on.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That could be. That could be.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It’s also -- remember, she had a hotel room. We had so many different hotel rooms, you know, I was in the four or five hotel rooms that were Tamara’s. I don't know if everybody knew which hotel room belonged to who. It was just a block of hotel rooms. It didn’t really matter, you know, whose room was whose.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I would go to the other rooms when they were around. So there was a boardroom on the 6th floor, if I remember ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- that I went up to for a couple of meetings. So communication was there. Like, it wasn’t, you know ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn’t know about that.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I heard Dean French’s name in one of the -- there was a news article. I didn’t know the capacity added at the time. Now I do. I didn’t know the details of it. Again, everything was opaque. It was, “Keith, we’re going to go do a deal with the City.”
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I don’t.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
This was on the phone, or Zoom or Signal?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t remember.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t remember.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, fair enough.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
So the deal, as I explained before, when Keith said, “We’re going to reach out to the City,” I questioned that strategy. And the Board was willing to reach out to the City. I said, “I don’t agree.” And I go no specifics in terms of what they were going to do. Because a deal is what? Leaving? How is that a deal? So I didn’t understand. It didn’t ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- make any sense.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
This was after.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, well after.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Do you want to know why?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Broke into?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The entire time, as she asked me to.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
There was no deal, no.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn’t go into her account. I was using her account from the very beginning and the account is linked to her cell phone number.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
If they didn’t want me to be using it, which was never told to me -- guess what. You could just tell me you don’t want to use it, which was never ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- communicated to me.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, Tamara told everybody on the Board all comms go through Benjamin and ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, but this is an important ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
She was telling me everything goes through him.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn’t make something up.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Then why did Keith tell me the deal is not going well? Sorry.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Right.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Focus on that.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It’s a comms piece, right? It’s not a deal. It’s a communications piece.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, when I followed up after that I was told there was no deal. That was the whole point. I was getting bombarded online. People were getting upset. Truckers were getting upset. I had to communicate something. That’s why I reached out to them in those text messages. That’s why I asked Keith, “Is there a deal?” “No”, and he said specifically in a text message, “We haven’t drafted anything.” And Tamara as well told me, “There’s nothing yet. I’ll let you know if there’s something.” And there never was.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, people online. I was getting bombarded with thousands of messages.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, the Board wasn’t getting angry. It’s the people on the street that I didn’t want them to get angry and, God forbid, get violent. So I needed to communicate at this point. There is no deal, there’s nothing.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, no. So what I said specifically and directly -- I said, “I’ll support you whatever you want to do. If you want to ask my opinion, I think maybe it’s time to leave.” Just to give them a little bit because I thought they would attack me for it, to be entirely honest. And Brigitte was the first one to pipe up and say, “Yeah, I think we should leave.” Joe, I think, was the next one. And they all said, “Yeah, it’s getting violent.” And I said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, I’ll do my best to communicate that, and call you later.” And we all started working.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. The deal was to consolidate trucks onto Wellington, is what I've been hearing all this week.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, that’s -- we were leaving Ottawa entirely.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s what I communicated.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Not consolidate them on to Wellington Street to make it easier to kettle the trucks.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I was uncomfortable with Keith Wilson and Eva because that’s not the client/solicitor relationship, them telling us what to do, and going and doing off their own deals and coming -- to dictating to the truckers what we have to do.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Of course. I was ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- one of the few on the Board ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- that knew that.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Because what the Board was doing -- what the JCCF was doing to them was scaring them. They offered them free legal advice, and if you don’t listen to us, then we’re going to pull your free legal advice. Everybody was scared. We had a class action suit, we didn’t know what we were going to see, potentially, and then had all of this pressure coming from the JCCF regularly trying to dictate how the messaging should -- well, not the messaging, but how the Convoy should operate, how the Board should work, whatever.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was really difficult. It really caused a lot of problems.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Which Keith supported.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
And he mentioned yesterday that -- anyways, yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. Like all the other interviews.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, they thought it was hysterical as well, because the CBC, -- I’ll ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
If I can explain ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It’s funny how back then they supported me, because there was a reason I did that. The reason I did that is because the CBC started disseminating some more narrative that maybe the Convoy is a Russian operation. And I wanted to bait the CBC into building that narrative. That’s how alternative media works. And they didn’t take the bait, but it was great. It was ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I was instructed with my team to do all the communications. That’s what I was told to do.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s a wonderful narrative, but they loved it when I did it, and everybody is changing their mind.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
All right.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. No. The people who live here? No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn’t see any harassment or anti-social behaviour myself for the first few days that I was walking around, or when I went on the stage any of the days. I’ve heard a lot of claims, swastikas, for example. And the woman I spoke to who had a swastika on her sign. She said, “Yeah, because I’m a religious Jew and what the government is doing to me is exactly what they did to us in Germany in the ’30s.” I don’t consider that anti-social behaviour. So people were just activists. They were just protestors.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t think anybody does. And the Ottawa Police have a great relationship ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, sorry.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. Gotcha.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Agreed.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
This is a silly question. I don’t know what anti-social behaviour means.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I wouldn’t ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well and parking the trucks, the parked trucks were parked where the Ottawa Police told us to park them. Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, no, no. That was not our intention. Of course not.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Of course not.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, but my brother is a police sergeant and I know they have protocols for everything. They always anticipate that there could be problem people in every protest and every organization; right? That’s just the way it is. You get enough people together, ---
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- there’s always going to be somebody who may cause issues.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, just a very large one.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
For the first day and a half, yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
All the businesses that I dealt with were supporting us and thought it was amazing.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well they were closed after. So Rideau Centre was open initially. All the businesses were open. And then the City brought in some emergency thing that made it -- one of the owners of the business told me, “It’s $150 penalty a day if I open today, but we’re going to support you. But that’s why that happened, from what I understand.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don’t know what evidence was provided to him, because I was not in that case. I don’t know if it was just claims of this and it was not substantiated and the Judge just ruled that, “If this is happening, it can’t.” because I was not a participant in those proceedings.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Of course, but, you know, judges have different leeway. You know, everybody is different in what they accept.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes. Do you want me to expand on the MOU?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
We were all really good. We were all really tight, and we could resolve our issues in the very beginning until the 4th of -- or sorry -- yeah, the 4th of February when I first met people from the JCCF, and that’s when all of a sudden, the distrust started. And I think some of the people who wanted to be on the Board got very upset. But initially, things were great for the first couple of weeks, working with Tamara, everything was awesome.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
On certain issues. You know, when I broke my ankle, I told that story when I was on the couch. Everybody came and coalesced around me. They were all very supportive, and yeah, we have some differences, but we'll - - it was an amazing moment. So we were able to resolve conflicts when we didn’t have people that were, you know, fuelling some division, in my opinion.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I have.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, I think the only Board member was Chris Barber, right? He was the only Board member who's testified?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. Tamara and I were in sync the entire time, at least, you know, that was my impression. We were messaging, calling, texting. Like, everything was great.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Say that again? What, what?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It seems to be that’s the case.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
He was representing the JCCF.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s right. I didn’t know the show they had with the mayor.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was opaque for sure.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. Sorry, no, no.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Sure.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I didn’t took it. I was in a wheelchair. I couldn't go out in the snow. I didn’t take that picture.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s Metro Toronto Police, no?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I wasn’t on the ground, so when I was in the hotel, for example, my friend Salman, who's been in many protests in Iran, he was running out and coming back to me and predicting everything, saying, "This is what they're going to do, this is how they're blockading everybody off." And he said to me, "Who put all the trucks in one area?" I'm like, "I don't know. I have no idea."
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
So that was my -- but I was in a wheelchair. It was snowy that day, so I couldn't even get out if I wanted to.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Not me, Chris Garrah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Correct.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. This is one of the reasons I was surprised Chris Garrah was not called as a witness here, because he was here for a week, so he could clearly comment on these issues. I just spoke to him on the phone a few times during the week, just to make sure he's okay and -- but that was his area and his department, right?
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The 28th.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. The team that was at the Swiss Hotel was -- the -- just dealing with volume, that was the problem. Nobody anticipated, you know, the largest longest convoy in history. So that’s what really caused it. And I know they were working with police, from what I understand, to clear up and make sure that the emergency laneways were opened up, and that was their primary concern.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Good afternoon.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
-
Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was eerily silent. It was really weird. Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I wouldn't agree with that. I would agree for the first couple of days, but I was living down here too in a hotel, and we all had to sleep. Truckers who have their kids in their cabs, they needed to sleep, so I don't know where this narrative is coming from. I didn't witness that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
For the first couple of day, for sure. When -- because you had multiple convoys coming in all through the night, different times of the day. People were moving things around. When they had the dance parties, or during the day, like, so many kids, you know, would do this, go up to the trunks, honk, because it was that sort of vibe. It was amazing.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, because I was only on my feet, remember, until the 4th. So for the first couple of days, I will say there was honking for the first couple days as everybody came in, but it was not sustained for weeks. I was here all three weeks.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Most of the time. I got out at least once a week, and there was that meeting I went to at the ARC with the road captains. There might have been one other -- I remembered some other reason I was in the lobby, went in and out, I just can't remember what it was, but yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, I was in a hotel in downtown Ottawa, two blocks away from Parliament Hill. There were trucks, a couple of trucks parked on the street in front of the hotel. Those weren't honking. The adjacent street, they weren't honking. If I'm staying in downtown Ottawa right in the core of all of it and I'm not hearing honking, I don't know where the honking's coming from.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don't want to project motives onto people. I would just say that I disagree, and perhaps there's other motives for it. I don't know. I just know my experience and what I saw, both when I was on foot for the first couple of days, which was that amazing moment where everybody came from Quebec to meet with the western Canadians, yeah, there was honking then. Oh, and I will admit as well, during the speeches on the Sundays, that when the pastor would give his speech, when somebody would finish, the trucks were there, when people would applaud, and the trucks that were there, the six trucks on either side, they would honk in applause, but that's all I saw.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That's right. That's what I mentioned before.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, that was handled by the lawyers that were representing us.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
What did it say? What specific?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That's right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I own a truck. The truck wasn't in Ottawa.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I'm getting lost. Can you simplify that? I don't ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, I didn't -- I wasn't there. I didn't attend the proceeding.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I signed an affidavit for my lawyers, yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay, is that how they worded it, irreparable harm? Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was provided with court decisions later on, like, they would show us, but it was so busy, there were so many things going on, and I kind of -- we all left the legal stuff in the hands of legal. I dealt with messaging. Certain people dealt with trucks, the security, that sort of thing. So it was -- so many things came in and out; right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It might have been within the couple of days they would have sent an email, and just because I was busy.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, nobody told me that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don't believe so. I'm trying to think. I don't believe so.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Could be wrong, but I don't -- I -- there were so many thousands of messages that I put out there, I'm trying to think if I was told -- but I don't recall that. I don't recall that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That's right.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Oh, it's just humour. The idea that when we came here -- I mean, it's about the humour and a cry for help from the government. Like, the little bit of honking that you saw, it wasn't to be aggressive. It's -- you have to understand what these people's lives were going through, and they were just completely desperate. And I know some of them, one particular driver, a Ukrainian driver, he was very passionate in the beginning for honking, because he said, "They don't listen to me. What do I have to do? I have to honk or something." And I'm, like, well, let's tone it down a little, but that was in the first couple of days.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, but again, it was just for the first couple of days, and that's when we all -- I believe that's when we changed -- I changed my social media tag to put that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I believe it was in the early days, but there's so many things going on so many days, it's hard to keep an eye; right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Because there's so much social media tags around the word honk and around this protest because it came -- became such a divisive issue, and cry for freedom didn't really have the same, you know, element in communicating what was going on, and honk was just a natural title for it.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, I'm not an intelligence analyst and ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- I figured he would be the best person to do that, and I think everybody agreed.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah. He also has worked for the RCMP, the Bank of Canada, military. He's got a very impressive CV in terms of his career working for the government.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I saw a couple of them, but I just got so overloaded with stuff that I couldn't make this my focus, but ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- he was posting them, and he also has a social media account. I believe he was posting them on his as well.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Lighten the load.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The sort of thing Elon Musk does.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
They're called NPCs in internet culture.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
A non-playable character is the term what it means, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The -- if you were -- you have to -- this is going down the rabbit hole of internet humour culture. Like it's a joke; right? It may not lend itself to legal proceedings, but this is -- you know, I mentioned Elon Musk, this is the sort of thing that he would put out frequently, he's probably the most popular to do it. And also, we knew there was a honking injunction, so people would go out on social media and they would put hashtag honk honk. It was people actually going outside and honking, it was their way to show their support for the convoy.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I think it's good to get people to have something that -- it might not be your type of humour, but for the people who were freezing in their trucks for three weeks, they need something, they need some sort of pick-me-up, and I think for them it's a way for people to vent. Right? That's why we have free speech for conflict resolution, and that's the -- that's why humour was very important. And there was so many memes going around the internet for all of this. Some of it was -- like for me, some of it was too extreme and distasteful, I get it, but I'm not going to dictate what people should say. Okay, that's not it, or that's not my thing, but then other stuff was great. It was... You know, you have a whole range of different worldviews and opinions because we're people from all over the world that were supporting us. When I was in Colombia there were people there who wanted to meet me because they were supporting. When I was in Miami, there were people who recognised me -- as Uber drivers that were supporting us. So you have a whole range of people with different worldviews.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, it's not literally honking in your truck. Again, you'll probably see those memes were grabbed from the internet, where people were putting memes up with the hashtag honk honk. That's where it all comes from.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Sure.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, I was in there. I got a coffee at Tim Horton's.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
And my understanding that came from the City that they demanded that all the businesses closed, and the Rideau Centre as well was one of them. Which didn't make sense to us because the businesses we were attending they had never been so busy. Like they were so happy. We had so many businesses tell us that they made record profits; right?
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I think it was the Iconic Café was one of them, one of the Shawarma places that stayed open. There's a number of videos online. One that just came out last week from somebody who works in one of the restaurants, and she said, "If I" -- they were coming around to our restaurant, the media was coming around telling these people are dangerous, you should close." And she said, "If I wasn't there to see the media trying to coerce us to make us think the truckers were dangerous I might've believed it." But she -- "I was here, I saw it, I saw everybody was peaceful. We served you, and it was great." So I think there was a little bit of some narrative and politics going on there.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I didn't know.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I can't comment to that. That might be the case. But I do know when my business was in Downtown Toronto I would try to stay open every day of the week, especially when university students were in town. If had something like this, it would've been amazing. I wish I would've had an event like this when I had my business in Toronto.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Truckers are very ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Hi, Nikolas.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
There were so many groups, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I think we all agree to that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I didn't.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I don't know. I found out about -- like I didn't realise that all the road captains, I don't know which ones had a PLT and which ones didn't. It just seemed to be random, and maybe -- I understand the PLT is part- time, that might have had something to do with it because I do know there were occasions where some drivers, captains, whatever, were trying to get in touch with PLT members and they couldn't. So -- but that's my -- I wasn't there with a truck, wasn't on the ground, so there was really no need for me to interact with PLTs, with the exception of the day that we left, when I told all the truckers, when I told all the, sorry, I didn't tell them. I said, "Do you want to leave?" And I suggested, "Call all your liaison officers and I'll meet you upstairs in the board meeting after -- in the boardroom afterwards and I walk up and Brigitte is yelling and arguing with the PL -- I’m like, “Just say you’ll do whatever you want. You got to go home. You got to leave.” But I personally didn’t.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, that’s true.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
At the time, I didn’t, no.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, because they seemed to be running their own show.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, the whole idea of -- I was told repeatedly that there’s -- it’s not going well. I didn’t assume “not going well” means there’s a deal, so. And I didn’t understand the deal. We’re not getting -- a deal is two- way, right? Just capitulating and saying, “We’re leaving,” like, if we told that to the truckers, they would lose their minds, get so angry.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, not -- well, some were protesters -- many of them were protesters but we had so much online support. That’s what was driving a lot of it. So a lot of it was people within Canada were supporting people that were in Ottawa that were supporting. So you had a whole mixed bag. And that was going on all the time, regularly. Like, there were people that were streaming in Twitter spaces -- that’s like a communal group -- that they would be in a group that was live, meaning active, people talking for 24, 36 hours straight with hundreds of people, sometimes thousands of people.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, so we always had those other -- there was our, you know, Freedom Corp, well, you know, aligned with, let’s say, the GoFundMe, where the money was being raised, and there were all these other little groups, for sure.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, that’s why I explained out moral persuasion, that we definitely had influence with them and could communicate to them. And one of the things, by the way, we did communicate, we were relieved with Chief Sloly when he said, I believe on February 3rd -- I don’t remember the date when he said, “This requires a political solution. This is not a policing solution because it’s peaceful.” And were like, “Great. Finally, there’s a police chief that’s not going to politicize everything.” It was such a -- it was a moment of hope for us.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Which is what I understand Tamara was trying to mitigate that, realizing that he’s not going to -- he’s going to latch -- I don’t about “latch on” but he’s going to be -- like many other people, he’s just going to come along. And I guess -- my understanding is the strategy was, “Just keep him under control. Keep him out of the limelight. And” -- but I had -- like, I never met him. I’ve never talked to him, don’t know him.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No, I disagree. And I disagree because people in the trucking industry -- it’s a very regulated industry. We know rules, PARS documents going across the border. You know, it’s not the central-casting description of what a trucker is. It’s far more corporate than people realize. So I was not terribly worried about that. But there are people that are very passionate about it. Sometimes you meet people that they have to have a little bit more handholding and talking and coming to consensus. And other people are just, “Yeah, I’m bored. Yeah, we’ll do it.” It just -- it comes down to the individual. It’s not truckers, it’s individual people that you’ve got to reach out to.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Thank you.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Twitter passwords can be easily changed if you have email and telephone access to your Twitter account.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Myself, Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Chris Garrah -- who am I forgetting -- Miranda, and somebody else, Sean Tiessen.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was actually quite good. Sean and I actually connected better than everybody. Like, we were only -- I mean maybe with the exception of Tamara. He seemed to be a pretty reasonable guy and I kept in touch with him.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
A few months ago. Maybe it’s now four or five months ago. No, I don’t think that long, a few months ago.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah, Sean Tiessen explained to me that, “They were really upset with a tweet that you made and they’re going to try to pin this all on you. They’re going to make some narrative that it’s your fault,” and I remember thinking like, “I don’t know how they’re going to do that.” And I said, “Well, what’s the rest of the board thinking,” and he said, “They’re all really scared. Tamara and Chris have both criminal and civil charges. None of them have any experience in law. And they feel like they’re being held hostage to the JCCF for free legal advice and legal counsel because they don’t have any money to fight a multimillion-dollar class action suit,” and he was very -- he was very direct about that.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Apparently, I am.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Get retained ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Charges related to honking, no.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, I was receiving privileged emails from Keith Wilson and his agent with regards to the Mareva injunction up until, I believe, May of this year. So my understanding was they were still representing me.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was to surrender the seed phrase of the Bitcoin which is a combination, to the Bitcoin app of which there were five codes or five see phrases. And I had one of them.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I submitted it to Keith Wilson via his agent, Norm Groot who was representing me in the Mareva agent. And my understanding is that went to the bankruptcy trustee or whoever dals with it.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
The particular incident? There was a number of things. Particularly when the tenor of the protest changed when those first videos came out. But then you start to see a lot of people getting on board. It became popular. There was a Bitcoin drive. It just became like a meme and a culturally significant event online with -- on Twitter and social media in general.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It was mor popular because they couldn’t honk. It was the only thing they could do is type “#honk”
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes, exactly.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It’s fuzzy but I can see it, yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
“Yes, he’s excited to get your call. Please remind your Board I never once spoke to Premier Ford about this or Katie Telford, Turneau’s chief.” And it was corrected as “Trudeau”.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
That’s the Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Well, this would indicate that firstly, he has the ability to reach out to the Premier and the Prime Minister if he wanted. And he’s clearly a significantly politically connected figure.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
No. Never, not once.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yeah.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
It looks like Chris Barber and that’s all.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Chris Barber and no one else. These are not Board members.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Okay.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Yes.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
I was quite shocked. I produce a podcast with lawyers. My mother is a paralegal. I've been around lawyers my whole life. I've never seen lawyers speak like that. I thought we were getting professional counsel. We got a ---
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
--- in a suit.
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Benjamin Dichter (Freedom Corp / Convoy Organizers)
Thank you very much.