Trevor Milton’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

And it kind of morphed through the time. We started off as like a natural gas truck, and then we moved it to a hydrogen zero emission truck.

TUCKER CARLSON: When you say truck, like pickup truck big?

TREVOR MILTON: Semi truck big.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so the trucks that haul goods across the country.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, exactly. The ones you see on the freeways hauling 80,000 pounds. That was our focus because it was the third largest polluting industry in America. So the whole point was to reduce the amount of emissions and noise.

It was also the fact that electric powertrains are so efficient. I just loved them. I grew up on locomotives. My dad managed the railroad when I was a kid. So I grew up on locomotives. And the whole idea was to build a locomotive semi truck.

The Electric Advantage

TUCKER CARLSON: My people may not know that many locomotives are electric.

TREVOR MILTON: They all are. Their entire powertrain’s electric. They have a diesel generator that powers the electric motors. But for the torque and the power, you have to have the electric motors.

TUCKER CARLSON: We did a video last summer on the Cybertruck and we hauled 8,000 pounds of dirt in the thing. And if you’ve ever hauled anything in a truck, you know you can feel the engine strain when you’re in an electric vehicle.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’m pretty opposed to electric vehicles generally, but for hauling stuff, the difference is just crazy.

TREVOR MILTON: One of the best parts is the ability to recapture all the energy. That’s what I love the most about electric powertrains. When you go to hit your brakes rather than wearing brake pads down, what happens is those motors are going to go into reverse and they’re able to absorb all that. They become a generator and they start outputting.

So say the Cybertruck’s like 400 volt platform. What happens is instead of using 400 volts, now you’re charging 400 volts into your batteries. And so with big semi trucks it makes a huge difference.

I live part of my life up in the Utah, Wyoming area. And there’s a Parley’s Pass that goes from Park City down to Salt Lake. Imagine if you have an 80,000 pound load, you’re charging your battery all the way from the top of Park City all the way to the bottom. You’re going to have a battery that’s 20, 30% more charged when you get to the bottom.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just from braking.

TREVOR MILTON: Just from exactly. Regeneration. So you’re not even braking. You never use your brakes. And that’s what’s so cool about electric vehicles. The instant torque and the ability to recover all the lost energy. And that’s just something you can’t get anywhere else.

The Hydrogen Solution

TUCKER CARLSON: I strongly agree. Just as an engineering matter, it’s incredible. So you build this company, it starts electric and then you go into hydrogen. Can you give us the non-complicated one minute explanation of what that means? What’s a hydrogen motor?

TREVOR MILTON: Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere. It’s the only energy that can never be depleted. So there’s a reason why I love hydrogen – it comes from water you can split. It comes from water, you’re able to split it. It’s also in the atmosphere.

TUCKER CARLSON: H2O.

TREVOR MILTON: H2O hydrogen exactly. Two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. So how this works is the hydrogen is stored – you separate it from the water, you store it, and the hydrogen is then passed through a membrane which creates electricity. That electricity is captured through these membranes and delivered to the batteries of the vehicle.

Now, there’s inefficiencies with hydrogen, but there’s also inefficiencies with electricity on the grid. So if you produce hydrogen on site, it can be as efficient or better efficiency than electricity itself.

When a lot of people plug in their cars, they talk about the efficiency of an electric vehicle, like 97% or 92%. Well, that’s great, but it’s actually not really that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where was that power generated from?

TREVOR MILTON: Exactly. It was generated from a solar farm of 22% efficiency or less, and then transmission lines that take it 800 miles to your home through transformers. You’ve lost another 20, 30% of efficiency over all that entire lifeline.

If you factor in how much loss actually happens on a grid and through transformers into your home and all this stuff, realistically, the numbers can actually be worse than hydrogen, but people don’t want to believe it. They’re like, “Oh, my car’s 90, 92% or 97% efficient” once the electricity reaches your vehicle.

TUCKER CARLSON: Once it reaches your vehicle.

TREVOR MILTON: Once it reaches your vehicle. So with hydrogen, the point is that hydrogen is difficult to transport. It’s not extremely difficult, but it’s harder than electricity to transport. So what you do is you produce it on site. So you’re saving all that efficiency from hydroelectricity or whatever.

But the whole point is that hydrogen can be used over and over and over again. And you don’t have to mine any mountains. You don’t have to – there’s no other elements other than just water and electricity. That’s it, to produce hydrogen.

So there’s good and bad about hydrogen. It does not fix every application. And I’ve always told people, I think that electric vehicles on a car level make much more sense, but hydrogen on a heavy duty level makes more sense. So hydrogen for semi trucks, for trains, for the maritime industry, for ships, for aviation, that’s where hydrogen makes all the sense.

The Economics of Hydrogen

TUCKER CARLSON: How expensive is it?

TREVOR MILTON: It’s not that expensive actually to produce. We call it “you move the decimals.” So let’s say that your cost of energy is 2 cents a kilowatt hour. Your hydrogen is $2 a kilogram. So it’s actually really cheap.

And a kilogram is pretty equivalent to if you were to think about like a gallon of diesel. It’s very similar on energy level. There’s a lot of factors into that. So it’s not an exact science. But the point is, to make it easy, a kilogram of hydrogen is going to be very similar – you’re going to cost compare it to a gallon of diesel.

TUCKER CARLSON: So just a couple dumb questions. I have a hydrogen powered truck. How do I fill it up?

TREVOR MILTON: You can’t right now. And that’s a problem. So that’s what Nikola was all about – the chicken and the egg. The idea around Nikola, the reason why it went parabolic, was it was not just building hydrogen trucks, it was actually supplying the infrastructure too.

So it’s like a cell phone. Your cell phone is worthless without the tower. Everyone’s like, “Oh, hydrogen, there’s no infrastructure. It’s stupid. It’s going to cost 100 billion to develop infrastructure.” Well, they spent hundreds of billions on cell phone towers. Who cares? Infrastructure usually sticks around for 50 to 100 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over a trillion dollars on the Iraq war.

TREVOR MILTON: There you go. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, got a lot out of it.

TREVOR MILTON: We didn’t even get our airplanes back. They left them over there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s now controlled by Iran. So yeah, big win. Okay, so you were in the business not just of building the trucks, but of building the infrastructure to fuel the trucks.

The Energy Play That Threatened Big Oil

TREVOR MILTON: That was the whole reason for Nikola. It was really an energy play. The point was to displace the oil companies. That was my goal and my dream – to either partner with or displace the oil companies entirely.

Look, I have no problem with diesel. I think it’s one of the greatest things America’s ever found. It powers everything. Diesel literally touches your life probably a hundred times a day. Even a piece of plastic has petroleum in it. Everything about diesel – it’s the most efficient way of moving American goods for over 100 years. It’s just the greatest thing America’s ever seen.

But there’s also ways you can have both in this world. And that was my goal – to become essentially as powerful or as big as an oil company, but not doing oil, but doing hydrogen. And that was my goal. That was really the idea – to eliminate the emissions on the road, become an energy conglomerate and provide energy that’s a residual income every month. And that’s what I was after.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is hydrogen produced at plants? I want to produce hydrogen to power a fleet of trucks. Where do I produce it?

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, you would have a plant that you would build and it would be done through two different ways – through a proton exchange membrane, they call them PEMs, or through electrolysis. So those are the two main methods.

Even Chevron right now produces hydrogen. But it’s like $20 something a kilogram. Well, that equates to $20 a gallon of diesel. So you’ll never compete. The point of hydrogen is what you have to do is build it on site.

Very similar to data centers. We were talking about data centers last night. The amount of energy that they’re consuming for AI – what do they do? They build them right next to the nuclear plant now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

TREVOR MILTON: So it’s the same thing with hydrogen. We had the nuclear plant in Arizona quoting us energy under 2 cents a kilowatt hour at the time. So they can make it for a penny and a quarter. A nuclear plant can.

So what you’re talking about is, if it’s 2 cents a kilowatt hour, you’re essentially producing hydrogen at about $2 a kilogram. And at that point you’re half the cost of diesel. It’s game over. The entire world would – everything would go hydrogen.

We were on the verge of that. And then that’s when the forces that be came after us and decided to completely destroy us. It was almost wild.

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of energy to produce hydrogen though.

Hydrogen Transportation and Safety

TUCKER CARLSON: How dangerous is it to transport hydrogen?

TREVOR MILTON: Not dangerous at all to transport it. Most of the time they’ll transport it in liquid form and that’s the best way to transport it. And it’s very inexpensive to liquefy. It’s about 50 cents a kilogram. So if you’re $2 a kilogram and you can liquefy it for 50 cents, now you’re $2.50 a kilogram and you can move that anywhere in America at 8 to 16,000 kilograms at a time, just like an oil tanker.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s not more dangerous than an oil tanker?

TREVOR MILTON: It’s more dangerous, I would say. But it’s nothing different than transporting helium or any other gas like natural gas. No one knows that natural gas is being transported everywhere all the time. And it’s extremely volatile.

The reason why hydrogen can be a little bit dangerous is that the molecule is so tiny. It’s the smallest molecule out there. So the fittings have to be designed perfectly, the lines have to be inspected all the time. But one great thing about hydrogen is how light it is. So if you were to have an accident or something like that, it just goes straight into the atmosphere because of how light it is. Unlike propane, where it settles.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

TREVOR MILTON: The real dangerous stuff is propane. Because it settles below the air and any spark… I mean, everyone doesn’t even know that. They have a propane tank next to almost everyone’s house in a lot of rural areas in America.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yeah, I think we do right here.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. I had eight of them at my cabin. So you have like eight 1,000 gallon propane tanks buried. Imagine if that went off. It would be… There’d be nothing left of like an acre lot or 5 acre lot.

TUCKER CARLSON: I have a lot of propane tanks and I never think about it at all.

TREVOR MILTON: So hydrogen is way safer than propane.

TUCKER CARLSON: In fact, I always take my matches and light them off the propane tanks.

TREVOR MILTON: Do you?

TUCKER CARLSON: No. Just kidding. No, but your point is a good one. I mean, people who live far from anyone in rural America has a lot of propane around. A lot.

TREVOR MILTON: Anything new scares people until they realize it’s not dangerous.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s not directly connected to the hydrogen bomb. It’s not the same as the hydrogen bomb.

TREVOR MILTON: No. Philosophy is similar, but a little bit different.

Building the Nikola Prototype

TUCKER CARLSON: Just kidding. Okay, so you build this company. How does it do?

TREVOR MILTON: It does fantastic. For a long time we developed our first prototype called the Nikola One. It was our very first prototype truck – a semi truck. We unveiled it in 2019.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where’d you build it?

TREVOR MILTON: In Salt Lake City at our facility. Yeah, it’s really cool.

TUCKER CARLSON: You built the truck at the facility?

TREVOR MILTON: We did at the facility. Hundreds of photos of us assembling and it was all fabricated by our teams and people we hired to help us. The frame was ours, the suspension was designed by our team and outside engineering partners. But we own the IP or co-owned it. It was really cool.

So think about a Peterbilt or a Kenworth truck, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TREVOR MILTON: That all took them decades to design their trucks. We had an initial design of our truck that we built. So all the frame was ours, the suspension, the cab, everything. It was not a pile of crap. But it was a first prototype. It was rugged.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you didn’t just take a Peterbilt and throw your logo on it?

TREVOR MILTON: No, no, no. It was entirely from ground up. Our truck. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t ready for production – it was a prototype. And all the parts… this is where the world didn’t know. I’m going to tell you a little later about how the short sellers came after us and the government did.

But what they don’t know is that truck was actually real and it functioned. They sold this huge lie that this truck was fake, but it was really real.

The Truth About the Nikola One

So let’s go through that. The suspension was real, the airlines, the air ride system was real. The entire frame system was real. The cab was real, the power steering was real, the batteries were real. We had the first 800 volt battery on a semi truck that I knew of in the world. And we tested it – 800 volts. It worked. Everything was fine.

So the axles were real, the case was real. We had the rotors and stators and gears. Everything was real. All this stuff was real in this truck.

And what’s crazy is when later on we ended up doing a commercial and we’re like, “Oh, yeah, go ahead and use it for commercial, no problem.” You see the Chevy Camaro turning into Bumblebee on the Transformers. You don’t think that GM’s defrauding everyone because the Camaro becomes Bumblebee. You’re like, “It’s a commercial or it’s a movie. Who cares what it’s used for?”

I was like, “Yeah, go ahead and use it. Who cares?” So they used our truck in a commercial and they rolled it down a hill. All the parts worked on it, could have powered itself if we wanted to. Probably would have taken a month’s worth of work to make sure it was safe enough – maybe two months to make sure it was safe enough to drive on all on its own. But the truck functioned. It was real.

And this was the lie that destroyed my life. This was the moment that destroyed my life. Because later on, the short sellers sold it to the government that this truck was fake and it never worked. And that message was so sexy – that this truck was rolling down the hill – that no one cared about the facts. They cared about this headline: “Nikola rolls a truck down a hill.”

And that’s what ended up allowing these people, all these evil people to destroy the company, destroy me, make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, and the government to indict me was this big fat lie by the short sellers that the truck didn’t function.

Understanding Short Sellers

TUCKER CARLSON: The reason I wanted to talk to you and the reason I think your story is amazing and not just another “oh, I was unfairly prosecuted” – which I think is a pretty common story in America’s prisons – is because of the role of the short sellers. And I think this is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever heard, ever.

And so I just want to ask you to explain it in a way that people can understand. So you’ve made two references to a short seller. What’s a short seller?

TREVOR MILTON: So a short seller is a person or a fund that actively bets against you that your stock is going to collapse. So unlike a regular investor that buys shares and they hope that the stock goes up, short sellers buy shares and they force it down. So it’s like… it should be completely illegal.

TUCKER CARLSON: It should be. Well, it has been for most of the last hundred years from I think the Depression until right before the last financial crisis. There was something called the uptick rule which prevented short sellers from selling when the stock was in decline. I think that’s correct.

TREVOR MILTON: I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s been heavily regulated, it’s banned in a lot of countries. It’s so clearly immoral and bad for a country and for markets that I don’t exactly know why we have it, but we’ve had it since 2007. But anyway. But you’re saying that a short seller, as distinct from an investor makes money…

TREVOR MILTON: On failure and not just failure, but forcing failure. So an investor invests and then they hope it goes well. They hope it does. You say you invest in Tesla or somebody else, whatever. You’re hoping that they come out and they deliver on their products. Right? You hope that they do good and that goes up and you make money and everybody makes money.

A short seller is different because they don’t just hope it goes down, they force it down. This is where it gets really crazy in the story. This is crazy. It’s never been told before. I’ve never gone through this.

Short Sellers and Government Collusion

TUCKER CARLSON: Explain how a short seller – this disreputable evil should be illegal brand of anti-investment – how they’re working with the US Government, the DOJ. How could that be? How does that work?

TREVOR MILTON: This is where the Department of Justice has just gone so far off the rails and it was covered up for a long time. No one knew about it in my trial. This stuff got exposed. So it’s actually available. It’s not like someone doesn’t have to take my word for it. It’s easily available through anyone can ask for a FOIA on it. Anyone can look at all the materials that was submitted in my trial.

What was really crazy is that the short sellers were building a fake report on me and the company prior to us going public and their entire goal was, “Okay, the SPAC is going to go crazy.” We went public via SPAC – it’s a special acquisition company. They knew it was going to go up and what they wanted to do was then force it down and that’s where they make their money.

So what they were doing is they were working with the Department of Justice. They were actually communicating with the Department of Justice prior to releasing the report, which to me is mind boggling.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is a short selling report?

The Short Selling Scheme

TREVOR MILTON: Short selling report is normally a salacious and false report for the most part. So what they’ll do is they’ll mix in 5% truth and 95% lies to just scare the market. It’s always some companies. Look, there are some bad ones and they’ve gotten it right on a few companies. But majority of what they attack is all complete bull crap. It’s just their interpretation to make a company look bad.

TUCKER CARLSON: But a short selling report’s like a magazine piece. It’s like a hit piece against a company.

TREVOR MILTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: “This company is bad, fraud, fraudulent for these reasons.”

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they do research on you.

TREVOR MILTON: They do and they pay an enormous amount of money to employees so they get inside information that a lot of time is slanted because they promise the employees money.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if I go to your employees and pay them for incident information on your company and then invest in the company, I go to prison because that’s called inside trading. But if I go and pay your employees for bad information and bet against your company, that’s legal.

TREVOR MILTON: It’s still insider trading. But yes, the prosecutors look the other way. We actually presented them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, is that really real?

TREVOR MILTON: It’s real. So look, they actually.

TUCKER CARLSON: Martha Stewart went to prison.

TREVOR MILTON: Yes. This is why it’s so I get so angry is we presented the Department of Justice the evidence on Hindenburg’s essentially insider trading.

Hindenburg Research and Nate Anderson

TUCKER CARLSON: Tell us what Hindenburg is.

TREVOR MILTON: Hindenburg was a short seller group that attacked us, that attacked Nikola and me. Primarily me, but Nikola.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s run by a guy named.

TREVOR MILTON: Nate Anderson who is the head of Hindenburg Research. And his entire goal was to burn a company to the ground, take out an insurance policy, burn the company to the ground, call the cops on you, and then collect on the insurance policy.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Nate Anderson, I just looked him up on the Internet. I’d never heard of him. This is not my world. But there’s like nothing on the guy at all. He was like 39 years old, no real track record as an investor. He was an ambulance driver in Israel for a while. Not clearly graduated from college. There’s like no information on the guy. And all of a sudden he winds up as this major player in the American economy running the short selling group called Hindenburg, which just disbanded.

TREVOR MILTON: Pretty barely just disbanded completely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, ran away.

The DOJ Coordination

TUCKER CARLSON: So Nate Anderson produces a report attacking you, a hit piece on you designed to drive your share price down because he’s bet against your share price as a short seller.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. The weird part about this, this is so crazy, the short sellers essentially commit this. I’m going to try to explain this easy to the public, but this will just get your blood boiling. Without the Department of Justice involvement, the short would never work. Because your stock would, they would just come out with some report and people would be like, “whatever. This is stupid. It’s not true. The trucks are obviously real.”

It turned out that Nate Anderson was communicating directly with the Department of Justice prior to releasing the report, which means what he was doing is he was telling the Department of Justice that there was this fraud that he was going to launch. He’s launching this investigation. He’s going to launch it, and he wanted to make sure that they had it in their hands and they were ready to look at it the second it hit. So what he does, he stokes the fire, gets them all angry at you, sells this big fraud.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were they looking. Was DOJ looking at your company before?

TREVOR MILTON: They were. Because of Nate? Because what we found out was because of what Hindenburg was doing. So Hindenburg was feeding this.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutors in New York had, as far as you know, no intention of investigating or prosecuting you until they were approached by a short seller.

TREVOR MILTON: That is our knowledge, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s fucking crazy, man. This is the craziest thing. That’s insane.

TREVOR MILTON: So this. The audience doesn’t know this? The feds showed up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, I’m just like, I’m shocked.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, it gets so much worse, too.

TUCKER CARLSON: Let me just say, just to put a finer point on this. In the United States, you’re not supposed to be prosecuted so some guy can profit from your prosecution. Is that justice?

TREVOR MILTON: It’s not our country anymore. We’ve lost it. Look, it is. So if people. This is going to be fun today, because I get to tell you. I get to tell us the entire thing, but what no one’s ever heard. This is why I love coming on your platform, because it’s so big and we can really explain the truth. The FBI. So Hindenburg started investigating us and filling the FBI with all these lies.

Shopping the Case Between Districts

TUCKER CARLSON: But just to be clear, you don’t believe the Department of Justice had any plans to screw with you? Investigate, indict, bring you to trial, anything, until they were approached by this group of short sellers who was like, “hey, you should look into this Trevor Milton.”

TREVOR MILTON: From what I know, that is a hundred percent accurate.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is unbelievable.

TREVOR MILTON: So Nate gets the Department of Justice that originally he goes the Eastern District. That was what we hear. He goes east. It lands in the Eastern District of New York’s. Because he wanted New York. Because New York you can get like New York, you’re done. If you get indicted in New York, you’re over. You get indicted in Arizona, Utah, you’re going to get a fair jury in New York, it’s over. It’s a guaranteed stamp, a conviction, 90 plus percent conviction rate. And the ones that get off are low level crimes they don’t care about.

So what happened was, is the Eastern District researched it. They sent the feds in Arizona out to our facility. They showed up at my chief engineer’s home. Out of the blue. I get a call from my chief engineer and he’s like, “Trevor, the FBI just showed up at my house.” I’m like, “for what?” They said the truck was fake. And I’m like, “well, the truck’s not fake. So I mean, that’s weird.” I’m like, “did you take him down to the facility? Go show it to him. I don’t care. Have him call us. Have him call our attorneys.”

And they asked, he’s like, “yeah, they questioned me for like 10 minutes. They’re like, hey, is a truck real? We know it’s fake.” And he’s like, “what are you talking about? It’s, of course it’s real. The truck’s freaking real. It’s at the facility. Why don’t you come down, I’ll show it to you.” Feds wrapped up, essentially scared him. And then they went back and they’re like, “yeah, nothing’s wrong. The trucks are real.”

So the feds originally looked at it and they said nothing’s wrong. So he didn’t get the response he wanted. They went back, they essentially declined anything. They’re like, “yeah, the company’s real. It’s all like, I don’t know what these guys are even saying that the company’s fake, this bull crap.”

So then he moves from the Eastern District to the Southern District. Then he goes to different prosecutors people, they have better connections with. And next thing you know, the Southern District opens up an investigation. So this is after the Eastern District already turned it down, looked at it and said, “there’s nothing wrong.” So then the Southern District gets it and decides they want to take me down.

TUCKER CARLSON: But this is all being shopped by a guy who’s hoping to get rich from your failure.

TREVOR MILTON: Exactly. Before, by the way, before we go.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why is he not in jail?

TREVOR MILTON: It’s the question that I think ever. That’s the question that should be answered.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just, I.

TREVOR MILTON: But it gets worse. It gets worse because I just didn’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry to keep repeating myself. I just didn’t know that this happened.

The Coordinated Attack and Profits

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, and it gets even worse because of what he does and how involved he is in making sure that the Southern District creates an indictment so his report is worthless without an indictment or an investigation by the Southern District.

So then what happens is that he creates this big report and he shares it with the government and then he launches his short. So he takes out a huge position that your stock’s going to collapse. And from according to the court, we have some information how much money he made. We don’t have it all. We’re going to get it through the. There’s a big lawsuit going on right now and we’ll find it all out. But we know that he made somewhere between thirty and a hundred million dollars off of this short.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nate Anderson did Hindenburg.

TREVOR MILTON: Nate Anderson. That’s what we know it was. We know he’s somewhere between 30 and 100 million is what he made on this short from creating this fake report, getting the Department of Justice involved.

And then when he launched it, what happens is then the, literally that day or the next day or whatever it was, within 48 hours, the Department justice sends all their subpoenas to everybody, like our entire company. Us, our attorneys, me, everyone. Scaring the shit out of everybody. And as a publicly traded company, you have to disclose it. So what happens when you disclose that a Fed, an investigation by the Department of Justice, your stock does what?

TUCKER CARLSON: And Nate Anderson and Hindenburg get rich.

TREVOR MILTON: It’s a guaranteed, absolute, guaranteed profit. Because without the Department of Justice, he makes no money. With them, he makes hundreds, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you know that this could happen?

TREVOR MILTON: No, I didn’t even know it was happening, dude. I didn’t know until way, way, way late, like almost probably two or three years later that who was all involved in it. It took the subpoena power and everything else of when I was getting, when I got indicted to finally get in there and find all this out. And by then it was like too late to do anything about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: The company’s gone.

TREVOR MILTON: Company now is destroyed and the Department of justice at fault. Thirty-four billion dollars destroyed by the Department of Justice.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Nate Anderson could make a hundred.

TREVOR MILTON: Million dollars and the other people he’s involved with made who knows how much money. So there’s funds in Canada that were involved in this and we still don’t know who they all were that made massive. So what he did is he went out and told them too. So the insider trading was prolific. You’re not allowed to go tell people something that you have insider knowledge on and get them to trade on it. He did this and this is why he shut his entire. This is why I believe. It’s a belief. This is why I believe he shut his entire firm down and ran.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where is he now?

The Government’s Chief Witness

TREVOR MILTON: No idea. I mean he’s obviously we’re in the middle of a lawsuit but no idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: So short sellers, as far as I know, don’t have to disclose or he does not specifically have to disclose who his investors are. So there’s a syndicate presumably because that’s typically the way. I don’t know this, but I’m just guessing that there’s a syndicate behind him. He has investors.

TREVOR MILTON: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct.

TREVOR MILTON: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re all profiting from this with insider information. And you know for a fact they paid members of your.

TREVOR MILTON: So the government’s chief witness was a guy who made $600,000 on the short paid by Hindenburg by the way. Paid by Nate Anderson. So the government’s chief witness in my trial, my federal trial was on the stand made $600,000 by making sure I got convicted and is set to make millions off of the so called fraudulent whistleblower group. This is the government’s chief witness. I mean imagine the guy on this guy named Paul Lackey.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what was his role?

TREVOR MILTON: Did he public because he was in the trial, that’s why.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did he work for the company?

TREVOR MILTON: No. He had been to our facility one time in his life. He worked on the batteries. He was an outside guy. He worked on the batteries, had been to our facility one time in his life and he was the government’s chief witness and he was paid by Hindenburg $600,000 by Hindenburg. He’s admitted that on the stand and he stood to make millions in the whistleblower groups. Who knows how much money he made from the fake fraudulent whistleblower group.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just ask one more time you are you positive that Hindenburg paid your employees for information about your company?

TREVOR MILTON: They paid contractors and outside other people for it. Yes. That were inside of our company that had come in. Yes. 100% for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Without they use that information to trade.

TREVOR MILTON: Yes. If someone wants to see go look at the trial transcript. It’s public. If you want to go see go search for Paul Lackey. And he admits he made $600,000 from Hindenburg. Hindenburg paid him $600,000 a portion of how much he would make if he agreed to come in and create a story. And they did this and they did it to other people. There was other people that he promised money to too.

There’s probably a half a dozen people that I don’t know the exact number we’re going to find out in the lawsuit but there was somewhere around a half a dozen people that Nate Anderson paid for information and gave him a portion of all the profits. And these are the guys that were part of this fake whistleblower group and that were part of testifying against me at trial.

Justice Corrupted by Commercial Interests

TUCKER CARLSON: So justice in the United States and all civilized countries is administered by the state on behalf of the population. The whole population. So when the state indicts somebody, the state makes the claim that indicting this person, convicting and imprisoning this person protects the public. That’s the point. Right? That’s the point of justice. Just protect the society.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: The idea that a private investor could be driving a prosecution in order to benefit from it makes a mockery of the idea of justice is not on behalf of the public or protecting the public. It’s on behalf of a commercial interest. They’re trying to put you in prison in order to help someone get rich.

TREVOR MILTON: If Pam Bondi looked into this right now, Nate would probably be in prison for 30 years. This is how corrupt. And not just him, there’s other short sellers. And it scares me because my.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lifeman was a big short seller. I mean, there are a bunch of short. There are a lot of prominent people who’ve done a lot of short sales and gone on television to talk down share prices in order to benefit from the decline in share prices. And I don’t understand why none of those people is ever prosecuted. And now I’m starting to understand that the system seems captive to those people. So you didn’t, as you just said, you didn’t know why this was happening for a couple of years. In those couple of years, what did the government do to you?

The Government’s Psychological Warfare Playbook

TREVOR MILTON: Oh, my gosh, man. So the government, it was. It’s really interesting. The government has it. What Americans don’t know is the government has a playbook, and it’s been developed by the CIA and other entities inside the government, and it’s passed down into the Department of Justice. They have a very clear playbook of how to guarantee a conviction and destroy someone’s life and break them.

So it’s like the profilers, but psychological profiling. And what they do is they figure out how to do it, and they have a very clear playbook and it’s taught and very disseminated within these groups to how to do it. The first thing you do is you separate the person from all their friends and colleagues. That’s the number one thing you have to do. You have to separate them. You have to turn everybody against each other. Yes, that’s number one. So psychological warfare.

So they come in and they threaten everybody differently individually. They separate them. They don’t care about the truth. They do not give a crap about the truth. We show. We actually showed them the truth about major things that they were going after me for. And once they realized that they were wrong. They just pivoted to something else that didn’t matter to indict me on.

So this is, this. I want to stop at the psychological warfare real quick and I want to tell everyone in the audience right now. In my indictment, there was never, not one time they could not find, not $1 missing, ever. Not $1 misappropriated, ever. Not one filing incorrect, ever. There was no crime, there was no fraud. There was no, there was nothing.

What did they hate me for? They came after me, indicted me specifically because of my tweets, my speech, how I explained the business plan. We were a pre revenue company going public, pre revenue. All of our filings disclosed that, that we were four years, two to four years out on revenue. And so I would speak about this business plan in present tense because why? Because our over filings, which is what the government requires you to do, explain that we are two to four years out.

So I was like, “hey, this is how we’re doing this.” Okay, Well, I didn’t realize it when you say “this is how we’re doing it,” that somehow they could indict you because, “oh, well, you haven’t done it yet.” Well, yeah, but this is the process of what we’re doing. I’ve explained that and they didn’t care. They just indict you on it. They cut your words out.

So it’s speech. I want America to know why. And this is important because I’ve had a lot of people ask me “Trevor, why did the government indict you? And why did these guys take you down?” And later I’ll get into that. But the answer is the speech is what they indicted me for. The answer is even more scary. It was the ability to prosecute speech is what was. What the Biden administration wanted was the ability to prosecute free speech. So I was the poster board for prosecuting free speech. But we’re going to, I’ll get into that later and we’ll actually really hit it hard.

But what they do is they psychologically, what they do is they come in, they threaten everyone individually, they split you up. And so what they did is they scared everybody. They threatened. They actually told my. We have an email from where they called Kirkland, which was the attorney group, Kirkland and Ellis. The prosecutors call Kirkland and Kirkland called the company because they want to keep these communications from ever getting private. This is how they do It. It’s like a big sham. It’s called privileged communications. Normally, it’s good when you seek advice from your attorney, but the government uses it to circumvent the ability of disclosure.

So what they did is they called Kirkland, Kirkland called the company and said, “we need two people, two executives to testify against Trevor or they’re going to get indicted.” So what they do is they just say, “executives, you’re going to indict you, too, if you don’t turn. If you don’t. Just don’t do whatever we say.” They don’t care about the truth. They just. They’re just saying, “this is what we’re going to want, demand, and you’re going to do it.”

So who showed up, the two executives to testify against me? And this was the crazy part. And by the way, that’s step one. Divide, divide everybody. Turn them against each other.

Kirkland & Ellis’s Inappropriate Relationship

TUCKER CARLSON: If I could ask you about. Do you believe the Department of Justice had an inappropriate relationship with Kirkland and Ellis?

TREVOR MILTON: Personally, I do, but it’s extremely inappropriate. But I think that they are very good at what they do and cover up their tracks. It’s very. Be very hard to.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you felt that Kirkland and Ellis was not straightforward.

TREVOR MILTON: Well, no. We found communications between Kirkland and Ellis and Nikola where they actually laid out nine steps on how to frame me. And this came from the Department of Justice because it was my exact. It was my exact indictment. So that we know that the department. The prosecutors had to have been talking to Kirkland and Ellis because they gave them literally the blueprint on what their indictment was going to be.

And these idiots put it in writing. Some intern was actually writing it down. There was nine steps on how they were going to frame me step by step. They actually said, “we’re going to make up stories about Trevor, and this is what we need to say.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Were you being represented by that firm?

TREVOR MILTON: I was at first, yeah. And then later I wasn’t. So there’s some really bad misconduct there that is. But ultimately, there’s. The hard part is, is they. It’s almost impossible to get into privileged communications and sue people. And privilege. It’s really, really difficult. It’s not. Not much you can do about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: How much did you pay Kirkland?

TREVOR MILTON: The company paid Kirkland over $100 million.

The Financial Winners and Losers

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. So I’m just trying to figure out who wins in this. So shareholders lost tens of billions of dollars. Your life was destroyed. You were convicted of a felony. And so the short seller won and the law firm won.

TREVOR MILTON: So my legal fees were over $80 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: Personally.

TREVOR MILTON: Personally and currently.

TUCKER CARLSON: $80 million.

TREVOR MILTON: $80 million. And you know why? It was because, remember how I talked about psychological warfare? The next thing the government does is say you’re going to turn them into an enemy combative, and you’re not going to share anything. So then what happened is I was not privy to any of my communicate. Any communications inside the company. I couldn’t interview a single employee. I couldn’t interview anyone in the company. I couldn’t get documents from the company.

They were obligated to turn your company for my company because I left at this time. And they were obligated to turn this over contractually, but they just said, “what do you do? Sue us? Go ahead. Take you two years.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Kirkland said that to you?

TREVOR MILTON: Well, that was. Yes. And essentially, Nikola. But through Kirkland said, “we’re not sharing anything. Piss off.” So then they got Kirkland to essentially turn the company against me.

TUCKER CARLSON: And wait, can I just to be clear on the fees here, because the fees are really substantial, and so they’re an incentive, clearly. So you paid Kirkland $80 million.

TREVOR MILTON: I didn’t pay Kirkland. I paid my attorneys. Separate attorneys, $80 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

TREVOR MILTON: And.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Kirkland made $100 million.

TREVOR MILTON: The company paid Kirkland around over $100 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: $100 million.

The Law Firm’s Perverse Incentives

TREVOR MILTON: So this is what they did, is what the law firms do. They create. Kirkland. Think about it. If Kirkland went into the Department of Justice and defended us and actually got this thing squashed, they might make $5 million. But if they create an indictment now, they create controversy. They get a bill at $2,000 to $3,000 an hour. They destroy the company, they create more problems. They defend every one of those fires. They create shareholder lawsuits. They defend those, too. And then they defend the company against a company with the Department of Justice through the indictment.

So if they create chaos, they make $100 million. If they prove innocence, they make five. Do you see it now?

TUCKER CARLSON: I do see it. I’m not even a math guy, Trevor, and I see it.

The Financial Web of Destruction

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. Yeah. That’s literally what happened. Over $100 million is what I’ve heard. And through the lawsuits of what I’ve heard through the discovery, around over $100 million to Kirkland and their attorneys.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve known a lot of Kirkland attorneys. There’s some nice ones, but mostly just greasy, disgusting people.

TREVOR MILTON: Honestly, I can tell you that law firms in New York are their single goal is to represent chaos because chaos creates immense wealth.

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn, this is dark.

TREVOR MILTON: Our country is screwed.

From Small Town Struggles to Corporate Warfare

TREVOR MILTON: I didn’t realize how deep this was, dude. I’m not… Look, I came from a farm town, man. I grew up in a small town called Kanab, Utah. Okay? My mom was dying when I was 8 years old with cancer. We lived in Vegas. My dad’s like, “I got to get out of here. We got to…” My mom’s like, “I don’t want to die in a city. I want to get out of here.”

So we moved to a small town called Kanab, Utah. One of the best things for me was really tough. But I moved to the small town in Kanab. We were extremely poor. My dad or my mom, essentially my mom was dying. Our insurance company dropped us, refused to pay any of her medical bills. My dad sold everything he owned in his life to pay for her medical bills and then tried to figure out a way for her to have some sense of happiness as she died.

So we’re in the small town in Kanab. I’m taking care of my mom. My dad’s working in Las Vegas, three to four hours away, trying to find work. And we are broke beyond measure. No food sometimes. I had no money, nothing. I had to go out and work. I was working in the morning. I was delivering papers. I was going over to milk cows with some of my neighbors. I did whatever I could to make a few bucks mowing lawns after school, whatever I could.

I was also in wrestling. And so I’d have to get up early and go to wrestling practice and sometimes I’d go to practice, and I wasn’t very good. I just wasn’t good. It was interesting because through Hindenburg and all the media there, they use this guy locally in Kanab about me. They were like, “Oh, what do you think about Trevor?” He’s like, “Oh, he’s a loser. He lost every wrestling match he did. He’s a total loser.” And it was really interesting.

The Media-Short Seller Alliance

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just ask you… So Hindenburg went and interviewed your childhood friends?

TREVOR MILTON: They sent media to do it because they got media to… Hindenburg works with massive media groups. One of them was Bloomberg. The other one was CNBC.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hindenburg works with Bloomberg and CNBC?

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, they’re tied. I mean, tied together. Almost tied completely together.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the short seller uses, has a formal relationship with the media?

TREVOR MILTON: Monster relationship. This is how they get the short. They guarantee the collapse of a company. And this is… Dude, it’s deep.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can a short seller use the media to destroy a company and then profit from it?

TREVOR MILTON: They’re best friends, dude. They all… I can’t tell you the relationship of how… of what happens behind the doors with these guys. All we know is there was an enormous amount of communication between Hindenburg, a guy named Bloomberg, Ben Foley, other guys, and also CNBC, where they created a salacious TV episode to hit during my jury deliberations. We’ll talk about that later.

Actually, we have a massive billion dollar lawsuit against CNBC and Hindenburg for this. That just got the judge. We just cleared the motion to dismiss. And the judge is like, “I can’t… Wow, it’s this deep.” It goes so deep, dude. These guys are straight up… It reminds me of a government entity. How deep the layers go. These guys had so much control with so many groups and they were working directly with the media, man.

The Bigger Picture

TUCKER CARLSON: This story is… It’s so much bigger than just you and your family. This just says so much about how our financial system works in tandem with our justice system and our media establishment to make a few people rich while destroying so much like the country itself.

TREVOR MILTON: It’s really difficult because the audience has only heard, “Oh, Nikola, roll the truck downhill.” They don’t know the truth. The truck was actually real function. No problem. We just didn’t turn it on for that scene. And you could have easily. But here’s the thing. What’s important to know is why I did certain things. This is what is important.

So going back to Kanab… So I mean the media went and interviewed in conjunction with the short seller groups went, interviewed this guy and he’s like, “Oh, Trevor’s a loser. He lost every wrestling match.” And it was interesting because later on someone was like, and this kid was like, “Oh, yeah, he’s a loser. He lost. This is why he probably stole from everyone. This is why he got indicted.” Like, I tied it to my wrestling matches.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your high school wrestling?

TREVOR MILTON: My high school wrestling matches.

TUCKER CARLSON: They went pretty deep on you, huh?

TREVOR MILTON: Deep, deep. It was just fine.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re interviewing your ninth grade classmates?

TREVOR MILTON: Actually earlier than that. It was like seventh and eighth grade. So… By the way, this is kind of interesting because this is one of the only areas that the short sellers got it right. I mean, it’s kind of sad to say, but the answer is I did lose all my wrestling matches.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry.

The Truth Behind the Wrestling Losses

TREVOR MILTON: I lost everyone, but they don’t know the reason why. Sometimes it’d be two days that I hadn’t eaten. I was so… We had no money. We were broke. We lost everything. My dad sold his welder to pay for money to get to Vegas to go work. I had no money. And it would be two days, sometimes three days. I wouldn’t eat and I would maybe grab a handful of cereal from a neighbor and that was my food.

It was just a tough time. It wasn’t like that for all of our life. It was just that time for a few years, really bad. And we lost everything. I would go to wrestling matches and get my ass kicked. I mean, just bad. Just get beat and… But I didn’t even have enough energy to even stand up.

So I was like, yeah… Some friends asked me, “Is it true, Trevor, because you’re a fighter? I can’t believe you’re losing wrestling because I’m a pretty scrappy guy.” And I’m like, “No, it’s true. I lost everyone.” Like, “Really?” And I’m like, “Yeah. But I hadn’t eaten for two days, dude. I was skin and bone. I had nothing on me. I was so exhausted, tired. My mom was dying, wasn’t mentally there.”

They use it. What they do is they take these huge things, and then they roll it into this whole entire short sell report about how you’re this big fraud. And that story is important because my family means more to me than anything in life.

TUCKER CARLSON: It just makes you not want to have company.

The System’s Corruption

TREVOR MILTON: I love the public system. I hate the corruption that the government allows to exist around… allows people to actually be equal to other people. Think about it. Allows an entrepreneur to go from zero to creating incredible wealth for their employees. The problem is, is the government really… The government figures out a way to destroy so many good people and profit the big people that their friends, like the big banks and other people, they’re making a billion off everyone they touch.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then the law firms are making a hundred million dollars by encouraging each one.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. So it’s important to know why I do things. One of the big lies that was set out was like, “Oh, Trevor left the company because he was…” When Hindenburg hit, I decided to step away from the company. What the public doesn’t know is they see the headlines, the media, the lies, but they don’t know the truth. Why did I step away? What was the reason for that?

I had told the board prior to when we went public. I told the board I was going to retire in December. So just a few months later, I was like, “Look, guys, I’ve taken this company as far as I can. It’s up to you guys to take it the rest of the way.” And my wife is incredibly sick.

This interview is amazing because the documentary comes out today. Finally. I’ve been working on this for almost a year. The documentary about Nikola and myself comes out is just… is now live and everyone can see it on YouTube. It just launched. So the handle is Trevor Milton, but the title of the documentary is “Conviction or Conspiracy?” And it’s made to provoke the thought process. Is this guy… Was it a gigantic conspiracy or was it a true conviction?

Part of the documentary is not favorable to me. Come bash it kind of… You got to show both sides. It’s pretty fair. And we wanted to make sure it was fair, but we also want to make sure the truth was out there. And so I had told the board, I said, “Look, I’m going to step aside.”

Personal Tragedy

TUCKER CARLSON: And your wife was sick?

TREVOR MILTON: My wife was actually dying at the time. I thought she wasn’t going to make it. She was… A doctor put the wrong person’s blood plasma into my wife during a procedure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, gosh.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. She developed all kinds of diseases, and I don’t like to go over them publicly because it’s not fair to her, but she developed a lot of diseases from what happened there, and also autoimmune diseases. She developed diabetes instantly. She went from a very healthy woman to a type 1 and type 1 1/2 diabetic to no longer being able to have children.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, God.

The Personal Toll and Corporate Betrayal

TREVOR MILTON: It was the worst thing you can imagine. She had taken a vaccine when we went to the emergency room. They gave her some type of vaccine that was required, and that put her into seizures. It almost killed her. It was awful.

My wife was literally dying, couldn’t get out of her bed. I was bathing her. She couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t walk. And then all of a sudden, Hindenburg hits. I’m like, I can’t stay here and fight all this when I got my company. They all promised me everything would be fine, that they would fight the government and they would expose the truth and work with me.

They got me to sign these papers, these lying scumbags. They used my wife’s death, or on the verge of death, in order to get me to sign papers because they wanted power and greed and control.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s they? The law firm?

TREVOR MILTON: The executives in the law firm. Yeah, the law firm wanted it because they knew they couldn’t control me, but they could control the other people because they were idiots. So they controlled them like little puppets. But they would never have gotten away with that with me. I would never allow it.

So I decided to go help my wife. And then what does Hindenburg do? They go out and they’re celebrating. Like, you see, Trevor’s a criminal. He’s a liar. He got thrown out of his company. He resigned because of the disgrace. That’s where Hindenburg used the Department of Justice, the media, and my wife’s illness to make sure that they profited 30 to 100 million dollars or whatever.

Hindenburg’s Intimidation Tactics

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you ever meet anyone from Hindenburg?

TREVOR MILTON: No. I saw him at trial. He came to my trial to rub it in my face. He’d just sit in the courtroom.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nate Anderson did?

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, there were times when he came through the trial. I think it was just intimidation is what I believe.

TUCKER CARLSON: He never called you? You had no contact?

TREVOR MILTON: No, never. Never even wanted to know the truth. Never wanted to have any comment on anything. He used people.

One thing they did is they used recordings from people and then deleted half of them. So Bloomberg did an interview with me, and they were trying to catch me in some kind of lie or fraud. They asked me, “Was the truck real? Did you guys just push it down the hill or was it under its own power?”

And I said, “No, the truck was real, but we didn’t use its own power. We just used it in a commercial. We let it roll down the hill for a cinematic effect.” And I told the truth.

So what does Bloomberg do? They come out with an article, and they cut out my answer. The headline is that Trevor rolled the truck down the hill. But they cut my answer out.

So in the criminal trial, the judge forced Bloomberg to turn over the entire recording. And sure enough, there it was – me explaining that the truck wasn’t under its own power. It was rolled down the hill for cinematic effects. So literally, Bloomberg deleted everything that showed I was innocent and hid it from the Department of Justice.

Media Coordination with Short Sellers

TUCKER CARLSON: And Bloomberg was working with the short seller, with Nate Anderson?

TREVOR MILTON: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think Bloomberg or CNBC took money from Nate Anderson?

TREVOR MILTON: I don’t know. I do know that they’re very close. They’re like best friends. Nate and some of these guys at Bloomberg work on every one of his projects. Literally every one of his short sales. You see the same guys launching massive attacks against people. So it’s a coordinated effort.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is crazy.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That Bloomberg allows that.

TREVOR MILTON: Unbelievable. We’re actually suing CNBC right now because of that and Nate Anderson. But the hard part with Bloomberg is there’s nothing I can sue them for. There’s no crime for lying about someone, unfortunately. It has to be slander and it has to be premeditated.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have to prove that they knew it was a lie.

TREVOR MILTON: We have it with CNBC easy. But we don’t have it with Bloomberg. They just did really awful journalism.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the fact that media organizations, business networks are working with short sellers who profit from attacking people is just so prima facie corrupt that you don’t need to make a case beyond that. Just that fact alone is disgraceful.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah.

The Government Playbook: Control the Environment

TUCKER CARLSON: And I didn’t know it – as low an opinion as I have of US Media having spent a lifetime in it, you’re still shocking me. My opinion’s even lower. They are criminals.

Okay, so back to the playbook that the US Government in conjunction with the media and the short sellers ran on you. The first part of that you said was to separate you from everyone you knew and loved and trusted. And they did that.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. And then they threatened the other guys. And then what they do from there is they get the company to – this is the third step – what they call “control the environment.” Control the environment is where they come in and they sanitize and filter every interview.

TREVOR MILTON: So these employees came to me afterwards and told me about this – this is now after my trial. This is how I knew. So they threatened the employees. They said, “You can’t talk to Trevor. You’ll get arrested,” which is a lie. They could talk to my attorneys, but the government threatened them. If they did, they would be turned on.

So Kirkland would threaten the employees and essentially divide and conquer and then sit down and say, “Okay, here’s our nine steps on how to frame Trevor.” And they would go through it with the employee, and they would tell the employee what they wanted to hear. The employee’s like, “That’s not accurate.” They’re like, “No, okay, well, we’re just going to move on. It is accurate, but we’re going to move on.”

And they wouldn’t take notes of it. So when an employee would be like, “Oh, no, Trevor told the chief legal counsel this, and the chief legal counsel signed off on this,” Kirkland was like, “No, it’s actually not how it happened, but it’s okay. We’re going to move on.” And then they wouldn’t write it down, and they would just move on.

I had no idea an employee would actually tell. This is Brady material – information that shows you’re innocent or exculpatory. Kirkland and the company would sanitize all of it. And then they would come up with a plan. They came up with this report, and Kirkland came out with a whole report on me about how I was a fraud. They created this report fraudulently with all these partial employee comments where they sanitized everything out of it that showed I was innocent.

And the government wanted it because they wanted to guarantee they would use that as part of their indictment and use it as part of the SEC coming after me. This is crazy. The whole thing is planned.

Facing 64 Years in Prison

TUCKER CARLSON: What kind of penalty were you facing at trial?

TREVOR MILTON: 64 years is what the government wanted.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, 64 years in prison?

TREVOR MILTON: 64 years in prison, I think, is what the number was at the time. I was like 40.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, so you’d be 104 when you got out. You’d be dead.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. And so you’re facing life in prison for tweeting, by the way. Remember, this is important to know. Even one day in prison is the worst thing you can do to an innocent human because it destroys their life, their freedom, their liberty, their family, their name. It’s irreparable.

There’s probably been a quarter million negative articles written about me because they just follow what the government says. So a great example is when the government came out, the U.S. attorney, Audrey Strauss came out. And this is the crazy thing. They will convict me for misunderstanding my tweet, right? Because they say it affected the market.

So here’s the crazy part. Audrey Strauss comes out, she stands in front of the whole world, and she says, “Trevor Milton is a liar. A fraud. Where the rubber meets the pavement. He created a truck that was nothing more than a Ford truck with his own badge on it. It wasn’t even real. It was fake.” Everything that was categorically 100% false.

So the market collapses on Nikola. So this is market manipulation. They should indict her like they indicted me because she actually caused massive market collapse when she had the resources at her hands to know that what she was saying was fake. But she didn’t care.

She can say, “Oh, well, maybe we misrepresented it a little bit.” No, they destroyed the company. The Department of Justice destroyed 34 billion dollars in value, and she is responsible. The U.S. attorney came out, literally lied to the entire market. It’s provable.

The Nikola pickup truck was a Nikola truck, Nikola frame, Nikola E-axle, Nikola battery that we were working on. All of our own suspension designs, our own exterior panels, everything. All that design was ours. We used a couple pieces from other OEMs, which every OEM in the world does. And she came out and said it was literally just destroyed. When she came out and said that, the whole entire company at that point was known as a fraud.

The Shocking Level of Institutional Coordination

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s one of the wildest interviews I’ve ever done, and I hope people understand the importance of it. Because what it shows is that there’s a shocking level of coordination between major institutions in our society that are not supposed to be coordinating with each other, and that it’s on behalf of what is, in my view, a criminal enterprise: short selling.

TREVOR MILTON: Here’s where it gets really crazy. So now we’ve had all this fun talking about this. And here’s the cherry on top. This just shows you how corrupt it is. So I didn’t know this was going down. This is completely – I did not know this was going down in the background.

So after everything I’m telling you, I’m sitting there, I get a call from my attorney, and he says, “Trevor, I need you to answer me something honestly, and if you lie to me, I’ll never represent you. You need to be 100% truthful to me right now.”

And I’m like, “What? I’ve never lied to you. What are you talking about? Why would you even phrase it that way? What’s going on? What the hell else is going on that I don’t know about?”

And he says, “Trevor, are you a Russian asset?”

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought you were a Mormon kid from Kanab, Utah.

The Russian Asset Allegations

TREVOR MILTON: I was a very innocent, naive Mormon kid from Kanab, Utah that had met. I had met one Russian in my lifetime up to that point, and she was a mail lady. She was really nice, like, at the post office. Yeah, the post office. She worked for the post office.

And are you a Russian asset? I had never been to Russia. I had never met a Russian in my life up to that point. No big deal. I mean, there’s probably lots of great people. I mean, it’s probably good and bad just like every country. Yeah, I. And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” I’m sorry for the language. Sorry for the language, everyone. My job. I had no clue. I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

They’re like, “Did you hack Nate Anderson and the Department of Justice?” “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t even know how to hack, dude.” Not a hacker, not a Russian asset, dude. I have to go to my engineers to ask them simple questions for, because that’s how I learn. Like, I don’t know how to do it. Like, I’m not, like, the expert when it comes to, like, you get in super advanced chemical engineering. I’m not the expert. I have my engineers teach me. I don’t know how to hack a government system. Good dude.

So I was. This is. That was the line of questioning right up front. And I said, “Why?” And they said, “There’s a meeting before the judge. The Department of Justice is alleging that you’re a government Russian asset and that you’ve been hacking their systems and Nate Anderson and they want to, they essentially want to take you to jail.” Like a pre. Pre trial. Like you want to just throw me in prison for this? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

He’s like, “You’ve never emailed anyone ever to get information from to like try to get into the system of Hindenburg or the United States government?” No. “You’ve never talked to anyone ever?” No. “You never asked someone to talk to someone else about it?” No. Don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.

The FBI Sting Operation

So guess what happened. Nate Anderson, before trial wanted to stoke the fear of the United States, get the government so mad at me that I have no ability to have a fair trial. Remember, they’re profiting off of the failure of me every step of the way. So every month they would make another however many millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. Millions. As your stock price declines, stock price declines, negative news comes out. They had to make sure that I was convicted. Their entire life and identity was on this.

From what we hear, and I have to say this is only from what I know. I don’t know all the details, I just know a lot of them. But from what I know, Nate Anderson reached out to his buddies in the Department of Justice, the prosecutors that he’s been that he fed the report to and told them that some Russian asset was trying to hack him in the government and get information and that it was me. And the Department of Justice fell for it hook, line and sinker.

They go to the judge, they tell the judge and they set up a FBI sting. I’ve never told any this is breaking here. An FBI sting in New York City. Supposedly I’m behind it. They’re going to nab me and my Russian asset. They set it up. Nate Anderson or a look alike. I heard it might. It was a look like it was a guy dressed up as Nate Anderson like that. He was like in the FBI or like away or something. But they didn’t want to risk his life. They got to protect him. He a personal lookalike show was there.

The Russian, this Russian person shows up, realizes it’s not Nate or whatever and takes off. Hits an FBI vehicle from what I hear. And by the way, this is all filmed. The FBI has it. These. Sorry, these people have it. I, I don’t have access to it. I’ve seen, I’ve heard about it and my attorneys have seen it. They filmed this thing. They actually. Because they were going to use it to go to the judge and throw me in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: If Nate Anderson is texting federal prosecutors, that right there should trigger a criminal investigation.

TREVOR MILTON: It should.

TUCKER CARLSON: If that’s true. I mean, I’m.

TREVOR MILTON: If it’s true. If it’s true, I, from what I know it is like that. That’s the thing. That’s where I have all the evidence. From what has been told to me, from my attorneys, from what I’ve seen. I was standing there one day when one of the prosecutors had to show me a message because they’re. For disclosure reasons. They literally had to show me their phone and say, “We just have to show you this message. Because it came into us.” They had to show it. It’s like, so this is how I know that. Like.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what was the. Who’s the message?

TREVOR MILTON: It was, it was a message about me fleeing the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is it from?

TREVOR MILTON: One of the, one of their, One of their who. Who? One of their friends that was involved in this whole scheme. And I couldn’t tell you who it was. I didn’t, I didn’t have their. I couldn’t write their number down and research them. It was in the prosecutor’s cell phone. Their cell phone. It’s just, it’s insane that, like these guys have.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they, they, meaning likely the short sellers were telling federal prosecutors that you were a flight risk in order to encourage them to put you in.

TREVOR MILTON: And a Russian asset.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Russian.

TREVOR MILTON: They wanted me in prison. They did not. They had to do it because they needed to make the judge think I was guilty. So remember, they had approached the. The judge sees all this. So the judge is thinking, I’m the biggest scum on earth. You know how it is. Like the liberal, like the very far left in New York, what do they hate more than anything? Russian assets. They, I mean, it was Trump 101. Trump’s a Russian asset. They use that to stoke the anger to the judge, to my life and my, My trial, knowing that they’re going to make another 10, 20, 30 million dollars on it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is just crazy.

Trump’s Pardon and Personal Losses

TREVOR MILTON: I lost almost everything I have in my life because of this. I lost 80 million dollars in attorney fees, billions of dollars in losses in my, in my, on my stock, in, in innocent investors. Lost billions of dollars out there, potentially in different ways, because of what the, because of the decline in the stock value, because of the department, the misconduct of the Department of Justice. And then they blamed it on me. And there’s been 200,000 articles out there about how I was the cause of this.

And it now the truth gets out is why I’m so excited to finally think. And I, and I, and I use his name so sacredly because I’m a, I’m a religious person. And I use this most, in the most sacred, most amazing way I ever can, in, like, respectful and reverent way, like, thank my God for stepping in and, and allowing Donald Trump to, to, to see my story, because he issued me a full and unconditional pardon days before the government was going to seize every asset I ever owned.

And I, that’s all. If it was not for Donald Trump, I would be destroyed. And it was the same people that came after him came after me. And when he saw this, he was like, “This is a huge abomination. I can’t stand for it. I don’t care what the articles say. I don’t care what the, what the short seller narrative is. This is wrong, and I don’t stand for it.”

And that’s one thing I love about Donald Trump. He does not stand for something when he thinks it’s wrong. He doesn’t give a shit who is going to attack him. He knew there was going to be blowback. He didn’t care. I don’t care. I do what’s right. This is. And he is a man. Like, he has got a spine. He’s a real man. He’s a true man. He’s not a cow. He’s not. He literally stood up to the media. They said, “Why’d you pardon Trevor Milton?” And because they were trying to, you know, get and, like, make him look bad. And he said, he stood there and said, “They destroyed five years of this man’s life. Trevor did nothing wrong. They’re evil people.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

TREVOR MILTON: And that was his statement to the press, live on the fly. Any. And that was, if it wasn’t for Donald Trump, I’d be screwed. They had filed to cease 690 million dollars or something like that from me. They were days away from taking everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: They were sending you in a prison and.

TREVOR MILTON: Then sending me to prison just weeks or months later.

Criminal Justice Reform Proposals

I, I’ve been. My goal in this life now has been to try to figure out a way to help Trump reform the criminal justice system, because there’s four or five things I could do, and I can lay them out real quick that will Change the entire justice system. I think it’s important to tell the world what it is. This would be. These would be like. Because, you know, you can go into thousands of things. I only care about four or five things because it’ll. 80 to 90% of prosecutions wrong prosecutions would go away instantaneously.

Number one is the. The Department of Justice should never allow. Be allowed to talk to anyone unless it’s a recorded call.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally.

TREVOR MILTON: That’s number one. They should never be allowed to talk to an attorney.

TUCKER CARLSON: Cops have beat cops who are making 50 grand a year and risking their life every day in the worst places in the United States have to wear a chest camera. But FBI agents don’t.

TREVOR MILTON: No. So here’s the problem. Here’s the problem. They coerce and they lie and they destroy people and they destroy evidence. So the number one thing they should be is. Is every call, every personal visit, everything should be on camera.

TUCKER CARLSON: Every interview.

TREVOR MILTON: Every interview as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Let me ask you a dumb question. Are you allowed to whip out your iPhone and record the interview?

TREVOR MILTON: I believe you are. If. I believe you are. If you’re being interviewed, that person is. But the person wouldn’t know. The employee would never know that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

TREVOR MILTON: They’re never told. So. But they should force the Department of Justice to do it so that way it’s turned over in discovery. That. That should be part of their discovery obligations. Okay. Number one is every single interview or. Or communication with the. With any counsel, any. Any in any attorney or anyone working on the case or instructed to work on the case. It should be a recorded call or video, number one.

Number two is if you indict someone, the. The defendant should be able to choose the venue. This is a really important one because what they did is they. I had no connections in New York. We filed them.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not a native New Yorker.

TREVOR MILTON: No, I never. I didn’t own a property. I had passed through New York on a flight one time overseas.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve been to Kennedy airport once.

TREVOR MILTON: I was. I had been interviewed one time. One time early on about Nikola in. In New York. And it was. It had nothing to do with the allegations the government claimed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Media interview.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, for media interview. So if you look at my whole history, everything the government alleged happened, happened in Arizona and Utah, not in New York. So we filed a motion with the judge, and we said, “Your honor, this is the wrong venue. I’m. I’m guaranteed by the. By the Constitution.” It’s actually one of the reasons why America exists is because they used to drag the Founding fathers across sometimes the ocean, sometimes into other cities and states, and they would prosecute them with people that hated them. There’s one reason why our founding fathers created the venue clause, and that is. That was, for me, was one of the most. Was. Was very sacred.

The New York Venue Question

TUCKER CARLSON: May I ask, how did the case wind up in New York City if you had no connection to New York City?

TREVOR MILTON: That’s the whole scam.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was the company chartered in New York City?

TREVOR MILTON: Well, no. They said. Well, so the prosecutors claimed that it was because we were. That they were publicly traded on the New York stock exchange, that they could drag me to New York. So my con. Somehow the company’s organization would bring my personal venue into the. Underneath the company, which is crazy. That doesn’t happen.

Number two is we. So they. We filed this motion with the judge, and we said, “Your honor, Trevor doesn’t have any connections to New York. This shouldn’t even be here. Should be in Arizona, Utah.” They would never try it in Arizona, Utah, ever.

TUCKER CARLSON: But because your stock was traded in New York.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, but here’s the fun.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually traded on the Internet.

The Venue Problem and Moving to New York

TREVOR MILTON: It’s traded. Well, yeah, so they say it passes through. Is traded through New York. But, you know, the funny thing is, we told the judge, we’re like, your honor, even.

TUCKER CARLSON: That.

TREVOR MILTON: Even that argument’s wrong. And he says, why is that? Why is that? It’s a New York stock exchange. Says, your honor, the servers are in New Jersey.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there is no New York stock exchange anymore. I mean, this. The whole thing is stupid. That there are a bunch of guys in coats with slips of paper trading stocks. No, it’s taking place digitally.

TREVOR MILTON: Digitally. So what that means is, is that if you took away the venue clause in the constitution, then the rights that we’ve been given. The venue is one of the most powerful clauses ever given, and it was made to prevent people from dragging people into other venues where they could get destroyed.

So here’s the important thing, though, real quick. The prosecutors claimed that because something passed through New York somehow digitally, that it allows them to prosecute me in New York. If that’s the case, you might as well get rid of every venue. Every district in America. It should only be southern district because that allows them to pull anyone they want from California, from Portland, from Texas, and charge them in New York just because the Internet goes through New York or some kind of thing like that. That’s the problem is it would violate. It would destroy every venue in America.

TUCKER CARLSON: So did you have to move to New York?

TREVOR MILTON: I did.

TUCKER CARLSON: You moved to New York?

TREVOR MILTON: I had to move there. During the entire time in trial.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, how long was that? How long were you new?

TREVOR MILTON: I mean, you know, we bought a house there for the whole trial was awful. It was terrible. It was for the trial and we were there. You know, the trial took. I mean the pre trial and trial was over a couple years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Should you move to New York for a couple years?

TREVOR MILTON: No, I wasn’t there the full time. I was still. I’d still go back and forth, but yeah, I was there for. I was there for a little over a year. I mean, at least probably a year in and out all the time.

The New York Jury Pool Problem

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you think of the jury pool?

TREVOR MILTON: That was hard. And that this is why the government tries people in New York. So the jury pool in my trial was. This is why they rubber stamp convictions in New York. This is how it works in Utah and Arizona. The jury would. The people actually feel like it’s a very patriotic thing to serve on the jury and they want to make sure that no innocent person goes to prison. This is why they wouldn’t try me in Arizona or Utah. They would. The prosecutors would have been laughed out of the courtroom and probably sanctioned by the judge for their conduct.

But in New York, the judges cover for them. They can do whatever they want. There’s never a prosecutor that’s ever reprimanded for anything in New York ever. In Utah, just barely that. The chief justice in Utah called the SEC in, essentially told them that they had committed crimes. Shut down the entire SEC division in Utah over this because the SEC lied to the judge one time. The prosecutors lied to the judge hundreds of times. In my trial, the judge literally threw the entire criminal case out against a guy because the prosecutors misled the judge one time. They, out there, they actually give a damn about the rule of law in New York. They don’t.

So what do they do in New York? How does it work? They bring you in and they have this huge jury poll. New York is. Is the people in my jury pool that ended up through process of attrition, which is guaranteed every time. Almost every one of them. None of them had. Very few of them had any type of job. Most of them were on government subsidies and welfare.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, they. The people that did have jobs. Like there was one guy that came through that was a plumber, an electrician. And I was begging, I was like, please, like stay on my journey.

TUCKER CARLSON: They didn’t have jobs or on welfare.

TREVOR MILTON: Some of them. Some of them. Not all.

TUCKER CARLSON: The jury of your peers. Promise.

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah. So the one of the guys was like, was. It was a was a small business guy. I’m like, oh, please, for the love being, stay on my jury. And he’s like. And the prosecutor’s like, your honor, this jury. This trial could take up to four months. The business guy’s like, I can’t be away from my business for four months. I’ll lose it. I’m sorry. I can’t be here. So the guy who’s actually, like. Who’s actually run a company that’s like, would would be up here. One person left, see other guys making. You know, the other people, they’re making six, eight bucks an hour, ten bucks an hour, whatever. Getting welfare. Getting welfare checks. Retired. Don’t even work anymore. They’re like really old people.

We had a couple of them that slept through the whole trial. They’re so old. They just slept. They didn’t even. They weren’t even awake. One of them was. And then what we found. The crazy part is, so during this void dire. You know, they call it void dire where they interview the jurors. There’s this one juror, and this juror had. She was a younger African American female. And most of my jury was other races. They were not white. It was. Most of it was all. I think that might have only had one white person on our jury off to look. But it was almost all a different race, which is fine. But, you know, you would think normally, but in this situation, it wasn’t.

So this juror had enduring questionnaires. We asked a juror, do you have social media? No, I don’t. Do you? Social media? No, I don’t. Do you. Where do you get your news from? I get it from YouTube. Okay. All right, cool. Sounds good. Any prior convictions? No. No. Okay, cool. Whatever. So there was nothing on her. And we asked the judge if we could research these jurors to make sure that the jurors weren’t lying. Just. Again, no problem. You can research, you know, so we. The person said they never had social media, never had. Do you have anything against rich people or white people that would that would affect your ability to be fair? No. No, your honor. Okay, so cool. We put her in a pool of, like, potentially just acceptable people because they didn’t meet any qualifications to be disregarded or just, you know, essentially thrown out. And so long story. Short is we go into the trial. Most of my jury is.

TUCKER CARLSON: And she’s on the jury.

The Biased Juror Discovery

TREVOR MILTON: She’s on the jury. There was. I had one good juror. I had one good juror, and it was a Hispanic lady, and she was awesome. She ultimately went along with the rest, but she was actually. She was the only one that had any sense of soul in her heart, in her that was like, hey, this might be wrong, guys. She was a really great woman, and I think she was bulldozed by everybody. She had. She. But I’ll go through this.

This African American girl lied to the judge, lied to us. My trial happens, I get convicted, and she goes out, she starts speaking to the jury. I mean, speaking to the media. We’re like, what the. Like. And so she starts speaking to the media. She gets interviewed by the media, and and the media is. The media asks her questions, and they’re really weird. And we start researching her, and we find multiple social media accounts that she owned through investigative ways that she never disclosed to the to the judge or us. And right before my trial, guess what her New Year’s resolution was? What? To abolish, quote, “abolish the billionaire class.” End of quote.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s unbelievable.

TREVOR MILTON: Her New Year’s resolution was to abolish the class of the human that she was on the trial for. Imagine this. Imagine if there was a trial with a young Hispanic kid or a young black kid, and there was a white supremacist on the trial, and his New Year’s resolution was to abolish the the African American culture. Abolish or class. Or abolish the Hispanic class. Can you imagine how quick that trial would be thrown out?

TUCKER CARLSON: What. Did she express any racial views?

TREVOR MILTON: Yeah, lots of stuff. Against white people, wealthy people. Everything was a. Everything was a class warfare against wealthy white people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, explicitly against whites.

TREVOR MILTON: Everyone except for Elon Musk, which was her. Which was her hero. So she was like, “implant my brain with your neural link, Elon.” Like, she was like a. She was an Elon lover.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Implant my brain with your neural link.”

TREVOR MILTON: That’s what she said. She actually tweeted that?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, she tweeted it, but she hates whites otherwise.

TREVOR MILTON: She hates whites otherwise. I think it’s because he’s South African or something. But, like, the point is, she absolutely was like. Her whole thing was like.

TUCKER CARLSON: She served on the jury and voted for your convention.

TREVOR MILTON: Not only served, she was the head of the. She took full control of the jury. She even admitted it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why wasn’t. Why wasn’t the conviction thrown out on the basis?

TREVOR MILTON: Oh, it even gets worse already. So one last thing, I’ll say so when she went out and interview with the media, they’re like, they’re like, oh, why didn’t you, you know, like, what about this, this and this? They asked her questions about something. She’s like, “well, we didn’t want to have an alternate come in because we knew he’d be found innocent.” She actually said that I would be.

The Broken Justice System

TUCKER CARLSON: Why didn’t you flee the country? No, seriously.

TREVOR MILTON: I wanted to see.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, this is a joke. Everything about this is fake. There’s no reference point injustice here at all or truth. And I know it’s your country and you love the country. I feel the same way. But like, if you, you’re sitting before a jury of racists who hate you for being white and rich and say so and lie.

TREVOR MILTON: You’re.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re going to do life in prison.

TREVOR MILTON: Life in prison. They asked for 64 years and so.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you consider fleeing the country?

The Jury’s Shocking Admission

TREVOR MILTON: No, I never did. Mainly because I grew up in a really small farm town. As I said, my dad was very patriotic, is still, but we know the problems in the government. We hope we can fix them.

But the point was, there’s something very brave and very patriotic and very manly about standing up, knowing you’re going to be assassinated and looking them in your eye and saying “you.” That was my best thing I could do – look at him through the eyes. And I looked at the jury and I said, “You know, one day you’re going to stand before God and you’re going to pay” because they’re going to realize what they did.

So one juror was like, “Oh, we didn’t want an alternate because they were going to exclude someone. We didn’t want an alternate because he would have been found innocent.” She’s like, “I couldn’t stay. So I just decided we needed to have this done by 5pm so I could go home.”

So she literally is just like, “Well, I have to be home by 5pm so we’re going to convict him. We’re not even going to look at the jury and the stuff. We’re just going to go home.” And she was bragging about convicting me, putting me in prison by 5pm and it was her lifelong goal. And then she went and bragged about it to the media because she wanted a big payday. It was just sick, dude. It’s sick.

Standing Up to Evil

And there’s something about – I feel like, you know, God, like Christ, you know, if you believe in God, allegedly, or what they believe is that he died on a cross. He didn’t die on that cross because he was forced to. He did it willingly. And it’s the greatest sign of a man is to look his people that are evil in their eye while they hurt him or murder them, and look him in the eye and just say, “You don’t know. And one day you will. And the pain will be deep.”

And I can promise you, if God does exist when they meet their maker, the pain they caused me and the lies that they – what they did to me, if it’s racial, their hatred towards wealth and race and everything else and whatever other reason, they will have to pay a price greater than what I paid over my five years of hell, because that’s the only way you can truly atone for something. You have to pay for what you did and then God can forgive about it.

But their pain is going to be incredible. And I don’t wish that on them, but the growth that’s required requires that. And so they will have to go through it. And that’s why I’m so afraid of ever doing anything wrong to anyone. That’s why I give so much away. That’s why I love – I give. So I gave 70% of my company away.

The Judge Wouldn’t Let Me Defend Myself

The judge wouldn’t let me talk about that at trial, so they could say that somehow I was lying. I was defrauding shareholders because I lied about something in a tweet when it was a misunderstanding, but they just didn’t understand how I was explaining it.

But if I was really trying to pump the stock and defraud people, wouldn’t I have not given 70% – I mean, I’m talking 10 billion plus dollars away. Why would I keep such a small amount for me? Why wouldn’t I keep it all? No, I gave it all away. But somehow I’m a fraud.

It was just – that’s America, Tucker. That’s where we’re at now. And this is the first time I’ve ever exposed it and first time I’ve ever come clean about what really happened and what went down. And I’m really proud.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did your wife take this?

TREVOR MILTON: Not well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Toll on My Wife

TREVOR MILTON: She still struggles to this day because with her illnesses and sicknesses, stress is the number one factor for diabetics and for autoimmune diseases. That’s what flares up the histamine reactions and everything. And her stress level – there were days where I thought we were both going to probably just wake up and God would just be kind to us and just let us die in our sleep.

I was like, “You know, that’d be the greatest way to go. That’d be wonderful to just wake up and I’m in heaven with her. That’d be rad.” There was – my heart hurt so bad and tore so hard. I was like, “I can’t – I could never imagine hurting” – I’ve come from a life of service.

A Life of Service

I lived in Brazil when I was a kid. I did a service mission in the favelas. I taught people English. I taught people about God for a period of time. I’ve given almost everything away to my employees. I gave everything away to other people. I never pass up a person – you can ask anyone you ever meet that knows me. I’ll never pass anyone up on the street unless it’s a dangerous position where I won’t stop and help a person.

It’s been who I was raised from the time I was a kid as a true patriot, as a lover of just wanting to see people happy. I want to see – when I meet my maker, I want him to say, “You know, Trevor, you stopped 23,000 times in your life to help my children. People that I made. And they were never grateful for it, but I am.”

And that’s what I wanted. I wanted that feeling. I wanted to know when I met my maker that I was like, “You know what? I never passed someone up that needed help.”

Grateful for President Trump

And that’s why I was so grateful for President Trump. He was the first person – there were other people there that helped as well, but he was the first person that was publicly able to, that was willing to stand up and do what’s right regardless of the consequence.

And thank God for President Donald Trump, because I’d be in prison, everything would be ripped away. My wife would probably be dead. And that’s how evil these prosecutors are. And I hope they go to – I hope they hear this, and I hope they understand the damage they do to people because they have to meet their maker one day and they can’t excuse it of like, “Oh, it’s just my job.”

God doesn’t care if it was your job. Was it your job to throw – not comparing equals here, but was it your job to throw the Jews in the oven? He doesn’t care if it’s your job. He cares what – you cannot excuse your behavior on your job.

America’s Future

And I’m telling you right now, dude, I’m halfway through my life right now, and I don’t think America has much more in the future. I think we got maybe 10 years left in US probably. So if I really think about it, I probably have 10 years left in my life because I think we’re going to end up in a world of hurt and most of us are going to be affected negatively.

And I look at it, I’m like, I’m pretty close to meeting my maker right now, and I’m really glad. I’m really proud. I can look at my maker in the eyes and I can say I did nothing but love people and help them and give everything I could. And I never lied, I never defrauded these guys, these short sellers and the prosecutors, they all just lied and they just spread it and they had their power.

They have layers, nine layers just deep everywhere. And they back it up because, “Oh, well, the media said this, Bloomberg said this. Oh, CNBC said this.”

The American Greed Connection

And the thing I didn’t tell you about and I kind of missed it in the timeline was that Hindenburg worked with a group with CNBC called American Greed, and they launched this massive –

TUCKER CARLSON: American Greed’s a show.

TREVOR MILTON: A show, yeah. Massive, disgusting show about me. That was all lies. The entire thing was lies. They launched it during my jury deliberation to guarantee – so if you think about this, these –

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, are you sure that Nate Anderson and Hindenburg work with CNBC on that show?

TREVOR MILTON: A hundred percent. It’s actually in all the lawsuit proven to the judges. It just passed a motion.

TUCKER CARLSON: How could CNBC work with a short seller to defame or attack, in any case, a company the short seller was profiting from the decline of?

Coordinated Attack During Trial

TREVOR MILTON: During my jury deliberations, knowing the jury members would go home because they’re all social media watchers. They all watch this. Every show that comes out, people watch. They’re all bingers watch it too. Think about it – during the jury deliberations.

And it’s a hundred percent factual that Hindenburg was working with American Greed. It’s part of the big lawsuit. It’s a billion dollar lawsuit against them.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope you put them under.

TREVOR MILTON: I hope they have to pay. I don’t know if the court systems are honorable enough to make them pay, but I hope they do. It’s bad.

I mean, the best thing would be for the Department of Justice to actually open a full investigation on the prosecutors, the process, what happened, Hindenburg, what they did, who was paying them money, who they – did they trade on this information which we know, which we have high beliefs that they did. We know it well. I mean, obviously they traded on it.

Restoring Faith in Justice

So if they did this, that would be the greatest – that would be the best thing that could happen to America is for them to actually restore trust in the justice system, to realize, “You know what we’re not going to stand for? Prosecutors working with short seller people committing crimes. We’re not going to stand for it. And if you are, you’re gone. And you’re prosecuted, too. Not just gone, but prosecuted.”

And that would be the best way to restore faith in the American system, because it’s gone right now.

Getting the Call About the Pardon

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you find out you were getting a pardon?

TREVOR MILTON: I got a call on – so this is crazy. I was actually – my world was over at this time. I had finally come to the conclusion, I had finally resigned mentally that it was done.

TUCKER CARLSON: When was this?

TREVOR MILTON: Beginning of April, I think it was. I think it was April. Beginning of April. Was it March? Sorry. It was a beginning. I’m sorry. It was about the beginning of March.

TUCKER CARLSON: I heard you.

TREVOR MILTON: Thanks. Thanks, baby. I appreciate it. She was like, “March.” I’m like, “Okay, March.” Sorry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your wife has a very good memory for dates and names.

TREVOR MILTON: I noticed.

TUCKER CARLSON: I noticed last night.

The Presidential Pardon Call

TREVOR MILTON: Yes, she remembers everything. It’s good. And so sometime around the beginning in March, I got a call on my phone and it pulled up and I screenshotted just the caller ID number because I was like, it was so interesting. It said “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” And I was like, I’m either getting trolled, like straight troll, like they’re going to impersonate him with AI. I’m getting full on set up here. But I was like, I got to answer this.

I answered it. And they’re like, “Hey, this is Trevor Milton?” I said, “Yeah.” “And this is the executive office, the President, United States. And Mr. President, President Trump would like to speak with you. Do you have a minute?” And I was like, “Yeah, absolutely. That’d be great.”

And I go on hold and I’m on hold for probably like three minutes. And I’m like, this is really scary because I truly thought it was like a full setup. And all of a sudden the president comes on the line. He’s, “You know, is this Trevor?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he says, “Trevor, how you doing today?” And I said, “Not too great, Mr. President, but I’m alive still. And that’s, you know, it’s all you can do is just keep fighting.”

And he says, “You’re so true, Trevor, so true.” And he says, “Well, you’re going to have a better day after this. And I just wanted to tell you.” And I said, “Yeah. And why is that?” And he says, “Well, Trevor, I’ve heard your story. And what they did to you was evil and disgusting. It was wrong on every level. And I’m going to issue you a full and unconditional pardon. The highest pardon a president can give a human is a full and unconditional. And I’m going to issue you a pardon. You don’t deserve what you’ve been through. I’m so sorry.” And he says, “You’re clean. You’re cleaner than a baby’s bottom.”

And it was very, very like… And I didn’t know how to take it. I’m like, I don’t even… Here I am like, I had finally given up, finally resigned mentally. It’s five years. I was just like, I just didn’t have anything left in me. I was just over it. And that was when I got the call and it was so incredible because I realize that sometimes in this life you don’t get the help until you have nothing left to give.

And it was at that moment and he stepped in for what reason? I know the reason because it was wrong. But like, most politicians don’t have bravery to do the right thing. They always do the wrong thing. And then he says, “I’ll be in touch soon.” And he says, “The team… I just want to let you know… I’ll be in touch soon.” So two and a half, three weeks go by.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what did you do in the meantime? Did you tell your lawyer?

Telling Family and Lawyers

TREVOR MILTON: I told my parent, my dad, and I told my brothers and my sisters, and I told my lawyers and I made sure that, like, I was like, “Listen, guys, this cannot get out. This is the highest level secrecy. Do not mention this to anybody.”

And my attorneys actually were like, didn’t know how to take it. They were like, “Are you… Trevor did… Do you have a piece of paper that signed?” And in that moment, I realized, oh, I don’t. Like, I’m like, “No, I don’t.” Then they’re like, “Then it didn’t happen and it doesn’t matter. And there’s a million things that can go wrong from now until then, or if it even… You know, like not questioning you because we like you and we trust you, but this is a little like, you got to understand, it’s very rare to get a pardon.”

And I said, “I’ve never lied to you guys before, and I’m not lying to you now.” I was like, “My wife was here. She listened to the whole thing,” and they’re like, “All right, well, we’ll see.” Two to three weeks goes by and nothing. And I’m like, terrified. I’m like, great. Someone got to him. Someone made him think I was the evil man that the press said, made him think what the short sellers believe. And next thing you know, I’m sitting there on an architecture call, and meanwhile…

TUCKER CARLSON: The government’s looming over you to seize all your assets and put you in jail.

Asset Seizure Threats

TREVOR MILTON: They did. I was three… I was a few days late on a filing because it was like, all my… it was an asset to seize all my assets. It was a filing to seize all my assets. They asked my judge to allow him to take $660 million from me when they couldn’t prove a single dollar had ever been lost or anything that, like, I had nothing wrong.

So that’s part of reform. When you’ll talk about that, you know that that’s one of the things in reform. Needs to be the true… needs to be not what the government just says that you… has to be true. Like, show me someone who invested on my comment when they made it and how much they lost. They couldn’t find one person that ever did. Ever. They searched every investor that ever invested in Nikola. They could never find one person that said they invested based on the comments that they took me to trial for. And what was the losses from that? None. Zero. So it was $660 million.

And we were a few days late on our filing, and then all of a sudden I’m on a call with our architects and attorneys and Chelsea. All of a sudden I get a call and it was a Florida number, and I was like, okay, I better take this. I usually don’t answer calls I don’t know numbers from because I get so much spam. But it was a Florida number, and I thought, okay, maybe.

The Pardon Signing Call

And it comes online. “Trevor?” “Yeah.” “Trevor. It’s President Trump. How you doing?” And I said, “I’m doing okay, Mr. President.” And he says, “Oh… boy, are you going to be doing better today.” He says, “I wanted to let you know that I’m sitting in front of your pardon right now, and I’m about to sign it. But I wanted you on the phone while I signed it.”

And then he said something to me that was really the most powerful thing I’ve ever heard probably in my life. And he says, “I’m doing something for you that they never did for me.” And it was one of the most… that they… No one can do for me, like, except for him. He may be the only person that can ever do it for himself, but, you know, as a president, whatever those constitutional powers are.

But essentially what he told me in that moment was I almost broke down bawling because it was like, out of everything, that’s what I took more powerfully than anything is that “Trevor, I’m giving you something that I’ve long wished I could have been given, and I can’t. No one did it for me, but I’m doing it for you.”

And I almost busted down because it was really, like a religious moment for me. It was a moment of like, where I felt like God was sometimes… Like, that’s the moment where God’s like, “I didn’t do anything, but I had to let the evil man of the world murder me and hang me on a cross and suffer for days beyond any human could ever comprehend. And I had to do it because you couldn’t do it for me.”

And like, that was like, that was a moment that, like, I had never imagined the power of a man’s words in my life ever hit me like that. And it was when Trump told me, “I’m doing something for you that no one could do for me.” And it was like, it hurt my heart. Like, it hurt me to think about what he went through and what Trump’s been through and what they’re doing, and no one could come in and do that for him.

A Moment of Profound Gratitude

And I was like, this guy’s a human beyond measure. The media loves to make him out to be a villain. He is so human, so amazing. Like, I straight up, I would die for him, dude. In two seconds, I’d take a bullet in one second for him. Like, he’s that good of a man. And like, I’m like, I just, it was so special, dude. My wife was crying. Like, I was crying. It was just like he did it.

He called me. He wanted to make sure I heard his pen. He put the phone and you could hear his pen up and down and up and down and up and down, up and down. Like, he has, you know, 20 peaks and valleys in his signature, and it’s so beautiful.

And he says, “Trevor, everyone here loves you. You don’t deserve this. I’m so sorry.” And he said, “Go tell the whole world. You should be proud of this. Go tell the whole world.” And I said, “You’re okay if I tell, if I talk about it?” “I expect you to.”

And I was like, what a man? Like, I think we forgot what men are like. I feel like society has dumbed men down to nothing, to almost no heroism anymore. No greatness, no spine, no character, no nothing. And I’m like, this is what our founding fathers were like. Like, the guy is willing to give up his life, everything, and he’s willing to save someone who means nothing to him.

I meant nothing to Trump. I mean, other than the story, other than he was wrong. But like, he did… I wasn’t a lifelong friend of his. He did this because it was wrong. What they did to me was wrong. And so he did this because he wanted to right a wrong. And that’s as godlike as they make in this world.

And I’m damn proud. I have that pardon on my desk, and I’m blowing it up, and I’m putting it on my wall in my hangar, and I’m going to blow it up to 30 feet high, and I’m going to wear it with a badge of honor for my entire life. And I’ll go down and I’ll die for that dude. Doesn’t matter. He deserves it. He’s earned it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t thank you enough for the interview. Thank you, Trevor Milton. Congrats.

TREVOR MILTON: Thanks, Tucker.

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