One of the suppressed YouTube videos at the center of the Hagee media suppression scandal, as it happens, was Max Blumenthal's and Thomas Shomaker's "Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christian United For Israel 2007 Tour", which the two shot at CUFI 2007 and co-produced. Thus, Blumenthal and Shomaker had exclusive copyright to their video and the John Hagee Ministries claim, filed with YouTube against the documentary, verges towards, if not over the line into, outright fraud, a legal reality which Blumenthal has apparently used to pry, from one of JHM's lawyers, details of the John Hagee Ministries conspiracy to suppress critical media coverage in advance of CUFI 2008. This new Hagee scandal comes as Pastor John Hagee is coming under greater scrutiny from Jewish groups and Senator Joseph Lieberman is coming under increasing fire, both for his absurdly hyperbolic claims of an "existential" threat from Iran against both Israel and The United States and for his tenuous commitment to the Democratic Party. This Wednesday at 11 AM, as noted on the New York Times political blog, a group calling itself lieberman must go "plan to deliver a petition with about 43,100 signatures to the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, telling the leadership to strip him of his committee chairmanship and rank in the caucus." There is some evidence, on the Hagee/CUFI side of the equation, that media scrutiny, at least on Lieberman's association with dubious and controversial elements associated with the Christian right, is starting to pay off. As noted by academic and blogger Richard Bartholomew, a CUFI 2008 panel that was scheduled for the time slot immediately preceding Joseph Lieberman's currently scheduled CUFI 2008 address and which was to feature three alleged "ex-Islamic terrorists" whose alleged terrorist backgrounds have been widely challenged as fraudulent, by terrorism  experts and even by their own relatives, appears to have been dropped from the CUFI 2008 events schedule.

Because the use of video and audio footage from Pastor John Hagee has been crucial, notes Max Blumenthal, in convincing mainstream media, which had long ignored alternative media journalistic coverage of Pastor Hagee's ideological extremity and agitation for apocalyptic war, to finally give Hagee's growing mainstream presence some belated coverage. As late as March 2007 when Hagee was invited to give a keynote address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual Washington DC conference, routinely attended by a large proportion of the US Congress, critical coverage of the apocalyptic, often anti-Muslim and at times viciously anti-Jewish nature of Pastor John Hagee's sermons was something AIPAC and mainstream media seemed willing to ignore despite the fact that Hagee's sermons, which have included versions of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories remarkably similar to the Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion even to the extent of mirroring the claim, put out by an early "Protocols"  publicist, the Russian Orthodox priest Sergei Nilus, that the anti-Christ will be Jewish, routinely go out on broadcast networks that reach upwards of 100 million households around the globe. Regardless of its technical legal merits, the claim of John Hagee Ministries, to copyright protection for Hagee's internationally telecast church sermons that often feature content wholly unrelated to Biblical scripture, amounts to a claim, by JHM, that its broadcasts of Hagee's anti-Jewish rhetoric and even Hagee's proposal of a version of the anti-Jewish "Protocols" myth, should enjoy copyright protection as a legitimate 501(c)(3) educational enterprise. Such a claim would seem to raise the question then, what could JHM Ministries educational mission conceivably be ? What the 501(c)(3) mission statement ?