The Iranian regime has released 5 Americans who were unjustly detained and placed them under house arrest in Tehran, but it will take another $1.2 billion to get them back to the United States. Is this the precursor to a deal with Iran? Or is this the beginning of a long-awaited thaw in relations with the ayatollahs? And if so, what kind of deal will it be and how will it affect our relations with Iran and the other rogue regimes in the Middle East? The answer to all of these questions and more will be answered in this episode of the podcast by Joe Biden's new group of people to bribe to get the 5 Americans back home. Joe Biden has found a new group to bribe, and they are the ones he needs to bribe. And guess what? They are the same people he used to bribe during the Reagan administration to get hostages out of Iran back in the 1980s and early in the Bush administration. The only difference is that this time around, they are not being bribed with $150 billion, $50 billion, or $150 million, or even $50 million. It turns out that actually works pretty well, and it's a great way to get American hostages back. And it's much cheaper than they used to pay for their release, and much better than they could have gotten them back if they had to pay a million dollars in exchange for their freedom, which they did in the past. If you don't like paying for hostages, you'll have to listen to this episode to understand why this is a good deal. Subscribe to our new segment called "The Devil's Playbook" to get a discount on tickets for your tickets to our next game of "The People's Game of Thrones! and other stuff like that's going to be better than the real Deal of the Week! Subscribe here! Subscribe here to get exclusive ad-free versions of our new show, "The Man Who Couldn't Tell Us What's Good, Not Good, and Other People's Deal" and much more! Learn more about our Sponsorships and get 10% off your chance to win $5,000 off your first purchase of a VIP Pass to attend our 5-day trial, too! and get 20% off of $50 or more? Subscribe for VIP access to our 1-day Testo DealBook membership! Get exclusive VIP discount code: VIP Access to our Testo deal and more.
00:00:18.000We're like, what could we trade to get her back?
00:00:21.000And the answer is the merchant of death, which again, bad trade.
00:00:25.000Like White Sox GM level trading right there.
00:00:28.000Like merchant to death for Britney Griner.
00:00:30.000Well, now we have a similar type of trade.
00:00:33.000Iran apparently has released from prison five Americans, but has placed them under house arrest and actually being fully released and not being sent back to the United States.
00:00:41.000They're just under house arrest in Tehran, which sounds like a real party.
00:00:43.000It's like being stuck in a house in Tehran.
00:00:46.000What exactly do we have to do to get them out of jail and into house arrest, which again is like its own sort of prison, in Tehran?
00:00:53.000All we had to do was give them access to six billion dollars in oil revenue for quote-unquote humanitarian purposes.
00:00:59.000By humanitarian purposes, Iran means, you know, terrorism and nuclear development.
00:01:03.000A statement from the National Security Council spokesperson Adrian Watson says, quote, We have received confirmation that Iran has released from prison five Americans who were unjustly detained and has placed them on house arrest.
00:01:14.000While this is an encouraging step, these U.S.
00:01:16.000citizens, Sayemak Namazi, Murad Tabaz, Ahmed Shargi, and two Americans who at this time wished to remain private, should never have been detained in the first place.
00:01:23.000We will continue to monitor their condition as closely as possible.
00:01:25.000Of course, we will not rest until they are all back home in the United States.
00:01:28.000Until that time, negotiations for their eventual release remain ongoing and are delicate.
00:01:32.000We will therefore have little in the way of details to provide about the state of their house arrest or about our efforts to secure their freedom.
00:01:38.000So, just to do the math for you, for those who aren't that good at math, that is 1.2 billion dollars per hostage.
00:01:44.000So, you think maybe Iran is going to think about taking some hostages in the future?
00:01:49.000So far, the trading strategy here appears to be like Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees from the Boston Red Sox level of trading strategy here.
00:02:05.000Now, to be fair, at least it wasn't, you know, $150 billion on the upper end or $50 billion on the lower end of cash in pallets sent to Iran when Barack Obama was president basically to cut a crappy nuclear deal so that he could have a legacy in the Middle East.
00:02:19.000And again, to be fair, he wasn't trading Taliban terrorists for Bo Bergdahl, a deserter.
00:02:26.000I mean, if you wish to incentivize terrorist states to take American hostages, very difficult to think of a better way to do that than by giving 1.2 billion with a B dollars to get these people released from jail to house arrest in Tehran.
00:02:38.000What, is it going to take another billion and a half bucks to get them released from house arrest back to the United States?
00:02:43.000Or is this the precursor to the long-awaited Biden move toward an Iran deal?
00:02:47.000Is Joe Biden going to use this as the predicate to argue that now relations are actually warming, they are thawing with the Iranian Ayatollahs?
00:02:53.000We should remember at this point that the Iranians are directly responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq.
00:02:59.000It was Iranian-backed force that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq.
00:03:02.000Iran is the most nefarious force in the Middle East.
00:03:05.000Whether we're talking about backing the Houthis in Yemen, whether we're talking about backing Hezbollah, a mass terrorist group in Lebanon, which could lead to a war between Israel and Lebanon in the very, very near future.
00:03:14.000Whether we're talking about Iran backing Hamas and shipping them rockets.
00:03:47.000It turns out that actually, sticks can be very effective as well.
00:03:51.000Not just carrots, but the Biden administration has offered no such stick in the past.
00:03:55.000I mean, the Reagan administration was able to free the Iranian hostages by basically being incredibly threatening toward the Iranian regime.
00:04:03.000It turns out a fantastic way to incentivize people to take hostages is to pay them billions of dollars for hostages.
00:04:08.000Is this going to be the predicate to an even warmer move by Joe Biden toward an Iran deal?
00:04:41.000Malley, just last month, He had his security clearance removed, leading a group of Republican senators to urge the State Department's internal watchdog to investigate the suspension of Malley's security clearance, ratcheting up scrutiny of the administration's handling of the incident.
00:04:56.000Malley was Joe Biden's top Iran envoy, and he was helming the administration's efforts to restore a nuclear deal with Iran when his security clearance was quietly suspended sometime this spring.
00:05:04.000He was then put on unpaid leave in late June, following media reports that his clearance had been suspended.
00:05:10.000This administration bends over so far backward to try and draw some sort of Iran deal up that now they are sending negotiators who can't even get security clearance, and they are clearing billions of dollars in cash to the Ayatollahs.
00:05:22.000Simultaneously, they're attempting to force the state of Israel to make concessions to Iranian-backed terror groups like, for example, Hamas.
00:05:30.000The latest attempt by Joe Biden to draw peace in the Middle East is a supposed Saudi-Israeli normalization deal.
00:05:36.000Now, the Saudis are perfectly willing to normalize relations with Israel.
00:05:40.000They've been wanting to do so since the Trump administration.
00:05:42.000That's the reason why the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, all these countries that have very friendly relations with the Saudis have normalized relations with the Israelis already.
00:05:56.000The holdup is that Joe Biden basically pressures on the Saudis not to do it unless Israel made concessions to the Palestinians.
00:06:02.000The Palestinians happen to be governed by terror groups.
00:06:06.000The Palestinian Authority is a longtime terror group.
00:06:08.000Islamic Jihad is an actual terror group.
00:06:10.000Hamas is clearly a terror group backed by Iran.
00:06:13.000Right now, Joe Biden's game with regard to the Saudis and the Israelis is to try to box Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, in by essentially offering the carrot of a Saudi peace deal and the stick that the Saudi peace deal will be removed unless Bibi Netanyahu makes overt concessions to a group of people who are likely to use all of those concessions as launching pads for terrorism.
00:06:32.000According to Axios, Prime Minister Netanyahu is seeking a security agreement with the United States focused on deterring Iran in the context of that mega deal that the Biden administration is trying to reach with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
00:06:42.000A formal agreement would give the U.S.
00:06:44.000security guarantees to Israel at a time when Iran continues to advance its nuclear program.
00:06:49.000But presumably, the thaw with Iran is just another way of attempting to pressure Bibi into taking some sort of deal with the Saudis that would amount to concessions to the Palestinians.
00:06:57.000Now again, the Saudis don't care about that.
00:06:59.000Realistically speaking, this idea that the Saudis are like desperately involved in Palestinian peace negotiations is nonsense.
00:07:05.000The reality is that economics trumps everything right now in the Middle East because all of these kingdoms are dependent on prosperity for their people.
00:07:13.000They do not have the democratic support of their people.
00:07:15.000The reason that they get to stay in power is because they enrich their people through economic growth.
00:07:19.000If the economic growth collapses, they also collapse.
00:07:21.000They have a strong interest in creating economic ties with the strongest economic power in the region, which actually is Israel.
00:07:28.000It's Biden that's standing in the way of all of that.
00:07:31.000So we'll see how all of this develops and we'll keep an eye on it, obviously.
00:07:34.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest developments in the Hunter Biden case, where the House Oversight Committee is preparing to issue subpoenas to both Hunter and Joe first.
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00:08:44.000Okay, so meanwhile, we have the House Oversight and Accountability Committee now announcing that they are going to subpoena the Biden family.
00:08:50.000Here is James Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the head of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, who said this today.
00:08:57.000Are you going to subpoena Hunter Biden?
00:09:01.000under oath during the Trump administration, and they asked him all sorts of questions about what we understood at the end of the day to be a lie about Russia collusion.
00:09:12.000Yeah, this is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee.
00:09:19.000I mean, we're putting the case together to win in court.
00:09:22.000Obviously, with all the opposition and obstruction we're getting from the Biden attorneys now, we know that this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens.
00:09:31.000So we're putting together a case, and I think we've done that very well.
00:09:35.000Now, will they actually pay attention to the subpoena?
00:09:46.000Now, being held in contempt by Congress at this point has very little consequence, but the fact that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee is now attempting to actually subpoena the Bidens means that this is getting more and more serious.
00:09:56.000Comer says, we want to talk to three or four more associates first.
00:10:00.000We've been communicating with a couple of them.
00:10:02.000He says we're trying to bring them in like we did Devin Archer for Transcribed Interview.
00:10:04.000If they don't come in voluntarily, they will, in fact, be subpoenaed.
00:10:07.000He said it'll be very difficult to get information from Joe Biden through subpoenas because, of course, anytime you try to subpoena the President of the United States, the President tends to ignore all of that.
00:10:16.000But Comer correctly points out, the thing that I've been pointing out for literally a couple of years at this point, Since the Hunter Biden laptop, the single most damning piece of information that we have with regard to how the money flowed in the Biden White House and with regard to Joe Biden as Vice President, Hunter Biden, all the rest of this, the single most damning piece of evidence is a text message sent from Hunter Biden to his daughter talking about how he paid half of his dad's bills.
00:10:42.000Hunter and Joe could have commingled funds very easily.
00:10:45.000Basically, Joe's defense here is that the money didn't formally enter my personal bank account, but if I pay for dinner with my father, Then he benefits.
00:10:57.000Well, if Hunter is basically signing checks for all of Joe's expenses, obviously he benefited.
00:11:02.000Here is James Comer saying that, um, the most damning piece of information is Hunter literally saying that he pays Joe's bills.
00:11:09.000Why are they blocking us from more bank record, Rob?
00:11:12.000If the president's done nothing wrong, then they should allow us to see their personal bank record.
00:11:17.000I mean, you've seen the emails that showed that Hunter Biden was complaining to his daughter that he had to give half of his income to his father.
00:11:26.000When his income, 100%, came from our adversaries around the world for influence peddling, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
00:11:35.000So, you know, he is right about all of that, obviously.
00:11:38.000And the juxtaposition between the DOJ basically attempting to cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden and the DOJ simultaneously going after President Trump is going to have some pretty major ramifications for the 2024 race.
00:11:48.000Representative Dan Musa, Republican of Pennsylvania, he points out the juxtaposition and how awkward it is for the Biden administration.
00:11:55.000How do you see that in terms of this coincidence that something happens in terms of evidence coming out on Hunter Biden the next day, another attack on Donald Trump?
00:12:05.000And the American people, I think, are waking up to it.
00:12:07.000I mean, doing everything they can to suppress their own malfeance activities and hide their own accounts and to desperately try to keep the Biden family out of jail.
00:12:18.000Meanwhile, they're completely focused on indicting that their number one opponent in a political Okay, well, he is right about that.
00:12:33.000He also points out, of course, that Joe Biden has lied repeatedly during this entire debacle.
00:12:37.000I mean, Joe Biden literally said that Hunter received no Chinese money.
00:12:40.000He said that in an open debate in 2020, he said that he never benefited.
00:12:44.000He said that Hunter really never benefited from even using his name.
00:12:47.000He said he had nothing to do with Hunter's business.
00:13:25.000The White House is immediately retreating to its final position in their Mott and Bailey argument.
00:13:30.000Their Mott was, Joe Biden knows nothing about any of the businesses, and their Bailey is, you know, the thing they retreat to is, Joe Biden's just such a wonderful father, and they can't actually show that the money flowed directly to Joe.
00:13:39.000Here is the White House spokesperson for Oversight and Investigations, Ian Samskel.
00:13:42.000Comer and his fellow extreme Republicans in Congress are now admitting they haven't uncovered any proof of involvement or wrongdoing by President Biden.
00:13:48.000Well, I mean, they proved involvement.
00:13:50.000Devin Archer literally testified to it.
00:13:52.000They simply will continue to spread innuendo and lies as they pursue a baseless impeachment stunt to attack the president.
00:13:56.000Well, I'm sorry to break it to you guys.
00:14:50.000Elizabeth Warren is starting to show a little bit of a crack in the dam.
00:14:53.000She's the senator from Massachusetts who used to have presidential aspirations of her own, and then it turned out she wasn't Native American.
00:15:00.000Well, now Elizabeth Warren says she is worried about influence peddlers on all sides, which is an interesting answer.
00:15:07.000People close to Joe Biden, or people close to Donald Trump, but I'm talking about Joe Biden, making tens of millions of dollars because of their closeness to him.
00:15:16.000That can't be something that you like.
00:15:18.000That can't be something that you're comfortable with as a phenomena.
00:15:24.000Look, I always worry about the influence peddlers in Washington, regardless of party affiliation.
00:15:33.000One of the things, as you know, I've spent a lot of my time in Congress working on is how we bring just more ethics and more oversight in general to everything that we do in government.
00:15:47.000Look, we've got a United States Supreme Court.
00:15:51.000Where people take gifts and don't even report them, even though the law requires them to report.
00:15:58.000Yeah, we'll get to that in just a second, because the Democrats are now swiveling to Clark Clarence Thomas.
00:16:02.000This is the way that this whole stupid game works.
00:16:05.000So there she's starting to show a little bit of discomfort with defending Joe Biden.
00:16:08.000As I say, if things start to get real bad for Joe, they could throw the old man overboard.
00:17:48.000Unless there is some sort of connection that can be shown between the people who are basically taking Clarence Thomas on vacations with them, or letting him use their beach house, and an actual case of controversy in front of Clarence Thomas, this is not a corruption problem.
00:18:21.000If, however, there is a Supreme Court justice And he has a rich friend, and his rich friend says, would you like to spend the night on my boat?
00:18:28.000And the Supreme Court Justice goes and spends the night on the boat.
00:18:30.000And the rich friend has no business before the court, never has had any business before the court, will not have any business before the court.
00:18:38.000Where exactly is the corruption as opposed to, you know, somebody just going on vacation with a friend?
00:18:42.000Well, ProPublica is not making that distinction.
00:18:43.000They have an entire article today talking about how Clarence Thomas had 38 vacations Wow, 38.
00:18:51.000Well, that sounds, you know, wild, except for we are talking over the course of 30 years.
00:19:07.000A cadre of industry titans and ultra-wealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into premium suites at sporting events, and sent their private jets to fetch him, including on more than one occasion in his hire, 737.
00:19:18.000Okay, I'm just going to point out that as a person who traffics in economically elite circles, this sort of stuff is not uncommon.
00:19:27.000I've spent time in luxury sports suites, and I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.
00:19:32.000I've traveled on private jets, and I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.
00:19:35.000And unless they can prove some sort of actual corruption, even allege some actual corruption here, Clarence Thomas going to a sports game with a rich friend does not amount to corruption.
00:19:45.000Like clockwork, Thomas's leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence.
00:19:51.000Wait, you mean that his friends agree with him on politics?
00:19:56.000Be still my beating heart, ProPublica.
00:19:59.000But this, of course, is being used as an excuse to try and get rid of Clarence Thomas.
00:20:03.000Because Clarence Thomas is the most influential justice of my lifetime.
00:20:08.000He has been incredibly influential in a wide variety of ways.
00:20:10.000It was Scalia, up until Scalia's untimely death, obviously.
00:20:14.000But they're really just angry at Clarence Thomas because he's a conservative black man, and that you're not allowed to be.
00:20:18.000An originalist black man on the Supreme Court, not allowed to do this.
00:20:22.000The real animus here is about his politics, which is why a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, Joan Biskupic, is talking about Clarence Thomas controlling our lives, which is weird since he's one of nine justices.
00:22:25.000Speaking of corruption that we're all going to ignore, apparently it's just okay now that the January 6th committee deleted all of its records.
00:22:33.000Is there any institution in America at this point that is not utterly incompetent and or corrupt?
00:22:37.000According to Fox News, the House Select Committee that investigated the Capitol riot on January 6th failed to adequately preserve documents, data, and video depositions, including communications it had with the Biden White House that are still missing, according to the Republican lawmaker overseeing the GOP investigation into the committee's work.
00:23:09.000However, how about the communications with the White House?
00:23:12.000What sort of coordination, political coordination, was going on between the J6 committee and the Biden White House?
00:23:18.000What sort of political considerations were going into the questioning that was happening?
00:23:21.000How much was the White House running the show?
00:23:23.000The now disbanded J6 committee, which was run by Democrats and included only two GOP members, has also failed to provide any evidence.
00:23:29.000It looked into Capitol Hill security failures the day of the riot, according to Representative Barry Loudermilk, Republican of Georgia.
00:23:33.000He's chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration.
00:23:37.000Loudermilk said his staff has had difficulty gathering all the information it needs to investigate Representative Bennie Thompson's handling of that J6 investigation.
00:23:44.000He says, part of our task as this oversight subcommittee is to actually address the security failures.
00:24:24.000Why was it that a few hundred rioters could storm what should be one of the most secure buildings on the face of the earth on a day when the election for the president was being certified?
00:24:54.000He said the blue team was essentially shut down by the committee in order to focus on placing blame on Trump.
00:24:58.000He said we've got lots of depositions, we've got lots of subpoenas, we've got video, other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals.
00:25:03.000We're not seeing anything from the blue team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself.
00:25:09.000We also didn't have any videos of all the depositions.
00:25:13.000So they destroyed, presumably, whatever records they had or they're just not turning any of that stuff over there.
00:25:20.000Loudermilk said he came across a letter that was not turned over to his committee from Thompson to White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber and the DHS discussing an agreement made between the J6 committee and the executive branch to interview personnel whose names were later redacted.
00:25:33.000So, apparently the J6 committee knew certain staffers at the White House and those staffers testified and then they just refused to turn any of that stuff over.
00:25:42.000So this is really dicey sort of stuff.
00:25:45.000If you're a fan of transparency, you should be pretty upset about all of this.
00:25:50.000President Trump, for his part, was upset about all this.
00:25:52.000Here was President Trump today about it.
00:26:06.000You know, now that we have the subpoena power, because we now have subpoena power, all of a sudden the J6 committee, the unselects I call them, everything was deleted and destroyed.
00:26:24.000Okay, meanwhile, we are now learning that the prosecution, Jack Smith, going up against Donald Trump, actually sought and obtained a search warrant for Donald Trump's Twitter account.
00:26:36.000What they wanted were drafts of his tweets, apparently.
00:26:39.000According to Politico, Jack Smith did obtain a search warrant for Trump's Twitter account earlier this year.
00:26:44.000Twitter's initial resistance to complying with the January 17th warrant resulted in a federal judge holding the company in contempt and levying a $350,000 fine.
00:26:51.000A federal court of appeals upheld that fine last month in a sealed opinion.
00:26:54.000On Wednesday, the court unsealed a redacted version of that opinion, revealing details of the secret court battle for the first time.
00:27:00.000What exactly was Smith seeking from Trump's account?
00:27:02.000Apparently, he was looking for drafts of the tweets.
00:27:06.000Obtaining data from Twitter might have revealed patterns about Trump's use of the account, whether others had access to it, and whether there were any draft statements that were unsent.
00:27:14.000I mean, like, what would be in the draft statements that would be of relevance to Jack Smith?
00:27:19.000Like, Trump was going to send a draft saying, I know the election was lost by me, but riot anyway.
00:27:23.000Like, that was going to be in the draft statements or something?
00:27:27.000By the way, the fact that he didn't send it would be a pretty quick and obvious defense to anything that might be found in the drafts anyway.
00:27:34.000Twitter complained that the order violated the First Amendment.
00:27:37.000District Court judge said no and forced Twitter to turn over the records.
00:27:42.000By the way, one of the things about this particular attempt to obtain Trump's Twitter records is that one of the federal judges who was overseeing the prosecution apparently suggested in a footnote that they had reason to believe that Trump would, quote, flee from prosecution So the same district court judge was saying they need to check his Twitter account was also saying that they thought that Trump might actually abscond, like leave, like free, he's one of, he is literally the most famous person on the planet.
00:28:29.000Meanwhile, you have members of the media who are very excited about the fact that Donald Trump's Twitter history is going to be searched, including his drafts.
00:28:35.000Here is a reporter from Reuters, Jeff Mason, saying there's got to be tons there in Trump's Twitter drafts.
00:28:41.000There are a lot more things that could be in those records that we wouldn't see publicly.
00:28:46.000Drafts, and I know from my reporting covering him the entire time he was in the White House, they would draft tweets, he would say tweets, he would give tweet ideas to his staff and they would put them together.
00:28:57.000So there's got to be a wealth of knowledge there alone.
00:28:59.000There are direct messages, a bunch of stuff like that that could be useful.
00:29:05.000Okay, well, just because you think a thing is useful, maybe.
00:29:08.000That's called a fishing expedition, and it's pretty absurd that it's come this far.
00:29:11.000Meanwhile, President Trump is not going to participate in the first debate, you would imagine.
00:29:15.000He says he's not going to sign any sort of RNC loyalty pledge ahead of the first debate.
00:29:18.000The RNC has said that everyone does have to sign a pledge that they will vote for whoever the Republican candidate is and support that Republican candidate.
00:29:24.000Trump said, I'm not signing the pledge.
00:29:26.000Why would I sign a pledge if there are people on there I wouldn't have?
00:29:29.000He told Eric Bolling he could name three or four of the GOP challengers he would not support for president.
00:29:34.000And he specifically criticized Chris Christie, which you can see, and Asa Hutchinson.
00:29:39.000And then he added, of course, Ron DeSantis, because that's the way this dumb nonsense works.
00:29:43.000But bottom line is that the idea that he was ever going to participate in the debate, I think, is foolhardy.
00:30:19.000And Joe Biden will say, and then they'll all cheer.
00:30:22.000And the lights will slowly dim as the music rises.
00:30:26.000That's the way this idiocy is going to go.
00:30:29.000Now, what does that mean for the rest of the Republican field?
00:30:31.000Well, basically, it means it's a grab pot.
00:30:34.000It means they're all going to be in that pot together, clawing each other down in the middle of that debate.
00:30:37.000Presumably, Ron DeSantis will be the chief target of all the other candidates on the stage.
00:30:41.000And Trump's just going to sit out here enjoying himself, which, again, is, in fact, the smart strategy.
00:30:47.000OK, in just one second, we are going to get to Rand Paul going after Anthony Fauci, referring him, actually, for prosecution.
00:30:53.000We'll get to that in just one second first.
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00:31:05.000I could be wrong, but I like diversification.
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00:34:48.000Okay, meanwhile, Rand Paul is now referring Anthony Fauci to the DOJ.
00:34:53.000He is suggesting that Anthony Fauci actually committed perjury before Congress when he suggested that he was not involved in gain-of-function research.
00:35:41.000So Anthony Fauci, as it turns out, was saying the opposite in private.
00:35:45.000The Free Press has a fantastic piece by David Zweig about this.
00:35:48.000On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President's Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing.
00:35:59.000Was there a possibility the novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?
00:36:03.000There was a study recently, Fauci said, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at sequences there, and sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations it took to get where it is now is totally consistent with jump of a species from an animal to a human, so it wasn't from a lab.
00:36:16.000Fauci maintained this for a very, very long time.
00:36:19.000But, Fauci had an incentive to arrive at that conclusion, because the Wuhan Institute of Virology was known for doing high-risk virology research, studying and manipulating coronaviruses, and Fauci had funded such research at the WIV.
00:36:31.000Last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the House Select Subcommittee on COVID.
00:36:37.000These revealed evidence of Fauci's and other officials' behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory entirely.
00:36:45.000The recently disclosed private communications first reported by Public and Racket lay bare that the highly qualified authors of that paper actually had extensive uncertainty about the virus being the result of a natural event at all.
00:36:56.000Apparently, a month just before that paper was published, Christian Anderson, one of the paper's authors,
00:37:01.000wrote a Slack message to his colleagues saying, quote, the lab escape version of this
00:37:04.000is so frigging likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work
00:37:07.000and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.
00:37:11.000And then another co-author wrote on Slack, quote, it's not crackpot to suggest this could have happened
00:37:15.000given the gain of function research we know is happening.
00:37:18.000So Fauci then intervened and he basically got them to write a paper saying that it was very unlikely.
00:37:23.000And then he went and he lied and said he hadn't funded gain of function research in the first place.
00:37:26.000And he tried to redefine gain of function research to mean gain of function within a species,
00:37:34.000So, should he be tried for perjury on this one?
00:37:36.000I mean, it's pretty obvious that he should.
00:37:40.000Is Merrick Garland's DOJ going to take that one up?
00:37:42.000Yeah, no, they're too busy going after everything that Donald Trump does, obviously.
00:37:46.000Meanwhile, the left, which it turns out was wrong on so many aspects of COVID, they just keep doubling down and creating fantasy scenarios where control is justified.
00:37:55.000So, Sam Harris, a person with whom I've been friendly, and I've had him on my show, he's had me on his show, it's been a little while since we talked.
00:38:03.000Sam Harris did an interview that's gone viral, in which he talks about government control.
00:38:07.000And in order for him to justify government control during the pandemic, he basically had to make the case that if COVID had been capable of killing everybody on Earth, we would have been okay with government force.
00:38:33.000You know, but dial up the deadliness of the pathogen, you know.
00:38:38.000Give us something like, you know, airborne Ebola that incubates for a month.
00:38:44.000You don't know you have it and you walk around spreading it and it's got, you know, a 75% fatality rate and it's mostly killing kids.
00:38:52.000No one gets to make that choice anymore.
00:38:54.000I mean, then literally the cops come in and vaccinate you and I would say that all of us would agree to that.
00:39:03.000The moment, again, that you turn up the lethality on the pathogen, you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine, you turn down the risk of the vaccine.
00:39:14.000Give me a truly safe vaccine where there's not even one documented case of vaccine injury, right?
00:39:21.000So then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that kind of
00:39:28.000environment, then it's just a no-brainer.
00:39:31.000Then we just don't tolerate a diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It's
00:39:37.000a full-on emergency. Bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks, right?
00:39:43.000There's so many of them, we don't know what to do with them.
00:39:45.000We've got these mobile morgues, and we have a vaccine that actually works, and then we've got RFK Jr.
00:39:50.000saying, you know, maybe you don't want to get the jab on Rogan's podcast, right?
00:39:57.000That's the world I've been worried about ever since COVID.
00:40:02.000Well, I mean, so I assume the argument that he's actually making here, to sort of steel man his argument, is that he's worried that vaccine skepticism is going to mean that if we ever do get a virus like this, then the reaction is going to be a lot of skepticism.
00:40:16.000But number one, that's the fault of the institutions.
00:40:18.000And to be fair, it's the fault of people like Sam Harris, who were promoting a lot of government interventionism along these lines.
00:40:27.000The reality is that if you looked at the stats, what you saw is that wherever the virus got incredibly prevalent, people actually voluntarily took the vaccine more during those time periods than when the virus was not prevalent, which is precisely what you would expect.
00:40:42.000People, in other words, take prophylactic measures as they see fit in order to prevent themselves from getting really severe versions of the virus.
00:40:49.000This is why elderly people took the vaccine at a far higher rate than people who are 20.
00:40:54.000And that should have been the case, by the way.
00:40:56.000But, I mean, of course, if we're talking about airborne Ebola killing 75% of people that it touched, and mostly killing kids, I mean, I wouldn't hesitate to get a vax at that point, would you?
00:41:11.000The point here is that the government treated this as a full-blown emergency for three long years in many places in the United States and across the world.
00:41:42.000I'm just confused as to why Sam Harris thinks that justifies what the government did here.
00:41:46.000Okay, meanwhile, In what has been a bizarrely hilarious and yet controversial case.
00:41:53.000Something happened the other day in Montgomery, Alabama that is now being called the Alabama Tea Party Brawl.
00:42:02.000Or the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, I have seen.
00:42:05.000So apparently what happened is that it was a Saturday evening on Montgomery's riverfront and a black riverboat co-captain was attacked by a group of white people as other black people rushed to his defense.
00:42:19.000Here is a video of what exactly happened.
00:42:20.000This is a riverboat captain trying to park his riverboat here.
00:42:25.000Somebody comes to him and actually hits him.
00:42:27.000A white guy is coming and hitting the black guy.
00:42:31.000Presumably saying that he wants to go.
00:42:33.000And these other white people are walking alongside the white guy, and they're trying to pull the black guy off, and then other white people run in and tackle the black guy, at which point a bunch of nearby black people, they got the hat signal, and they run in to intervene.
00:42:49.000One black guy jumps in the water and swims across the The reason this was treated with some humor is because everyone understood that the white guys here were actually doing the wrong thing.
00:44:15.000All of them facing misdemeanor assault charges.
00:44:18.000Okay, so this is a bizarre story with a happy ending.
00:44:23.000It seems like the people who are engaging in assault are going to jail.
00:44:27.000Now, the police say this is not racially motivated, so maybe it's just a bunch of drunk people being drunk and attacking other people.
00:44:33.000But the media can quickly turn this into a racial story, so that's what Charles Blow is doing over at the New York Times.
00:44:38.000He says, the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, that was one nickname people gave to a brawl this past Saturday on Montgomery, Alabama Riverfront Dock, captured in viral videos after a group of white people attacked Damien Pickett.
00:44:47.000In some obvious ways, the whole episode is sad.
00:44:49.000The situation should never have descended into violence.
00:44:51.000The people who were asked to move their boat so the riverboat could dock should have simply complied.
00:44:54.000But in other ways, many black people in particular saw it as an unfortunate but practically unavoidable response to what can feel like an unending stream of incidents in which black people are publicly victimized with no one willing or able to intervene or render aid.
00:45:06.000Black people coming to the defense of that black man wasn't just a specific thing that happened at one time and place.
00:45:10.000It was also a departure in some ways from the most memorable images in a history that centuries of black targeted brutality which traces the journey of black people in this land that became the United States.
00:45:18.000So leave it to Charles Blow to turn this into a referendum on all of America's racial history as opposed to some drunk jackasses attacking a black guy and getting their asses kicked for the benefit and going to jail.
00:45:29.000By the way, would Charles Blow be writing the reverse if this had been a group of black people attacking a white riverboat captain?
00:45:35.000I have serious, serious doubts that there'd be anything like this level of societal analysis from Charles Blow.
00:45:40.000Sometimes, dumb people and criminals and bad people do bad, dumb, criminal things.
00:45:45.000And the race isn't actually the main issue in all this, which is why, again, white people and black people were mainly happy that the perpetrators were arrested regardless of race.
00:45:55.000Okay, time for some quick things I like.
00:46:36.000We're also asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency.
00:46:41.000This will allow federal funds to be allocated quickly to help address the urgent challenges we face.
00:46:48.000Even Chuck Todd over on MSNBC was like, oh, well, I guess that Greg Abbott was right when he said that the Democrats were going to turn on each other over illegal immigration.
00:46:56.000New York City's growing humanitarian crisis, the shelter system slammed by an influx of migrants.