In this episode, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D -NJ) introduce a new committee to investigate the use of federal law enforcement resources to target parents who wanted to stand up for their kids at school board meetings.
00:00:00.000On the Democratic side of the aisle, who serve on the Weaponization Committee, are experienced in dealing with oversight, accountability, and our congressional duties in a reasonable, rational, and responsible fashion,
00:00:15.800and are going to be ready to push back against the extremism that we are going to see from the Weaponization Committee.
00:00:22.740The American people do not support this Weaponization Committee, but it's Exhibit A of the extreme MAGA Republican agenda, which is not designed to do anything to make a difference in the lives of the American people.
00:00:37.860This is why President Biden's remarks during the State of the Union was so powerful and compelling, because he spoke about job creation.
00:00:46.460He spoke about the economy. He spoke about achieving the American dream.
00:00:50.140He spoke about helping everyday Americans to lower costs against aggressive corporate overreach that takes place in the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans.
00:01:02.320These are the issues that we're going to continue to focus on.
00:01:05.640The Weaponization Committee is another unnecessary distraction, and it's a waste of time and the treasure of the American people.
00:01:14.660Because this is not just about the Twitter files, which folks are focused on because of the news it made.
00:01:20.140It's about a systemic rot in the culture and the politicization of the leadership of the FBI, and it needs to be rooted out.
00:01:29.380Let's look at the targeting illegally of parents who wanted to stand up for their kids at school board meetings.
00:01:36.480On September 29th, 2021, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Joe Biden equating parents at school board meetings to domestic terrorists.
00:01:46.920And on October 4th, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum to the FBI and U.S. attorneys that the department would use federal enforcement tools to target and prosecute these parents.
00:01:59.600Do you consider parents as domestic terrorists?
00:02:02.840I do not consider parents as domestic terrorists. No, I do not.
00:02:06.260No, and neither do the American people.
00:02:09.760It goes back further than that initial letter on September 29th.
00:02:13.760Because the letter didn't happen organically, it was solicited.
00:02:17.200It was solicited by the White House and by the Secretary of Education.
00:02:21.420Essentially, the Biden administration laid the predicate for which it used to justify illegally targeting the American people, targeting these parents.
00:02:31.000Of the people that were made aware of the Hunter Biden laptop story, 53 percent would have changed their vote, including 61 percent of Democrats.
00:02:40.780This is the definition of election meddling.
00:02:43.680And it's the definition of election meddling by the FBI on behalf of Democrats paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.
00:02:56.800A lot has been said here about the fear of threats, but what we're concerned about in the scope of this committee is the fear of threats to the American citizens.
00:03:03.380The reason we use the term weaponization is because it is appropriate.
00:03:06.800We have so many examples of that across so many federal agencies.
00:03:09.780They were designed to serve and protect the American people and have been used in recent years against them.
00:03:16.140It will take us probably two years to lay that out.
00:03:19.080But I just want to focus on one that's been mentioned this morning because the timeline is important.
00:03:24.880On June 22nd, 2021, Loudoun County parent Scott Smith spoke out at his local school board meeting and he was arrested.
00:03:32.660On September 29th, citing Mr. Smith's arrest as an example, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting federal law enforcement involvement in local school board disputes.
00:03:45.880We learn later that the White House helped the NSBA draft that letter to itself.
00:03:52.080On October 4th, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued the now infamous memo directing federal law enforcement to mobilize against the parents of school children who protest at their local school board meetings.
00:04:05.020He turned the FBI, the U.S. attorney's offices, the full weight of the federal Department of Justice against the very citizens they were sworn to defend and protect.
00:04:12.860On October 12th, we learned that the Loudoun County parent Scott Smith's daughter was actually sexually assaulted at her school and that the school board covered it up.
00:04:22.780And that was the reason why that dad showed up to protest.
00:04:26.040Nine days later, October 21st happened to be the day previously scheduled for Attorney General Merrick Garland himself to appear before our House Judiciary Committee.
00:04:33.660In that hearing, as my colleagues will remember, he was forced to acknowledge before our committee that the NSBA letter was the basis of his memo targeting concerned parents.
00:04:43.380But he refused to acknowledge the obvious chilling effect that memo, involving the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus, would have on parents' protected First Amendment speech.
00:04:52.860He also, by the way, refused to commit to a mandatory, under federal law, mandatory ethics review of his own family's financial ties to advancing critical race theory in schools and its relation to his school board memo and the obvious appearance of the conflict of interest therein.
00:05:07.920I encourage all interested citizens to watch the video of that hearing.
00:05:11.800The very next day, on October 22nd, after much public outcry, the NSBA retracted and publicly apologized for its letter labeling concerned parents like Scott Smith as, quote, domestic terrorists.
00:05:23.880In the following weeks, over 20 different state school board associations severed their ties with the National School Boards Association.
00:05:30.180Our Democrat colleagues have tried to downplay the importance of this select committee and even criticized its name as hyperbolic.
00:05:35.320But, as this example and so many others clearly show, key agencies have indeed been weaponized.
00:05:41.800We're informed, even still today, that that memo has not been retracted by the Attorney General.
00:05:45.940The timestamp data provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.
00:05:53.120Only the few without cell phones could escape this tireless and absolute surveillance.
00:05:58.580Those are quotes from the Supreme Court's majority opinion in U.S. v. Carpenter.
00:06:02.580And while Carpenter is a limited ruling addressing warrantless monitoring of cell site locations under the Fourth Amendment,
00:06:07.960the court began considering whether the law needs to adjust to a digital world with extensive data collection and the analytical tools to operationalize that data.
00:06:18.080The federal government has realized the value of the massive amounts of commercial consumer data that is freely available on the open market.
00:06:25.900The data is produced to inform on aggregate population levels, but it also generates leads that produce investigations into individuals.
00:06:33.560In 2020, the CDC purchased a cell phone location data from a data broker to monitor whether or not people went to church during quarantine.
00:06:42.800In 2020, the DOD obtains consumer data from a Muslim prayer app.
00:06:48.640In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security purchased cell phone location data to make enforcement decisions on the U.S.-Mexican border.
00:06:55.500In the summer of 2020, in the turn of the year in 2021, DOJ obtained cell phone location data on Black Lives Matter protests and every cell phone in and around the Capitol on January 6th.
00:07:07.8202022, several law enforcement associations publicly opposed a bipartisan data privacy bill because it would disrupt the ability to easily obtain certain consumer data.
00:07:18.300And in 2023, just this week, the IRS proposed comparing a waiter's reported income from tips to the tip data that's submitted by their employing restaurant.
00:07:28.560You may agree with some of these, you may disagree with some of these, but here's the thing.
00:07:32.980None of these third-party data acquisitions required a warrant.
00:07:37.140Hi there, everyone. It's 4 o'clock in New York.
00:07:39.160A new chapter in the House GOP's plan to govern for Fox News and Fox News Only began today.
00:07:44.760The committee set up for one purpose only, that is to fuel the right's favorite conspiracy theory,
00:07:51.500that somehow the deep state is out to protect Democrats and persecute conservatives and the disgraced ex-president and his allies.
00:08:00.380The so-called Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its very first hearing today.
00:08:07.160Republicans invited a panel that included Senator Chuck Grassley,
00:08:10.400who once said this, that the FBI was, quote, corrupted to its core.
00:08:14.940Senator Ron Johnson, who has never met a conspiracy he didn't really like a lot.
00:08:20.240And former Congresswoman and current Fox News regular Tulsi Gabbard.
00:08:24.300Here's just some of what they had to say.
00:08:26.420It's clear to me that the Justice Department and the FBI are suffering from a political infection
00:08:34.820that, if it's not defeated, will cause the American people no longer to trust these storied institutions.
00:08:44.500It will also threaten the American way of life.
00:08:47.620It was a litany of complaints and grievances and delusions and fantasies about Hunter Biden,
00:09:06.200the FBI, the deep state, Twitter, COVID-19, and of course, as you heard right there, January 6th.
00:09:48.160I mean, it looks like there's a role here played by a close friend of Joe Biden's.
00:09:54.000We know that Joe Biden has spent several Thanksgiving dinners at the home of Carlisle Group's co-CEO and co-founder David Rubenstein.
00:10:04.120David Rubenstein is also a very big private donor to National Archives.
00:10:09.280And this started, my investigation started when I realized that there's not something right, naturally,
00:10:16.260about the official Biden administration account about how Joe Biden has wound up with so many classified documents.
00:10:24.200As I described in the piece, I said there's lots of people on the Hill who are contemplating what they're calling the Sandy Berger scenario,
00:10:33.860referring, of course, to Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor, who was caught stealing documents out of the archives.
00:10:41.380And there's a lot of similarity here, though.
00:10:43.640We haven't seen yet Joe Biden or evidence that Joe Biden stuffed documents in his socks like Sandy Berger did.
00:10:50.880But again, what I work out in the piece is if you look at the different documents that were found all over different Joe Biden properties,
00:10:57.660his home, his beach house, the office at Penn Biden Center,
00:11:02.060what it looks like is he's just dropping stuff as he's returning from National Archives.
00:11:06.100And we do know he was there at a certain point.
00:11:09.100It looks like early 2017 when he was researching the book Promise Me Dad.
00:11:15.520So that's how David Rubenstein plays into this as the head of the, or not the head of the archives,
00:11:21.860but as a major donor to the archives and someone who has a lot of influence there.
00:11:26.080It looks like he influenced the last two, the former archivist, David Ferraro,
00:11:31.760who is responsible for referring Donald Trump to the DOJ for a criminal investigation,
00:11:37.560and the new incoming archivist, a woman named Colleen Shogan.
00:47:12.960You're going to start to see this big pressure and this war is starting to metastasize, and we are the ones underwriting it.
00:47:20.340If we're going to continue to do that, the commander in chief has to come and make the case to the Congress, make the case to the American people.
00:47:28.060We can't have a situation like Vietnam, the Iraq war, Afghanistan.
00:47:31.360We just drift through these things, and they get worse and worse and worse.
00:47:34.680And I'm telling you, right now, when we talk tanks and you talk jets, you talk combined arms warfare, you're going to have Americans first in as advisors, second in as maintenance, all of it.
00:47:46.580Next thing you know, the 101st Airborne that's right on the border of Romania, they're going to be called in.
00:48:08.680I think it's like 28 states talking about it.
00:48:10.680It is we have to dig this thing out root and branch.
00:48:13.980This is a way not just to kill MAGA candidates, but this is also going to ensure people who actually don't win elections are the ones that are standing up.
00:48:22.700They're the ones that actually win at the end of the day, although they didn't win in the legitimate first round.
00:49:24.940I don't know all the details of what's going on there, but somehow they've got to work that out.
00:49:29.640You don't have – I find it – I'm not a believer in coincidence.
00:49:33.280I can't believe the great work they've done on Pfizer.
00:49:36.420And all of a sudden, we have this big controversy, and the board's turfing him out.
00:49:40.220Hey, and people can sit there and go, it has nothing to do with it.
00:49:42.300But, hey, you've got to – I'm from Missouri on this one.
00:49:44.260And the work they have done on Pfizer coupled with what Natalie Winter – or excuse me, what Naomi Wolf and the War Room Posse did with the Pfizer research and what he did – what they did on Pfizer, I just can't believe this thing is coming up.
00:49:57.720So hopefully more developments in the next 24 hours.
00:50:00.700But to me, he's got to stay at Veritas.
00:50:40.540What we do, Steve, is we take a particular molecule from fresh green tea.
00:50:45.060We have a proprietary fermentation process.
00:50:48.140And from that process, we extract teoflavin.
00:50:51.240And we end up with a 22% concentration of teoflavin as opposed to a simple 1% concentration in green tea.
00:51:00.040And it is that active ingredient in Salty that makes it so beneficial for the heart and particularly for lowering cholesterol.
00:51:08.500And 18 years ago, we did clinical trials.
00:51:10.720And David Marin, a cardiologist at Vanderbilt, looked at all of the data, wrote up a paper that was then published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
00:51:21.200So we have some very, very strong science behind the heart health benefits of Salty and especially the cholesterol-lowering benefits of Salty.
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