Stephen K. Vance and Ben Harnell discuss the latest in the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine crisis, and the Mideast conflict with Russia. They also talk about the latest on the Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the Russia scandal.
00:03:12.000And now we're down, we got two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea to keep the Suez Canal open so that Europe can get goods.
00:03:22.000The Suez Canal has virtually nothing to do with the United States of America.
00:03:27.000So a lot of this, what's happening in the Mideast is another American, a huge military commitment for Europe, not just for Israel, for Europe.
00:03:37.000In fact, I would respectfully submit that the bulk of the actual money being spent right now,
00:03:44.000because I think naval operations and air operations around naval operations, security, is more of its going for European security.
00:04:40.000Is there anybody besides, you know, Starmer signing a 100-year treaty and the Brits talking big talk, a nation that's bankrupt, to be brutally frank about it, bankrupt, and outside the city of London in the greater London area is essentially economically a third-world country.
00:04:55.000You see big talk at the elites and big talk in commons.
00:05:03.000Are they all depending once again on American troops and American money, sir?
00:05:07.000Well, Steve, you can add Italy onto that list of big talk because Giorgio Meloni, the prime minister, said about a month or so ago that they're going to support Ukraine no matter what, at least to the end of this year.
00:05:26.000The problem with that and the reason why it's big talk is because if America does retreat or withdraw or disengage, whatever verb you want to use, and the Europeans, who are all largely bankrupt and have no money to fill the gap left by America,
00:05:46.000either they're going to have to fundamentally transform their political and economic structures, which they're not prepared to do, or they're going to have to watch Putin just come in and take Ukraine within a matter of days, as he could have done and would have done right back in the beginning.
00:06:00.620So they're standing around promising, you know, whatever it takes for as long as it takes.
00:06:07.340It's all performative because no political will to deliver on it.
00:06:12.460And they know that the moment Ukraine falls, they're then off the hook for following through on that.
00:06:19.440So, and I'll add to that point, by the way, something that we did cover on the show, I think this was before Christmas now, in an article in Foreign Affairs, one of the two foreign policy magazines.
00:06:39.700They said that there's an astonishing revelation, I have no idea how it was buried towards the bottom and not in a headline, but they said that Europe is being offered by the Biden,
00:06:55.020well, it was by the Biden regime, so it was towards the last couple of weeks of last year, they said that European leaders had been offered, guaranteed, assured by the Biden administration,
00:07:08.060that whatever, you know, if they are expected to follow through with their own European-provided security guarantees, America would refund them.
00:07:17.480And it's the only single reference I've seen in any of the international press, the astonishing thing to say.
00:07:23.920That is it, so when Biden was going around saying, look, Europe is going to pull its fair weight and all this, behind closed doors, it was always ever only going to be the American taxpayer.
00:07:34.640As I said just before the break, I hope, I pray, as do you, and we've been consistent and coherent on this for three years,
00:07:45.140I do hope and pray that Donald Trump makes it absolutely clear, sooner rather than later, because people are still dying there, that America is out.
00:07:53.640And then President Zelensky has the, he knows what the boundaries are, and he can go straight into negotiating on those terms.
00:08:02.600The problem is that the ambiguity of the current situation is only dragging on further.
00:08:07.240I close with this point, Steve, because you mentioned it in your question about General Kellogg's audit.
00:08:11.960He did make that statement on US press just before the weekend.
00:08:16.720And I have seen very, very little about that, however, in the print press, and I wonder why such a momentous and important thing has effectively got some kind of gag order on it.
00:08:28.540Astonishing, because that will, I think, make a lot of people's minds up in one direction or the other, the outcome of that audit.
00:09:56.280And talk to me about the overall, President Trump's, at least the people he's putting in, and David's going to join in a second, because Article 3 really started around this, so taking on big tech.
00:10:05.900Is President Trump signaling he's going to take on big tech, ma'am?
00:10:09.620I think he is, and I think people had a fundamental misread of what it meant to have Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai at his inauguration, because everyone said, oh, they're in his fold now.
00:10:25.760No, the way I looked at that was Trump was doing what the Roman emperors used to do.
00:10:31.000When they used to conquer these lands, they would bring the vanquished rulers back and parade them in front of the Roman citizens, saying, look who's bent the knee.
00:10:40.640And that was my read on what Donald Trump was doing by having those execs at his inauguration.
00:10:46.100And his nominations signify that he intends to, I think, continue this no more excuses, crackdown on the people, tyrannizing not only our free speech but our economy.
00:10:59.100You have Pam Bondi, obviously, who I don't think is going to go easy on these tech companies.
00:11:03.420But Gail Slater, as you point out, the subject of my piece, has been nominated to be the AAG, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust.
00:11:11.060And you couldn't find someone better, I think, philosophically, ideologically.
00:11:16.040And she's just an absolute killer on these issues.
00:11:19.800And I think that this signifies most of all that Donald Trump isn't taking his foot off the gas.
00:11:43.580Gail is actually where Republicans should be when it comes to antitrust, which is that a vibrant and free-functioning economy is not dominated solely by big players.
00:11:54.080Big is not always bad, but when big is bottlenecking and throttling free speech and doing so at a scale we've never seen before, that does require a second look.
00:12:05.620A free and competitive economy doesn't just happen.
00:12:09.980And I've argued in other places that antitrust enforcement is really the way to get at these speech concerns because speech is downstream of concentration.
00:12:18.100So if you have responsible people enforcing the law in the marketplace, you're going to see speech flourish.
00:12:24.320And I think that's exactly the approach Gail Slater will take, not just to big tech, but to all the other areas of concentration in our economy where these companies have come in with their DEI agendas and dominated the marketplace and crushed conservatives and really people who disagree with them at all, conservative or not.
00:12:42.420She's going to take an honest look at that, and it's refreshing.
00:12:45.920And I think Donald Trump is doing the right thing here.
00:12:48.040The Senate should confirm her quickly.
00:12:49.980Rachel, this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on here.
00:13:28.660I want to hold this because I think this is going to be so important going forward.
00:13:33.960These concentrations of power and what is the way to do it?
00:13:39.380There are two different ways to kind of look at this thing broadly.
00:13:42.620The bottom line is President Trump is putting all his chips in back of one that could be very powerful.
00:13:50.440He is not going easy on the oligarchs at all.
00:13:55.820And Rachel is absolutely 1,000% correct.
00:13:59.620It was like the Roman emperor, the Roman general, tribune, coming back with chained in back of him, in back of his chariot, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths and all the guys from the north – you know, from the German border or from Gaul that they were bringing back.
00:14:18.700That's what – that's what Inauguration Day, and he's proven that by Gail Slater and others.
00:14:26.880This is deconstructing administrative states through the courts, through Gorsuch, through the administrative apparatus that should remain and must remain.
00:14:36.980We're not going to anarchy and no government.
00:14:39.240We're taking down the administrative state in the deep state through the courts, through legislation, through all of it.
00:14:46.600A multi-front attack, and one through the regulatory apparatus, a regulatory apparatus that one does need.
00:17:27.100CNBC says a major win for U.S. citizens of the United States, the tariffs on steel and aluminum.
00:17:35.400Davis, before you were Mike Davis, before, and the worm had a small part of this, before you became the viceroy in a literally media, I wouldn't say whore, a media, a media, a superstar.
00:17:47.420You started laboring in the vineyards because you were one of the early people with Rachel that years ago, when the Republicans weren't there, you were sending up the flares.
00:18:00.620We have a massive problem here, and we've got to get our hands around it if we're going to stay a free republic.
00:18:05.980Yeah, the sister organization to the Article III project, which focuses on judges and the rule of law, is the Internet Accountability Project, which Rachel Bovard and I started five years ago.
00:18:20.040And we were the first group on the right to take on the trillion-dollar big tech monopolist, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, on their antitrust amnesty that they got for decades, from the George W. Bush Republicans to the Barack Obama Democrats.
00:18:39.400And we took on big tech from the right on antitrust, and we really changed the narrative.
00:18:54.640I'm used to getting ridiculed, so it doesn't bother me.
00:18:56.500But, yeah, we got ridiculed for years, and they're not laughing anymore because you have bipartisan antitrust lawsuits by the Biden Justice Department teaming up with state Republican attorneys general to break up Google's online advertising monopoly, their lifeblood, for all the woke censorship and canceling that they do, along with their search monopoly.
00:19:19.620Additionally, we have Gail Slater nominated to lead the antitrust division, and Rachel Bovard and I are very close friends with Gail Slater.
00:19:29.700I don't want to tank her confirmation.
00:19:31.400But we also have Andrew Ferguson, my close friend at the FTC who became the chair.
00:19:36.840Andrew Ferguson just announced a new chief technology officer, Jake Denton, who used to be at Heritage, who is now going to help Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the FTC, go after big tech, along with Lucas Croslow as the general counsel, who's one of my friends and former colleagues.
00:20:49.560How did you get hooked up with guys like Davis?
00:20:51.460And what is this construct of either being neobrandecian or Chicago school, ma'am, or somewhere in between?
00:20:59.300Well, I think what really, you know, launched the Internet Accountability Project, and I will say it was fascinating when we started this group, we were ridiculed throughout Washington, D.C., right?
00:21:10.660The town turned on us, especially on the right.
00:21:13.400But everywhere else around the country, people started nodding their heads.
00:21:17.500They said, oh, yeah, these companies have way too much power.
00:21:19.940Why has it taken somebody so long to recognize this and to say it?
00:21:30.180And it was so true when it comes to this.
00:21:32.400And I think that the right, after being captured by this sort of libertarian economic idea, was really ready to say maybe that theory worked 30 years ago in some respects.
00:21:45.700The concentration within our economy has become untenable.
00:21:49.000And it's not only squashing competition.
00:21:50.720It now has downstream effects all over the place.
00:21:53.420Ideological weaponization only works when you have concentrated power at the top.
00:21:59.000These companies are so large, they can effectively, they can debank you.
00:22:02.680They can cut you off from free society.
00:22:04.220People were looking for answers as to why this happened.
00:22:07.620And our answer was because of what Mike Davis calls the antitrust amnesty.
00:22:13.260And essentially it goes back to what you're talking about, this idea between a neo-Berrandeisian view of antitrust and a Chicago school of antitrust.
00:22:20.380And to make it very simple, the Berrandeisians say if a company's grown very big, it's probably because something has gone wrong and it's deserving of scrutiny.
00:22:29.220The Chicago school says, oh, just because it's big, it isn't bad.
00:22:32.620And we're going to present, you know, 10 economic models to suggest that this bigness is probably good for consumers and so we'll just let it slide.
00:23:08.460And you have proponents of the Chicago school on the other side of that saying, well, we don't think it's going to be bad because this economist over here says that maybe in 10 years, X, Y, and Z might happen.
00:23:22.500It's, you know, tarot card reading in some respects.
00:23:25.360And the right has put all of their faith in these economists, and these economists have been wrong, flat out wrong.
00:23:31.460And the result has been these massive companies who now use their market power to tyrannize anyone who disagrees with them on speech, in the market, in banking, in all these areas.
00:23:43.800And so what we've been saying for the last five years is the right needs to reapply antitrust the way it was intended, which is law enforcement for the market, a clear-eyed view of behavior that's actually happening.
00:23:56.520We can talk about economics of antitrust, but we don't rely solely on it.
00:24:01.540And this is the philosophy that Gail Slater has that I think is going to be incredibly beneficial to the Trump agenda, but also just to restoring freedom to the marketplace.
00:24:11.000Because that's what antitrust enforcement, properly applied, actually is.
00:24:14.620It protects the market from these big actors.
00:24:21.200And so I'm really looking forward to Gail being able to get in there and continue the lawsuits against Google and others that have been so effectively litigated.
00:24:29.540We're in the remedies phase of the Google trial.
00:24:31.760And also just take a look at the rest of the economy and say, you know, this isn't working the way it's supposed to be.
00:24:37.220We're going to use our enforcement powers properly.
00:24:41.420Tell us about Gail, the person and the professional, because now she's coming out, being thrust out onto the national stage.
00:25:00.560She is one of the shrewdest operators I've seen in Washington.
00:25:04.660She is very skilled, not only at her trade, right, which is the antitrust agenda, but also just in operating the politics of the issue on both sides.
00:25:16.020And I think she is going to have bipartisan support in the Senate because of that.
00:25:19.840And I think she's going to very effectively work the Department of Justice toward the Trump agenda.
00:25:25.580I can't say enough good things about her.
00:25:27.400She's not only ideologically consistent.
00:25:29.620She's one of the sharpest antitrust practitioners in the town.
00:25:32.840And she knows how to make it work for her benefit.
00:25:34.540So I'm excited to see the Senate confirm her.
00:25:37.020And I am committing now that she's going to have bipartisan support.
00:25:39.500Rachel, how do people track you, website and social media?
00:27:14.540She's always been tough, but she's extremely tough now.
00:27:18.000And she's extremely smart and extremely effective.
00:27:21.380And we got to know Gail Slater during this time frame when she was kind of, well, all outer.
00:27:29.800She was very much providing the intellectual framework for the Internet Accountability Project.
00:27:36.940And she's been a very close friend and advisor on all of these issues to both Rachel Bovard and me and to our teams.
00:27:45.520Gail Slater worked for the Internet Association many years ago.
00:27:50.940And the Internet Association forced her to go testify before Congress and defend the indefensible, defend Google and Facebook and all these big tech platforms making money off of child pornography online.
00:31:54.840But let's go back to the federal courts.
00:31:56.380Clearly, the political process, the Democrats have – and they don't even have spokesmen that can come on and articulate a counter to this because people want it.
00:33:17.440President Trump campaigned on the fact that he was going to set up Doge with Elon Musk,
00:33:24.660and he was going to make dramatic reforms to the executive branch to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:33:33.540And the American people like what they heard, and they gave the president a very broad electoral mandate on November 5th.
00:33:41.960312 electoral votes, all seven swing states.
00:33:45.580And President Trump is implementing what the American voters elected him to do.
00:33:51.500They're doing – he's actually doing what he campaigned on, which is unheard of in Washington, D.C.
00:33:58.240And then you have these uniparty federal judges, these activist judges,
00:34:05.060who are unlawfully, unconstitutionally, dangerously trying to curtail the president's article to powers.
00:34:15.120For example, we have a judge telling the president and his treasury secretary that they can't look at spending data at the Department of the Treasury.
00:34:26.680That is certainly not constitutional for a judge to rule that.
00:34:31.640The president has the executive power.
00:34:34.320He is the chief executive officer of the executive branch.
00:34:38.680He has a constitutional duty to take care that our laws are faithfully executed.
00:34:45.760And this judge thinks he can tell the president and his secretary of treasury,
00:34:50.360you can't look at what the federal government is spending money on.
00:34:53.260Is this judge completely out of his mind?
00:37:40.080She has Emil Bovet right now, one of Trump, President Trump's former defense lawyers, as the acting deputy attorney general.
00:37:49.900And that guy is a savage and he is on top of this stuff immediately.
00:37:54.600The president has a good acting solicitor general.
00:37:58.060He has a good acting head of the civil division.
00:38:01.400The Senate needs to move forward and get the President Trump's nominees approved as quickly as possible.
00:38:07.320But President Trump has a very good team with Pam Bondi and the rest of them.
00:38:11.620OK, this is why I want to say this is why I want to say I want to say a segue to the confirmations because that's all dependent upon getting the second and third tier done.
00:38:20.620This is kind of your your bailiwick now.
00:38:23.660The confirmations we got Tulsi this week of the controversial ones, Bobby Kennedy.
00:38:29.080Then he got the committee vote on cash.
00:38:33.340What's your guidance to the war and posse?
00:38:35.340We know that we can bring the political muscle.
00:38:37.720What are our marching orders this week, sir?
00:38:39.300Well, we go to Article three project dot org, Article number three project dot org and take action.
00:38:45.720And on these action items that we have there, we have Tulsi, we have RFK Jr., and we have Cash Patel.
00:38:53.400And those are going to be the three biggest fights that the Democrats put up.
00:38:57.340Remember, the Democrats tried to do everything they could to stop Pete Hegseth.
00:39:03.520They tried to do everything that they could to stop Russ Vogt.
00:39:06.080We got them confirmed, and it was because the war room posse went to the Article three project website, took action, called both of their home state senators, sent them emails, and lit them up on social media.
00:39:19.380And I'll tell you, as a former Senate staffer who ran these confirmations, this is the most effective thing you can do to get these Trump nominees across the finish line.
00:39:32.040It is to get the—we have 53 Senate Republicans.
00:39:35.700Our job with the Article three project and the war room posse is to help these 53 Republicans find and keep their backbones.
00:39:44.000We don't need any Democrats to get President Trump's nominees confirmed.
00:39:47.920We just need Republicans to stay focused and remember that the president gets to pick his team.
00:39:55.480The president doesn't pick Senate staffers, and the Senate shouldn't pick the president's cabinet team so long as they are qualified, right?
00:40:02.920And all of these picks are certainly qualified.
00:40:05.820If someone says they're disqualified because of personal misconduct, it is the burden of the person claiming that to come forward with very clear and convincing evidence, including public testimony.
00:40:20.400We're not doing the Me Too presumption of guilt.
00:40:23.720We're not doing the Christine Blasey Ford nut job, anonymous allegations, and the political drive-by shootings that we've seen in the past.
00:40:32.780We have President Trump and his team have—they know that they made mistakes on personnel in the first term.
00:40:39.160They're not making those mistakes this time.
00:40:42.040President Trump knows what he's doing on day one, and he's not playing games.
00:40:45.820He is going to fight for the American people every day, and he's going to implement the campaign agenda he campaigned on.
00:40:53.640The second and third tier, to protect Doge, Elon Musk, Scott Besant, Stephen Miller, Russ Vogt, we have to have the second tier and third tier of these amazing picks by President Trump in justice.
00:41:17.260Yeah, we have the nomination hearing for Todd Blanche, who's President Trump's nominee to serve as the number two in the Justice Department, the deputy attorney general, along with Gail Slater, who Rachel Bovard and I had been talking about for the antitrust division.
00:41:33.260Todd and Gail's hearing is this Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:41:39.100And it generally takes four weeks after the hearing for these nominees to get voted to the floor from the committee and then confirmed by the Senate.
00:41:49.960You know, it might take a few days after that.
00:41:52.860They're going to prioritize Todd's nomination because he's the deputy attorney general, the number two.
00:41:59.000But we are going to be fighting this every step of the way through the Article III project.
00:42:04.480We'll come on here and give constant updates to the War Room Posse and get them engaged.
00:42:10.420It's the critical piece on all this is the War Room Posse engaging with phone calls and emails and social media.
00:42:17.440That is what is making these confirmations happen.
00:42:20.200There is no chance in hell Pete Hegshef would have been confirmed but for the Article III projects and the War Room Posse.
00:42:57.640And thank you for all the work on the Internet Accountability Project.
00:43:00.260See, I keep telling you, you work on these things, and it takes a while, but years later, look, it's come to fruition with these major hammers now going into the Trump 47 administration.
00:43:53.000$52 trillion in debt, the United States government, $2 trillion per year for the next 10 years in perpetuity, essentially, unless we stopped federal spending out of control.
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00:45:33.520We've been given the one-eye stink eye on this process of spending in the budget.
00:45:38.640And the Hill newspaper, on their Sunday morning, which is always big because they're getting ready for the talk shows in the morning, they drop major articles.
00:45:46.120The article, and everybody should read it, in the Hill, absolutely what we've been saying.
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