On today's show, we discuss the Fed's decision to leave interest rates on hold, President Trump's latest attack on former FBI Director Jack Smith, and the growing possibility that the Justice Department may be investigating Trump's former attorney general, Jack Smith.
00:01:26.960Chris, in a truth social post, the president has denounced Jack Smith as a deranged thug
00:01:33.660and a criminal who should be investigated and put in prison.
00:01:37.240This is not a surprise, but the reason it's significant is that there are investigations swirling around Jack Smith.
00:01:43.560There's congressional investigations and there may well be a Justice Department investigation of his conduct as special counsel.
00:01:50.240Trump, in particular, is referring to the investigation into his efforts to overturn the election.
00:01:55.140The irony of that, Chris, is that we're out with an exclusive story today about a book by our colleague Carol Lenning,
00:02:01.280which reveals that, in fact, the Justice Department essentially moved much more slowly in that investigation than it had to
00:02:08.180and can fairly be criticized for slow walking that investigation, for being overly deferential to Donald Trump as the past and possibly future president
00:02:16.800and made some decisions that really slowed that thing down.
00:02:19.300It may never have gotten to trial because of the Supreme Court in any event, but it certainly didn't go as quickly as it could have.
00:02:25.420And, in fact, there's no evidence that Jack Smith did anything wrong or that Democrats weaponized the Justice Department to go after Donald Trump.
00:02:31.400Politicians who have been investigated by the federal government have forever been denouncing their prosecutors.
00:02:37.740I've seen this my whole career, Chris.
00:02:39.260But what we've never seen is a person who is then investigated federally and then becomes president
00:02:43.780and has the authority to actually bring the weight of the Justice Department against the prosecutor who investigated him, Chris.
00:02:50.020So much that we have never seen before. There's no doubt about that.
00:02:53.180Well, extremely difficult, particularly since in the in the release.
00:02:55.520They also know, Katie, that inflation remains elevated and above the Fed's target.
00:03:00.420And so we are a little bit off the highs, as you can see.
00:03:03.140And so this split, too, that Justin just referred to shows that there are still warring camps within the Federal Reserve,
00:03:10.200some of whom are worried about inflation remain elevated, some who are worried about, as you pointed out at the top of the show,
00:03:17.680And yet at the very same time, with this A.I. boom and with wealthier people spending a lot of money,
00:03:24.480gross domestic product or economic growth is actually stronger than anticipated.
00:03:28.060So this is the type of conundrum the Fed has not faced in the past, particularly when you've got stocks making new all-time highs.
00:03:35.660It's a very rare environment in which the Federal Reserve actually cuts rates when you have this combination of economic factors all taking place at one time.
00:03:45.980So my guess is they might, or Jay Powell in his commentary coming up, might indicate a pause,
00:03:52.100given that we may not get any inflation or jobs data for another month, month and a half, maybe even two months.
00:03:58.200As much of a gut punch as it was at the time, it is all the more chilling and haunting now.
00:04:05.980The new official acts of immunity lies about like a loaded weapon, she wrote,
00:04:10.180for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival or his own financial gains.
00:04:23.680I think that that decision was written, and I remember we talked about it at the time,
00:04:28.880as this entirely academic thought experiment about executive power.
00:04:34.880Imagine a normal president in a normal presidency and imagine sort of the maximalist read of what kind of power we would want him to have so that we didn't chill him.
00:04:48.460We want him to make, you know, fast, good decisions.
00:04:50.740And in some sense, it was presented that way.
00:04:54.600And we all looked at each other and we said, but this isn't an ordinary president and this isn't an academic exercise.
00:05:01.120This is a person who is time and time and time again led with the proposition that he could shoot someone and get away with it.
00:05:09.720And so for the court to say, yeah, yeah, his lawyers went into court and said he could send someone from SEAL Team 6 in to assassinate a political rival, and that's plausible.
00:05:23.460And you're quite right about two things.
00:05:25.480One is this immunity decision keeps popping up time and time and time again, right?
00:05:31.060It's being invoked now as the basis for dismissing the criminal charges against Trump in New York.
00:05:37.220It was invoked as some basis for why Trump wanted to go after the Justice Department and shake them down for investigating him.
00:05:46.140And we are going to see immunity, immunity, immunity, as Justice Sotomayor said, pulled out time and time again.
00:05:53.560And let's recall a part of that decision really bubble wrapped him in consultation with his attorney general, right?
00:06:02.020That becomes also something that the courts can't look at or second guess.
00:06:06.500And so when President Trump says to Pam Bondi, inadvertently tells the whole world, thinking he's communicating with her privately, that she needs to do a better job going after his political rivals.
00:06:18.500All of that is because he's emboldened, because the court handed him that on a silver platter.
00:06:25.140And I think the other piece of that that is so important, and this just goes to where Glenn started, is it's not just Justice Department lawyers who don't know what to do about this.
00:06:35.100It's judges themselves around the country who have to grapple with the fact that Donald Trump was handed a loaded gun by the Supreme Court.
00:06:43.860And he's waving it around all over the country in case after case.
00:06:49.260And judges now have to figure out, what do I do?
00:06:52.220Because my hands are tied by this broad maximalist decision that was presented as a fait accompli.
00:07:01.840This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:07:06.900Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:07:10.820I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:07:16.460The people have had a belly full of it.
00:17:41.640First thing we're going to do here is get John Gardner.
00:17:44.280And John is the leader in this country of kind of this small manufacturing.
00:17:49.240He's saying we can have a renaissance and we don't need to be doing trillion dollars investments with foreign capital to build these mega plants.
00:17:59.800And he's the advocate and the spokesman for the little guy that has these great manufacturing shops.
00:18:06.540I don't know, 25 or 50 people in it are the backbone of the country.
00:18:10.140John, we've been talking offline and you've been making this point that President Trump is doing something here that's historic, not just geopolitically, but also economically in his quest for it to get peace throughout the world, whether it's in the Ukraine or the Middle East or around Taiwan.
00:18:31.340Walk me through your theory of the case, sir.
00:18:33.180Well, the post-World War II rules-based international order really created dependency for America.
00:18:46.260America can't make its own goods for its military.
00:18:49.220We're severely dependent on China for rare earth processing and minerals.
00:18:54.120What President Trump's trying to do with tariffs is to make America independent.
00:18:59.020And one of the things that I see that he's doing that I don't think enough people are talking about, and I really want it's unique, it's novel, creating peace by using tariff diplomacy.
00:19:10.960President Trump said, I'd rather fight with tariffs than tanks.
00:19:16.100He's using tariffs as a non-kinetic warfare tool with his Trumponomics plan.
00:19:24.400And I think that's so interesting because historically, tariffs have been used to create revenue, external revenue, to protect the domestic manufacturing, and to reach reciprocity agreements.
00:19:36.460But what President Trump's doing is he's taking our golden market, America's consumer goods, and saying, if you want access to our market, if you want to be able to sell your goods here and make money, you will do as we say and stop these wars.
00:19:50.920I had to write them down because it just went on and on.
00:19:53.080I don't think he's getting enough credit for this.
00:19:55.460And I wanted to live in his legacy and really hopefully change the minds of some of these libertarians like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie who stand against tariffs.
00:20:03.800But, you know, in Trump term one, he had China, he told China, hey, keep your pimp hands strong with your proxy, North Korea, and have them stop doing missile tests over Japan, or else, you know, we're going to ratchet up the tariffs.
00:20:38.840India and Pakistan, you know, according to President Trump, he said, I'm going to hit you both with 200% tariffs if you don't figure this out within 24 hours.
00:22:02.540I saw in a segment yesterday we talked about him traveling around the world as possibly angering some America first people.
00:22:08.660And I really think we need to look at what he's doing, how he's making these deals that will help us.
00:22:13.700Having Korea and ally help us build our shipbuilding industry buys us time and geographic space.
00:22:22.280In warfare, as we are in economic warfare with communist China, time and space are very valuable.
00:22:28.220Like in June 1941, after Operation Barbarossa launched, the Soviet Union moved 2,500 of their factories to the eastern side of Russia by the end of the year, by the end of 1941.
00:22:40.140They used that time and geographic space to reorganize to be able to produce the Russian military to fight back against Nazi Germany.
00:22:48.000I think right now President Trump is on his massive international geographic strategic tour to get the puzzle pieces in place for America.
00:22:57.760Shipbuilding, rare earths, and creating peace while he's doing it.
00:23:02.140And I think he's not getting enough credit.
00:23:04.520And, you know, you mentioned, Steve, that, you know, the entrenched Washington and maybe even international leaders view President Trump as a passing storm.
00:23:15.040And I believe his novel, unique approach to using tariffs and deploying them for peace.
00:23:19.820I think I want that to live in his legacy because it was impressive to me and I don't think he's he's getting enough credit for it.
00:23:28.960By the way, the brilliance I love about this is that they're throwing terrorists back on the populist nationalist movement as really driving wars.
00:23:38.660And John Gardner is absolutely correct.
00:23:40.040I do want to go back and get some clarification of one point.
00:23:43.360You said the post-war international rules based order tied America into a cycle of dependence in President Trump's economic order with redoing the world's commercial relationships with trade arrangements around those commercial relationships that benefit American companies, the country of the United States of America, plus American citizens.
00:24:08.720What did you mean by the first part that that the post-war international rules based order led to dependency of the United States that was not healthy, sir?
00:24:20.340I'm so glad you asked that post-war war to Milton Friedman.
00:24:39.620But what they didn't calculate is that when your manufacturing is done overseas in communist China or in other nations, that you are then dependent on these nations for goods.
00:24:50.880And I don't think those academics do anything about manufacturing.
00:24:57.140In fact, I'll prove it in page 46 of Free to Choose.
00:25:01.400Milton Friedman said, it is inconceivable that complete free trade in steel would destroy the U.S. steel industry.
00:25:08.700However, look at the U.K., the nation that the Industrial Revolution started in.
00:25:13.580They almost closed their very last steel mill on the whole nation this year, had to be saved by the government.
00:25:21.460Also, I don't think they understood manufacturing because he mentions that it would be better and easier to stockpile steel and maintain steel plants and mothballs.
00:26:00.200It is an experiential, experience-based thing.
00:26:02.520And you have to do it to be good at it and proficient at it.
00:26:05.440And that mindset is something I wrote my book for.
00:26:09.160The number one reason I wrote my book was to be used as a tool to change the Rand Pauls, to change the minds of the Thomas Masseys and these libertarians who are just no tariffs, no tariffs, no tariffs.
00:26:19.100I wrote my book to be a tool to have them start to question what has unilateral free trade done to us and how has it made us a dependent nation?
00:26:29.840And I think, you know, if we can start to question that and the universities and the academics can start to look at it, and it's on the conservative side.
00:26:38.640I talked to a guy from Hillsdale, a big Trump fan.
00:26:42.120Hillsdale is a great conservative college.
00:26:44.400And he's like, I love President Trump, but I just will never do tariffs.
00:26:48.380He's like, well, I learned in business class 101 that Milton Friedman said they're bad.
00:26:53.980And I think that I would like to start, for President Trump's legacy and for America first, I believe in free trade within America's borders.
00:27:22.200I believe in free trade within our borders.
00:27:24.540But if you want access to our golden market, you have to pay.
00:27:27.540And how the post-World War II rules-based international order basically crippled us is they did not understand manufacturing, what it takes to keep it here within a nation, and how it is the backbone of importance for nation and national security and the middle class.
00:27:42.880And how we keep our consumer market that people want to get into is to rebuild our middle class through manufacturing.
00:33:35.820Only the front dial of this timer and some of the components underneath were attached to the device.
00:33:42.160There was no way for Carlin Younger to determine in any way, shape, or form that there were 20 minutes left on that device.
00:33:51.040Because the only thing on the front of the device was this dial.
00:33:57.240Well, the casing, the frame of the timer that has the red mark, which actually counts down all the time, had been removed.
00:34:07.700So there was no way for her to determine that any time was left on this timer.
00:34:13.160It was only the face of the timer that acted as the grip.
00:34:18.280I realize you're out and you're doing this investigation because the pipe bomb thing, Darren Beattie, yourself, you guys have been on it from the beginning because something didn't feel right.
00:34:25.800However, didn't she already tell this information to people who are professional investigators?
00:34:34.580And shouldn't they have put two and two together before, I don't know, five years, is it five years, four years later?
00:34:52.600And furthermore, Steve, the documents that were released by the new select committee on January 6th that's headed by Barry Loudermilk, he obtained the records related to Carlin Younger's two contacts with the FBI.
00:35:05.340That's what we wrote about on Monday on my substack, Declassified with Julie Kelly.
00:35:09.180She sent in an online tip saying that she was the one who discovered it and then sat down with agents on January 11th where she repeated the 20-minute timer story.
00:35:25.680So not only did she tell FBI investigators this, she also told the news media in subsequent interviews.
00:35:33.180The problem for the FBI, and for everyone involved in especially the current FBI, is that the assessment that we based our conclusions on, the report was conducted, investigative report into the device at Quantico, and was finished on January 13th of 2021.
00:35:56.580So the FBI has known all along that her story about a 20-minute timer on the RNC device indicating, or what she suggested, is that that bomb was set to detonate at 1 o'clock.
00:36:15.800It was set to detonate at 1 o'clock just as the joint session of Congress convened a few blocks away.
00:36:22.160So her story now has completely unraveled, collapsed under all the evidence of her FBI contacts and also her news media interviews.
00:36:34.140Is it strained credulity to think that a sophisticated FBI investigator, particularly at Quantico, where they have, I guess, all those labs and stuff, could have not seen what you saw?
00:36:48.160They are the ones who said, as they piece together this device, and they even purchased the timer that they believe it was this mainstay's kitchen timer.
00:37:01.420They even purchased one and disassembled it and tried to reconfigure the devices both at the DNC and the RNC.
00:37:08.960So they knew, they knew that because that grip twist, and you could see it again right there, that is the device that was allegedly found at the RNC when she was going to do her laundry in the middle of the day, et cetera, et cetera.
00:37:23.680So, but they have known that that grip twist, which only turns, the plastic, it's a plastic dial, it doesn't move.
00:37:32.420So the only thing that would have indicated a time would be that mainframe unit that was non-existent.
00:37:39.220So why did she say that there was a 20-minute timer when it didn't exist to perpetuate this narrative that bombs were going to explode as a joint session convened?
00:37:52.280And why did the FBI not publicize that at the time and make a big deal about it?
00:37:59.340Correct me if I'm wrong, and far be it from war room to point the finger to anybody that shouldn't have the finger pointed to them, but Ms. Younger's testimony is problematic.
00:38:12.580I guess in litigation they say, we have some bad facts here about her.
00:38:21.980Now I understand you kind of subtly said something the other day I kind of picked up on because I guess Julie's, I guess she's messaging us somehow.
00:38:33.340What, this is pretty glaring, is it not?
00:38:37.940Start with kind of this suspicious story of a woman who's working from home on January 6th.
00:38:43.980She is working for FirstNet, so she is already tied to law enforcement.
00:38:48.500FirstNet is the kind of public-private partnership.
00:38:52.540She was working for the Department of Commerce.
00:38:55.140And what FirstNet does is oversees broadband, and this will be a follow-up story, oversees broadband for first responders for emergencies and disasters.
00:39:05.680All of a sudden at noon, as the president starts his speech at the Ellipse, Carlin Younger decides she's going to go do her laundry.
00:39:16.120Because who doesn't do their laundry on a momentous day in freezing temperatures, 20-mile-an-hour winds, and just happen to walk first in front of the Capitol Hill Club.
00:39:28.280There's that alleyway, you're very familiar with it, right next to the RNC.
00:39:32.480Just walks through that alleyway at noon to do her first load of laundry.
00:40:16.340She alerts authorities, finally gets someone at RNC, a guard there.
00:40:19.720He alerts Capitol Police, and the whole thing unraveled.
00:40:23.060You know, then the whole thing is initiated from there.
00:40:25.980And that's why, Steve, and this goes back to Arctic Frost, and I know we'll talk about that as well.
00:40:30.700Because January 6th was and has been the predicate for this abusive, unconstitutional, unaccountable, sprawling investigation into the president and everyone around him in the entire MAGA movement,
00:40:47.100it's imperative that we get the truth about everything on January 6th, starting with this pipe bomb, because that launched everything that day.
00:40:55.980Well, as Darren Beatty and you guys said five years ago, can you think a half a decade?
00:41:54.400So this really was the, lit the match of January 6th.
00:41:59.620And now that her story has completely collapsed, and I think this lie about the hand on 20 minutes is the most suspicious part of her involvement and her account that involves other inconsistencies as well.
00:42:31.080Birch Gold, now more than ever, you need Philip Patrick in the team.
00:42:35.800You've got End of the Dollar Empire as a good starter to kind of get you up to speed on, I don't know.
00:42:43.140We talked about earlier the post-war international rules-based order.
00:42:46.540How about the underpinnings of that was the U.S. dollar as the prime reserve currency.
00:42:51.360It's under onslaught right now on a de-dollarization move led by, wait for it, the Chinese Communist Party, who we're going to have a special on at 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time tonight.
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