Join us as we hear from Gail Slater and Peter Tickton as they discuss the latest in the Tina Peters case, and how the Justice Department's Antitrust Division is leading the fight against the "Big Tech" oligarchs.
00:03:52.720And he did it as much and said what he said as much in support of the little tech companies to see them thrive, to come under the heel of the big tech platforms.
00:04:08.420You guys are bringing, you know, you're in court all the time.
00:04:11.520What is the overall just kind of philosophy?
00:04:13.900Because you've seen, I tell people, the biggest difference I've seen between the first term and the second term in those four years, the concentration of corporate power was pretty overwhelming in the first term.
00:04:24.520But under Biden, it just got so concentrated, whether it's big pharma, whether it's big tech, the corporatists, Wall Street, et cetera.
00:04:32.440So given that you've got other allies and you've got the alphabet agencies that are also kind of what we call neo-Brandeisians, you've got great work, you know, great work over the FCC at the FTC.
00:04:44.680How do you guys look at the world and how do you divide things up?
00:05:01.000And we closed out the last one on Friday and we're going to wait on a remedies decision from the judge down in Virginia, your beloved home state, that we should get that about January, February.
00:05:12.360We have a search case that's also before us.
00:05:16.160And to the extent that, you know, I have time in the day after that, it's a big docket, but I really want to focus on affordability, on the pocketbook issues.
00:05:25.180And I promised that I committed that to the senators when I went before them for confirmation.
00:05:28.900So, in addition to the RealPage case, which I just talked about before the break, you know, we have other things going on around affordability, the cost of living.
00:05:40.240How can we make the markets more competitive such that prices come down through these market forces and everybody gets more money back in their pocketbooks and can maybe even put it into a savings account?
00:06:13.140It's very bipartisan, which is neat to see around this town.
00:06:17.400When Mark sent me back the polling, he was pretty amazed by some of the numbers.
00:06:21.280It's like as high as the 70s or the high 70s support levels for our work.
00:06:26.800And he said, you know, in his text back to me, this is a carte blanche if ever I saw one.
00:06:31.600So, that's what we're really focused on.
00:06:33.580And this week, in addition to the RealPage case, the rental market case, we've also, through our criminal section, Omid, who is, you know, a friend of the shows too, we sentenced the very, very first time the division has taken a wage-fixing case through our criminal section.
00:06:54.960And wage-fixing is different from price-fixing.
00:06:58.000Wage-fixing is like fixing the salaries.
00:07:00.220In this case, Lopez, it was salaries going to hardworking nurses in Las Vegas.
00:07:05.800And whereas the judge is sending Mr. Lopez to jail for 40 months for wage-fixing those nurses' salaries at a time when they really needed that money.
00:07:15.660So, that's another area of focus for us here at the division.
00:07:18.980And then recently, and quite publicly, I know you've talked to Dr. Navarro about this, we were tasked at looking into the Big Four meatpackers.
00:07:28.840Can't say too much about that investigation because we don't talk about our pending investigations.
00:07:34.000But, you know, the Big Four, another consolidated industry, we have four competitors.
00:07:39.580They control about 85% of that market-by-market share.
00:07:42.900And about 40% of that share is controlled by two Brazilian companies.
00:07:47.100So, the president has tasked us with looking into that industry in particular.
00:07:52.240And we're also looking at other bits of, like, the food sector.
00:07:55.200We have an egg investigation that's opened since the very start of the administration.
00:09:32.640I mean, just the simple fact, Steve, that the wage-fixing case that he brought to trial is the first time in the history of the division, the history of this division at the DOJ, that we've won a wage-fixing case.
00:09:45.480So that alone tells you that he's working hard and he's a fierce prosecutor.
00:09:58.780I did a shift over from Eric Bolling today.
00:10:00.780You know, Eric was actually, President Trump talked to him about being Commerce Secretary during the first term.
00:10:05.940And we were talking, and Eric goes, hey, President Trump and the economic team have done such a good job on full-spectrum energy dominance and bringing commodity prices down that the input cost to the major companies now is, I'm not saying record lows,
00:10:20.780but it's dropped so much from the Biden term, yet the prices haven't come up.
00:10:25.000Now, President Trump is the capitalist capitalist.
00:10:28.020But as you know, he was a scrappy real estate developer in New York City and always taking on the big guys.
00:10:34.340Is there going to be any effort to say, hey, we've had – you've got these prices that are kind of here.
00:10:39.420And President Trump, through his policies and the execution of those policies by the cabinet, has brought energy costs down dramatically, kind of full-spectrum energy dominance, plus the other commodity prices, input prices, or input costs.
00:10:53.200Is there some point in time when we're going to start looking at what these people are charging folks at retail?
00:11:00.800Because we know the wholesale prices, I think, are coming down.
00:11:02.740Is Justice going to look at that at all?
00:11:06.600Yeah, so we're looking at a bunch of different prices in that regard.
00:11:10.980But you make a great point, which is like a lot of the macroeconomic policies are already working their way through the economy.
00:11:16.860So the energy shift in energy policy, deregulation, the tax cuts will kick in big time earlier next year.
00:11:24.800And so we're just a piece of that, but where we can be helpful is looking at these markets at the micro level and looking at individual companies, individual sectors of the economy, and taking a deep dive into pricing at the retail level, as you say.
00:11:40.300Gail, I'm going to leave you with, you know, Larry Kudlow and I are both big believers in growth.
00:13:58.720What happened was there's this teacher that teaches the GED courses there in the prison who was not teaching reading, writing, arithmetic.
00:14:09.780He was teaching Tina Peters, and he's a lefty.
00:14:14.280So, you know, it wasn't exactly complimentary.
00:14:17.540So what he was doing is extremely dangerous because you start turning people against people in a closed environment.
00:14:27.080You're going to see terrible things happening.
00:14:31.180So she went to him and asked him, please stop that, and he wouldn't stop.
00:14:35.120So then she filled out a grievance statement, which is something that jail provides.
00:14:43.100And then when she did make a grievance, the first reaction that they had was to basically take her and put her into solitary confinement.
00:14:55.300But it wasn't exactly the kind of solitary confinement that we've seen, like with the J6ers and so on, where they get out one hour a day, and even then they're just in another cell that they can see a little sky maybe.
00:15:09.820No, hers was, I mean, it was just cement.
00:15:50.640But I think what the prison was actually doing was making sure that she was safe.
00:15:56.480You know, once this came about, and then they allowed her today, or it could have been last night, to sign off that she didn't feel she was in danger.
00:16:08.700And then they released her and let her be in her cell again, where she really is not in as much danger as she used to be.
00:16:17.400Because, you know, it just so happens that the people right around her understand her and accept her.
00:17:08.760And the GED, by the way, I had flexibility because I was teaching civics in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution.
00:17:15.220I had a lot of flexibility at talking about, you know, the issues related to finance and debt and deficits that the students had never heard of before and wanted to learn.
00:18:43.860Peter, can you describe when I was in federal prison, the SHU, the special housing unit, which is either they call it the whole or solitary, is not a place.
00:18:54.500I mean, they put people that do drugs, get lines, start fights, start riots.
00:18:58.580They put them in the SHU normally before they transfer them to a medium, but sometimes 30, 60 days.
00:19:26.820But as I said, they allowed her to go out to make a phone call.
00:19:29.760But when she would need to go out to make a phone call, that meant everybody else had to stay in their cells.
00:19:36.540And they couldn't be, you know, at leisure while she was making a phone call.
00:19:41.440It's not exactly a way to become, you know, popular or acceptable to the other people that are now getting upset with you because you're making a phone call.
00:19:51.680So, I mean, when you're in, you know, because you have a personal experience.
00:19:59.000And I'm sorry that you do, but you do have that knowledge of what it's like to be in a confined place with other people that might be very dangerous.
00:20:09.740You know, in the women's prisons in Colorado, it's not like the men's prisons where the monsters are in maximum security.
00:20:17.880And then they've got medium security, minimum.
00:20:34.520But if she, you know, so you've got your white-collar people together with your monsters.
00:20:41.380And it's a scary place for these women.
00:20:44.040And don't think that some women aren't monsters.
00:20:46.780Believe me, she had a cellmate at one point who was, and not only participated in a murder, but she was the one that chopped up the body, you know?
00:20:57.260No, these prisons are full of predators.
00:20:59.660They are full of some of the worst people in the world.
00:22:46.800And for preserving evidence, for making sure that the truth will be told, to get to the bottom of the people that basically stole our country for four years.
00:23:00.600I mean, for that, that's why she's in prison, for basically making an image of the hard drive.
00:23:06.600I mean, they found other pretexts and ways of calling it a crime so they can get away from the election.
00:23:11.560So, nobody could say anything during the trial about the election.
00:23:14.780Although, this is all grounds to get it all reversed on appeal.
00:23:20.220But that appeal process is a process that will take a significant time, correct?
00:23:49.160I know you don't want to mess around with the judge or anything like that.
00:23:52.100But isn't the reality, Tina Peters is a political prisoner and has been used by the Secretary of State there as a political prop.
00:24:02.500And that Polis, the governor, is going to run for president and he needs to be able to point that Tina Peters, who tried to show that the 2020 election was stolen and had all this evidence and preserved the evidence as she should, is going to be his exhibit one for all the crazy political lefties that are Trump haters, that have Trump derangement syndrome.
00:24:23.580That separates him out from the pack so that you're fighting uphill no matter what your legal arguments are.
00:24:29.740In Colorado, we see how corrupt it is, not just at the governmental level, but also at the court level and even the prosecutor level.
00:24:36.900What's happened to Tina Peters is outrageous.
00:24:39.320And you sit there stunned that it could happen in the United States of America, sir.
00:24:42.440I don't disagree with you at all on what you're saying.
00:24:47.060And I may be a gentleman, but I know when somebody's pissing on my leg and telling me it's raining out, you've got a judge, Judge Barrett.
00:25:20.800And doing exactly what the enemies of the United States wants them to do.
00:25:25.160I've encouraged people at the Department of Justice to start looking at some of the judges that acted in outrageous ways.
00:25:31.960And I'm hoping that these judges get charged for whatever conspiracy they're part of where they are.
00:25:39.100They know, you know, in some cases you might have a judge that swept into it, may believe, honestly, that these people are doing something wrong and so on.
00:25:52.120But look at what happened to the J6 defendants.
00:25:55.840Somebody needs to look into the ones that knew that they were doing something wrong.
00:26:01.660There's no way in the world, for instance, that a judge can say in front of an impaneled jury before opening statements and look at an accused and say to that defendant, say,
00:26:14.480you are an insurrectionist, you know, you're trying to destroy this company, you're guilty of killing five police officers, and you're guilty.
00:36:06.360The governor's office basically believes that we're just doing that so we can release her, which would destroy the entire program.
00:36:15.720You know, that would be a stupid thing to do.
00:36:18.060You know, the federal government is on a regular basis getting state prisoners to be removed and put into their custody so they can deal with federal crimes and investigations that are federal.
00:36:31.920If they start using that as a trick to free somebody, they're going to destroy the whole system.
00:36:53.020It says he, meaning the president, shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except for cases of impeachment.
00:37:04.820So cases against the United States or offenses, rather, against the United States.
00:37:10.940One would think that that would mean federal.
00:37:43.240It says, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
00:37:59.660So let me just take out the exception part to make it easier to understand.
00:38:02.880Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States.
00:38:09.880And when I say United States, of course, you're thinking about the federal government, the country.
00:38:21.820But they until after when this was this was read at the end of the movie, it reminded me of something that I had learned long ago,
00:38:30.000which was that until after the Civil War, when people referred to the United States, they always saw it as a there or a they.
00:38:42.840And this amendment, when I heard it, it reminded me of that exists within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction, not its jurisdiction.
00:38:51.640So when they speak of the United States in the Constitution, they're speaking of the states.
00:39:04.160The president shall have the power to grant pardons for offenses against the United States.
00:39:09.680But at that point in time, they were talking about the states.
00:39:14.960Even in the Constitution itself, not just the amendment that was at the end of the Civil War.
00:39:19.900But in Article 3, Section 3, it says treason against the United States shall consist only of levying war against them, against them, against the states.
00:39:39.680Or in adhering to their enemies, not its enemies.
00:39:46.740So when the Constitution speaks of the United States in terms of the power of pardon, they're speaking of the states and the crimes that are done against the states,
00:40:01.940as well as any that would be against the federal government.
00:40:05.220And believe it or not, this question has never come up in jurisprudence.
00:47:23.300Are you calling, hang on, are you calling for the 80s?
00:47:26.900I think in Arkansas against the governor there, he's sending in the 101st Airborne.
00:47:32.100Are you saying that you believe the president should call out the 101st Airborne?
00:47:35.900They should go to her prison in Colorado and say, hey, boys, the pros from Dover here, back off.
00:47:42.700We're taking Tina Peters and we're going to take her today.
00:47:44.820Because this audience would 1 million percent back you, back the Justice Department, back the Secretary of War, back the President of the United States if we did that tomorrow morning.
00:47:55.120And that's the type of thing it's going to take.
00:49:15.380Because they think we're weak, and they think we're unfocused.
00:49:19.340If I can get a judge to agree with me that she should be released, whether it's by habeas corpus, which we're already doing, we're just waiting for that decision from the judge.
00:49:28.900If I get, if she is to be released, and we have a federal court judge saying that she needs to be released, believe me, they're going to either release her or there will be something.
00:49:39.560There will be marshals, at least, knocking on their door and requiring that she be released.
00:49:44.720It's going to happen once we get that order.
00:49:47.660And we did have that order for Eisenhower.
00:49:50.900But meanwhile, what you're saying is so true.
00:49:56.520Sometimes I don't even know what's going on in the world.
00:49:59.100Sometimes I think I'm standing in the movie Matrix, and I got all these people that are asleep on beds all around me.
00:50:07.400And somehow I woke up and pulled my tubes out.
00:50:09.800And then I find people like you and other people that are like people in your audience that are seeing reality.
00:50:17.220Because when you say that they stole the election, they didn't just steal the election.
00:50:22.600They took over our country for four years and did whatever they could to destroy it.
00:50:27.040When did it ever become a good idea to open the southern border?
00:50:30.740When did it, I mean, all of their ideas, all of their craziness and what they were doing.
00:50:34.920The weaponization that I have seen since I started doing these pardons, it's all over the United States.
00:51:51.080And for the guys negotiating the Ukraine deal, I don't want to hear about the sovereignty of Ukraine until we have the sovereignty of the United States of America.
00:51:58.460And center of that is freeing a 71-year-old gold star mother from these corrupt demons and devils in the state of Colorado.
00:52:07.940We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
00:52:10.980When you will be back in the war room.
00:52:13.060We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.