In this episode of the War Room podcast, I interview Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GAetz) and discuss the latest in the Hunter Biden scandal, and why he's a problem in the Democratic Party. I also discuss why 13 Republicans crossed the aisle and voted for Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi's infrastructure bill and why they should be disciplined for it. And I talk about why I think the current Republican leadership in Congress is weak and why it s time for a new generation of leadership in the Republican Party to step up to the plate and take control of the country. The War Room is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. New Episodes drop every Monday morning. Subscribe to Native Creative on Apple Podcasts and stay up to date with Native Creative. Learn more about Native Creative and Native Podcasts by becoming a supporter and listening to all things Native Creative! Subscribe, Like, and Share this episode with your friends and family! Thank you for listening and supporting Native Creative - we really appreciate it! - Your support is greatly appreciated and helps keep us on our journey to create a better future for our children and families. Thank you and send us your support and support! , we'll see you next Monday morning with a new episode of Native Creativity, featuring more Native Creative and Native Creative, coming soon. - PODCAST, PODCASTS, featuring: , , "Native Creative, , and "Native Creators, " " . - "Podcasts, " - " and " , " " " , & "PODCAST Podcasts, , produced by Native Creative " , hosted by Native Creators is produced by . . , and , is a proud member of the Native Creative & (Native Creative Podcast, . , "Paid Podcast, produced and produced by PODCO, produced and " , and ( ) , & , featuring Native Creative , " and "PANIC, & . ( ) . , , " ( ), , PANDORA, is an of the podcast, "PAND , AKA " . . . " is a Native Creative ( ) , ( , PRODCAST - , AND "PRAISE, ) is , . ( , )
00:00:03.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:00:10.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
00:00:13.000He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:00:16.000So we're going to keep running those stories to get hurt again.
00:00:22.000If you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
00:00:53.000Steve Bannon's former producer on the War Room podcast was directly involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story and what revelations we have gotten from it regarding the Biden crime family.
00:01:07.000So you'll hear my interview with Vish Burra, who's now a member of our congressional staff, and you'll get the inside story on the Hunter Biden laptop and what some of the specific allegations of corruption mean to your life and the government that you get.
00:01:23.000But first, many in Congress in the Republican conference are confused and frustrated and concerned about the fact that Republicans helped Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi pass really the first step In their socialist agenda,
00:01:40.000they call it the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but really it's a way to punish people for driving long distances and to put a wet blanket over job creation and economic growth, the features of the Trump presidency that were the most popular.
00:01:56.000We look at these last 10 months in the Biden administration and for all of the problems they've created, This path of legislation makes things worse.
00:02:05.000If you're worried about higher gas prices, this would make them higher.
00:02:09.000If you're worried about inflation, this would make it worse.
00:02:12.000If you're worried about economic conditions that disincentivize work, this re-entrenches the policies that we have already seen fail for the last 10 months.
00:03:12.000I've got the highest concentration of active duty military in the country, and in the past I've had to vote against the National Defense Authorization Act because it wasn't good for all of America.
00:03:25.000And so to see members of Congress sell out their vote, trade it for some roads and bridges and tunnels, for some train stops, it's disgraceful.
00:03:36.000We also see that many of them are retiring.
00:03:39.000And Republican leadership came to us and said, how are we supposed to manage the, you know, impulses and expectations of members of Congress who aren't running for reelection?
00:04:07.000And I am shocked at the number of members of these 13 dissenters that are actually in Republican leadership.
00:04:16.000They are Republican leads on either full committees or subcommittees in the Congress, which means that our overall leadership says that on certain issues, these folks speak for us.
00:04:28.000If you hope Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden pass their agenda, you don't speak for me on any issue.
00:04:35.000that should be the position of our conference We should join together and demand that John Katko be removed as the lead on the Homeland Security Committee and any other members who are leads on subcommittees should lose those positions.
00:04:50.000I believe that in the 117th Congress, there have been five critical votes for Republicans.
00:04:57.000Impeachment, the witch hunt January 6 commission, removing Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees, the ban and contempt vote, and of course, this Biden spending plan.
00:05:10.000And on every one of those critical votes, John Katko of New York, supposedly a Republican, has voted with the Democrats and he is the Republican lead on the Homeland Security Committee.
00:05:22.000So just take a listen and see if this sounds like a Republican leader to you.
00:07:54.000John Katko doesn't know what he's doing on this vote because if you take the 228 votes that passed and back out the 13 Republicans, my math usually isn't too good, but at 215, you're still short of the 218 you need to pass legislation in Congress.
00:08:11.000John Katko is the ultimate DC insider who's lining himself up for a lucrative lobby job, much like Jim Walsh did when he left and much like other members of Congress do, and that's what he's doing.
00:08:26.000He doesn't care about the Central New York taxpayers and the debt that we're accumulating or the fact that a $1.5 trillion spending bill, only $110 billion goes to roads and bridges.
00:08:41.000The rest goes to let's help the electric vehicle market with batteries.
00:08:48.000Well, you know who makes 80% of the electric vehicle batteries?
00:10:05.000Is our government engaging in corruption under the guise of a family member outselling access and selling out America?
00:10:15.000We learned that the Hunter Biden story would become central to our politics when the Hunter Biden laptop arose in really the most interesting of ways.
00:10:26.000Now, I've got a member of my congressional staff who is actually central to the recovery of the assembly of the production of the delivery of the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:10:38.000And I'm here with my colleague Vish Burra.
00:10:46.000What were you doing when you found out you were about to come into the possession of some of the most compelling evidence of the 2020 campaign cycle?
00:10:55.000Well, thank you for having me on, Matt.
00:11:01.000at night, and I'm driving my former boss and mentor, Steve Bannon, and we're driving around New York after I'd picked him up from Rudy's house, and we were doing this back and forth thing with Rudy.
00:11:12.000Now, a little after he got arrested last year, he tells me, pack up your stuff, we're going to New York.
00:11:18.000Steve Bannon gets indicted under this politically motivated so-called fraud investigation where actually Bannon and Brian Kofage were out building portions of a wall in a strategic area on the US-Mexico border.
00:11:54.000So I didn't see it at first, but a few days after that, Rudy and Bannon basically sat down and said, we need to be able to go through this thing faster and what's on it.
00:12:07.000At this point, did you know how they had come in possession of it, or did you just know we've got the piece of evidence?
00:12:12.000At this point, I knew we got the piece of evidence.
00:12:17.000I just knew that whatever I'm asked to do here, I have to get it done.
00:12:22.000And so at that point, they needed time to go through this thing, and they needed to go through it faster because there's just so much content on it.
00:13:08.000What was the first place you said, I'm opening this up and I'm diving in?
00:13:12.000I wanted to go through the emails first and the text messages, right?
00:13:16.000So a lot of people, especially who have Macs, will sync their cell phones to their MacBook and all their text messages come to their Mac.
00:13:28.000this is the case with hunter as well and we had text messages between him and his his father president joe biden and and uh hallie biden and you know uh his niece and and if all sorts of interpersonal that's really what kind of you know got got my interest going is the is the interpersonal family family relationships and those interactions
00:13:52.000and though that stuff was really revealing to me because you know my my little project mini projects myself at that time is i just want to get into the mind of hunter biden and how he's seeing his world you know in the middle of this confluence of corruption and just this lifestyle of you know, being on the road and kind of, you know, being a playboy or whatever.
00:14:57.000I see Frank Luntz's name and I'm thinking, hey, isn't this like a GOP guy, a pollster?
00:15:01.000And the email is basically Frank Luntz upset that Hunter Biden is not returning his calls or emails and he was lamenting, hey, why did I help out your father when you guys dropped that disastrous Jeep commercial and I went against my own client at the time, Paul Ryan.
00:15:20.000To do that for you, and you guys still won't look out for me.
00:15:26.000So if you have Paul Ryan on your Hunter laptop bingo card, you can go ahead and mark that box now.
00:15:32.000But what it shows us, I think, what this Luntz email shows us, Is that Hunter Biden isn't some ancillary node.
00:15:39.000He's not out there in the ether doing his own thing, unconnected to the politics and the ambition of his father, that he is both doing the politics and doing the corruption.
00:15:51.000Was there an email, a text, a piece of evidence that really framed up kind of the seedy, swampy nature of Hunter Biden's business dealings where you could go back to Bannon and Rudy and say, hey, look, you know, this is something that really Well, I mean, there's the infamous big guy email, right?
00:16:12.000I mean, you can't cook up a more perfect situation.
00:16:16.000They're talking about a deal with CEFC, the largest state-owned energy corporation in the world.
00:16:24.000Uh, and, uh, this, I believe it was a Bohai Harvest or one of these companies that they come together and cook up, right?
00:16:32.000To be able to funnel funds through back and forth and make it seem legit, not like you're doing direct business with a, a state owned company.
00:16:39.000And, uh, They are laying out the terms in 10% for the big guy.
00:16:45.000We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:16:47.000And so that, I think, was the international sort of big money, like international scale grift that you saw.
00:16:54.000But I think locally what's really troubling is actually the email that I didn't end up finding.
00:17:01.000Uh, it exists on the laptop is the Louis free email.
00:17:04.000I mean, you got former director of the FBI on, you know, doing business with you, making donations back and forth between family family foundations and and then working to get use FBI resources that currently exist in the department to making donations back and forth between family family foundations and and then working to get use FBI resources that Like, you know, that's that's that's crazy.
00:17:29.000You know, we talk often on the show and in the Congress about the corrupt unity of purpose that can often exist with corrupt businesses and corrupt government officials and melding the line, you know, kind of the.
00:17:42.000The neo-libertarian philosophy that I developed in my politics in the 2010s was let's get, you know, government just out of the decision-making process.
00:17:50.000But the problem is big business has become so persuasive on government that we've now wrapped government around the apparatus of big business in a lot of ways.
00:18:01.000And that is what this energy deal really represents with sort of the foreign flavor to it of Of big China.
00:18:09.000And, you know, we have also covered the extent to which the Biden administration is influenced by China.
00:18:14.000But I mean, what you're really laying out here in those energy deals, the 10% for the big guy, is that there's a huge value in accessing this Chinese marketplace and being able to utilize the way that China has fused big government and big business.
00:18:45.000And, you know, it's this sort of modern way of doing business where you You're not out there conquering nations, you know, out and outright, because then you'd have to own those nations and take those proceeds and give it to your people to justify owning them.
00:19:00.000Now you do this indirect, you know, shell company things where you're still kind of grifting, you're only benefiting yourself, and you're making these deals with foreign nations that still the effects of that deal, the everyday American people are subject to it, right?
00:19:17.000The focus on the Hunter Biden laptop has been on some of the weird stuff, the bizarre pictures, the potential crimes.
00:19:25.000But for most Americans, the impact is really felt through the corrupt acts that implicate Joe Biden.
00:19:34.000I mean, you got into the brains of these folks.
00:19:36.000What did you learn about them as people?
00:21:16.000In a certain way, Hunter feels like he is the one who put...
00:21:20.000Joe Biden is the one who put Hunter in this position.
00:21:22.000And in the emails, in the text messages, he says, you need to run for office so I So me, Hunter, I have a shot at redemption.
00:21:33.000My reputation has a shot at redemption if you run for president.
00:21:39.000And so that is now part of the decision calculus when Joe Biden's deciding to run for president as well as his son's reputation for the position Joe Biden put him in by being his bag man.
00:21:52.000It is certainly reflective of a healthy dose of narcissism.
00:21:57.000As you went through the texts and the emails, were there other figures in politics, in media, in legal circles that you were surprised to see in this nexus?
00:22:12.000Well, the Frank Luntz thing, that was just fun, you know?
00:22:24.000Entity that keeps popping up that I definitely think needs way more looking into.
00:22:29.000It's this entity called Eudora, and there's this gambling thing around it called Juega Ocho Gaming that might implicate a close associate of Senator Dick Durbin, as well as Harry Reid's son, Key Reid.
00:22:45.000And because, see, the way I see it is, The China grift and all these foreign policy grifts, these are all just trying to create laundry machines abroad to be able to send taxpayer money for it to find its way back into your personal pockets.
00:23:00.000And I believe that the Bidens engaged in this thing with other elites in our system, elected elites, to set up this gaming grift or laundry machine in South America.
00:23:14.000I believe it's called Juega Ocho Gaming.
00:23:17.000And then they use this Eudora entity as well to basically get that money from Ocho Rio into Eudora and then split it out to the folks.
00:23:26.000You said something very important and it informs on precisely the legislative work that we see the Congress embarking on now.
00:23:33.000That the way the elites try to use their power is to leverage the largesse of the US dollar abroad and frankly even at home and then to see that wealth, that value transition right back to their businesses, to their pocketbooks and to hope that they're able to sort of to their pocketbooks and to hope that they're able to sort of keep the plates spinning long enough for the surf class, the plebs, the regular folks to just allow it
00:23:58.000Yeah, it's like the three card Monty kind of game that you'd see pop up on a street corner of New York except they're doing it with your tax money.
00:24:06.000And the only loser at the end of the day is you.
00:24:09.000Was there a piece of evidence on the laptop that either Rudy Giuliani or Steve Bannon found particularly compelling where they said, hey, this is the smoking gun, this is what we have to ripen?
00:24:21.000Well, there was a piece of evidence on there that they felt so compelled that it was criminal to possess it that Rudy hand-delivered this piece of evidence along with a few other pieces of evidence To the Delaware Attorney General, and Steve and I followed Rudy as he's delivering it just to make sure he gets there.
00:24:50.000That's the kind of level we're on as we're trying to get this thing into the right hands, as we're trying to do the right thing, basically expose this wrongdoing and corruption.
00:25:01.000This piece of evidence, it's on the salacious side of things, but we delivered that to the Delaware Attorney General and I don't think anybody's ever heard of any news popping out of that since.
00:25:14.000You had to know at some point that this was going to become the biggest political story in America.
00:25:20.000What decisions were made or what was the perspective on sort of the New York Post as an initial outlet?
00:25:27.000Were there other outlets that were skeptical at first?
00:25:29.000How did you go from the investigative reporting that you were doing, Steve Bannon was doing as a part of your work for War Room, to actually getting this into the political bloodstream of the country?
00:25:42.000Yeah, so, you know, the Daily Mail was one of the first outlets to come out and verify, and this is now, this is after the election, of course, but they had a forensic sort of, like, auditor, technical auditor go through the hard drive, and they published that they verified it, and that it's real, right?
00:26:04.000Or at the very least, it hasn't been manipulated by any outside hands.
00:26:09.000And I found that to be a mea culpa because it was the Daily Mail originally that we went to before the New York Post to try and get this story out.
00:26:18.000The largest website in the world, right?
00:27:05.000It's like, I got to go to work tomorrow, publish this story.
00:27:08.000And all my friends are probably hate Trump, love Biden.
00:27:12.000And if I got to go in there and I publish this story and Joe Biden loses, my entire industry might hate me, you know, and so because they're all haters of Trump or a good chunk of them are.
00:27:25.000And so that, you know, I think that was part of the calculus.
00:27:28.000And another thing I want to state is, you know, there's a ton of salacious stuff on there.
00:27:47.000I mean, here you guys had captured this evidence, you had done the reviews, you had found information that you thought really illuminated the inner workings of this crime family in serious ways and also in sort of salacious ways as well.
00:28:04.000And here you go to two entities and it sounds like they weren't having it.
00:28:16.000Because what you were about to face in terms of headwinds from big media and big tech has literally never been seen before in American democracy.
00:28:23.000I couldn't have written a script in Hollywood that would have passed if I told you this is what we're going to do and this is going to be the...
00:28:31.000Overt, brazen reaction from big tech media.
00:28:35.000I mean, it was practically all coordinated.
00:28:39.000I'm not going to say that everyone was on the phone with each other saying, we're going to do this.
00:28:43.000I think what you're saying is that there is an ethic around investigative reporting that is negative for Democrats that isn't explicit, but that is very potent.
00:28:54.000And that ethic is, you know, if it's bad about Republicans, get it out, source it later, sort it out later, you know, get clicks that something's bad about a Republican.
00:29:04.000That's the way they're kind of thinking about it.
00:29:06.000But when it's about a Democrat, people start to think, okay, well, you know, do I want to have as a part of my forever journalistic identity Taking out a Democrat, exposing a Democrat, potentially even causing a Democrat presidential candidate to lose.
00:29:36.000That moment when you finally know this thing you've been working on, this political Manhattan project, is finally going to erupt in some way.
00:29:44.000So I wake up, we finally got the conference, and we pushed really, really hard to get it through the New York Post.
00:29:51.000Finally we got an approval to push it.
00:29:53.000And I will say that the decision did go all the way up to Murdoch on that one.
00:30:26.000And then we had to go produce The War Room at that time, too, so I'm looking for any buzz in the morning once the story dropped that morning.
00:30:38.000The New York Post publishes it, and The War Room is kind of the first on it to broadcast it in a video format.
00:30:48.000And so what we're thinking is, oh, well this didn't kind of have the effect that we were thinking.
00:30:54.000But once it was all shared, made it to the ether on the internet, right?
00:30:58.000On Twitter, on Facebook, and the story starts getting shared around, that was when it blew up because people started texting me saying, hey, I can't even like send this to you via Facebook Messenger or DM this to you by Twitter.
00:31:15.000And then multiple reports started popping up, and that's when people realized, like, wait a minute, the tech companies are blocking the sharing of this story.
00:31:25.000And then it eventually comes out that they locked the New York Post out of their own account.
00:31:32.000And this is not, you know, this is not like Infowars or anything like this.
00:31:36.000And they locked them out of their Twitter account for publishing this story.
00:31:41.000I mean, I would have never believed that the big tech companies would overtly try to challenge the ability of a publisher to, you know, a media company, a brother in arms, I would even say.
00:31:57.000In sort of the metaverse of things to distribute information to people, that they would shut one out because there's a story here that they don't like.
00:32:07.000It really is the strongest evidence I have ever seen that big tech wants to be the arbiter of truth itself.
00:32:16.000You know, that while in the law, while when they come and testify before Congress, they say, we just want to be a platform.
00:32:22.000We just want to be a place where people come and share information and interact with one another.
00:32:28.000That when the chips are down, When you're in a high-impact moment, like the days and weeks before an election, and when you have a highly relevant piece of information, they want to be the ones to make the judgments, not the American people.
00:32:45.000The way I see it is that these tech companies essentially want to Establish a monopsonic relationship between the rest of the world and reality itself, where they are the ultimate middleman and everything has to go through them.
00:33:02.000In the words of Dave Chappelle, Twitter is not a real place.
00:33:05.000But it does really impact politics, right?
00:33:08.000And that's why it must have been very frustrating for you personally and for your colleagues Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani to have done all this work To have gotten no less than the New York Post to verify and publish it, and then still the most powerful forces in media and technology trying to limit the distribution of your work.
00:33:30.000I mean, it couldn't have been all glee at that point for you.
00:33:33.000I mean, there's a moment of upsetness there, but at that time, I'm still in the mindset of a renegade media professional.
00:33:41.000So our rule is, you get censored, that's a badge of honor, right?
00:33:46.000And if you really think about it, the story didn't really pop until the censorship of it was...
00:34:20.000You know, the evidence that we've discussed here that you have brought to the world really does show a sophisticated business system that is probably used by a lot of American elites to drain the US experience and to use it for their benefit.
00:34:40.000Recently, my colleague Ken Buck in the Judiciary Committee exposed the modern incarnations of the Hunter Biden grift through the art sales.
00:35:32.000The Hunter Biden painting sold for $500,000 also.
00:35:36.000Now, you may think That's such an exclusive, that when Hunter Biden is in such exclusive company, that he would have a background, you know, artistic training, for example.
00:35:46.000But you would be wrong if you thought that.
00:35:48.000And you might think that he had some sort of apprenticeship with a world-renowned artist, but you would be wrong again if you thought that.
00:35:55.000Or perhaps that he has been selling his works for years, and again, unfortunately, you would be wrong.
00:36:00.000It turns out that in 2019, Hunter Biden couldn't find a gallery to list his art.
00:36:06.000And what happened in 2020 that changed all that?
00:36:09.000His dad became president of the United States.
00:36:11.000Now a single piece of art from Hunter Biden sells for more than the average American home.
00:36:20.000This art arrangement is so suspicious that the Obama administration ethics czar, Walter Schaub, tweeted on July 10th of this year, Hunter Biden should cancel this art sale because he knows the prices are based on his dad's job.
00:36:36.000Shame on POTUS if he doesn't ask Hunter to stop.
00:36:41.000By the way, Mr. Attorney General, this is the same Hunter Biden who's being investigated by your department and the IRS for tax fraud.
00:36:50.000Selling fakes or selling or having a fake skill set is nothing new to Hunter Biden.
00:36:58.000When his dad was vice president, Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian oligarch to sit on a board of an energy company.
00:37:07.000What was Hunter Biden's background in energy?
00:37:12.000Soon after he received his dad, soon after he and his dad got off Air Force Two in China, Hunter Biden became a private equity guru and assisted with a Chinese private equity firm linked to the Chinese Central Bank.
00:37:26.000You might ask what his background was with Pacific Rim Investments or the Chinese Central Bank?
00:37:33.000With his dubious track record, inquiring minds might question why any art gallery would want to sell Hunter Biden's art.
00:37:40.000Well, this particular art gallery had its COVID relief loan more than doubled by the Biden administration.
00:37:47.000In a survey of more than 100 art galleries in New York's 10th Congressional District, this particular art gallery received by far the largest SBA disaster loan.
00:37:57.000And as an aside, Mr. Attorney General, the member who represents the 10th Congressional District is none other than Chairman Nadler.
00:38:06.000Mr. Attorney General, who buys Hunter Biden's art?
00:38:20.000I have sent a letter to the Department of Justice before your tenure asking them to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.
00:38:27.000I have today sent a letter to you and I am asking you now, will you appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden?
00:38:38.000I'm not, for the same reason that I'm not able to respond to questions about investigations of the former president or of anyone else, I'm not able to discuss any Investigations pending or otherwise with respect to any citizen of the United States.
00:38:57.000I mean, Ken Buck just described a circumstance where Hunter Biden is out there literally selling his art right alongside the masters and getting master level compensation for it.
00:39:08.000Have we heard the last of Hunter Biden?
00:39:11.000So what I will say is that I am probably still the only person on this side of America that could competently make a copy of this thing.
00:39:21.000And I've distributed over 40 copies to multiple outlets that have peaked...
00:39:26.000Their interest has peaked after Joe Biden has won, he's firmly in place, and now people are looking for ways to make their own bones now, now that they don't have to worry about being the pariah.
00:39:38.000And so the interest level has gone up in the Hunter Biden laptop since.
00:39:43.000And I believe you will start seeing more mainstream outlets verifying this thing and coming out and saying that this thing is real and these are things that have to be addressed.
00:39:55.000You think the Ocho Rios South American gambling story is still the untold story that some investigative reporters need to get on, and it could tie back to even current members of the legislative branch of government.
00:40:16.000That's where I think that the real meat of, like, if you really want to kind of get the rat's nest at once, I think those are the places you would have to look.
00:40:30.000it is there's a ton of stuff on there um i think that we should also be very careful because you know as being from new york i kind of see like what's what what is happening with biden could also could could sort of harken back to what happened with cuomo where at the right time you kind of needed to get rid of the guy and that these stories would now be deployed to put get
00:40:54.000So they could be tools waiting in the wings if it's determined that Joe Biden is too much of a drag on the political left that they want to sort of freshen up the movement with.
00:41:03.000Kamala Harris and whatever assembly of child actors she's hanging out with that day, that you think that actually we could be learning more about the Hunter laptop, the corruption that's on there going forward if the left and the media choose to politically take out the guy that they sort of just used as a masthead for the anti-Trump movement.
00:41:26.000And, you know, I said this when Andrew Cuomo was about to be, looked out very obviously, was about to be removed, and Kathy Hochul would take his place.
00:41:37.000I said this then, and I would say it again, if that seems to be the obvious case with Joe Biden, it only goes left from here.