In this episode, we discuss Rep. Matt Gaetz's decision to defy a subpoena from a select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the implications for the ongoing investigation. We also hear from the head of the panel investigating the incident, Professor Darren Beattie, and Rep. Merrick Garland's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.
00:03:11.000The chairman of the commission, Benny Thompson, he, in his personal capacity,
00:03:16.000launched a lawsuit against Roger Stone, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Donald Trump.
00:03:23.000And in this lawsuit, he adduces his theory of the case.
00:03:29.000And in the theory of the case, these militia groups played a huge role, including the Oath Keepers.
00:03:35.000And he even addressed this lawsuit directly to the head of the Oath Keepers organization.
00:03:41.000Now, in his capacity as the head of the January 6 commission, he's interested in everything but these militia groups that he pretended to care about in the lawsuit.
00:03:52.000He's interested in grandstanding and going after Steve Bannon and really anyone else who was remotely connected with Donald Trump and his inner circle and so forth.
00:04:03.000So it's a big sham and that's a shame because they're really important questions that a legitimate commission should be asking and getting to the bottom of.
00:04:13.000It seems that this is coordinated from a Washington theater standpoint.
00:04:19.000They want to have action against Bannon.
00:04:23.000They want Merrick Garland saying he will use the Department of Justice to enforce the actions of the January 6 committee.
00:04:30.000But we know, Darren, that the real reason they need Garland in this act, in this play, is because the founders never vested in the United States Congress any real authority or any real power to enforce its subpoenas.
00:04:45.000It's very interesting in the balance of powers we have.
00:04:48.000If someone simply defies Congress, there is no inherent consequence to that.
00:04:54.000What does it tell you that at this stage of the game, they are trying to supercharge the use of criminal process rather than the normal political tools that a congressional committee would use in the media or with the collection of documents and legislation?
00:05:11.000Well, it tells you that all the normal procedure is thrown right out the window.
00:05:17.000It's been a power consolidation from the beginning.
00:05:20.000So, you know, theoretical consideration like, you know, separation of powers and so forth, the founders intention.
00:05:27.000This is irrelevant from the point of view of the regime, the Biden regime.
00:05:32.000It's certainly irrelevant from the point of view of Garland, who has a long and storied history of covering up the crimes of the intelligence community.
00:05:43.000Now, you were often a critic of the Republican Congress in the majority, present company excluded, of course, because they would not use the tools even that the Congress had, for example, to issue subpoenas.
00:05:56.000I mean, a lot of people will reflect on the fact that when we had the House and the Senate and we could have blown up the Russia hoax before it took off and consumed our country for two years, we didn't issue a single subpoena.
00:06:09.000But now the Democrats, they're jumping right over kind of the normal outlay of foundation and the development of a factual case.
00:06:19.000They're going right to contempt before Congress and then criminal action from Garland.
00:06:25.000You know, what's interesting to me is that when Republicans actually last used these tools, it was against Lois Lerner when conservatives were being targeted at the IRS.
00:06:34.000And it was something like 300 days that Republicans took to hold hearings, develop evidence.
00:06:39.000Here, we're seeing this happen in a real snap.
00:06:42.000Does it tell us something about how Republicans fight versus how Democrats fight, that they're willing to actually do what we only talked about?
00:06:55.000And I think partially it says that when the Democrats are operating, they're swimming in the same direction as the larger current determined by the vast bureaucracies, the intelligence apparatus, the media, basically every major institution in the entire country.
00:07:13.000And therefore, it's not simply an issue of, oh, should we do this or not?
00:07:18.000The underlying conditions are just fundamentally different from the Democrat side.
00:07:23.000From the Republican side, this is not to excuse any inaction.
00:07:27.000I think that we need to be as aggressive and proactive as possible.
00:07:32.000And there are many occasions when I think subpoenas would have been appropriate.
00:07:36.000And I think simply drawing attention to issues can be better than nothing.
00:07:40.000And so I would say I would have to give mixed reviews, to put it generously, to the broader kind of congressional sector in the Republican side and how they've approached 1.6.
00:07:57.000I think they've kind of been lagging behind and really should have taken an aggressive approach in particular on the question of FBI involvement in 1.6 in order to reshape the narrative from the defensive to the offensive.
00:08:13.000Now, that is going to be a question area that I expect to be developed during Attorney General Garland's presence before the House Judiciary Committee.
00:08:39.000Folks want to talk about the use of the FBI to target school board parents who show up at meetings and wag their fingers in the face of their duly elected members of the school board.
00:08:51.000But undoubtedly, you would be asking questions about the FBI's assets that were there on January 6th.
00:08:58.000Now, here, I'm bringing folks into the room a little bit here, but, you know, what occurred, what has to occur, I should say, is that we've got to get around the standard answers to these types of questions.
00:09:08.000So, Darren Beattie, if you're sitting there on the dais, you've got five minutes.
00:09:13.000What's the first question you're asking Merrick Garland?
00:09:15.000The first question I'm asking Merrick Garland is, how many informants do you have present or did you have present in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters in the three, four months leading up to 1-6?
00:09:33.000And if his answer is, well, you know, that is the subject of ongoing investigations and we never talk about ongoing investigations and we don't reveal FBI assets, what's the follow up?
00:09:46.000The follow up is, the founder and head of the Oath Keepers, Stuart Rhodes, what do you know about him?
00:09:57.000Why has it taken eight, nine months after the event and nobody's touched him versus others, the smaller fish that they've touched?
00:10:07.000How do you explain this seeming reverse RICO structure of the 1-6 prosecution cases in which the little fish are indicted and in many cases wallow in prison, whereas many of the big fish and in some cases the biggest fish swim free?
00:10:27.000Well, it is concerning that we haven't gotten responses from the Attorney General regarding the conditions of those, I would say, you know, lower level criminal trespassers, federal property destructionists who normally would be released on some sort of, you know, bond or bail.
00:10:45.000But many of whom are now still facing some of the really the harshest tools that our government has.
00:10:50.000And I believe the reason those folks are facing those tools is because we have to maintain this construct that there is an ongoing threat.
00:10:58.000And I think that is a theme you'll also hear from the Attorney General that like the threat isn't over, that an insurrection may may pop up in the Judiciary Committee just because Jim Jordan and I are in the same room with each other.
00:11:08.000It may occur like spontaneous combustion.
00:11:12.000Here's how I think it might be effective to get around the answers like, oh, well, Stuart Rhodes, I can't talk about a particular case or that may inform on an ongoing investigation.
00:11:23.000Mr. Attorney General, can you assure the country that there were no FBI informants, assets or agents that animated any violence on January 6th, that instigated in any way?
00:11:37.000And my suspicion is that will elicit the same response that I've been sort of giving you in our strategy session here.
00:11:45.000And if he's unable to give the country the assurance that our own government wasn't a part of animating that violence, that will be the news of the day.
00:11:56.000They want the news of the day to be that the Attorney General will go after the Steve Bannons of the world.
00:12:01.000But I think if he cannot deny the activity that really would be the most extreme activity, then I think that that would be really the news.
00:12:11.000Now, you think there's a reasonable basis to ask that question because of Stuart Rhodes, because there is leadership that has been able to escape.
00:12:20.000Not only Stuart Rhodes, I think there are many people and I think that's a good approach.
00:12:27.000I think the right approach is to basically anticipate the fact that he's not going to give a straightforward answer to anything.
00:12:33.000And so ask the question that really can generate that kind of attention and interest from the point of view of the public in this narrative that is become a national narrative, but still remains under explored.
00:12:50.000And something like saying, Mr. Attorney General, can you assure us that that that maybe even ask him, can you assure us that none of the individuals named in the charging documents are not prosecuted on the basis of a prior relationship with the federal government?
00:13:11.000Oh, that that is a very, very precise question.
00:13:14.000That's a very precise question. And I think it's it's precise for a reason. It's very pointed. And that goes back to the Revolver News original thesis.
00:13:22.000Now, just another thing as we're kind of plotting plotting the question to keep in mind is, well, we know, you know, I've I've zero doubt that the FBI is involved.
00:13:33.000And in fact, as you know, The New York Times came out and did a damage control piece acknowledging that the one member of the Proud Boys who was in the Capitol,
00:13:43.000the Capitol was texting his FBI handler throughout the day. So we know for a fact that there's this.
00:13:49.000And in fact, I might even reference that in one of your questions, perhaps just because we have confirmation now from the time of some handler who was from the FBI.
00:13:58.000And I just wanted to add sort of an addendum that is somewhat technical, but it's important in how he might try to weasel his way out of questions.
00:14:07.000And that is this is that I strongly suspect that the informants involved, especially in the militia groups won't just be involved with the FBI.
00:14:17.000And in fact, there's more likely a relationship with various counterintelligence equities, including army counterintelligence and the JTTF.
00:14:27.000And so I would hate to have them weasel out of the technicality and say, well, actually, I know three or four guys, but they're technically army counterintelligence.
00:14:37.000They're not FBI. You know, it's like it's not just the FBI who does things.
00:14:41.000And when it comes to militia groups, actually, it's more likely the army counterintelligence and JTTF.
00:14:48.000And they've been running infiltration operations into militia groups for a long, long time.
00:14:53.000And none other than Merrick Garland, as I alluded to earlier, has a storied history in this very theme.
00:16:10.000But as to what's really going on, I could I could only offer vague speculations.
00:16:16.000And I'd really defer to your it's just it's just really interesting, Darren, that the FBI goes to this guy seeking twenty five million dollars to free an American spy named Bob Levinson, who's busted in Iran.
00:16:29.000And they pitched to Deripaska that his problems with the U.
00:16:36.000And that he'll be lauded as this great hero if he only pays this twenty five million.
00:16:41.000So I guess to a Russian oligarch billionaire, that's not that much change.
00:16:46.000So he forks over the cash and then Mueller accuses him anyway in the Russia hoax for somehow like being the handler of Donald Trump in this crazy fiction.
00:17:10.000But then for it to be like a deep state mad lib where then this sort of local con man fool pitches this notion, you know, to my family and to me that somehow I've got these problems and I've got to pay twenty five million dollars to free Bob Levinson.
00:17:25.000It's just really interesting that like the these ops get repeated.
00:17:29.000Right. The pattern recognition here is that just like the Bob Levinson twenty five million dollar op is sort of repeated on Deripaska and then me.
00:17:39.000You see this sort of like infiltration of militia groups storming a capital like was kind of the original plan in Michigan.
00:17:47.000And then lo and behold, you're able to sort of catch some rubes in the whole scheme.
00:17:52.000I think that that is the pattern recognition that we're seeing.
00:17:56.000No, that's an excellent insight. They they're not especially ingenious when it comes to these things or creative.
00:18:02.000And the sad part is, is in most cases they don't really need to be.
00:18:06.000They can keep running the same dumb operations and usually they get what they want because they have entire control of the media and they have control of a lot of institutions.
00:18:16.000So usually they're able to get away with it. Luckily, with opposition voices rising in the media and so forth, people are kind of wising up to it.
00:18:25.000But it the the lack of creativity is actually something that I find especially astonishing.
00:18:32.000Yeah. Like, do they teach this in the FBI Academy, twenty five million dollars, Bob Levinson?
00:18:36.000Like, do they do they teach, you know, the storming the Capitol thing? Same operations.
00:18:40.000Well, speaking of dumb people getting their way, you've got a piece up on Revolver News that I'd encourage folks to check out regarding Tesla and litigation they've been in that has resulted in this sort of sort of bizarre outcome.
00:18:56.000You know, even with this company that we view as rejecting some of the woke ism of the day, walk folks through that that piece you've got on Revolver.
00:19:05.000Right. Well, it's it's an interesting case and I could go through the details, but I'll just focus on the general context of it and why it matters.
00:19:16.000So just very briefly, in fact, it wasn't even an employee of Tesla was a contractor and a contractor for Tesla had some kind of racial complaint, discrimination complaint against other contractors.
00:19:31.000They said the other side said supposedly offensive things to them.
00:19:36.000It turns out that the offending parties weren't even white, which is an interesting detail to it.
00:19:42.000But long story short, the aggrieved party in this case, the African-American aggrieved party.
00:19:50.000It's a judgment of something like one hundred thirty million dollars, some insane, some over one hundred million dollars for suffering such terrible fate at his job that he had to endure impolite remarks.
00:20:06.000Which, first of all, for perspective, that one hundred thirty million dollar judgment is more than people have gotten in in previous cases for just becoming completely paralyzed as a result of workplace injuries.
00:20:22.000And so this guy gets far more money than even quadriplegics have gotten in similar types of cases.
00:20:29.000But I think beyond the typical outrage of a case like this, which sort of combines out of control litigiousness with out of control wokeness and so forth, is it really, I think, helps to refine our notion of what type of economy that we're in.
00:20:46.000Because there's this notion, I think, that a lot of conservatives sort of cling to almost as an opiate that, oh, you know, if you get woke, you go broke.
00:20:55.460And in a way that makes sense, because a lot of this woke stuff is so divorced from any ordinary common sense conception of reality that we think that you can't carry these fantasies on in the business world.
00:21:09.480You get crushed because the business world is, you know, hard and logical and there's a direct cause and effect relationship that anyone would would think of.
00:21:19.420And if you prioritize wokeness over efficiency and competence, you'll produce inferior products and you'll get crushed by the competitor.
00:21:28.000Now, that all sounds very nice and it would make sense in a econ 101 theoretical course.
00:21:33.640But I think what this shows and really anyone paying attention to the economy over the past, say, decade, maybe even more, is that this isn't really how the economy operates.
00:21:43.480And the Tesla case in particular shows how deeply embedded civil rights law is into the economy such that if you are a major corporation operating at the highest level, your downside risk from some kind of, you know, racial agreement case is existential.
00:22:03.480And the Revolver.News article goes through cases of major mergers that got held up because of seemingly trivial racial offenses and so forth.
00:22:16.820And so I think this really underscores that we need to understand that wokeness is not just some hysteria that's sort of attached on to an otherwise coherent and functioning economy.
00:22:29.660Wokeness, the tentacles of wokeness are integrated into the very foundation of the economy at this point through the vehicle of law, through the vehicle of NGOs and the media and other institutions such that it's actually the reverse.
00:22:50.380Unless you go woke, you cannot operate at the highest level of the American economy, similar to in China.
00:22:58.220If you're Jack Ma and you're a great businessman, but you offend the CCP, you get crushed.
00:23:04.540If you want to operate at the highest level in business or anything else, you have to bend the knee to what amounts to really the official ideology of the American regime, which is wokeness.
00:23:15.860You know, and we've got a great episode, Welcome to the Woketopia, that really breaks down some of the goals and objectives of this movement.
00:23:24.060And the conclusion is we have to take it seriously.
00:23:26.520You know, the left wants us to believe that America is systemically racist.
00:23:30.540But unfortunately, this piece that you have on this one particular litigation event shows how systemically woke the country is from the judicial system to the economy, to even the way that we resolve what might otherwise be pretty pedestrian disputes.
00:23:46.560And if I could add something that I think is just so bizarre, but fascinating that we uncovered and we excerpt it in this Tesla piece at Revolver.News, but it's really from a previous piece.
00:24:00.980And of course, in the ordinary context, this is completely ridiculous.
00:24:05.540The statistics, in fact, simply don't bear out the sort of progressive understanding of what systemic racism is.
00:24:14.680However, in a very literal sense, there is a systemic racism.
00:24:18.840And this is another element of how wokeness and sort of the diversity agenda is deeply integrated into the nature of the economy.
00:24:28.540And that is that there are so many perks to being a minority in terms of getting business loans, in terms of getting all sorts of other deals.
00:24:37.280And people ask, well, why don't people just go, you know, become trans minority and just identify as a minority in order to get these perks?
00:25:34.360But to my knowledge, there's been no charge of insurrection or terrorism.
00:25:40.400Largely, the charges that have been levied against those who are involved in breaking the law result in property damage charges.
00:25:47.120And it's my expectation that if there are folks who broke the law, they should be treated no better or no worse than anyone else who breaks these particular laws.
00:26:01.500Mr. Chairman, the American people are in trouble.
00:26:04.060I was recently in Qatar on a bipartisan delegation led by Mr. Issa, and we learned directly that thousands upon thousands of Afghans were let into our country with principally no vetting, no screening.
00:26:17.360The general we met with at the base in Doha said that refugees were merely handed a blank sheet of paper and whatever they wrote on it was deemed their paper passport.
00:26:28.740And people are concerned about that on our border.
00:26:35.640I never believed that President Biden could be worse than President Obama on the border.
00:26:40.380But we've gone from the Obama days of catch and release to the Biden days of import and release,
00:26:47.440where people are being really beckoned across the border as a consequence of our policies and then shuttled around the country.
00:26:55.640And our supply chain issues have come to the forefront of the minds of so many of Americans.
00:27:01.300I mean, supply chain used to be something people learned about in economics class.
00:27:05.380And now the supply chain issues are resulting in inadequate access to things that people need.
00:27:11.780And we see the Washington Post tell Americans to just lower their expectations regarding the American economy.
00:27:21.920I was recently at the Port of Long Beach.
00:27:23.860I saw just, you know, cargo ship after cargo ship.
00:27:27.700You could about walk from the Port of Long Beach to the Channel Islands in California without ever having your feet touch the water on cargo ships that cannot come into port because of a total failure of the U.S. economy.
00:27:40.120Our country has been humiliated abroad in Afghanistan, where reliance on this strategy of an Afghan government being left to facilitate American departure and withdrawal turned out to be a total fiction.
00:27:55.460And yet here we are reviewing Steve Bannon's podcast.
00:27:59.340You know, the average American, when they wake up, I don't think one of the first hundred things they think about is Steve Bannon's podcast, the things he said before or after January 6th.
00:28:13.820I think that is a uniquely Washington obsession.
00:28:17.080And it wouldn't be so damaging to our country if it wasn't absorbing the capacity of the Congress to meet the actual challenges that the American people are facing.
00:28:25.980Do you really think that your constituents are out there hoping that you guys are here sharing your hot takes on Steve Bannon's podcast rather than dealing with the inflation that is crushing them, the border crisis that is concerning them, the problems we have abroad?
00:28:41.860It's truly shameful that this has got the focus and the obsession of so many in the Congress.