The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz - May 20, 2020


Episode 8 - Roger Stone Will Be Pardoned, F-35 Crash, and Vice President Pence in Florida

Topics
Florida nursing homes and policies
Hosted by
Matt Gaetz
Mentioned
Roger Stone Donald Trump Jr. Robert Mueller Michael Flynn Barack Obama DeSantis Hillary Clinton Jerome Corsi Susan Rice Jim Comey Andrew Cuomo Mike Pence Alexander Hamilton Trump Campaigned Jared Kushner Andrew McCabe Peter Strzok Trish Regan Mary Mayhew Don Young and 8 more
Episode 7 - Rubio Tapped for Intel Chairman, Trump Leading on COVID Testing, Camp David's Incredible History Episode 9 - DeSantis Unloads on Media, Future Florida Man Elon Musk, Ratcliffe Confirmed as Intel Director

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

168.9

Word count

3,349

Sentence count

205

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Roger Stone should not spend a single day in jail, Congressman Matt Gaetz says. Matt also calls on President Trump to issue a pardon for Roger Stone, who has been charged with conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Hot Takes. This is Congressman Matt Gaetz. Let's talk about the news.
00:00:21.160 Roger Stone should not spend one day in jail. I tweeted that out recently and it is now trending.
00:00:28.120 It seems as though there are a lot of people in the MAGA movement who agree with me that the Roger Stone prosecution, the Michael Flynn prosecution, the attempt to set up Donald Trump Jr., the attempt to smear Jared Kushner were all part of the corrupt plan initiated by Jim Comey, executed by Robert Mueller to try to steal the presidency of Donald Trump away from the voters who elected him.
00:00:57.240 And the whole deal that the FBI and Mueller were trying to execute was a pressure campaign.
00:01:04.360 They were trying to find the people around President Trump, find anything that they could set him up for, that they could find that they might have done bad in the 80s,
00:01:14.060 that they could tell an untrue story about, like the Donald Trump Jr. meeting on June 9th in Trump Tower.
00:01:22.480 And their hope was that they could find this group of people around the president, get them to then lie and flip and turn on the president.
00:01:31.300 Now, don't just take my word for it that that was the case.
00:01:33.560 That's exactly what the Mueller team tried to do with Michael Flynn.
00:01:37.880 They set him up.
00:01:38.980 They pressured his son.
00:01:40.280 And you know what?
00:01:41.280 Michael Flynn did not take the bait.
00:01:44.320 He did not go and make false statements about the president.
00:01:47.260 And now it's my expectation that Flynn will be exonerated.
00:01:50.360 But it wasn't just Flynn, right?
00:01:52.380 It was Jerome Corsi.
00:01:54.780 I mean, Jerome Corsi is a weird dude, no doubt, but that's not illegal.
00:01:57.940 And while he might have been utilizing some strange sourcing to go and find out what was going on with WikiLeaks,
00:02:04.840 that certainly doesn't mean he was engaged in criminal activity.
00:02:08.620 But Corsi even said on numerous interviews on Trish Regan's show that the reason he felt this pressure from the Mueller prosecutors
00:02:18.160 was because he wouldn't lie about the president.
00:02:20.720 Let's take a listen in on this commentary from Dr. Jerome Corsi about just how the pressure campaign works with Mueller.
00:02:27.620 The only facts Mueller's interested in are the facts that meet his predetermined theory.
00:02:32.880 Since I said it didn't happen that way, suddenly they wanted to say, you're a liar, you're going to go to prison the rest of your life. 0.98
00:02:39.260 And not only are you a liar, but you're alleging that they're saying, not only are you a liar, 0.99
00:02:42.580 we're going to make your life absolutely miserable until you come around to our way of thinking. 0.99
00:02:47.000 And they've done everything they can.
00:02:48.280 They make you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal defense.
00:02:51.440 They make you, you know, you're just about, are we going to lose the house?
00:02:54.220 Well, I don't think so.
00:02:55.080 So, you know, they make you go through, is dad going to be in prison in Christmas time?
00:03:00.080 Well, I can't say no.
00:03:02.100 I mean, so I've been fighting this.
00:03:03.900 Roger Stone, a lot like Corsi, didn't flip, didn't turn, didn't lie.
00:03:09.860 When it came to President Trump, you know, there were circumstances that Stone, in fact, recently reflected on,
00:03:17.280 where if he was willing to say things about the president that weren't true,
00:03:21.460 then maybe he wouldn't have to face jail time.
00:03:23.700 Here's Roger Stone last night on Lou Dobbs Tonight making the case.
00:03:27.960 After illegal leaks over a year saying I would be charged with treason and conspiracy against the United States,
00:03:33.960 being the link between the Trump campaign and Russia,
00:03:37.240 they indicted me on the flimsiest charges of lying to Congress,
00:03:40.580 even though there was no underlying crime for me to lie about.
00:03:44.220 And then on July 24th, 2019, a member of the Mueller's Dirty Cop Squad approached one of my lawyers proposing a deal.
00:03:53.860 If Stone would be willing to re-remember the content of some 36 phone calls I had with candidate Trump
00:04:00.740 and admit that they were about Russia and WikiLeaks,
00:04:04.480 they would be willing to perhaps recommend no jail time.
00:04:08.580 And I said, no, this president needs to be re-elected, Lou.
00:04:12.380 He's the greatest president in my lifetime.
00:04:14.580 I would never give false testimony against him.
00:04:17.240 Roger Stone should have never been prosecuted.
00:04:19.820 He should have never been convicted.
00:04:21.820 The jury that he got was just completely rigged against him.
00:04:25.620 And now, the only appropriate action is to pardon Roger Stone.
00:04:31.840 I am calling on President Trump to issue this pardon,
00:04:35.400 not for the president's benefit, not even for Roger's benefit,
00:04:39.240 but for the benefit of a justice system that cannot be perverted for political ends
00:04:44.020 when the elites don't like the fact that someone like Donald Trump won the election.
00:04:49.180 Today, Roger Stone is disproportionately carrying the burden
00:04:53.000 of the fake, corrupt Mueller investigation that was really initiated,
00:04:58.600 we know now, when the Obama administration was trying to set up Trump on their final days in office.
00:05:06.180 The recently released emails from Susan Rice show that Comey never thought
00:05:11.520 that Flynn was passing information to Kislyak.
00:05:15.180 He never had any basis for that view.
00:05:17.600 He just wanted a way to smear Flynn.
00:05:19.920 So did Susan Rice.
00:05:21.040 And so they used this bogus interview as a predicate
00:05:26.400 to try to get the guy out of a job that they didn't want him in
00:05:29.500 because he had policy views that they didn't particularly like.
00:05:32.960 With Roger Stone, you know, look, I've known Roger for the better part of a decade.
00:05:39.200 And Roger is, you know, a political BS artist.
00:05:43.060 I mean, there are those folks on the Republican side and those folks on the Democrat side.
00:05:47.020 And, you know, we don't want to live in a country where the totalitarian authoritarian governments 0.95
00:05:52.260 get to say that because you're weird and we don't like your politics that we get to freaking throw you in jail.
00:05:57.620 But that seems to be what some of these folks on the far left want to do to Roger. 0.80
00:06:01.940 So it's my hope.
00:06:03.340 It's my expectation that Roger will be pardoned.
00:06:05.820 I spoke to Roger Stone yesterday.
00:06:09.140 Again, I've known Roger for a long time.
00:06:11.680 And the timing of this pardon is important.
00:06:15.020 Roger's wife is ill.
00:06:16.680 He's lost his health insurance.
00:06:18.740 He's had to sell his home.
00:06:20.420 He's destitute.
00:06:21.740 It's hard for him to get work because, you know, who's going to hire a convicted felon,
00:06:25.860 even if it was a political setup job.
00:06:28.620 And so I think to restore justice and to correct the double standard that seems to bother the president so much,
00:06:35.240 we would love to see a pardon of Roger Stone.
00:06:37.640 And by the way, President Trump is right that there is a double standard.
00:06:42.360 He is frustrated that there seemed to be a statement from Bill Barr that there wouldn't be prosecutions of Obama or Biden.
00:06:50.000 And again, I'm not saying that that we have that evidence today, but I wouldn't rule it out.
00:06:55.000 Here's President Trump reflecting on the need to not have a double standard yesterday.
00:06:59.380 But I think Obama and Biden knew about it.
00:07:02.300 There were participants.
00:07:03.860 But so I'm a little surprised by that statement.
00:07:07.140 I don't think he said it quite the way you said it.
00:07:09.220 I think he said as of this moment, I guess.
00:07:11.640 But if it was me, I guarantee they'd be going after me in his case than not.
00:07:16.720 So I think it's just a continuation of a double standard.
00:07:19.360 I'm surprised by it.
00:07:20.180 I made the case for Roger Stone's pardon on the television show.
00:07:23.700 And Trump Complain-a-thon, The View.
00:07:27.240 Here's my commentary with the ladies of The View on the pardoning of Roger Stone.
00:07:31.280 Do you think Trump should pardon Roger Stone?
00:07:34.200 I do.
00:07:34.700 And I think that it requires a review of the pardon power.
00:07:38.100 Come on.
00:07:38.700 Come on.
00:07:39.620 Barack Obama pardoned over 1,700 people.
00:07:43.000 Bill Clinton pardoned 459 people.
00:07:45.020 Those were people he didn't know.
00:07:45.740 Bill Clinton pardoned 16 people who were a member of a Puerto Rican terrorist organization
00:07:49.640 that planned murders at the Franz Tavern here in the United States of America.
00:07:54.200 Perhaps that wasn't the right thing to do.
00:07:56.100 When we designed our Constitution, there were vestiges of the British monarchy
00:08:00.060 that Americans still had some reverence for.
00:08:02.780 And one was the notion that the executive, that the sovereign,
00:08:05.660 could extend unlimited grace for any reason or no reason at all.
00:08:10.360 Yeah, that was an element of the British system that I was saying was borrowed from.
00:08:16.280 No, no, I understand.
00:08:17.020 What I was getting at is, can we agree that perhaps that pardon power needs to be reviewed and curbed?
00:08:24.280 So, great question.
00:08:25.560 In Federalist 74, Alexander Hamilton writes that the reason we have the pardon power
00:08:30.540 is to serve as a check on a criminal justice system,
00:08:33.640 which, if allowed to run wild, could create a great sense of sanguinity in our country.
00:08:38.540 And so I think that if you look at the original intent of the pardon power,
00:08:41.380 it cannot be limited.
00:08:42.780 And again, Trump has pardoned 26 people.
00:08:45.060 Obama pardoned over 1,700.
00:08:46.800 Bill Clinton pardoned 459.
00:08:48.560 So, did you...
00:08:49.520 The answer to the question is what?
00:08:51.360 I would agree that Roger Stone should be pardoned,
00:08:53.860 if for no other reason that there has been a double standard in this country
00:08:56.900 where people like Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, Clapper, Brennan...
00:09:01.540 So, I just didn't understand if you had answered.
00:09:02.140 Go ahead, Megan.
00:09:02.980 So, the president has all the power to do something about it.
00:09:06.280 He has used the pardon power.
00:09:07.780 I think, effectively, where people have been unfairly targeted.
00:09:11.700 And I would love to see President Trump pardon Roger Stone
00:09:15.080 to ensure that Roger Stone does not spend one day in jail.
00:09:19.400 And you know what?
00:09:20.460 I'm going to call it.
00:09:21.500 I'm going to make a prediction right here and right now
00:09:24.180 that not only should Roger Stone be pardoned,
00:09:27.460 Roger Stone will be pardoned.
00:09:30.200 President Trump understands justice.
00:09:33.160 He is aggrieved as someone who was unfairly targeted.
00:09:36.620 I think he has empathy for those who were unfairly targeted.
00:09:40.060 And I have every expectation that President Trump will pardon Roger Stone
00:09:45.040 and that Roger Stone will not spend one day in jail.
00:09:48.320 That will be true justice.
00:09:50.060 And that will bear a stark contrast to the corrupt, politically motivated investigations that started
00:09:57.580 with the Obama administration, that were memorialized by Susan Rice in her emails,
00:10:03.180 that were sleazily conducted by Jim Comey as he was saying he was doing things by the book
00:10:09.440 while at the same time deviating to go and target Michael Flynn.
00:10:12.980 And then that which was ultimately contrived by the Mueller team.
00:10:18.460 The Mueller team couldn't get Trump, who they really wanted.
00:10:21.220 They couldn't get Donald Trump Jr., who was target 1A.
00:10:24.920 And so now they used the full might and force of the $40 million they spent
00:10:30.120 and the countless agents and subpoenas to lock up Roger freaking Stone,
00:10:34.580 who happened to guess right that WikiLeaks was going to bust Hillary Clinton. 0.97
00:10:39.220 Roger Stone will be pardoned and justice will be restored.
00:10:42.980 Big news in Northwest Florida.
00:10:52.120 Two military aircraft in the last week have crashed, an F-22 and also an F-35.
00:10:58.620 The F-22 crashed on the Eglin Reservation with a safe pilot eject.
00:11:04.620 The F-35 crashed late last night.
00:11:08.220 We expect that was over water with also an ejection.
00:11:11.780 And it's our understanding that the pilot is safe.
00:11:14.240 My congressional team has reached out to Eglin Air Force Base to ensure that they have all the resources they need to conduct an investigation.
00:11:22.440 What I'm grateful for is that when we have these unfortunate circumstances,
00:11:27.280 we always want to see the diminution in any risk to civilian personnel, civilian property.
00:11:38.140 And of course, the most valuable weapon we have in our military is not any airplane or tank or missile.
00:11:44.040 The most valuable weapon we have is the brave fighting force, the folks who put the uniform on and express their patriotism by serving our country at the highest level.
00:11:53.280 These crashes are not, at this point, indicative of some major failure of the weapon systems.
00:12:00.940 I am grateful that the military will have review panels that come in and evaluate everything from the technical equipment to the different risk factors to the choices made by the pilot.
00:12:13.820 And we will get full reports.
00:12:15.280 So I don't expect a lot of news on that.
00:12:17.960 I'm very soon.
00:12:19.660 I am grateful that the pilots appear to be safe, that there was no loss of civilian life or property.
00:12:26.820 And it's a reminder that with the training mission that has to constantly be going on throughout my community and throughout our country to keep our nation at the right level of readiness, that these training missions are risky.
00:12:40.640 You know, these night sorties, these night jumps, these, you know, swamp training exercises that we host in my mission, they do cost lives.
00:12:49.860 And it only should further deepen our appreciation for those who are willing to wear that uniform and maintain that hair trigger readiness in the event that our country needs.
00:13:07.060 Vice President Mike Pence will be in Orlando, Florida today with Governor DeSantis.
00:13:11.340 He'll be visiting a nursing home and holding a meeting with tourism industry leaders to see how we can make the right safety moves to ensure that this tourism sector of our economy is able to rebound.
00:13:23.920 And in Florida, it's really important.
00:13:26.540 We have over 100 million people every year who visit our state.
00:13:32.020 We don't have a state income tax.
00:13:33.960 We have a state sales tax.
00:13:35.140 So in a lot of ways in Florida, we balance our budget on the backs of the people who come here, who come to Disney World and Miami Beach and my community in Destin, Florida and spend their money.
00:13:46.460 And we use that for our schools and our roads and also to take care of the visitors who come here with the form of services that they need, like emergency care, lifeguards and those types of things.
00:13:57.420 The head of Visit Florida, Dana Young, recently said that we have seen a decrease in revenue and spending in our hotels over the six-week period to the tune of $1.6 billion.
00:14:10.400 So I suspect that there'll be a lot of discussion about what we anticipate regarding demand.
00:14:16.480 I could just tell you here, I'm back in Florida today.
00:14:19.600 And as I've traveled around my community this morning, people are out and about.
00:14:24.160 They're giving each other appropriate distance.
00:14:27.980 You know, you don't see folks bunched up in lines.
00:14:30.720 When people pass each other, they're very respectful and giving each other space.
00:14:34.880 But as I'm looking out here in Fort Walton Beach, Florida today, folks aren't locked up and pinned down in their houses.
00:14:43.620 They're out and about and under the sun and hopefully everyone stays safe.
00:14:47.660 The particular focus of the vice president on nursing homes is one I want to talk about because
00:14:52.880 too often in these moments of national tension and crisis, like we gravitate to the style over the substance.
00:15:03.600 And substantively, I think there was a key decision that was either made or not made with nursing homes
00:15:10.180 that has informed on a lot of these spikes and deaths and how the coronavirus has been very lethal to a great number of Americans.
00:15:20.780 In the state of Florida, we made a key decision.
00:15:24.940 If someone had coronavirus, if we thought they had coronavirus, if we were waiting for test results,
00:15:31.460 if they were in the hospital and might have coronavirus,
00:15:34.460 we did not send that patient back to the nursing home.
00:15:38.100 Governor DeSantis and our Agency for Healthcare Administration head Mary Mayhew made the right call
00:15:44.580 to not reinsert people who may be infected into a nursing home environment.
00:15:50.020 Andrew Cuomo in New York made precisely the alternate decision.
00:15:55.100 He actually took people from the hospitals and sent them back to the nursing homes.
00:16:00.180 And so again, while I'm sure the country is regaled by the great pros of Andrew Cuomo
00:16:06.780 and his daily press conferences, all of the tone and tenor and bedside manner in the world
00:16:12.080 doesn't help if you're taking people who have freaking coronavirus
00:16:15.040 and you're putting them into situations with other vulnerable people
00:16:18.820 who have a high likelihood of dying as a result of coronavirus.
00:16:22.660 In the state of New York, nursing homes have accounted for over 4,800 deaths.
00:16:28.080 I mean, you think about that number, it's like considerably more than New Yorkers suffered following 9-11, for goodness sakes.
00:16:37.440 And in the state of Florida, because we didn't make that choice, we've had only 665 deaths in nursing homes.
00:16:44.980 And while each one of those deaths is tragic, you could see the substantial difference just in that one policy choice.
00:16:51.000 So again, it's not just how someone is on television or whether or not you like the tone of their voice
00:16:56.400 or their witty comebacks to the politicians they disagree with.
00:16:59.280 It's actually about the choices that are made.
00:17:01.760 Governor DeSantis made the right choice.
00:17:03.880 We have fewer nursing home deaths.
00:17:05.700 In New York, they made the wrong choice.
00:17:07.860 We also see nursing home deaths, you know, contributing a great deal to the mortality throughout the country.
00:17:13.980 The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio, they've got a story out about how 60% of the deaths in Ohio are nursing home deaths.
00:17:19.740 We see that trend also in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Inquirer, indicating that a lot of the places where they're seeing nursing home deaths are in Philly
00:17:30.120 and in the Philly suburbs where those nursing homes were not prepared and perhaps did not make the right policy choices that we made here in the state of Florida.
00:17:40.220 So it's great to see the vice president coming.
00:17:43.080 He and his team have been fantastic.
00:17:44.800 I can tell you there was one specific circumstance where a company in the state of Florida was providing oxygen tank deliveries to a number of our residents.
00:17:54.520 And again, you know, this is Florida.
00:17:56.400 We're sort of God's waiting room.
00:17:57.760 So we have tens of thousands of people in our state who receive deliveries of oxygen tanks that literally is their lifeline.
00:18:06.100 And this company wasn't able to get the appropriate personal protective equipment for their employees so that as they were delivering life-saving oxygen, they would not be a vector for the disease.
00:18:19.740 I talked to the vice president and his team about this.
00:18:22.580 They got right on it, worked with me to ensure that even this private company, but they were performing such a, you know, such a critical public purpose through the Medicaid program that they had the right equipment to care for Floridians.
00:18:34.480 Here's Vice President Pence with Governor DeSantis in Florida today.
00:18:37.800 Governor DeSantis from early on made a priority of seniors here in Florida.
00:18:43.500 Your administration recognized the unique challenges that seniors, particularly those with underlying health conditions, would have, the coronavirus.
00:18:53.620 I know while we were raising standards at the national level, you were implementing limitations on people entering nursing homes.
00:19:00.680 You created new standards.
00:19:01.780 You enforced those, and let me just say, Governor, we're really grateful for your leadership.
00:19:06.140 And now, as Florida begins to open up again in counties across the state, following your best information, your best analysis, we're going to continue to partner with you to protect our most vulnerable, but to get Florida and America back to work.
00:19:24.200 So it's great to have the vice president back in Florida today with the governor, and I'm sure they'll make progress in protecting our most vulnerable and then crafting some of the policies that we'll need to invigorate the great American comeback.
00:19:38.720 And certainly in Florida, that will include the tourism economy.
00:19:41.460 If you're enjoying Hot Takes with Matt Gaetz, make sure to subscribe, leave us a five-star rating and review, and tune in tomorrow for more Hot Takes.