Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter late last night. We ll get into everything that means, what it shows about Joe Biden, about Democrats, and about the state of American politics. First, your reminder, Cyber Monday is now here! Get 50% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships, including all access to my live weekly Q&A where you can join me live for exclusive weekly questions.
00:00:23.000Alrighty, so last night, Joe Biden decided that now was the moment.
00:00:28.000Yes, of course, he had promised he was not going to pardon his son Hunter on gun and tax charges, but hell, that dude is leaving office, ain't no reason for him to lie anymore, and so last night he released a statement announcing that he was going to pardon his son Hunter on all charges, not just grant commutation of the sentence.
00:00:44.000You can actually grant commutation of your president, meaning that he could have left all the guilty pleas on the books for his son.
00:00:50.000He could have left all the convictions on the books for his son, and still his son could have not gone to jail.
00:00:55.000Instead, he decided to issue a full pardon, meaning that his record is wiped clean.
00:01:00.000And he didn't just issue a full pardon for the things for which Hunter was convicted or to which he pled guilty.
00:01:05.000He issued a full pardon going all the way back To January 1st, 2014, a nearly 11-year period.
00:01:13.000Anything he did, blanket pardon for everything.
00:01:16.000In fact, this led to the rather hilarious spectacle of last night, Joe Biden issues this pardon.
00:01:23.000And there were still like three or four hours to go on December 1st.
00:01:27.000And so theoretically, Hunter Biden could have done the funniest thing and like gone on a murder spree or something.
00:01:32.000The pardon still would have applied, actually, at least with regard to federal crimes.
00:02:23.000Since the time he was in the Senate in Delaware.
00:02:25.000He used his position to enrich his brothers, Frank and James.
00:02:28.000He used his position to enrich his sister, Val.
00:02:31.000He used his position in order to deploy Hunter Biden, his derelict, drug-addled son, all over the world to pick up sacks of cash on behalf of the family from China to Ukraine.
00:02:41.000And much of that was apparently being held in trust for, quote-unquote, the big guy, according to contemporaneous email messages and texts that were sent by Hunter Biden on that famous Hunter Biden laptop.
00:02:53.000So why is he issuing a pardon on all of this stuff?
00:02:55.000Because he is afraid that it's not just the charges that Hunter Biden was caught up in that will be the subject of further investigation.
00:03:02.000He's trying to clear the decks so that Hunter Biden is now off the hook for literally everything, including his time at Burisma.
00:03:09.000It is not a coincidence that this pardon begins January 1st, 2014. When exactly did Hunter Biden join Burisma?
00:03:16.000The answer, April 2014. So, he's clearly attempting to wipe the books of Hunter Biden's Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, of his corruption, of any possible investigation into the money that passed hands between foreign countries and Hunter Biden, and then was held by Hunter Biden for the big guy.
00:03:34.000This is full-scale, obvious political corruption of the most unseemly sort.
00:03:39.000And Joe Biden put out a statement on this, and here is what the statement says.
00:03:43.000Quote, Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
00:03:46.000From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making, and I kept my word, even as I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted.
00:03:55.000Okay, so first of all, if you say that you're not going to interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making, and then you full-on pardon your son after claiming that the Justice Department selectively prosecuted your son, that would be technically the largest-scale interference with the Department of Justice.
00:04:11.000Sure, you let them waste millions of dollars prosecuting your son only to pardon him later, but you are openly suggesting that they were corrupt, that they did something wrong, which they didn't.
00:04:21.000President Biden says, quote, Now, the reality, of course, is that Joe Biden's son filled out a gun form claiming that he was not a drug addict while he was, in fact, in full-scale drug addiction mode snorting Parmesan cheese off carpets thinking that perhaps it was meth or cocaine.
00:04:48.000According to Joe Biden, however, this was all unfair.
00:04:50.000Now, if you lie on a gun registration form by being a drug addict, the punishment is up to 10 years in jail or $250,000 in fines.
00:04:59.000And very often, those sorts of charges are brought specifically so you then plea bargain the person so that they'll flip on somebody else.
00:05:05.000But with regard to Hunter Biden, the notion that he was selectively prosecuted in this case, if he were some poor kid from Appalachia, the chances that this kid would not have been But according to Joe Biden, it was all corrupt.
00:05:25.000The real issue here is that the selective enforcement Justice Department was going after his poor, innocent 51-year-old, totally derelict son.
00:05:33.000Who happened to be picking up, you know, sacks of cash for him.
00:05:36.000According to President Biden, quote, those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions.
00:05:43.000It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.
00:05:46.000The charges in his cases came out only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
00:05:52.000Then a carefully negotiated plea deal agreed to by the Department of Justice unraveled in the courtroom with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process.
00:06:01.000Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter's cases.
00:06:04.000Now, if you will recall, actually what happened in this case is that the Justice Department tried to cut an unprecedented sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden.
00:06:13.000The nature of that deal is that there were essentially two sets of plea agreements.
00:06:19.000One was a plea agreement with regard to the gun charge, and the other added onto the tax charges all the other stuff that Hunter Biden might have done.
00:06:31.000So there was the plea deal on the gun charge, and that was out and in the open.
00:06:34.000And then there was a secret agreement on the tax charges that included an addendum that covered any other crimes that Hunter Biden may have committed during this period.
00:06:43.000And the judge in that case looked at the plea agreement and said, what the hell is this?
00:06:49.000Now again, there are IRS whistleblowers, one's name was Gary Shapley and one's name was Joseph Ziegler, who pointed out that the DOJ and IRS were preventing any sort of serious investigation into the connections between Hunter Biden financially and Joe Biden.
00:07:02.000The plea agreement itself was obviously a setup.
00:07:05.000As the Heritage Foundation's John Malcolm, who's the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government, as he writes, This plea agreement was anything but straightforward.
00:07:15.000The government actually entered two agreements with Biden, one which would normally require judicial approval and one which wouldn't.
00:07:20.000The parties hid material terms that should have been included in the one requiring judicial approval by putting them in the one that didn't.
00:07:26.000So the first agreement, which required judicial approval, was Biden's agreement to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of tax evasion in return for the government's agreement to recommend a sentence of probation.
00:07:36.000Now, that plea agreement set forth all the rights Biden would be waiving and including, as Exhibit 1, a recitation of the factual predicate for the plea, including a synopsis for the millions of dollars he's paid over the course of several years.
00:07:47.000But there was no word about any agreement by the government not to prosecute additional crimes in that plea agreement because this was only supposed to apply to the tax charges.
00:07:56.000But there was a separate agreement on the gun charges, which was a diversion agreement.
00:08:01.000It basically said that he was going to go to some sort of drug correctional program and would have permitted him to agree to a recommended two-year term of probation subject to certain standard conditions in return for an agreement by the government not to prosecute him for a separate gun charge.
00:08:14.000But under the terms of that agreement, if Biden were to complete probation successfully, the government would agree to drop that charge.
00:08:20.000The problem, of course, is that the diversion agreement Also required that if the government ever came to believe that Biden had materially breached the agreement, they would first have to ask the judge to make a final determination that he had done so before bringing charges.
00:08:32.000And second, the agreement said that if Biden complied with the terms of the agreement, the government would not prosecute him for any federal crimes encompassed by the attached statement of fact, which of course is everything regarding the Foreign Agents Registration Act stuff.
00:08:54.000But according to Joe Biden, the plea agreement was great.
00:08:58.000Again, it was a sweetheart deal that the DOJ cut with Joe Biden's son in the middle of the election cycle to serve a couple purposes.
00:09:06.000One, to get Hunter Biden off the hook.
00:09:07.000And two, as we will see, to make it look as though the DOJ was being fair.
00:09:13.000A lot of this Hunter Biden shtick was all about the idea that they were going after Donald Trump for everything under the sun.
00:09:19.000There are multiple federal cases being brought against Donald Trump, ranging from classified documents cases.
00:09:24.000By the way, the DOJ also failed to bring a classified documents violation case against President Biden himself, openly acknowledging, as Robert Herr, the special prosecutor, said, that Joe Biden had clearly violated federal law.
00:10:21.000They were only forced to prosecute Hunter Biden after the judge stepped in and said no.
00:10:25.000But back to Joseph Biden's entirely dishonest statement, quote, no reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion Then Hunter was singled out only because he was my son.
00:10:37.000There's been an effort to break Hunter, who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.
00:10:43.000In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me.
00:10:45.000And there's no reason to believe it will stop here.
00:10:48.000So he's suggesting here that if he doesn't pardon Hunter, there will be further charges that are brought against Hunter Biden on the Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, for example, or possible corruption with Joe.
00:11:04.000So if, for example, the DOJ, under, say, Pam Bondi, under a Trump administration, decides that Joe Biden ought to be prosecuted for violation of bribery statute, to take an example, Let's say that the DOJ investigates, and what they find is that Hunter Biden was likely picking up sacks of cash on behalf of his dad in foreign countries while his dad was vice president of the United States, for example.
00:11:29.000Hunter can no longer plead the Fifth, because to plead the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment is designed to prevent you from incriminating yourself.
00:11:36.000Well, if you've been pardoned for the possible crimes, then you literally have no grounds for citing the Fifth Amendment.
00:11:42.000It's just going to be a lot of I don't recall, I would imagine.
00:11:44.000Joe Biden continues, One of the great liars in American history, Joe Biden.
00:11:52.000Just tell the American people the truth, says the man who ran on the presumption that he was not senile for full-on two years while everyone knew it was untrue.
00:12:00.000They'll be fair-minded, says Joe Biden.
00:13:16.000And by the way, this is probably not the last pardon that Joe Biden is going to issue on behalf of his family.
00:13:20.000I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to pardon his brother Jim, who is also involved in much of the money-gathering activity on behalf of the Biden family.
00:13:28.000Now, if you recall, the media actually suggested at the time, because Joe Biden said he would not pardon Hunter, that this demonstrated what an upright, upstanding person Joe Biden was, somebody who respected the rule of law.
00:13:39.000And look at the DOJ, as I say, so impartial, willing to prosecute even the president's son.
00:13:44.000I mean, sure, they're going after Donald Trump, but they were even willing to go after Hunter Biden.
00:13:48.000Sure, they were trying to, you know, shuffle all of the Joe Biden questions off into the other room, into the darkness.
00:13:54.000And they're trying to avoid all culpability of Joe Biden in the classified document scandal or any culpability he had for his son utilizing his name to pick up sacks of cash in Ukraine, in the energy industry.
00:14:06.000Hunter Biden, by the way, knows nothing about the energy industry or Ukraine and has openly admitted the only reason he got that job is because his last name was Biden.
00:14:12.000But remember, the media angle when this happened, when Hunter was convicted and when Joe said he wouldn't pardon Hunter, was that this is because Joe was absolutely upstanding, a respecter of the institutions, normal.
00:14:24.000Remember, Donald Trump is the threat to normal.
00:14:31.000In fact, John Harwood, The former debate moderator in 2012, it's unbelievable.
00:14:36.000He literally tweeted at the time, this is June 13th, quote, people who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves.
00:14:45.000They can't imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.
00:14:50.000Well, you sweet, sweet summer child, John Harwood, I'm sure that that's what happened.
00:14:56.000And again, the media at the time suggested that this was all demonstrative of how the DOJ was impartial itself.
00:15:06.000According to, for example, Politico, quote, Hunter Biden verdict throws sand in the gears of GOP's attacks on legal system.
00:15:14.000The idea here was that the DOJ's willingness to prosecute Hunter demonstrated that they were just being fair and impartial about Donald Trump.
00:15:22.000Quote, Others tried to have it both ways.
00:15:36.000Kash Patel, former national security advisor of Trump, said the verdict, quote, demonstrates a fleeting moment of justice for all, while also arguing the trials of the former president and his rival's son will expose the inequities in our legal system based on its weaponization.
00:15:49.000So again, the idea was DOJ had been cleared by its prosecution of Hunter Biden.
00:15:54.000Joe Biden was an upstanding individual, and none of this was true.
00:16:36.000So they were lying and lying and lying again.
00:16:39.000Hunter Biden, for his part, is, of course, happy as a clam.
00:16:43.000He issued a statement, quote, I've admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction.
00:16:48.000Well, I mean, you didn't take responsibility for the daughter that you abandoned and then refused to allow into sort of the Biden household.
00:16:53.000Mistakes that have been exploited, he says, to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.
00:16:57.000Despite all of this, I've maintained my sobriety for more than five years because of my deep faith and the unwavering love and support of my family and friends.
00:17:04.000In the throes of addiction, I squandered the many opportunities and advantages I have.
00:17:08.000In recovery, we can be given the opportunity to make amends where possible and rebuild our lives if we never take for granted the mercy that we have been afforded.
00:17:14.000I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have to rebuild to helping those who are still sick and suffering.
00:17:21.000Also, presumably, he will sell finger paintings for half a million dollars.
00:17:25.000The absolute, utter, thoroughgoing corruption of the Biden family is perfectly obvious.
00:17:30.000And when it comes to this particular pardon...
00:17:33.000This is now basically a green light for Trump to do whatever he wants.
00:17:36.000If you're a Democrat and you were worried Donald Trump was just going to pardon January 6th, for example, you should be worried about that because your boy broke the system.
00:17:43.000This is the story of the last 20 years in American politics.
00:17:46.000Democrats break the system and then they are shocked when the system is broken.
00:17:50.000Whether you're talking about killing the filibuster for judicial nominees and then Republicans actually using that same rule.
00:17:57.000Or whether you're talking about the weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump during his presidency and now Donald Trump is going to come in and clean house.
00:18:10.000You guys don't get to complain about what Donald Trump does from here on in with the pardon power, given what Joe Biden just did.
00:18:16.000Not in order to exonerate his son or prevent him from getting a jail sentence, but in order to clear the decks forever for anything that both Hunter and Joe did from January 1st, 2014 and on.
00:18:29.000Jared Polis, who is a moderate Democrat governor of Colorado, moderate with a bit of a grain of salt, he tweeted yesterday, quote, Well, as a father, I certainly understand President Joe Biden's natural desire to help his son by pardoning him.
00:18:40.000I'm disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country.
00:18:42.000There's a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.
00:18:46.000When you become president, your role is paterfamilias of the nation.
00:18:49.000Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself.
00:18:52.000One can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a president and not a president's son.
00:18:58.000Now, Eric Holder, who was Barack Obama's wingman, he apparently tweeted out, quote, So you have people who are out there attempting to defend all of this by suggesting, well, it just shows what a loving father he is.
00:20:05.000Some of Biden's support team is beside itself today.
00:20:10.000MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes, former Republican, he said, quote, Now, again, that's probably true.
00:20:26.000Meanwhile, Chris Chaliza over at CNN, he says, quote, a colossally selfish decision that will allow every Trump supporter to note the Democrats say one thing and do another.
00:20:36.000Well, yeah, I mean, that's certainly true.
00:20:41.000And y'all who were attempting to say that Joe Biden was above the fray, Democrats were above the fray, they would never militarize or weaponize the justice system.
00:20:48.000They would never militarize or weaponize the deep state.
00:21:14.000And the same thing just happened in 2024 because people perceived that about Joe Biden as well.
00:21:20.000The vile dishonesty, the supreme and thoroughgoing corruption.
00:21:23.000Donald Trump is not the person who made all of that happen in American politics.
00:21:26.000He's the person who came along and pointed out that it was happening and everybody went, well, yep, I guess that's true.
00:21:33.000Meanwhile, this is also one of the reasons why Donald Trump yesterday announced that he was going to be nominating Kash Patel to the position of FBI director.
00:21:41.000So, we should note here, Democrats spent all of the first Trump administration attempting to weaponize career appointees inside the executive agencies against Donald Trump.
00:21:51.000That was particularly true with the FBI, which absolutely outdid itself in its corruption during the Trump administration won.
00:22:00.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, We advised Trump in January 2017 to fire then-director James Comey.
00:22:07.000Mr. Trump eventually fired Comey that spring after much self-imposed political damage.
00:22:10.000You'll remember that it was Comey who had effectively leaked the Steele dossier into public view by presenting it to Trump.
00:22:18.000And then someone said, hey, by the way, to BuzzFeed, by the way, this file has been presented to Trump.
00:22:22.000And then magically they had a news hook and it went out in public.
00:22:26.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, the FBI's abuses under Mr. Comey were the worst since J. Edgar Hoover.
00:22:31.000As documented by the Justice Department Inspector General and Special Counsel John Durham, officials lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a warrant against Trump campaign official Carter Page.
00:22:39.000They also lied about the disinformation in the Steele dossier, which was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:22:45.000This is how you get Kash Patel, who worked for GOP Representative Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee at the time.
00:22:50.000We had him on the show at the time, Devin Nunes, and he helped uncover a lot of these FISA abuses.
00:22:56.000So now, Patel, who worked for Nunes and uncovered an enormous amount of the scandalous behavior by the FBI surrounding Russiagate, now he is the person who's going to be up for running the FBI. Again, this is a direct result of Democrats believing that they get an unelected branch of government in order to effectuate their own policy.
00:23:15.000In defiance of the president who's the head of that branch.
00:23:18.000Here, for example, is Jeffrey Goldberg, an execrable editor of The Atlantic, stenographer for Barack Obama, just an awful person, Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting, you know, his hope that maybe people inside the executive agencies can thwart these nominees and what they're about to do.
00:23:33.000Can the people who are working there actually thwart, to use the word of the day, thwart what these nominees, what these future cabinet secretaries want to do?
00:24:17.000I mean, this is the attempt, the open attempt by members of the media to get members of the executive branch agencies to defy the president.
00:24:24.000This is why Donald Trump wants to clean house, because the same DOJ that came after him, the same DOJ that was involved in Russiagate and the FBI that was involved in Russiagate, this is why he's appointing people like Attorney General, nominee Pam Bondi, or Kash Patel over at FBI in order to clean house.
00:24:42.000He previously served as a U.S. National Security Council official and chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense.
00:24:48.000And as we say, he really first made his bones attempting to uncover Russiagate.
00:24:53.000President Trump made the announcement, quote, I am proud to announce that Kashyap Kash Patel will serve as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
00:25:00.000Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and America First fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending justice, and protecting the American people.
00:25:06.000He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.
00:25:12.000Kash did an incredible job during my first term, where he served as chief of staff at the Department of Defense.
00:25:20.000Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
00:25:26.000This FBI will end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the border.
00:25:34.000Cash will work under our great AG, Pan Bondi, to bring back fidelity, bravery, and integrity to the FBI. So, a lot of people have a lot of heartburn over Cash Patel today.
00:25:43.000The reason, again, Kash Patel is being nominated in the first place is because of widespread perceptions of political corruption inside of the FBI. So Chris Wray, who was a Trump appointee in the first place, he is serving a 10-year term, so he'll be in year 7 when he is presumably fired by Donald Trump, which, of course, Trump does have the constitutional ability to do.
00:26:01.000You'll remember that just a few months ago, he was specifically asked about the assassination attempt on Trump, and he suggested that maybe Trump had not been hit by a bullet.
00:26:12.000As I said, I think with respect to former President Trump, there's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.
00:26:23.000So it's conceivable, although as I sit here right now, I don't know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.
00:26:33.000I mean, this is ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.
00:26:35.000Of course, he had to clarify afterward.
00:26:37.000Wray also admitted that the FBI handed matters terribly during the Russiagate scandal.
00:26:43.000But that the Inspector General did find a number of instances where employees either failed to follow our policies, neglected to exercise appropriate diligence, or in some other way fell short of the standard of conduct and performance that we and that I, as Director, expect of all of our employees.
00:27:04.000But again, we are, and I am, ordering 40, over 40, corrective actions to address all of those things in a way that's robust and serious.
00:27:15.000And we're determined to learn the lessons from this report and make sure the FBI emerges from this even better and stronger.
00:27:22.000Well, the FBI so far has not emerged better or stronger.
00:27:25.000That's presumably the reason why Donald Trump is now going to attempt to clean house.
00:27:28.000Now, a lot of the objections to Kash Patel have come from some of the comments that he has made in the past regarding what he plans to do about political opponents he believes have committed criminal violations.
00:27:39.000Kash Patel, for example, appeared on War Room with Steve Bannon, and he talked about what the FBI might do with regard to opponents inside the FBI, for example.
00:27:50.000We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
00:27:58.000Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out.
00:28:00.000But yeah, we're putting you all on notice.
00:28:02.000So comments like that, obviously not particularly useful when you're talking about law enforcement agencies and the power of the federal government to do things like surveillance.
00:28:09.000But he's going to have to act within the boundaries of the law.
00:28:12.000He's just saying the quiet part out loud.
00:28:14.000The same thing that Janet Reno and Eric Holder and Merrick Garland have actually effectuated.
00:28:19.000Patel has also, to his credit, suggested the decentralization of the FBI, and he suggests that 7,000 FBI agents should, you know, be out there on the streets rather than spending their time tracking down Russiagate nonsense.
00:28:31.000Then we need to decrease what I call government creep with personnel.
00:28:37.000The FBI's footprint has gotten so freaking big...
00:28:41.000And the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops.
00:29:03.000Go chase down murderers and drug dealers and violent offenders.
00:29:07.000What do you need 7,000 people there for?
00:29:09.000Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here?
00:29:12.000Looking for their next government promotion.
00:29:14.000Looking for their next fancy government title.
00:29:16.000Looking for their parachute out of government.
00:29:18.000So while you're bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.
00:29:22.000Okay, again, all of that sounds not only perfectly reasonable, but perfectly necessary.
00:29:25.000And of course, as we say, Patel made his bones going after Russiagate.
00:29:28.000Here he was talking about how Russiagate was a hoax.
00:29:31.000Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general then of the DOJ, were tasked with helping us at Congress, where I ran the Russiagate investigation, to expose Russiagate.
00:29:44.000We went to them and said, look, you guys didn't do this.
00:29:52.000They launched an investigation against me, the senior congressional investigator for Russiagate on the House Intelligence Committee, and six other staffers.
00:30:01.000They used grand jury subpoenas to get my personal information, my banking information, my emails, my cell phone information, everything else.
00:30:08.000And now, Donald Trump is making a habit, I think it's a good habit, of taking people who are victimized by the system and putting them in charge of the system so as to cleanse the system.
00:30:16.000In a second, we'll get to Democratic objections to Kash Patel.
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00:30:50.000Now remember, for Democrats, they have to simultaneously claim that their weaponization of the institutions isn't happening and that when it is happening, it is good.
00:31:05.000So, Representative Jamie Raskin, who took the lead in the impeachment trials of Donald Trump in the House, he says he has no proof that the FBI or DOJ were ever weaponized at any point, under any circumstances.
00:31:18.000I haven't seen what the proof is that the FBI has been weaponized against a political party or the Department of Justice.
00:31:26.000Of course, this Department of Justice has brought charges against a Democratic U.S. senator in New Jersey, a Democratic congressman in Texas, and so some people just seem to think that it should go only in one direction,
00:31:42.000and if it doesn't, No, what they're talking about is the DOJ being weaponized against Donald Trump while trying to cut sweetheart deals with Hunter Biden only to be thwarted and then Joe Biden pardons Hunter.
00:31:58.000Or maybe what they mean is the FBI being utilized in order to get surveillance warrants against members of the Trump campaign and then leaders of the FBI working against Along with the media, in order to leak false documentation from Hillary Clinton into public view.
00:32:16.000Speaking of which, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is very upset about Kash Patel.
00:32:20.000He suggests that Trump is planning to dismantle the FBI. What does this signal in terms of Donald Trump's intent for the FBI? The installation or the nomination, I guess we should say at this point, of Kash Patel's FBI director can only possibly be a plan to disrupt, to dismantle, to distract the FBI and to possibly use it as a tool for the president's political agenda.
00:32:49.000Now again, listening to Andrew McCabe talk about politicization as though he was not involved is insane.
00:32:54.000You'll remember that he was actually fired originally back in March of 2018 because he allegedly had been leaking information from the FBI to the Wall Street Journal in an attempt to demonstrate the FBI had actually been going after Hillary Clinton.
00:33:09.000He lost his pension temporarily and all the rest.
00:33:11.000These are the people who are at the FBI. Meanwhile, the panel at MSNBC, which is perfectly happy with weaponization of the executive branch, so long as it's against a Republican, is very upset about this.
00:33:21.000Cash Patel as FBI director would be like if you cross Alex Jones with J. Edgar Hoover in terms of just how much he would want to ignore precedent and the constraints that have been put onto the FBI over the years.
00:33:33.000With all of the conspiracy theorizing, all of the eagerness to ban the flames of the worst instincts that President Trump put into power, those two things should never mix.
00:33:45.000Cash Patel has a vote and he is a couple of votes away from that happening once he's put before the Senate.
00:33:52.000Again, all these folks care about is weaponization of the government on their own behalf.
00:33:57.000But the reality is that one of the chief missions of the new Trump administration is going to be to defenestrate all of those who would be involved in the left-wing politicization of these departments.
00:34:07.000This is why, for example, the head of the NIH is now presumably going to be Jay Bhattacharya.
00:34:12.000As the New York Times points out, the National Institutes of Health, the world's leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record.
00:34:18.000No surprise the agency has been called the crown jewel of the federal government.
00:34:21.000But come January, when President-elect Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the NIH may face a reckoning.
00:34:27.000Well, yeah, because it deserves a reckoning.
00:34:29.000Have you seen some of the idiotic studies funded by the NIH? They spend literally billions of dollars on absolute sheer nonsense gobbledygook that has nothing to do with actual science.
00:34:41.000Bhattacharya has called for dramatic restructuring for the NIH. He says it's led by small-minded bureaucrats, which is true.
00:34:47.000According to the New York Times, many fear the next administration will nonetheless weaken the NIH, divesting from critical research with long-lasting consequences for science, innovation, and public health.
00:34:57.000Jay Bhattacharya is a well-known researcher from Stanford University.
00:34:59.000He's not intending on preventing them from doing research.
00:35:02.000He wants them to be able to duplicate research, for example.
00:35:06.000They also want to be able to fund studies that aren't necessarily politically correct.
00:35:11.000He says he wants to restructure the agencies, says Bhattacharya, so the power is decentralized from, quote, a small number of scientific bureaucrats.
00:35:20.000The people who were victimized by these institutions are now going to be the people who are in charge of these institutions.
00:35:26.000And that needs to happen because the thoroughgoing corruption of institutions, both in the government and sort of at the gunpoint of government, that's very real.
00:35:34.000So Mark Andreessen, who, of course, is a billionaire venture capitalist from Silicon Valley.
00:35:41.000He did a pretty stunning episode with Joe Rogan talking about the phenomenon of what is called debanking.
00:35:45.000This would be people who are on the right predominantly who are cut off from the banking and financial system for political reasons, largely because of pressure from government.
00:35:54.000Here he was describing the phenomenon.
00:35:57.000So, debanking is when you, as either a person or your company, are literally kicked out of the banking system.
00:37:02.000And so, and then you go into this thing of like, well, there's no, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined, back to your fascism point, which is, there's no, there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech, but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you.
00:37:38.000I've spoken about this repeatedly myself.
00:37:40.000I testified before Congress about the sort of soft pressure from Democrats on social media that push social media to work with organizations that are now disbanded like GARM, which was a consortium of advertisers who got together and decided that they just were going to boycott basically anything that was on the right.
00:37:56.000Only public exposure forced GARM to essentially disband.
00:38:00.000The same thing is happening in the banking industry.
00:38:05.000There was a Supreme Court case a little bit earlier this year in which the Supreme Court wrongly found, in my opinion, a 6-3 majority wrongly found that people who sued the federal government for putting pressure on Facebook to take down their posts didn't have standing.
00:38:20.000But it's these sorts of problems that Trump world is there to fix.
00:38:24.000Trump world is going to have to be very creative about how they go about all of this.
00:38:27.000But if you're wondering why precisely Donald Trump is putting all these disruptors in positions of power, the answer is because the system is entirely corrupt.
00:38:35.000Now, again, these people, I think they're going to have to be very meticulous in how they go about depoliticking these institutions.
00:38:41.000The best way to do it, as Kash Patel himself suggests right there, is to shrink them dramatically.
00:38:45.000It turns out that with enormous power, with huge staffing, with literally 2 million people in the executive branch, it's very easy to exert the levers of pressure against people that you don't like from inside the government and using the government as a pressure tool against private industry and get private industry to do your dirty work the way that Mark Andreessen is talking about right there.
00:39:05.000The best way to do this would be to shrink government.
00:39:07.000This is one of the reasons why, more than even cutting government spending, what I think the Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy really needs to focus on It's less about cuts than it is about cutting the staffing.
00:39:19.000It's about shrinking the mandate of these particular branches of the government that are totally unanswerable.
00:39:27.000What just happened with Joe and Hunter Biden is the most obvious symptom of a far graver disease that is now spread throughout the executive branch of the government.
00:39:35.000People in positions of power who are willing to do the most corrupt things available in order to benefit themselves and harm their political opponents.
00:39:42.000And again, this is like the ring of power.
00:39:45.000And people think they can wield it fairly and accurate?
00:39:48.000It needs to be thrown into the fiery furnace from whence it came.
00:39:51.000It needs to be thrown into Mount Doom.
00:39:53.000And that means shrinking the size and scope of the federal government dramatically, particularly inside the executive branch.
00:40:00.000On the line is my friend Greg Hurwitz.
00:40:02.000You, of course, know him as a novelist and a screenwriter, but also from his appearance in our brand new Daily Wire Plus series, The Gospels, a 10-part follow-up to the highly acclaimed Exodus series with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
00:40:13.000Greg is one of the chief guests, one of the chief panelists in The Gospel Series.
00:40:17.000Greg, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:40:39.000And so, it was really great going into Gospels as I felt like there was a lot of, not just trust and rapport, but there was a lot of respect for everyone's particular perspective that they were going to bring to it.
00:40:50.000Whenever you're approaching anything that's this powerful narrative that's this powerful, I think it's very important that it gets encouraged to be approached with Respect and skepticism and differences and discussion and negotiation.
00:41:03.000And so it was really great having everyone there.
00:41:05.000I'd say the one person we really missed was Oz Guinness.
00:41:10.000It would have been wonderful to have an evangelical in the mix there, but it was terrific.
00:41:14.000And I feel like all the different perspectives coming in and around this central story were really key.
00:41:20.000So the first couple episodes are already out.
00:41:22.000That, of course, is episode one, which covers the birth, youth, and baptism of Jesus, and episode two, which is the beginning of his ministry.
00:41:28.000But what is your favorite episode that you guys filmed?
00:41:32.000I'm not sure which number it is, but I loved when we were going into, you know, for me, it's the Last Supper is so poignant.
00:41:40.000And this notion that we discuss where, you know, when people read the Gospels, everybody thinks that the key point to relate to is to relate to Jesus.
00:41:50.000And what's so interesting to me is the notion that we are all of the different characters, as in any biblical text.
00:41:56.000And we discussed this somewhat in Exodus.
00:41:59.000But we're Judas, and we are Paul, and we're the ones who deny.
00:42:04.000And it's this beautiful kind of constellation of different perspectives and personalities.
00:42:08.000And I love how that all comes together at the Last Supper.
00:42:11.000My favorite moment is probably the denying Christ three times before the crow comes.
00:42:19.000It sort of tells you that no matter how close you are to any version of spirituality, there's still things within you that'll break and that'll cave.
00:42:29.000So, it's an amazing story in which I think everybody fails.
00:42:33.000Every single person fails in some manner except for Jesus.
00:42:39.000Look, I'm very grateful to The Daily Wire who just completely left us alone to have whatever sort of debate, disagreement, commentary that we wanted.
00:42:49.000It was total intellectual and spiritual freedom.
00:42:52.000It's a very, very loaded text, obviously.
00:42:55.000And it's something that migrates from the profane in both directions of what can be discussed and what can't be discussed.
00:43:02.000And I think it's got to be explored with this level of openness.
00:43:05.000So obviously the West is experiencing a spiritual crisis right now.
00:43:08.000I think that the reception so far has been incredible.
00:43:11.000Why do you think the Gospels is so particularly relevant right now?
00:43:14.000You could have picked a lot of different biblical books to move through.
00:43:16.000I think Jordan picked the Gospels after having done Exodus.
00:43:21.000Well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, you know, even though me, you, and Prager are holding down the Hebraic end of the scale in Exodus, you know, this is the foundational story for the entirety of the West.
00:43:33.000And, you know, I think it's something that really differentiates.
00:43:35.000We've been talking a lot in general in all of our different ways and avenues about the fact that the West is...
00:43:45.000What are unifying stories that we can all get behind?
00:43:48.000And I think that if we can approach the story of the Gospels as something that's foundational.
00:43:52.000I mean, I grew up without, I mean, obviously in a Jewish household, we weren't reading this, but I was reading Divine Comedy.
00:43:59.000It's just shot through all of the art and the foundational value set of the West.
00:44:04.000And I think it's incredibly important to To explore it and to be able to approach it from all these different perspectives, not just from a sort of straight religious perspective, but to be able to really come up to the text and explore and walk all the way around it.
00:44:54.000So you've been doing a lot of work on a bunch of other topics as well.
00:44:56.000You have a recent short film called Ask an Iranian, The Truth About the Middle East, which talks about what the Islamic Republic of Iran has been doing.
00:45:03.000Why don't you talk a little bit about that?
00:45:06.000Well, you know, one of the things I think that's very important is that we talk among the...
00:45:11.000We've seen this explosion of Jew hate, obviously.
00:45:14.000You've seen that, I think, firsthand and up close as much as anybody has in the world.
00:45:18.000It's very important that we step back from just talking about it in the context of how that is damaging or comes at Jews and look at what a shared narrative set is that we all want to have.
00:45:28.000And so within the community, obviously, there's a lot of conversation with Jews about what's happening.
00:45:32.000But so much of this is what is the value set that we're going to aspire to?
00:45:37.000What are the things that we're going to stand for?
00:45:38.000And the Iranian-American population and the diaspora in general and the Iranian people have been sort of spectacularly undeceived morally.
00:45:47.000I think in a time when a lot of people, there's a lot of false equivocation.
00:45:51.000There's a lot of people who can't figure out which side of this conflict they want to support, depending on which news sources they have, depending on which words are being used.
00:45:59.000And one of the things I noticed early on from October 8th on was the Iranian-American community was just rock solid.
00:46:05.000And we thought, why don't we talk to them, talk to a Muslim, talk to a Jew, talk to a gay Iranian, have them paint out this playbook and have them say what they saw when the Shah was deposed.
00:46:17.000And what they saw, of course, were the extremist radicalists partnering with Marxist students to overthrow the government.
00:46:25.000And so they have a sort of clarity on this playbook.
00:46:28.000They have a clarity on the propaganda and how it works.
00:46:32.000And because it's coming from them and it's applied to a time that is seemingly in the further past, there's an enormous amount of education that can happen, I think, to Americans.
00:46:42.000And it takes us out of the straight dynamic that we're used to because this is their own people.
00:46:46.000People in America still think about this as a conflict between Palestine and Israel.
00:46:51.000And it's a conflict between Israel and the fingers of the most misogynistic, hateful, extremist regime in the world.
00:47:04.000And so I think it was just an enormous...
00:47:07.000Great benefit to be able to bring the kind of grace and clarity and courage of the Iranian Americans to tell the story and then to sort of relate it to what's happening now.
00:47:17.000I think it was a very big wake-up call.