00:00:00.000I'm Alex Marlowe, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News.
00:00:02.000And on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we talked to Peter Schweitzer, who is a prolific author, president of the Government Accountability Institute, a senior contributor to Breitbart News.
00:00:12.000And he breaks down everything in the Biden crime family that has been reported in recent days and what he is anticipating is coming over the horizon.
00:00:22.000He connects a lot of the dots for us in terms of the latest investigations, and you're not going to want to miss his assessment of all of them.
00:00:29.000Then we talk to JD Vance, who is a senator from Ohio, but also one of the more forward-thinking populist nationalist conservatives out there.
00:00:38.000He pitches us his new rail bill before I ask him a very compelling question, I believe.
00:01:04.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:10.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:08.000Peter, as usual, we have nothing good to talk about.
00:02:10.000As much as I would like to talk to you about positive things, there's only negative things to get to.
00:02:15.000But I want to get your thoughts on, first of all, some of the Biden investigations and then some of what's going on with the U.S.-China relations.
00:02:23.000But let's start with there's two sort of competing revelations that we've been seeing coming out of Washington.
00:02:30.000Republicans trying to investigate the Bidens.
00:02:32.000You're world famous for your reporting on the Biden crime family.
00:02:36.000So we've got the House Oversight Committee that has just this week revealed that Hunter Biden perhaps got received a bribe directed towards Joe Biden for about a million bucks.
00:02:49.000This doesn't seem to be entirely fresh, but it was certainly framed to us as if it was fresh.
00:03:01.000And then give me what you think this means in the grand scheme of things.
00:03:04.000Yeah, Alex, I think the thing we have to keep in mind with this congressional committee is it's going to move slow just by its nature, and it's being driven by their access to records they've subpoenaed.
00:03:16.000They've been focusing primarily on the banking records associated with the Biden family and the myriad of Biden LLCs that they've set up.
00:03:25.000Thus far, they've obtained records from four of what are believed to be 12 banks that the Biden family had financial transactions through.
00:03:36.000And out of those four banks, we've now got about $10 million in foreign money coming to the Bidens.
00:03:42.000And as the committee has reiterated, and as you and I have made the point really since 2018, when we first broke this story, there's no discernible business that the Bidens have.
00:03:56.000They don't bring any capital to the table.
00:03:58.000The business seems to be them getting money for some possible future business that never materializes.
00:04:05.000And I think that's just a way to mask the fact that they are receiving money from foreign entities, and those foreign entities want access to Joe Biden.
00:04:14.000So I didn't learn a lot new, but I think the committee did a couple of things.
00:04:18.000Number one, they provided undisputed fact that this money came to the Bidens to these banks.
00:04:26.000And number two, the committee finally raised the specific point that we made from the beginning that the people actually sending the money to the Bidens have links to Chinese intelligence at a very high level.
00:04:39.000And that's something I think they should keep pounding on.
00:04:42.000Okay, so what did we learn about this million-dollar check from this Romanian oligarch who was somewhat familiar to us?
00:04:50.000Let's be honest, Peter, in the scheme of things, a million bucks is just not a ton of money.
00:04:53.000But is that enough perhaps to grease the palms of the Biden family and get Joe to do something that he shouldn't have done?
00:05:02.000Yeah, I mean, look, if you look at the Bidens, the Biden family really does not have a whole lot of resources.
00:05:09.000So a million dollars for the Biden family is, you know, pretty good sum of money.
00:05:14.000It's somewhat small by other standards when you look at the Clintons and others, but that million dollars still matters a lot to the Bidens.
00:05:22.000And what I think is particularly scurrilous about this case, you can add Romania to the list of foreign countries that have sent money to the Bidens.
00:05:31.000And again, it's never Japan or Germany or the UK.
00:05:35.000It's countries that are rife with corruption.
00:05:37.000And in this particular case, this gentleman had been charged with corruption.
00:05:41.000He hired the Bidens to try to get that removed, that attached to him removed so he could do more business in the United States.
00:05:49.000And the Bidens turned to their friend, Louis Free, the former FBI director, who also got money from this same individual.
00:05:56.000So this is a Biden story, but it also is a story of what happens to senior FBI people when they leave.
00:06:02.000And the answer is sometimes not good things.
00:06:04.000So in the court of public opinion, if the establishment media lets people talk about this, you see this million dollars coming in for, as you say, no goods, no services.
00:06:14.000We don't really know what the Bidens are doing.
00:06:16.000So we know this is obviously some way to curry favor or maybe a direct one-to-one bribe.
00:07:53.000Then they're going to work from the outside in.
00:07:55.000They're going to go to the Hunter Biden business partners, some of whom are cooperating with this committee, which is quite interesting.
00:08:02.000Then they're going to work their way closer into the inner circle of the family.
00:08:06.000And I think finally, once they've gathered all this other material, they are going to bring Hunter Biden before this committee.
00:08:13.000And the question is, what is Hunter Biden going to do?
00:08:15.000If he ignores the committee, then it's going to be incumbent upon this Department of Justice, his father's Department of Justice, to charge him with contempt of Congress, which is, of course, what was done to Stephen Bannon.
00:08:28.000And the question is, are they going to apply the same standard to Joe Biden's son as they are applying to other people?
00:08:34.000And if they don't, I think things are really going to hit the fan for this administration.
00:08:39.000So would you say you're keeping your hopes up or you're actually high hopes that this thing is really going to yield some real fruit?
00:08:49.000And I think that is because we know where the truth lies.
00:08:53.000The official congressional investigation is arriving at a lot of the conclusions that we already had, but they're doing it in a way where they actually have the banking records.
00:09:04.000What we did, Alex, before in showing that there was some $30 million the Bidens got from Chinese entities was looking at the laptop and looking at emails where they talked about the transfer of money.
00:09:15.000What this committee is now going to do before the American people is say, look, here's the actual wiring of the money.
00:09:21.000So I am very optimistic because I know where the truth lies, and I still want to believe there are enough people in the United States that care about this stuff and want something to be done about it.
00:09:32.000There's a couple other places where people are looking into the Biden family right now.
00:09:37.000One thing that is interesting, this wasn't exactly your beat, but learning that the U.S. government was really deeply involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop news.
00:09:49.000It should be a huge bombshell because we know, of course, that the FBI and probably other government agencies had access to the laptop in 2019.
00:09:59.000And it was very, very easy to confirm that at least a large number of those emails were real and accurate.
00:10:06.000When we got a copy of the laptop, Alex, we simply took the email and we compared it to the Secret Service travel logs for Hunter Biden that had been released by a congressional committee.
00:10:16.000We compared it to the email collection of some of Hunter Biden's business partners, and we found that it matched completely.
00:10:24.000Is there any way to hold him to account, or is this just another one of those things where we just sit here frustrated?
00:10:29.000No, I mean, I think Congress needs to hold him to account.
00:10:32.000And like any office, he can be potentially impeached if they feel that's necessary.
00:10:37.000Look, to me, the biggest problem is with the FBI leadership, there's a complete lack of curiosity on these issues.
00:10:45.000I mean, they get very excited about all these other issues they want to investigate.
00:10:49.000You're talking about the first family of the United States.
00:10:52.000If you had a possession of Hunter Biden's laptop and you are this world supreme law enforcement agency, there are lots of things you can do to confirm the accuracy of what's in it and look at the very serious national implications, national security implications behind that laptop.
00:11:09.000The fact of the matter is they didn't seem to do any of that.
00:11:12.000And that is a problem that starts at the top.
00:11:15.000Okay, so moving towards Arkansas, Hunter Biden's in a paternity case.
00:11:19.000The most fascinating thing to me about this, he's been skipping out on alimony, child support, all that stuff.
00:11:25.000It's incredibly creepy that the Biden family doesn't even acknowledge Hunter's love child with this stripper that he had about four years ago, which is just one of the most appalling things of all the appalling things the Bidens do.
00:11:37.000But I will say it's fascinating that this judge is going to know everything about Hunter Biden's finances.
00:11:42.000Do we have any hope of learning what's going on?
00:11:45.000Because he'll know every place Hunter gets money, correct?
00:12:20.000He's now being dragged in front of court and he is required to disclose his sources of income.
00:12:27.000And so some of that, I'm sure, is already aware of the mother's defense team.
00:12:33.000And hopefully we'll get to learn some about that.
00:12:36.000But this has been, I think, one of the great mysteries and one of the problems in America today.
00:12:40.000A guy like Joe Biden has to tell us if he has $1,000 of GE stock, he has to give us every campaign contributions, you know, starting from $200 and above.
00:12:50.000But if his adult son uses his name to make millions of dollars from China, there's no disclosure requirement.
00:13:04.000We got two minutes, and this is a topic.
00:13:05.000I'm sure you could do an hour on this.
00:13:07.000But the leaked Reuters revealed from four State Department sources that the Biden policy has shifted towards engagement with China and essentially has let them off the hook, and they're slow walking information from this spy balloon that bizarrely floated over our country for was about a week or so, a few months, ago.
00:13:28.000Peter, did you catch this story and do you have any thoughts on this revelation?
00:13:32.000Yeah, I mean honestly, I think American foreign policy towards China right now is a disgrace.
00:13:37.000It's basically the same thing we've been doing for 40 years.
00:13:40.000If we engage with them, whatever that means, it generally means giving them whatever they want.
00:13:45.000They're going to become more calm, more liberal, more friendly.
00:13:50.000The fact of the matter is that has not happened.
00:13:52.000China is far more aggressive, far more powerful than it was 40 years ago.
00:13:58.000Engagement has got us nothing and the Biden approach is to return to that policy, somehow thinking that I don't know maybe they think they're smarter or better looking or more persuasive they're somehow going to get a different result from China.
00:14:11.000They're not, and it's going to be the American people that are going to suffer.
00:14:15.000So yeah, this is a huge problem and it demonstrates that this administration is tone deaf to the realities of what's going on in the world and what China is doing to us.
00:14:31.000We need these details and they're using them because they think it's some sort of a bargaining chip.
00:14:36.000They're not going to get anything with them, they're just withholding the information from us and meanwhile, the establishment media is focused on, you know, January the 6th.
00:14:43.000Still Peter, I wish I could give you more time.
00:14:45.000Unfortunately, they're giving me the big time old timey hook to pull me off the stage.
00:14:49.000But the Government Accountability Institute, where Peter Schweitzer is the best investigative journalist in America, senior contributor to Breitbart.
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00:16:38.000Yeah, so the basic idea is what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, where you had a train crash, terrible chemical fire afterwards, and basically a chemical bomb that went off in northeastern Ohio.
00:16:48.000I don't think that should happen again, or at least we should do some common sense things to make it less likely.
00:16:53.000What I've tried to do here is basically create a couple of additional safety standards that railroads have to comport with, and then simultaneously make it so that the firefighters who are dealing with these chemical fires when you have the train crashes to begin with, they actually know what they're dealing with.
00:17:07.000Because that's something I heard from the folks of East Palestine and 99% volunteer firefighting force is they were going into this chemical fire.
00:17:14.000They didn't know what they were actually dealing with and how could they properly protect themselves or deal with the fire given that reality.
00:17:22.000So the bill addresses both of those things.
00:17:24.000And the thing that I try to remind people, because I know a number of conservatives don't like the idea of doing anything that makes it harder for corporate America to live their life, the basic problem here is that the railroads socialize the risk of their business model.
00:17:38.000When they have a massive train crash, that costs a lot of money for Ohio taxpayers.
00:17:43.000It costs a lot of money for federal taxpayers.
00:17:45.000Think about the welfare benefits that are going to flow out through the door to the people of East Palestine, the health care benefits because of the health and economic consequences of what Norfolk Southern did.
00:17:56.000And if we're going to do that, and I think, of course, we should, we have to take care of the people of East Palestine.
00:18:00.000We should expect Norfolk Southern and other rail companies to hold themselves to a higher standard.
00:18:05.000And that's exactly what we're doing with this bill.
00:18:07.000It's pretty simple and straightforward.
00:18:12.000People are focused on the debt ceiling negotiation.
00:18:14.000Those are all very important issues, but I think this is a small win that I can get for the people of Ohio that matters a lot to folks back home.
00:18:20.000Yeah, and you're building an interesting coalition here.
00:18:23.000You've got Senator Rubio, Senator Hawley are backing it, but you've also got Sherrod Brown and John Fetterman, or at least what John Fetterman's operation will say, is backing it.
00:20:24.000My counter-argument, Alex, is I've been complaining for the last three months that Pete Buttigig has done nothing.
00:20:30.000So if I draft a bill that forces him to take action, that's not giving him too much discretion.
00:20:35.000The way that I think about it is we're actually forcing him to take some action, which is exactly what he should be doing.
00:20:40.000I think there's sort of some broader concerns about very narrow parts of the bill.
00:20:44.000I actually think that over the next couple of months, maybe a couple of weeks, we're going to address some of those concerns, get a lot of additional Republicans on board.
00:20:52.000But I think the concern that I really have no patience with is this idea that somehow we're violating a free market principle by forcing the railroads to observe some common sense safety standards.
00:21:03.000The railroads are not a free market industry.
00:21:05.000They've benefited from any number of government monopolies, government special subsidies.
00:21:10.000And by the way, Alex, six months or so ago, they came to the federal government and literally begged for a bailout from a labor dispute that they had gotten themselves in.
00:21:19.000And Joe Biden and the Democrats went right along with it.
00:21:22.000So these guys can't claim to be the representatives of the free market given how enmeshed they are with the government.
00:21:29.000That's been my argument from the beginning.
00:21:31.000And that's really the one criticism of the bill that I have no patience with.
00:21:35.000This is not about infringing on the free market.
00:21:39.000It's about making a free rider pay their fair share.
00:21:43.000Yeah, it seems like it's accountability for both sides of the argument.
00:21:46.000The EPA said, and Charlie Kirk just tweeted this out yesterday, that they weren't even consulted on the decision to burn thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals in East Palestine.
00:21:55.000JD, can we check in on East Palestine?
00:22:04.000Well, this is one of the big fears I've had, Alex, and certainly the people of East Palestine have had that as soon as this stopped being a front page story, that everyone would just ignore them.
00:22:12.000I certainly haven't done that, but unfortunately, far too many have.
00:22:18.000Things are certainly improving, though they're improving at a slow pace.
00:22:22.000It's kind of crazy, Alex, if you think about all of the toxic waste caused by that chemical spill, it's still not out of East Palestine, though it's getting out piece by piece.
00:22:31.000We think by mid-June, the community should be cleaned up.
00:22:34.000And then really, once we get the cleanup done, which is what I'm most focused on, like I said, should be happening by mid-June.
00:22:41.000The two things we're going to have to worry about are: number one, how do we rebuild East Palestine economically?
00:22:45.000I mean, think about the farmers, the homeowners who have completely had their lives devastated by what's happened.
00:22:51.000And then the second thing is we've got to do some long-term health monitoring so that people know with confidence that they can go back to their homes, they can live their lives, and their grandkids aren't going to get weird diseases five, 10 years down the road.
00:23:04.000If you think of all the weirdness that we've gone through the last couple of years with COVID, the massive sprawling public health bureaucracy we have in this country, there is not an arm of the federal government, of the entire public health bureaucracy that is set up to test and monitor for long-term health concerns, you know, the consequences of a chemical spill 10 years down the road.
00:23:27.000So that's something we have to work on too, because the people of East Palestine are coming to me and saying, look, we're not worried we're going to drink the water and drop dead tomorrow.
00:23:34.000We're worried we're going to drink the water for the next 10 years and it's going to cause problems for our kids and our grandkids.
00:23:40.000That's, of course, a totally reasonable fear and something their government has to be responsive to.
00:23:44.000Yeah, and it's been said before, President Trump getting there first, I think, was a pretty important moment in the presidential.
00:24:10.000And it did make me feel like President Trump's getting his fastball back, which is what we all want, whether you're a big fan or not a fan at all.
00:24:38.000We have to sort of step back and remember the posture here where Joe Biden refused to negotiate for months, basically daring the Republicans to come up with a deal.
00:24:46.000Kevin McCarthy, to his great credit, got the moderates in his coalition, the conservatives in his coalition behind a deal that does two things.
00:24:53.000It pays the country's debts, ensures that we don't have a terrible economic outcome.
00:24:58.000It also puts the country on a sustainable path financially.
00:25:02.000I think it's a very big win for our country and really astonishing that Joe Biden continues to sort of sit in the Oval Office and say, I'm not going to do anything.
00:25:10.000It really shows how much the radicals, I think, drive the agenda in the Biden White House.
00:25:14.000I don't think Joe Biden five years ago would have been sitting on his hands doing absolute nothing, at least I hope not.
00:25:20.000But it goes to show how far his administration has gone off the left end of the cliff.
00:25:26.000Unfortunately, the country needs him to do his job.
00:25:29.000We can't do all of this ourselves as Republicans.
00:25:32.000The president has to come to the table.
00:25:34.000What I think President Trump said in his town hall the other day was really important.
00:25:38.000We should not allow these guys to play chicken with us.
00:25:40.000We should go in, eyes wide open, about what the downsides are, and we should say we have more patience and we have more willingness to get a deal done than you do.
00:25:49.000So we're not going to let you guys dictate terms on us.
00:25:52.000If we have to go right up to the edge, we will.
00:25:54.000We'll do it in the service of getting the country back on the right path financially.
00:25:58.000Biden's also falsely claiming the Republicans' plan would cut veterans' health care.
00:26:04.000JD, I've been doing a lot of research into Joe Biden, and I'm going to tease the audience with this.
00:26:09.000But down the road, I will definitively make the case he is the most fiscally irresponsible person to ever live in the history of the world.
00:26:15.000And I think this is yet another example of it.
00:26:18.000Let's turn to the border, but let me ask you a question.
00:26:21.000And I think you'll know where I'm going with this.
00:26:26.000I mean, every place is a border state because we deal with the consequences of what comes across the southern border.
00:26:32.000I mean, if you live in Ohio and you maybe don't see the effects of the border crisis as obviously as you do in El Paso, Texas, if you know someone who's died of a fentanyl overdose, you are feeling the effects of Ohio being a border state.
00:26:44.000If you've gone to a hospital emergency room and you've seen the wait times way too long because there are a number of illegal aliens getting health care in the state of Ohio, you're seeing the effects of Ohio as a border state.
00:26:55.000And if you've tried to buy a house and you've seen the effects of skyrocketing housing costs and interest rates, you're seeing the effects of Ohio as a border state because when you bring in 10 million people illegally, you've got to house them somewhere.
00:27:10.000And houses that should go to American citizens are right now going to people who should not be here in the first place.
00:27:15.000So everything from the skyrocketing cost of housing and health care to the fentanyl on our streets is a direct consequence of Joe Biden's border policy.
00:27:24.000And I know we're short on time, Alex, but Maorcus came out and said this.
00:27:29.000He said we are having an open border because American companies need cheap labor.
00:27:34.000He actually said we're allowing a border crisis in this country in the service of cheap labor.
00:27:40.000These guys are not even hiding it anymore.
00:27:58.000Are we completely helpless here, or what can we do, particularly you elected Republicans?
00:28:04.000No, look, we're not completely helpless.
00:28:06.000Obviously, Joe Biden has a lot of power at the southern border, but we can fight him tooth and nail.
00:28:10.000We can try to reinforce and re-implement Title 42.
00:28:13.000We can take money from his priorities unless he promises to enforce the border.
00:28:18.000I think that's one of the things we have to do through this debt ceiling negotiation: say, look, if you want us to be better negotiating partners, actually enforce the southern border.
00:28:25.000That's the most important thing we could do.
00:28:28.000JD Vance, Republican from Ohio, anything to plug today, JD?
00:28:31.000Or where should people go if they want to support the train bill?
00:28:56.000Well, the reason why is because there is one particular Fed official, someone who's seen as a moderate, who came out today and suggested that perhaps the unemployment rate is too low and the inflation rate is not low enough, which sends a signal that perhaps we could see yet another Federal Reserve rate hike.
00:29:19.000And inflation actually ticked up a little bit from the last time we did a read on this.
00:29:25.000So even though it's a bit below its peak, it's actually going in the wrong direction.
00:29:29.000We're seeing unemployment at a historic rate.
00:29:31.000And what the Fed's trying to do with these interest rates is they're trying to titrate the market so that there actually is some increased level of unemployment in order to slow down the inflation rate.
00:29:42.000So they have not been able to accomplish this, clearly, at this point.
00:29:46.000We saw unemployment claims go up in the last weekly reporting, but overall, we're just in way too precarious of a position.
00:29:54.000And so even though Wall Street, I think, had a consensus, perhaps until earlier today, even that the rate hikes were going to stop, now that is no longer the case.
00:30:03.000And we're to interpret, I think, some of this early reporting from today from the Fed as pretty much what Jerome Powell is thinking.
00:30:13.000So he probably shares his point of view, and he seems to be willing to continue to hike rates.
00:30:20.000So this is a pretty big change because the market is now, it was betting on probably rate cuts or at least no additional rate hikes coming up.
00:30:29.000And we could see yet another hike based on this recent data.
00:30:33.000So this is volatile time and it is not to belabor the point, but it's definitely one where you want to be hedging as best you can with money, particularly when you know we are going to be seeing the Biden administration continue to try to spend.
00:30:48.000And this is why I think he doesn't want to go with the Republicans' debt ceiling rules because all he knows how to do is spend.
00:31:19.000And that's where we're at in the U.S. right now.
00:31:21.000Six in 10 Americans say the Biden inflation impacts their lives a lot.
00:31:28.000Who are the people who are not in this group?
00:31:30.000Your purchasing power is declining at a rapid rate because the inflation is outpacing any sort of wage growth or economic growth that we're seeing.
00:31:41.000The fact that we're going to be having so much money being sent back to other countries via remittances plays a role in this.
00:31:46.000All of these aren't just national security issues, but they're also issues that make it so that it is going to be more and more difficult to service our debt.
00:31:54.000Now, are we looking at a debt default anytime soon?
00:32:15.000And we have a story on this at Breitbart.com.
00:32:18.000Any reduction in the deficit is largely attributable to the reopening of the economy post-coronavirus.
00:32:23.000Sean Moran writes for us at Breitbart News.
00:32:25.000It has nothing to do with anything Biden's done.
00:32:27.000Biden is entirely incompetent on this stuff, but he's very willing to lie about it and maybe lie successfully enough to get all the media off his back while he readies the next trillion dollar spending package.
00:32:40.000Thanks to Charlie Kirk and his wonderful production team, giving me the platform, doing such a great job putting the shows together, making me look good.
00:32:47.000And for all of you who go to Breitbart.com, can't thank you enough for that.