The Charlie Kirk Show - Is Twitter a Crime Scene? with Matt Gaetz and Tom Fitton

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Tom Fitton walks through what laws were broken by the FBI and DHS for what they did with Twitter.

00:00:06.000 And then Matt Gates and I talk about the Twitter files and then have an interesting conversation about who should be the next speaker of the House of Representatives.

00:00:13.000 Email us or thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:33.000 Here we go.

00:00:34.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:35.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:38.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:41.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:44.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:45.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:46.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:48.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:01:15.000 Joining us now is one of the most important people in the conservative movement, one of the most influential, and one of the most, let's just say, powerful is one way to say it, but they just they are so results-driven and oriented, and I love them.

00:01:31.000 It's Judicial Watch.

00:01:32.000 Tom Fitton joins us right now.

00:01:34.000 Tom, welcome back to the program.

00:01:36.000 Hey, Charlie, good to be with you.

00:01:37.000 Appreciate the good word.

00:01:39.000 I mean it.

00:01:39.000 So, Tom, walk us through your analysis of the Twitter files.

00:01:43.000 Most specifically, what, if any, laws were broken by our federal government?

00:01:49.000 Oh, well, there were, I think, four batches of Twitter files put out there.

00:01:55.000 And as it relates to government intervention in Twitter censorship activities, you have two categories.

00:02:05.000 You had these regular meetings taking place with the FBI and DHS and who knows, the Office of Director of National Intelligence prior to the election.

00:02:18.000 And they've been cagey as to what those meetings were about.

00:02:23.000 But the context around that time, obviously, was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but not by not only Twitter, but by Facebook and others.

00:02:33.000 So the question is: were they telling or suggesting Twitter to take this material down?

00:02:41.000 It's not clear that happened, but certainly regular meetings with a private company to persuade or talk about deleting or censoring any material would raise significant First Amendment concerns just generally.

00:02:59.000 But more recently, one of the more recent batches, I think it was either batch three or batch four, you saw that the FBI specifically asks tweets be taken down.

00:03:10.000 And that to me raises significant legal concerns.

00:03:14.000 You know, I'm no lawyer, but I've been doing this too long and I've been doing this longer than I care to admit to in terms of figuring out what the FBI is supposed to do and what it's able to do.

00:03:25.000 And what it's not able to do is to track the social media accounts of individual Americans for just because they don't like what they're saying about election debates and then go to a private company and get them to take it down.

00:03:41.000 That ought to be the subject of a serious criminal investigation.

00:03:46.000 The victims of that type of activity may have civil claims against the FBI and anyone else involved in this.

00:03:52.000 And I just saw in just the news over with our friend John Solomon, he highlighted the deposition testimony in the Missouri and other lawsuits about Twitter censorship or big tech censorship of this FBI special agent, Mr. Chan, out in San Francisco.

00:04:10.000 And he said these censorship requests were being approved at the highest levels before they went to places like Twitter.

00:04:16.000 So that's a real major revelation.

00:04:20.000 And there ought to be heck to pay.

00:04:23.000 Yeah.

00:04:23.000 So Tom, you were one of the leading voices and Judicial Watch was one of the only organizations to uncover the nonsense around RussiaGate.

00:04:33.000 I believe it was your lawsuit that actually got us the Peter Struckstroke smirk text messages.

00:04:37.000 I could be wrong, but I know you guys were involved in some of the discovery there and some of the FOIA requests.

00:04:43.000 But the same blueprint, the same behavior that they used for RussiaGate seems that they now used for Twittergate in 2020, which is we are going to use the intelligence agencies to then have third-party actors, whether it be Perkins Cooey, whether it be a dossier, whatever it might be, they're still calling the shots, but they do it a step removed.

00:05:08.000 So Tom, failure to hold people accountable for what they did with RussiaGate, I think is directly correlated with this behavior that we saw with Twitter.

00:05:17.000 Yeah.

00:05:18.000 And in this case, you had the Trump administration kind of taking a step back.

00:05:24.000 And it does go back to Russia Gate because the Trump administration or folks within the Trump administration were scared as a result of the ferocious attack on Trump over 2016 and his election.

00:05:41.000 And they bought into Hookline and Sinker the idea that the Russians colluded and interfered in our election in a substantial material way.

00:05:51.000 And in response to that, they took it upon themselves to police the internet and start evidently here targeting Americans for censorship through Twitter and such. 0.86

00:06:04.000 And so these are deep state actors who made up crap against President Trump and then used the resulting political blowback to continue to censor Americans they didn't like.

00:06:16.000 And one of the dangers is that it's escalated that they did it on the sly in 2020, but now they're doing it in a forthright manner under the Biden administration, where you have the White House calling in the heads of these big tech companies and being quite blatant and brazen in asking them to censor Americans about issues that get in the way of their political agenda. 0.90

00:06:43.000 I want to play a piece of tape here of Yoel Roth, the degenerate boy king who is the de facto CEO of Twitter and had the power that SARS, Caesars, dictators, and despots hundreds of years before would only dreamed of, the ability to shut people up and manipulate news cycles and be able to really configure what people's opinions are about pressing issues.

00:07:05.000 Let's go to this one here.

00:07:07.000 Yoel Roth saying in the weeks before, between Election Day and January 6th, Twitter moderated 140 individual tweets just from Trump.

00:07:15.000 And now we know it was the FBI that was pushing him to do it, play cut four.

00:07:20.000 The weeks leading up, in the weeks between Election Day and January 6th, Twitter moderated hundreds.

00:07:27.000 I think the final number ended up with like 140 separate tweets from just at real Donald Trump that violated various policies.

00:07:35.000 He was good at that.

00:07:38.000 And so he's bragging about the volume of censorship.

00:07:40.000 Tom, your thoughts?

00:07:43.000 He's being, the documents show he's not telling the truth.

00:07:48.000 The challenge that Twitter had was that Donald Trump was not in violation of its rules, and they had to come up with new reasons and pretexts to censor him.

00:08:00.000 And ultimately, they came up with a rule that applied only to him, Donald Trump.

00:08:05.000 He was censored not because of what he said, it was because he was Donald Trump, and they opposed him for years.

00:08:12.000 You see this in the material.

00:08:14.000 So they didn't weren't moderating his content.

00:08:17.000 They were opposed to his content and figuring out ways and making up rules on the fly to censor it.

00:08:24.000 So you had this outrageous election interference prior to 2020, and then he's in a political fight about how the election is going to be resolved, that those disputes are going to be resolved.

00:08:40.000 They were upset about what happened on January 6th, but the problem was he hadn't done anything that was in violation of their rules.

00:08:47.000 And you can see they acknowledged that, but they said, well, we're going to take these tweets down or we're going to suspend his account because of what he's been saying for four years.

00:08:58.000 Incredible.

00:08:59.000 And I want to go back to you, Charlie, because I see they were lying about you.

00:09:04.000 They were.

00:09:04.000 They were lying about Dan Bongino.

00:09:06.000 And I tell you, it's one thing to lie to you.

00:09:08.000 And, you know, I don't know, I'm sure you'll be consulting lawyers as to what actions you can take.

00:09:13.000 We are.

00:09:14.000 But when they lie to shareholders, when they lie to federal agencies, and when they lie to Congress, and they lie to users about how they're censoring people, that raises a whole host of other legal issues outside of criminality by the government, but potential misconduct, both civil and criminal by the prior Twitter management.

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00:11:40.000 You mentioned crimes committed by our government.

00:11:42.000 I believe one of the reasons why we are seeing people on the conservative side get angrier and angrier is we see citizens have to be indicted and put in prison for crimes they did not commit.

00:11:58.000 They have to see their apartments raided for things they did not do.

00:12:01.000 James O'Keefe, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump.

00:12:04.000 The list goes on.

00:12:05.000 And yet we see blatant, naked, proud criminality by our government.

00:12:11.000 What can possibly be done to hold the crimes of the government accountable?

00:12:16.000 Well, we have to use the tools available to us under the law to end the Constitution for accountability and a check.

00:12:25.000 And there are a variety of tools ranging from impeachment from Congress to funding the fights in Congress.

00:12:35.000 Also, you have civil claims that individual citizens can bring.

00:12:40.000 And hopefully there are honest administrative employees, people in the executive branch in the law enforcement area, who are willing to look at their own.

00:12:49.000 But as we know, that's been almost a fool's gold in terms of looking for that to happen because the Justice Department and the FBI, in my view, are irredeemably compromised.

00:13:03.000 And we need to think about how we start over in terms of organizing them or in the case of the FBI, maybe even disbanding them and figuring out other ways to enforce federal law through an investigative agency.

00:13:20.000 You guys have done a little bit of this.

00:13:22.000 You've done it a lot, I should say, but some of it's been successful where the American people can technically go to the courts and say, my government is breaking the law.

00:13:31.000 But those are tough lawsuits, aren't they?

00:13:33.000 They take time, they take money, and the government almost always seems to get away with it.

00:13:38.000 Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.

00:13:40.000 You know, you win some, you lose some.

00:13:42.000 In California, you know, they have this broad liberal standing require position that taxpayers can challenge illegal conduct by the government, misuse of tax dollars for illegal behavior, you know, illegal activity.

00:13:58.000 And they had quotas in California they were trying to impose on private boards of directors.

00:14:03.000 And we went and sued under this theory of taxpayer standing, and we won.

00:14:09.000 So, you know, there are opportunities even in blue states to enforce the rule of law.

00:14:15.000 And certainly, you know, the example of Judicial Watch is we're famous for FOIA, right, Charlie?

00:14:21.000 I mean, just think about that.

00:14:22.000 Let's take a step back.

00:14:24.000 We've got this gargantuan Leviathan government, billions and billions of dollars.

00:14:29.000 But if they don't give Judicial Watch documents, those government agencies have to go into court when we sue and explain to the court why they're not giving us the documents or when they're going to give them to us.

00:14:40.000 And they have to explain if they're withholding anything, why it is they're withholding it.

00:14:45.000 And I mean, that's an awesome, awesome leveling of power between the American people and their government.

00:14:55.000 So this is why the left hates the rule of law.

00:14:58.000 So, you know, those things that seem challenges to us, we know what needs to be done and we should embrace what the left is attacking.

00:15:05.000 Embrace the rule of law.

00:15:07.000 Embrace the idea that the courts provide some check on the system.

00:15:14.000 Embrace Congress's powers under the Constitution to not spend money where it's being used and misused and abused.

00:15:24.000 And of course, embrace our core constitutional rights, which are God-given.

00:15:28.000 The Constitution actually just codifies what God has granted us, such as the First Amendment rights, free speech, association, and to petition our government.

00:15:41.000 That's all part of the First Amendment.

00:15:43.000 The left would have you believe, would have you forget about those two second ones, the association and the petition your government.

00:15:50.000 That's a core right, too, which is what this whole Twitter fight's been about.

00:15:54.000 They don't want us to criticize the government.

00:15:57.000 That's right.

00:15:58.000 Well, I think there needs to be a flurry of lawsuits very soon.

00:16:02.000 And I'm not sure what the success can be, but it should be, it needs to be repudiated and not tolerated if a government agency by proxy uses a private company to do what they themselves specifically cannot do.

00:16:19.000 We got a lawsuit already underway in California against the Secretary of State's office there.

00:16:24.000 They were getting Twitter to take down tweets, but specifically with Judicial Watch, they got YouTube to take down a video of mine about Judicial Watch's work, Judicial Watch video, just before the election.

00:16:37.000 And so we sued the Secretary of State's office for that violation of our civil rights.

00:16:43.000 So we're not standing idly by and just complaining about it.

00:16:49.000 We're going to court to figure out what went on and hold them accountable where we can.

00:16:53.000 That's what we need to do.

00:16:54.000 Tom, thank you so much.

00:16:55.000 Keep up the great work with Judicial Watch.

00:16:56.000 And if you want to represent me, just shoot me a text.

00:16:59.000 We'll talk.

00:17:00.000 Thanks.

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00:18:05.000 Joining us now is Matt Gates.

00:18:06.000 He's a fighter.

00:18:07.000 He loves his country and he's terrific.

00:18:09.000 Matt, I'm going to see you this weekend at America Fest.

00:18:12.000 Looking forward to it.

00:18:13.000 Oh, man, there's nothing like Phoenix in the winter.

00:18:15.000 So I can't wait.

00:18:16.000 We always get to shape the vision.

00:18:19.000 We're able to shape the future.

00:18:20.000 And that's going to be a lot of patriots.

00:18:22.000 And I'm looking forward to being there.

00:18:23.000 So, Matt, later on, I want to talk to you about the House leadership kind of contest and race and where we agree and where we might not agree.

00:18:30.000 But we'll do that in a second.

00:18:31.000 I first want to talk about Twitter.

00:18:33.000 You were specifically named by the degenerate boy king, Yoel Roth, pushing internally to ban you following January 6th.

00:18:43.000 Your reaction, Matt. 0.89

00:18:44.000 Well, it's no surprise that the woettopians that want to define the very nature of the truth itself didn't like something I said.

00:18:52.000 And what's interesting about the reference to me is that there was no violation of Twitter policies. 0.93

00:18:58.000 And so they were trying to use this awesome power that Twitter has to really shape the discussion that we have throughout the world and in this country.

00:19:07.000 And they wanted to ban me despite any violation of those rules.

00:19:10.000 And when we see that through the context of what they did to you, basically just trying to suppress your reach because you're effective, you see a common thread.

00:19:20.000 If you were an effective conservative voice on Twitter, they were first identifying you as the problem and then subsequently trying to figure out how to torture their own set of rules to try to constrain that.

00:19:33.000 I believe that this evidence unlocks a ton of litigation opportunity for state attorneys general to go after Twitter for violating their own terms of service and engaging in fraud on the consumers.

00:19:48.000 The boy king, cut six, Yoel Roth confessing he's deeply terrified by us, Matt, Trump supporters, play cut six.

00:19:56.000 But what are you worried about these Twitter files?

00:19:59.000 It's terrifying.

00:20:00.000 All of a sudden, we apply a misinformation label to Donald Trump's account, and I'm on the cover of the New York Post.

00:20:06.000 And that is a deeply terrifying experience.

00:20:09.000 And I say this from a position of unquestioned privilege as a cis white male.

00:20:15.000 Like the internet is much scarier and much worse for lots of other people who aren't me, but it was pretty f ⁇ ing scary for a long time. 0.97

00:20:24.000 Trump supporters are scary.

00:20:26.000 And if it wasn't for him coming in benevolently from the heavens, Matt, the Twitter internet would be much scarier.

00:20:34.000 Matt, your reaction.

00:20:35.000 Oh, I'm so glad he was able to disclaim all of his privileges there.

00:20:39.000 The one privilege he didn't disclaim was the privilege that they had to try to take people out of the digital world with no appeal, with no notice, and with their CEO, Jack Dorsey, lying to Congress, which is a crime, by the way, that in a just world would be thoroughly evaluated.

00:20:57.000 But instead, what you have are these folks who sit around and believe that they have the power to just cancel you, to limit your ability to get your ideas out there.

00:21:06.000 And look at what's going on in our country right now with all these close elections and close races.

00:21:10.000 If they're able to just shave down maybe a little Charlie Kirk in Arizona or maybe not allow our message to reach some of those key voters who might not have been engaged in politics otherwise, then you really get to a circumstance where the terms of service on Twitter and the whims of these crazy people become more important than the values that undergird our Constitution.

00:21:31.000 It's why I take a very aggressive approach to the utilization of antitrust laws so that we can break up some of these entities.

00:21:38.000 And then you know what will happen if you break them up?

00:21:40.000 You'll actually get the Google files and the YouTube files and the meta files where this stuff that's going on in Twitter is going on in all those other.

00:21:49.000 So here's my fear.

00:21:51.000 A year ago, Matt, I would have sang that song in unison with you.

00:21:54.000 But now that Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, I could see Democrats want to use that break it all up strategy, but they won't actually enforce it against Meta or Google.

00:22:03.000 They'll just use it as a way to go against Elon.

00:22:06.000 Is that a fear you might have?

00:22:07.000 No, because Twitter is actually a far smaller business.

00:22:10.000 It actually has a far less impact on the competitive marketplace than when you see the vertically integrated approach that Amazon takes, when you see the preferencing on the Apple Store, when you see what Google has done in search.

00:22:23.000 So I think those.

00:22:24.000 It pales in comparison.

00:22:25.000 You're clear.

00:22:26.000 Those are really the big forces.

00:22:28.000 I mean, Google is nearly a trillion and a half dollar company.

00:22:30.000 I'm just approximating.

00:22:31.000 I think that's about right.

00:22:32.000 Twitter, based on the purchase, was an overly inflated $44 billion purchase.

00:22:38.000 And so that proves your point.

00:22:40.000 So from an oversight perspective, and this will kind of transition us eventually to where I want to get your opinion on it.

00:22:49.000 But what can Republicans do coming into January about these Twitter files?

00:22:53.000 Well, I think the first thing we have to ascertain is whether or not the testimony we've already received was just untruthful or untruthful with malice and intend to lie.

00:23:03.000 And so I think that there is thorough review that is actively ongoing right now to get into the documents that have been produced by Twitter, the testimony that has been given by their executives, and then to bounce that off of what we've learned.

00:23:16.000 And there may be criminal implications to that.

00:23:19.000 And Congress may have to make a referral on that, which is typically what happens when Congress feels aggrieved as a result of people lying.

00:23:27.000 Beyond that, I don't think you're going to get any of the election interference charges that some are calling for because the Federal Election Commission, in response to a complaint I filed, said all of this is legal, actually.

00:23:38.000 That Twitter is allowed to discriminate against some viewpoints and is allowed to shadow ban people based on their ideology and that that's an appropriate action for a company.

00:23:48.000 I certainly don't think that's true.

00:23:50.000 So it may be as much legislating around some of these issues as much as it is ensuring that there's a regulatory action because there may not be a regulatory violation of law.

00:24:00.000 I do think there's good eaten, as I said earlier, for state attorneys general who can have fraud claims, who can have deceptive and unfair trade practices claims.

00:24:09.000 In Florida, we have a deceptive and unfair trade practices statute.

00:24:13.000 Most states do.

00:24:14.000 And I think that that's going to be a very fruitful space for litigation.

00:24:17.000 So I want to play cut five here.

00:24:20.000 The boy king says that one of the reasons Trump was banned because of his own trauma.

00:24:25.000 Play cut five.

00:24:26.000 The events of the sixth happen.

00:24:28.000 And if you talk to content moderators who worked on January 6th, myself included, the word that nearly everybody uses is trauma.

00:24:37.000 We experience those events, not some of us as Americans, but not just as Americans or as citizens, but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet.

00:24:47.000 And we saw people dead in the Capitol.

00:24:53.000 Who did they see dead in the Capitol?

00:24:54.000 Yeah, I mean, were they traumatized by Ashley Bolt? 0.93

00:24:57.000 And I was going to say, I mean, based on what we now know, Ashley Babbitt, who was, in my opinion, illegally and immorally assassinated by a black, I think the Secret Service, Capitol Police, whatever. 0.88

00:25:09.000 I think he was Capitol Police. 0.84

00:25:11.000 Capitol Police.

00:25:12.000 And Michael Bird, is that right?

00:25:12.000 Yeah.

00:25:15.000 Anyway, and he gets away with it, no investigation, and then Republicans defend him.

00:25:19.000 As far as Officer Brian Sisnik, I believe he actually died afterwards for unrelated health complications and reasons.

00:25:28.000 To this day, I guarantee if you take a poll, SickNick, thank you.

00:25:31.000 If you take a poll, people still think that there were like dozens of police officers that were murdered that day.

00:25:36.000 Just not true.

00:25:37.000 Anyway, so, but he says it was my own personal trauma.

00:25:41.000 Matt, this goes to your point about there was way too much power in this person's hand.

00:25:47.000 Way too much.

00:25:48.000 And then you have DHS, DNI, and the FBI having weekly meetings.

00:25:52.000 And one of the Slack channels, Matt, he's so casual about it.

00:25:55.000 He basically tells his other buddy that was working there, hey, I got to go to the Aspen Institute and do this stuff.

00:26:02.000 Can you fill in for me on one of our meeting today with the FBI?

00:26:05.000 And it struck me because this was a regular occurrence.

00:26:09.000 This was like having an HR, just kind of like, okay, we got this calendar thing.

00:26:13.000 The FBI is coming in.

00:26:14.000 They got their badges.

00:26:15.000 This wasn't something remarkable.

00:26:18.000 It was routine.

00:26:20.000 And I can tell you there's great interest on the Judiciary Committee to ascertain the content of those discussions.

00:26:26.000 And you know, Charlie, just like I do, that in a lot of cases, that's the DOJ people and the FBI people auditioning for their next jobs with big tech.

00:26:34.000 There is a revolving door between DOJ and big tech.

00:26:34.000 Well, that's exactly what they're doing.

00:26:38.000 It's how they get paid.

00:26:40.000 It's a down payment for the big bucks because when they work at DOJ, they're earning $75,000, $80,000 a year, which is a nice wage, but they want to go earn $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 a year.

00:26:53.000 And that's how they audition.

00:26:54.000 Sorry, Matt, to interrupt you.

00:26:55.000 No, you see it with James Baker himself.

00:26:58.000 You see him go from being one of the kind of deep state operatives around the Trump-Russia hoax to then appearing in Twitter and scrubbing information that would have demonstrated the culpability of the people who were violating the terms of service and departing from the public statements of the company regarding censorship.

00:27:17.000 So it's oftentimes the same people just wearing different hats.

00:27:21.000 But we want to know what was said in those meetings.

00:27:23.000 And particularly when you had the FBI and DOJ trying to convince Twitter and Meta for that matter, that certain information derogatory to the Biden family was Russian disinformation.

00:27:35.000 We're going to have to get to what the actual basis is for that.

00:27:37.000 And it goes to the clip you played where Mr. Roth is talking about his personal trauma. 0.88

00:27:43.000 Well, I don't think that our access to the digital world ought to depend on how some woketopian in Silicon Valley is experiencing their personal trauma on that particular day. 0.54

00:27:54.000 There ought to be verifiable standards.

00:27:57.000 If we aren't going to break up these companies, and I wouldn't suggest we break up Twitter quite yet, there should be some sort of regulation more akin to a public utility rather than an entity that's just able to act on these whims.

00:28:12.000 And while it's certainly a great thing that Elon Musk is putting all this information out to the country, we should not rest on the notion that, well, Elon owns Twitter, so everything's okay now.

00:28:22.000 There's a lot of this discourse that goes on outside of Twitter.

00:28:25.000 And Twitter fell was in bad hands, might now be in good hands, but it could fall back into bad hands.

00:28:31.000 And so I think we need to have a standard that is transparent, where people have an appeal process.

00:28:38.000 And that way there'll be greater confidence that the conversation going on in the digital square is in fact a legitimate one, not some operation by the FBI.

00:28:46.000 No one voted for Yoel Roth.

00:28:48.000 No one knew he even existed.

00:28:49.000 And he had more power than the elected that the sovereign voluntarily gave power to.

00:28:54.000 That's wrong.

00:28:55.000 I don't care what your political affiliation is. 0.98

00:28:57.000 It's wrong that some brat who's also a degenerate, by the way, and writes about really weird and creepy stuff is able to police speech like that. 0.94

00:29:05.000 It's immoral. 0.94

00:29:06.000 It's unconstitutional.

00:29:07.000 It's a civilizational issue.

00:29:10.000 You got to walk me through the strategy for 1-3 because so 1-3, just for everyone knows, Speaker of the House vote, Matt has come out against Kevin McCarthy and has said, under no circumstance am I going to vote for McCarthy.

00:29:24.000 And so what's the plan?

00:29:26.000 What's the strategy?

00:29:27.000 Who do you think should be Speaker, Matt?

00:29:28.000 We need a name.

00:29:30.000 Well, I would vote for Jim Jordan for Speaker.

00:29:32.000 I'd vote for Andy Biggs.

00:29:34.000 There's actually probably 221 of the 222 that I'd at least be open-minded about.

00:29:39.000 It's ridiculous to assume that only Kevin McCarthy can lead the Republican conference.

00:29:43.000 And I think more important than the individual are the rules and the values and the strategy that the House of Representatives will have on the 4th of January and beyond.

00:29:55.000 Seven of my colleagues has signed a letter that lay that out in technicolor.

00:29:59.000 They want single subject.

00:30:00.000 They want a plan on spending.

00:30:02.000 They want conservatives on key committees. 0.87

00:30:04.000 And they want the motion to vacate the chair that existed for centuries until Nancy Pelosi changed it.

00:30:10.000 McCarthy seems to prefer the Pelosi approach, not the Thomas Jefferson approach.

00:30:14.000 I agree.

00:30:15.000 So what you're saying, though, is that potentially it's not about Kevin.

00:30:18.000 It's about if these concessions can be made, then maybe a deal could be struck.

00:30:22.000 Is that right?

00:30:23.000 Well, what is disheartening and what led me to my view that I don't think Kevin's going to be our speaker is that Kevin has said under no circumstance will he consider the Jeffersonian motion to vacate.

00:30:33.000 He is only going to agree to something.

00:30:36.000 So I'm ignorant on this.

00:30:38.000 What is motion to vacate the chair?

00:30:39.000 Sorry to interrupt, Matt for a short time.

00:30:40.000 Yeah, for centuries, any member of Congress could call a vote of no confidence on the Speaker of the House, and all members would have to cast that vote and it would determine whether or not that speaker would continue.

00:30:50.000 Now, John Boehner got removed when Mark Meadows did that because he realized that members were going to have to take a tough vote or vote against him.

00:30:59.000 So it's a mechanism to keep the speaker accountable to the membership.

00:31:03.000 And we're not asking for crazy things.

00:31:04.000 We just want to pass appropriations bills separately.

00:31:07.000 We want to have 72 hours to read the bills.

00:31:09.000 And the fact that Kevin McCarthy has been recalcitrant against the Jeffersonian motion to vacate disqualifies him from consideration in my eyes and in the eyes of a growing number of House Republicans.

00:31:21.000 I guess the counter argument, and I'm sure you guys can figure this out, is Wona just turn every day someone could do a motion to vacate the chair?

00:31:27.000 Or does it take a certain amount of votes or does it go to voice vote?

00:31:30.000 Could it potentially derail the business of Congress?

00:31:33.000 I don't know.

00:31:33.000 As Elaine.

00:31:34.000 I guess it could, but in hundreds of years, it was only used like less than five times.

00:31:40.000 So that would defy history.

00:31:41.000 Also, like if the Democrats did that every day, if every day we had the prayer, the pledge, and the motion to vacate, I mean, I could see them do that.

00:31:47.000 Kevin McCarthy's stronger.

00:31:49.000 By the way, if they did that, there's no way any Republican could vote for a Democrat motion to vacate.

00:31:54.000 And so I think it could actually be a unifying force if used by the Democrats, but it's an accountability measure for Republicans who feel like otherwise Kevin will lie to us.

00:32:02.000 So the fear that I have and other people have is: okay, let's say it goes to 1-3.

00:32:07.000 You guys say we're not voting, and then it goes to conference, and then we're just supposed to hope it gets sorted out there.

00:32:12.000 Matt, I have very little faith in kind of hope as a strategy right now.

00:32:17.000 So give me some confidence, give our audience some confidence that that circus will result in a stronger country.

00:32:26.000 I will point the audience to a piece that was just published in Politico this morning, busting the unity speaker bubble.

00:32:34.000 So this totally debunks the hoax that somehow like Fred Upton or some moderate Republican is going to be speaker.

00:32:40.000 It debunks the hoax that it's going to be a Democrat speaker.

00:32:43.000 We will get to a Republican speaker.

00:32:45.000 Now, it might not be on the third.

00:32:46.000 There might be a slight delay, but I would rather it take a little bit longer and get it right to just coordinate Kevin McCarthy.

00:32:54.000 You acknowledge, but do you at least acknowledge there is a risk?

00:32:56.000 There's a risk that this thing could get out of control.

00:32:59.000 I mean, the Unit Party would love nothing more.

00:33:03.000 I mean, you're saying that it's a political piece.

00:33:05.000 I haven't read it.

00:33:07.000 Kevin McCarthy is the Unit Party's candidate.

00:33:09.000 That is obvious, right?

00:33:11.000 And he's also recalcitrant on these rules changes that I would think any American would reasonably agree to, like giving us 72 hours to read the bills, having a single subject with Germany so that you're not voting on like the farm bill and the war in Yemen at the same time or the national defense and WordA like we had to do last week.

00:33:30.000 So those are the demands we've placed on McCarthy.

00:33:32.000 He's unequivocally said he would rather not be speaker than agree to some of the things in this memo.

00:33:37.000 And so at some point we have to move on.

00:33:40.000 This is not a doomsday.

00:33:41.000 It might take a little longer, but ultimately, if we get a speaker responsive to the membership and agreeing to rules that will open up the house so that we can do a good job for our constituents, that's what's better for the country in the long term.

00:33:52.000 If those concessions are made, are you at least open to voting for Kevin for Speaker?

00:33:57.000 Well, I have yet to see any deal that doesn't require some element of trust to bind it together.

00:34:05.000 And since I don't trust Kevin McCarthy, that's why I am not voting for him.

00:34:09.000 Now, if somehow someone can bind some deal together that is not in any way reliant on trust, I'm always open-minded, but right now I'm not going to vote for Kevin.

00:34:19.000 On-minded is good.

00:34:20.000 So, Matt, we got to make sure the House stays Republican.

00:34:22.000 That's my vote for my number one mission is you got to make sure the House stays Republican.

00:34:26.000 We can't lose it through a process.

00:34:27.000 Matt, see you this week at an Amfest.

00:34:29.000 Thanks so much.

00:34:29.000 Appreciate it.

00:34:30.000 Can't wait.

00:34:33.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:34.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:37.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:34:39.000 God bless.

00:34:43.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 13, 2022

Is Twitter a Crime Scene? with Matt Gaetz and Tom Fitton

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