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00:01:38.000Congressman, thank you for taking the time.
00:01:40.000Congressman, I just got to ask as plainly as possible, what the hell happened this weekend?
00:01:46.000It was the third betrayal of Mike Johnson to the American public and the GOP conference.
00:01:53.000It's, you know, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Deep State, the FBI, everybody who wanted what they wanted and is not elected got what they wanted.
00:02:06.000Some people think that Mike Johnson basically rolled over for Chuck Schumer, but the reality is Chuck Schumer's bill was the same as Mike Johnson's bill, and it was pre-conferenced with the Pentagon.
00:02:19.000It was, you know, I don't know where to start, man.
00:02:23.000Well, it's just, I mean, let's dive into this because let's start with FISA, right?
00:02:28.000So FISA was the one that really animated me.
00:02:32.000I thought that he was this constitutional lawyer, this fighter for freedom, this believer in liberty.
00:02:39.000And he comes down and says that he doesn't think that the FBI needs to get a warrant to spy on Americans.
00:03:02.000Last summer, in exchange for raising the debt limit, Joe Biden agreed to a 1% across-the-board cut to every aspect of discretionary spending if we did a one-year CR.
00:03:32.000And he chose the omnibus and he chose to spend more money than Nancy Pelosi ever dreamed of spending in her highest year.
00:03:40.000And we didn't even have 72 hours to read the bill.
00:03:44.000That was the first time that had been violated since the beginning of Congress.
00:03:48.000And as a member of the rules committee, I fought to give everybody 72 hours.
00:03:53.000So the first big betrayal was that omnibus bill.
00:03:56.000By the way, that spent funded a new FBI building.
00:04:01.000Meanwhile, the FBI is like laughing at us when we send them subpoenas and requests for information in the oversight and the Judiciary Committee and the Weaponization Committee.
00:04:14.000But let's put that behind us and go to FISA because that is the one where people who are defending Mike Johnson right now are saying, well, it's such a slim majority.
00:04:25.000You can't get everything you want with such a slim majority.
00:04:28.000These conservatives are asking for too much.
00:04:30.000No, that is not what happened with FISA.
00:04:33.000Mike Johnson did a 180 on the ideology that he's represented to us ever since he's been in Congress and as a member of the Judiciary Committee.
00:04:41.000He was there with me and Jim Jordan and Chip Roy and Matt Gates and others like Tom McClintock who were fighting to get warrants.
00:04:52.000Then he became speaker and he cast the deciding vote.
00:04:56.000Now, some people may say he didn't cast the last vote, so it wasn't the deciding vote.
00:05:02.000But here's why it was the deciding vote.
00:05:05.000He didn't vote on the other amendments that day.
00:05:08.000He didn't vote on the three amendments Intel Committee offered up or down.
00:05:12.000He voted no on the Judiciary Committee amendment to offer the to require a warrant if you want to spy on Americans.
00:05:21.000And he did it early enough that he convinced a lot of other Republicans to walk the plank.
00:05:28.000And by the way, it was a majority of Democrats who voted not to have a warrant, and it was a majority of Republicans who voted for a warrant.
00:05:37.000So when the vote stalled at 212 to 212, I took a picture of it.
00:05:44.000In front of my eyes was something that for 12 years I've been fighting for.
00:05:49.000You know, and here it was going down in flames because Mike Johnson chose the side of the deep state, flipped on us, and now we, and it got reauthorized and we don't have warrants.
00:06:04.000I went home that day just thoroughly disgusted.
00:06:09.000And I spent two days thinking about it.
00:06:15.000And then I came to the GOP conference at the beginning of this past week.
00:06:21.000And I stood up in front of everybody and I told Mike Johnson he needed to resign and that I was co-sponsoring Marjorie Taylor Green's motion to vacate.
00:06:59.000I don't even believe that he went in a skiff and learned something that we don't know because I spent three and a half hours in the skiff with Mike Johnson.
00:07:07.000Remember, I'm on the judiciary committee, and I got the same briefing he got from CIA, NSA, DOD, FBI, DNI, FISA judge.
00:07:53.000I haven't heard anyone say that as crispily as you have.
00:07:55.000Want to repeat that you were in the same skiff as Speaker Johnson because I got really fired up at Speaker Johnson on this vote and I called him and I texted him and he was arguing from authority with me, Congressman, saying, Charlie, if you were in the skiff like I was, you would understand.
00:08:36.000When you go into a skiff, remember, most congressmen are used to having two things with them that allow them to verify something if they're being told a lie.
00:08:44.000Number one, they usually have their smartphone with them and their staff.
00:08:52.000So if you are deprived of those two things and any connection to anybody for three or four hours, you kind of start believing what they're saying.
00:09:02.000And you think, well, maybe they'll let me out of this skiff if I just nod my head and succumb to the pressure.
00:09:13.000It was basically the Mike Turner show.
00:09:15.000He got to show us, he had every tool at his disposal, every prop, every representative from the agencies, and still couldn't compel us of the members of the Judiciary Committee, because that's what it was.
00:09:31.000And Mike Johnson was there to vote for this.
00:09:36.000And, you know, maybe Mike got some extra special briefing, but if there's an extra special briefing, he needs to tell us about us and have us get the extra special briefing.
00:09:48.000On the subject of Ukraine, he encouraged me to go in the skiff again.
00:09:53.000And I said, I'll go in the skiff on one condition.
00:09:56.000You go in with me because I'm going to ask them questions that need to be asked.
00:10:01.000And also, it's a total waste of time, Mike.
00:10:08.000He actually, to me, he will agree that going into the SCIF on FISA for those three and a half hours was a total waste of time.
00:10:16.000Well, he told the population, and he said this privately and publicly, that if every member went in the skiff, they would also vote for FISA.
00:10:27.000You went into it, and this is what the Intel agencies do.
00:11:50.000And as more and more truth came out, it turned out there was one example and they could have solved it a different way or had other information sources.
00:12:10.000And I've always admired that about you, especially when it comes to privacy concerns, which is something that I would think the Republicans would be fired up about given what they did to Donald Trump.
00:12:19.000But there's this false choice that is presented.
00:12:22.000If you do not allow the FBI to spy on us, a bunch of people are going to die.
00:12:48.000Yeah, if you put a policeman on every corner and a camera in everybody's living room, you could probably impose more safety than we have now.
00:12:56.000The problem is you give up so many rights and it violates the Constitution.
00:13:01.000I do want to say there was one person in that skiff who made sense, and it was the FISA judge.
00:13:07.000By the way, I'm a little bit uncomfortable that these are secret warrants, but in a court in a special court, but at least the FISA judges are real judges that work back in, they're federal judges that work back in districts, and they sort of moonlight for FISA.
00:13:22.000And one of the arguments that was made is, well, you'll have to contact us when we're not at the FISA court, when we're back in our districts doing our regular judge jobs.
00:13:32.000And they said, we don't have skiffs there.
00:14:46.000What we want them to do is to get a warrant when they go into this massive database of data that they have collected.
00:14:53.000Now, remember, Charlie, they're not over in Afghanistan snooping on the web servers there.
00:14:59.000The traffic from Afghanistan goes through U.S. servers and backbones.
00:15:05.000Like most of the world's internet traffic comes through America at some point.
00:15:09.000And so they've got the snooping devices here.
00:15:13.000And they incidentally collect a lot of information on Americans.
00:15:17.000By the way, they'll say, we're just trying to reveal some bomb-making class they took.
00:15:22.000But an NSA employee searched his tender date there.
00:15:28.000Folks, so many people I know are disheartened that our country seems to have forgotten the importance of citizenship and they wonder how a strong sense of citizenship might be revived.
00:15:38.000That's why my friends at Hillsdale College have produced a free online course on this topic, American Citizenship and Its Decline.
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00:16:33.000So, Congressman, let's get to the third chapter in this you call betrayal this weekend.
00:16:39.000How did we all of a sudden go from the speaker saying no Ukraine money without border security money to a bunch of Ukrainian flags flying in such a short period of time?
00:16:49.000Walk us through what happened this weekend.
00:16:51.000Well, it's a long story, like how they actually did it.
00:17:14.000What we did this week is we pretended to pass four separate bills and pretended to put those together in one package and send it to the Senate.
00:17:24.000But what we actually did is we amended the Senate supplemental, the H.R. 15 that started out as a veterans bill.
00:17:32.000I just want to let you know this thing ping-ponged back and forth and it started out under bad pretenses.
00:17:38.000Now, Speaker Johnson did say he was going to add border to this, but Chuck Schumer said we're not going to pass it if it's got border on it.
00:17:46.000So Speaker Johnson took the border off.
00:17:52.000And then it just glides through with Democrats bailing him out.
00:17:56.000Can you explain to our audience those details, the Democrats bailing him out?
00:18:01.000Yeah, so something happened that's never happened in decades.
00:18:04.000Like for a bill to pass with bipartisan votes, it's not remarkable.
00:18:08.000You usually get one or two Democrats on something, okay?
00:18:12.000But what happened this week is Speaker Johnson couldn't even get the bill to the floor because he couldn't get it through the rules committee.
00:18:19.000And so what we're talking about this week is he shared power with Hakeem Jeffries, the power to say what bills will come to the floor, how long they'll debate be debated, how they get combined when they go back to the Senate, that kind of power, which has never been bipartisan.
00:18:38.000Now, Speaker Johnson, this week, he crossed the Rubicon, frankly, and he went with Hakeem Jeffries to dictate the terms of the debate, which amendments would be allowed, and how this would all get packaged together.
00:18:51.000Those are, when you're in the majority, you control the rules, you control the procedure, and then people can vote how they want.
00:18:58.000But this week, Speaker Johnson did the unthinkable, and he saw he shouldered up with Hakeem Jeffries, and that's how he used these procedures and got these bills to the floor.
00:19:10.000Finally, can you contrast that with Kevin McCarthy, who refused to do a deal with Speaker Jeffries?
00:19:17.000Essentially, it is Speaker Jeffries, but yes.
00:19:23.000He could have walked across the aisle and asked Hakeem Jeffries to bail him out, for instance, on the Fiscal Responsibility Act last summer.
00:19:31.000But instead, Kevin drove a hard line and he said, we're going to get this 1% cut in there, and we're going to get budget caps in exchange for doing this.
00:19:56.000We saw Speaker Johnson try to do that this week.
00:19:59.000This is what happens in banana republicans, banana republics and third world countries: when somebody gets power, they change the rules for the next election or the date of the next election.
00:20:10.000And that's what Mike Johnson tried to do.
00:20:12.000He admitted as much in a Twitter post, an ex-post.
00:20:16.000He said, I think we should change the rule that allows people to get rid of me.
00:20:20.000And I tried to change the rule that allows to get people to get rid of me, but I didn't have enough votes from the Democrats.
00:20:27.000So that's something that Kevin never did.
00:20:29.000And Kevin also never went into the rules committee.
00:20:36.000Now, Kevin put three of us, you might consider us rebels, Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, and myself on there, gave us a blocking position.
00:20:43.000But every time that the three of us needed to block because Kevin was off track, he would work with us instead of going and getting all the Democrats in that committee to vote with him.
00:20:54.000So there's, you know, there's several precedents.
00:20:56.000People don't understand this back home, I think, where Speaker Johnson is, these are not just bipartisan bills.
00:22:07.000We had last month saving babies with pre-born by providing ultrasounds.
00:22:11.000And we're doing again this year what we did last year.
00:22:13.000We're going to stand for life because remaining silent in the face of the most radically pro-death administration is not an option.
00:22:18.000As Sir Edmund Burke said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, and we're not going to do nothing.
00:22:24.000Your gift to pre-born will give a girl the truth about what's happening in her body so that she can make the right choice.
00:23:01.000Go to charliekirk.com, click on the pre-born banner.
00:23:06.000Joining us now is one of the few good guys in the kingdom of Washington, D.C. I'll be going to his home state tomorrow, which is why I'll be off on the show tomorrow.
00:23:15.000Senator Mike Lee, Senator, welcome to the program.
00:24:01.000And it's arriving in the form of what's known as a message from the House of Representatives, which truncates some of our procedures.
00:24:10.000Part of how they're pushing this through.
00:24:12.000This is kind of odd, given that they intentionally utilized a procedure that they knew would make it easier for members to vote for it, or at least for various parts of it, but then send it over to the Senate, where we're asked to take it as a one-size-fits-all, take it or leave it proposition.
00:24:55.000Or do you think they'll be able to break that rather easily?
00:24:58.000So it's still subject to the 60-vote cloture standard, which is one of the more common usages of the word filibuster.
00:25:06.000Usually that's what it's referring to.
00:25:08.000And I assume that's how you mean that term here.
00:25:11.000So yeah, it's still subject to the 60-vote cloture standard.
00:25:14.000They have to bring debate to a close before we can pass the bill.
00:25:17.000And that takes three-fifths of the Senate or 60, 60 votes.
00:25:23.000The fear is that they'll have that and perhaps more than that.
00:25:27.000But the good news is among Republicans, they can't pass this without Republican votes because you can't pass it unless you bring debate to a close.
00:25:36.000You can't bring debate to a close without 60 votes.
00:25:38.000And there are only 51 Democrats in the Senate.
00:25:45.000So if all Republicans stood together on this bill and said, we're not going to vote for it, or even just said, we're not going to vote for it unless we have a full, robust amendment process where individual members are allowed to offer up suggestions as to how to make the bill better or less bad, as you may perceive it, we could stop it.
00:26:04.000That's going to be the challenge tomorrow.
00:26:07.000Republicans really ought to stand by each other's procedural rights in the Senate.
00:26:12.000And I'd like to think that we would stand up for something that's being cheered by the left instead of facilitating what the left wants to do, which is what happened in the House last week.
00:26:22.000Yeah, so I hope there's no Ukrainian flags tomorrow on the Senate floor.
00:26:27.000Can you help our audience understand, help me understand what is the major drive of the urgency for neocon politics in D.C.?
00:26:35.000You've been around for quite some time.
00:26:37.000There is this priority on nation building, of war funding.
00:26:43.000We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars right now that we know of.
00:26:48.000Why is this such a top priority for the UNI party in Washington?
00:26:54.000You know, the Uniparty and the military-industrial complex love each other, Charlie.
00:26:59.000And it's part of how this weird alliance gets formed between left and right on projects like this one.
00:27:06.000The left understands that this is the Achilles heel of many Republicans.
00:27:10.000If they can get them to go all in on war, particularly those Republicans who are beholden to the military-industrial complex in one way or another, they can tie it together in spending bill after spending bill to get Republicans to agree to support bloated budgets, to support appropriations bills that are completely lopsided and out of sync with what the American people want and more importantly, what they can afford.
00:27:36.000This is a lot of the reason why we're $34.5 trillion in debt is because of these dynamics.
00:27:43.000The Republican Party's attachment to unnecessary wars and to the military industrial complex is very, very costly.
00:27:51.000Not just because they get us involved in wars that we have no business being involved in, but also because it's the teaser rate.
00:27:59.000It's the trick that gets Republicans to vote for things they know better than to vote for.
00:28:05.000So I want to play a piece of tape here, and I think it's very illuminating and it's eye-opening, which is Cut 28.
00:28:12.000This is Representative Tom Cole from Oklahoma saying that there's a reservoir of goodwill against Mike Johnson.
00:28:18.000But I don't want to have you talk about Mike Johnson.
00:28:20.000I want you to talk about how D.C. is thrilled with this last weekend and the people are livid.
00:28:36.000Every single Republican voted for him.
00:28:38.000I don't think any other person could have done that at the time other than Mike Johnson.
00:28:43.000So the reservoir of goodwill is enormous.
00:28:46.000I think he's much stronger than the people seem to think.
00:28:50.000And I think he's demonstrated that by what he's passed.
00:28:53.000So the comments on Mike Johnson aside, Senator, but what is being done is wildly unpopular with the American people, and they seem not to care.
00:29:02.000That doesn't seem like a representative form of government to me.
00:29:18.000Reservoir of goodwill from the military industrial complex and from those in the Department of Defense and related agencies that really like this stuff?
00:29:31.000But there's a real disconnect between that and the reservoir of goodwill that may exist among the American people, among the voters who put us here, particularly Republican voters and rank and file Republican members, many of whom feel alienated because they've been betrayed, frankly.
00:29:47.000They elected leadership on one set of premises, and those premises have not been honored.
00:29:55.000In fact, they've been outright neglected.
00:29:57.000And they have every reason to be upset.
00:29:59.000Look, Republicans said just not too many weeks ago, and we said this for months consistently, not another dime, not another penny goes to Ukraine until at a minimum the border is secure,
00:30:13.000until at a minimum we've been able to pass legislation that would force President Biden's hand so as to disable this wholesale invasion across our southern border that he has invited and been facilitating in a way that's been very costly to Americans and that's been an absolute gold mine for international drug cartels who have made many tens of billions of dollars off of this.
00:30:41.000And all of a sudden, those conditions have just been neglected.
00:30:45.000It's as if we never made any nod in that direction.
00:30:50.000And we're passing now basically the same measure that Republicans were saying they would never pass in the House unless our conditions had been met, which they have not.
00:31:05.000And to make matters worse, Charlie, just days ago, the Democrats in the Senate basically nuked the impeachment clauses of the Constitution.
00:31:17.000You know, the House having impeached Secretary Mayorkis for facilitating the invasion and violating federal law and lying to Congress, Democrats just said, yeah, we're not going to deal with it.
00:31:26.000They didn't reach a finding of guilt or innocence.
00:31:28.000They just said those aren't impeachable.
00:31:30.000And if those aren't impeachable, up means down and yes means no.
00:32:02.000And in fact, we know that not all of it can be accounted for.
00:32:06.000At least not all of it can be accounted for in a way that would reflect what the priorities were supposed to be.
00:32:14.000You know, you saw a virtual admission out of the White House and some of our intelligence gathering agencies not too long ago when they rather publicly started sending the signal to the Zelensky administration in Ukraine.
00:32:31.000You know, you can't make the corruption quite this bad.
00:32:35.000It can't be this severe and this obvious.
00:32:38.000Don't be stealing quite so much of this money anymore.
00:32:42.000So we know that's been underway, and yet we're still sending them more money, not just a little bit more money, but another between $60 and $61 billion.
00:32:53.000And just does anyone think it's actually going to win the war for the Ukrainians?
00:32:58.000No one that I know believes that this sum of money is going to win the war for the Ukrainians.
00:33:05.000I don't know one person who believes that.
00:33:08.000And, you know, Charlie, in their more honest moments when you get people from the Department of Defense in a room and you get them talking.
00:33:16.000It was not too many months ago when a bunch of senators were talking to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
00:33:24.000And we asked him how much longer would this war take?
00:33:29.000And I think his guess in that moment was something like six, seven, eight more years.
00:33:35.000And I can only assume that the costs are going to continue to be, you know, between $50 and $100 billion a year just on our end.
00:33:47.000I haven't heard one person say that this installment is going to make the difference between victory and defeat for Ukraine.
00:33:54.000And in fact, what we're doing, I think we're making a brokered peace settlement, brokered peace negotiation more and more elusive by sending this money over there.
00:35:38.000Yeah, so the Repo Act is this means by which many people are saying we can get money, seize Russian assets basically to no cost to the United States and send that money over for things like the war in Ukraine when it's not really our money, American taxpayer money.
00:36:04.000They're talking about a large number of assets that are Russian assets that could be seized.
00:36:10.000But those Russian assets that could be seized that the United States has the ability to go after are relatively few.
00:36:19.000I mean, I think it's limited to around 8 billion or so.
00:36:24.000And this is one of many ways in which dominoes could fall once we start undertaking this.
00:36:30.000As I understand it, under customary international law, this is a fairly extreme step to take under these circumstances.
00:36:41.000And it's likely to result in a series of retaliatory actions by Russia that could impact U.S. investment within Russia in a pretty adverse way, potentially harming more U.S. interests than it ever would Russian interests in the United States.
00:36:59.000So, Senator, I also want to get your thoughts on the FISA vote.
00:37:13.000Look, last week was at Doozy because we had a failed Maorca's impeachment vote.
00:37:20.000We had this horrific bill passed in the House of Representatives coming over to the Senate now.
00:37:25.000And then we had, following the House capitulation on FISA the previous week, last week we had the Senate pass a House-passed FISA bill without a single modification, with the Turner Amendment intact, the Turner Amendment, which expands the government's authority under FISA, and without, most importantly, a warrant requirement.
00:37:48.000A warrant requirement that would have been limited to situations in which the government is searching for a particular U.S. citizen.
00:37:55.000What private communications that you, as a specific U.S. citizen, may have stored on the FISA 702 collection database.
00:38:06.000Lots of Americans may, unbeknownst to them, have communications with someone who's outside the United States and maybe on the federal government's target list overseas, people who are legitimately being spied on by the U.S. government.
00:38:26.000But if you're an American citizen and you talk to one of those people, you probably have no idea whether they're on there, your end of those conversations over the phone, by text message, email, and otherwise, are stored somewhere in a FISA 702 database.
00:38:41.000My argument for years has been before you get onto that database and search for, you know, if it's you they're wanting to look into, show me all that, everything you've got on Charlie Kirk.
00:38:54.000And for them to search for that on you, given the way they collected it without any warrant, they should have to get a warrant before they open communications that they've searched after specifically by using your name or your number.
00:39:18.000It is incredibly disappointing that the House and the Senate of America, they don't believe in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.