On today's show, Citizen Kane joins us to talk about Fox News and Tucker Carlson's exit from the network. Plus, John Solomon takes a look at why he believes Hunter Biden is going to be indicted soon. And more.
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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.
00:02:09.000It's funny, you know, Drudge turns to the left, and now several years later, as some people would argue sooner, Fox News is kind of turning that way.
00:02:20.000Obviously, someone is coordinating some leaks here.
00:02:24.000There's a great town hall story that has four or five videos, quote-unquote, leaked Tucker Carlson videos from a Media Matters reporter on Twitter.
00:02:34.000So that's, I would, I would tell people to look at that, but it's all backfiring because this sort of leaked audio stuff, leaked video from Tucker on, you know, on his set before broadcast before filming begins.
00:02:50.000Regarding those texts, I'm with you 100%.
00:02:53.000They did not show Tucker Carlson as a racist.
00:02:56.000Let's ask Simon Ateba, the White House reporter who has been blacklisted by Karen Jean-Pierre.
00:03:02.000Ask him if he thinks Tucker's a racist.
00:03:04.000You know, you'll get a response that Fox News won't like.
00:03:09.000And, you know, one other thing, a little birdie told me here recently that, well, this week, Lawrence Jones is filling in for Tucker at 8 p.m.
00:03:19.000By the way, you were correct to mention that the 8 p.m. slot on Fox News is down 50%.
00:03:25.000I just posted a story that the overall MSNBC beat Fox News in primetime ratings two nights ago.
00:04:26.000Yeah, that's a good, that's a good complex question.
00:04:29.000You know, I thought of the Rogan theme because there was a quote from Tucker one night on his show, and he was like, you guys think my audience is big?
00:04:35.000Joe Rogan has 12 million every day on Spotify.
00:04:39.000So I know there's a part of Tucker that probably has a little bit of a desire to go that alternate route and reach a younger audience.
00:04:48.000In terms of what it makes, you know, my first thought when you said, how does it make our job?
00:04:53.000I thought you were leaning into sort of us presenting news.
00:04:56.000And as a side note, it does make my job more difficult, right?
00:05:00.000Because let's say I have an outstanding clip from Fox News.
00:05:04.000Let's say it's you on Laura Ingram, or let's say it's Senator Johnson on Maria Bartaromo's show.
00:05:09.000Now, if I present that video, I get pushback from a certain part of my audience just for showing it because it's from the Fox News platform.
00:05:18.000So now going back to the meat of your question, which is, does this, how does this affect our ability to reach the MAGA audience and reach maybe an independent Republican-leaning audience if we all leave Fox News, if we all stop watching?
00:05:36.000Well, it's, you know, it's going to hurt Fox's bottom line, number one.
00:05:44.000Yeah, that's, I'm sure that's a huge part of the reason for this panic, right?
00:05:47.000For this, this pushing out of text messages and Suzanne Scott leaking to the Wall Street Journal is because they're trying to recapture a part of their audience and say, look, we were the good guys.
00:06:20.000I didn't mean to cut you off in the middle of your question, but look, let's say you're Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdock, and you think, oh, maybe we're going to lose 20%, you know, if we fire Tucker.
00:06:29.000They obviously had to be thinking about damage control.
00:06:32.000And now when they see down 50% in the eight o'clock hour and they see that MSNBC is beating them in overall prime time, yeah, I would think that would push them to the panic stage, such as now they're just throwing anything and everything.
00:06:46.000And that's why I implied perhaps that they're even bedfellows with Media Matters.
00:06:50.000Like, who's supplying these clips to Media Matters, these quote-unquote gotcha clips on Tucker?
00:06:56.000It's got to be inside people at Fox because, so yeah, so I think that Fox News is desperate.
00:07:02.000They're putting this out to try to get, you know, just to try to get people to see their side and it's not working.
00:07:09.000So that that's a that's a new point that I have not heard anybody make.
00:07:13.000And quite honestly, Kane, I was making somewhat of the opposite point, which also they actually could both be true.
00:07:19.000I was saying they might want to take Tucker out.
00:07:22.000You're actually saying they're trying to rewind the narrative to the audience.
00:07:25.000Like, hey, hey, guys, you would have fired him too.
00:07:28.000But it's just this fundamental misunderstanding of who their audience actually is.
00:07:33.000They think they're going to regain the audience based on that text message or a couple of off-the-cuff remarks.
00:08:53.000You never make a good decision when you're in the midst of panic ever in life.
00:08:56.000That's why you need to slow down and you need to use prudence and not hysteria.
00:09:01.000And so basically they're seeing the ratings fall.
00:09:04.000They're seeing, I mean, not just fall, collapse, down 60 or 70%.
00:09:08.000They're seeing massive audience erosion that seems to only be accelerating the more information gets out.
00:09:15.000And probably somebody says, hey, we need to try to tell the audience why we did this without doing that.
00:09:20.000And so someone has the genius idea to leak a text message to the New York Times.
00:09:26.000I mean, and we're also learning, Kane, that Fox has full-time people, four full-time people at Fox that collect dossiers on their talent.
00:09:35.000I don't know if that's true, but it sounds like it's true.
00:09:37.000And then they're working in harmony with Media Matters.
00:09:40.000I mean, Kane, 30 seconds, and we'll talk about this after the break.
00:09:45.000If you were Fox, I think the only way you could save this right now is not try to leak stuff on Tucker, is go take your Gulf stream down to Tucker's home in Florida or up in Maine and offer him $100 million a year and try to sweep this under the rug.
00:10:01.000I don't think they can survive if they don't resign Tucker.
00:10:28.000I'm not quite understanding the philosophy or the thought here.
00:10:30.000Maybe they just want to truncate the network and go down 800,000 people at a 3.3 million.
00:10:35.000And okay, Rupert Murdoch will be worth 8 billion instead of 18 billion, but maybe no more lawsuits and you get to go back to the Met Gala and no more boycotts and Dylan Mulvaney can do ads for you again.
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00:12:13.000He's going to, unless they've paid him off to like the, I mean, if I was a person in a position of power and a wild card like Tucker Carlson got released from Fox News and maybe Rumble makes a deal with him or something like that.
00:12:27.000Do you have any idea how big that would be?
00:12:30.000With us is Citizen Kane from citizenfreepress.com.
00:12:38.000So you went, your last comment right before the break was, does Rupert Murdoch, is he happy to shrink his network from 3 million viewers to 800,000?
00:12:50.000You know, look, again, I don't think they anticipated that this was going to happen.
00:12:56.000Tucker brings a completely different audience to Fox News that no other of their primetime anchors does.
00:13:05.000As Joe Rogan just showed it, stated in that last clip, he's sort of built for the internet, right?
00:13:12.000So it, you know, that's in a way, that's probably responsible for a bigger part of this boycott, right?
00:13:19.000If Tucker's audience is this young, meme-making, internet-loving audience and you sack him, now you've pissed off the most active people in the modern community.
00:13:31.000That's what they always say, the desired target demo on cable news.
00:13:34.000And if you look at the, if you go actually a level deeper, that's the biggest collapse on the 8 p.m. hour is 25 to 44, which is what advertisers look at the most.
00:14:18.00026% is hugely substantial to a beer company.
00:14:21.000So obviously this part of the MAGA base is happy to do boycotts and successful at them.
00:14:30.000And again, we have the best meme makers, as we know, and all of this sort of works.
00:14:36.000So, you know, something else I want to get to with Fox is, you know, what will they plan to, that comment from that guy with Joe Rogan was dead on.
00:14:48.000If you replace Don Lemon, it's going to be another Don Lemon.
00:14:51.000There really isn't another Tucker Carlson except for maybe Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and, you know, and a few other independent people, because I think the independence of what you guys do on your platforms sort of gives you some freedom to say things.
00:15:07.000Yes, because we don't have that kind of corporate sort of Damocles hanging over us where we're going to get a call because Hyundai got mad because I went after Dylan Milvaney or something, right?
00:15:20.000But so, but Kane, I want to kind of just build this out a little bit.
00:15:23.000We only have two minutes remaining, but I think this is a cause and effect.
00:15:26.000Not everything in life is cause and effect, but this is.
00:15:28.000This is the house that was built when Fox called Arizona preemptively on election night, based on everything that I have learned from this audience and other people.
00:15:37.000That was a shock and awe, where they were brazen.
00:16:58.000And we can't forget my good friend Dan Bongino, which I think, if you look at the Dan Bongino contract deal and the Tucker deal was within 72 hours, which looks as if a complete editorial shift, somebody in that New York office, somebody on Avenue of the Americas, I think it's 1211.
00:17:16.000It's all public right there, said, Hey, these MAGA people, they're going to keep watching.
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00:18:54.000I never thought in my life I'd do a children's book, but it's a very special project to mark.
00:18:58.000First off, it stars my son's hamster Chunk, who in this particular book becomes a newspaper editor.
00:19:04.000He publishes a newspaper and he can't get his newspaper out because the tunnels, the towers, the tubes in the Hamster Village are clogged by an evil koala bear named Carl.
00:19:15.000But the story is designed to tell young children ages four to 11 why censorship is bad, why the First Amendment was first.
00:19:23.000These are lessons that were not given them in their own schools over the last two decades.
00:19:27.000And so this is an opportunity for mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie, and uncle to share a story about why free speech matters in a fun, entertaining way.
00:19:35.000There's great animals, great characters, beautiful artistry.
00:19:39.000And you get to tell and pass on a value to our children about free speech that a lot of our schools are now teaching the opposite of, which is censorship could actually be good.
00:19:47.000They're actually teaching that in some places.
00:20:36.000Yeah, listen, there's a lot going on behind the scenes.
00:20:39.000Right now, there is a proffer, an offer of testimony being drafted that will be conveyed to the House committees later this week.
00:20:45.000Last week, the big development was this whistleblower couldn't even tell his lawyers what he knew and certainly couldn't tell Congress until the House Ways and Means Committee voted to accept him as a whistleblower and to pierce the tax privacy laws that prevent him from talking about anything that isn't a public tax case.
00:21:12.000The IRS agent's able to tell his lawyers what he knows.
00:21:15.000His lawyers are able to make an offer of testimony to Congress.
00:21:18.000I would expect that this agent would be testifying before Congress in the next couple of weeks behind closed doors, and that by Memorial Day, we'll know exactly what it is that he has as evidence to back up his claim.
00:21:30.000His claim is that the career people at the FBI and IRS were ready to indict Hunter Biden a long time ago on tax charges, political appointees of the Justice Department.
00:21:40.000The Biden Justice Department blocked it.
00:21:42.000And then Merrick Garland went out and said there is no political interference, which he knew to be false, he said.
00:21:47.000And so that's why he approached the Justice Department Inspector General.
00:21:51.000He's been investigating this for about eight weeks now.
00:21:53.000And now Congress, and I think the American public will get the goods, the receipts, the proof before Memorial Day on the current schedule that Congress is on.
00:22:03.000Meanwhile, Hunter Biden could very well be indicted in the next few days.
00:22:07.000The legal team around Hunter Biden believes that an indictment is inevitable and that the Justice Department's in the final phases of doing that.
00:22:18.000It didn't result in a plea deal or a bargain.
00:22:20.000And so I think the Hunter Biden team, based on my reporting, seems resolved that there could be criminal charges.
00:22:25.000Again, you won't know until the grand jury does it.
00:22:27.000And of course, unlike Nancy Pelosi, we're going to give Hunter Biden the presumption of innocence, something that Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have deprived President Trump.
00:22:36.000But at the end of the day, this case seems to be moving forward.
00:22:40.000It's going to be a narrower case, though, than what a lot of the agents believe could have been brought a year or two ago.
00:23:02.000Yeah, what leads you to believe this will happen?
00:23:04.000And I think you've kind of alluded to it.
00:23:06.000Is it just going to be a paperwork slap on the wrist, go clean up the side of a highway for a couple days type thing where you check the box, but you don't go all the way, where they just do like 1% of the 100%, you know, 1% of the crimes where they say, oh, you know, we're equal opportunity.
00:23:20.000And, John, is it, and this is how sinister my calculation gets, is it a way to go do Hunter because they want to do a DOJ with Trump later on, where they say, hey, look, both parties are after DOJ.
00:23:49.000The defense team comes in and tries to convince the Justice Department why you shouldn't charge my client or why you should charge him with lesser crimes or maybe get a plea deal.
00:23:59.000There are reports out there that the government is looking at two or three felony charges against Hunter Biden related to taxes, one charge related to his gun application that we know a lot about, then some misdemeanors.
00:24:11.000My sources tell me that those reports are generally accurate.
00:24:15.000Here's the big concern that people in the know have.
00:24:18.000And we may get an answer from the IRS whistleblower if he gets a chance to testify.
00:24:23.000But there is in the discussions in the Washington Press right now, the suggestion is that the tax charges are going to involve transactions of about $20,000, $30,000 on business expenses that weren't declared as income, like in the 2018 timeframe.
00:24:37.000So a small amount of tax evasion alleged and more recent in the last five years.
00:24:43.000We know from my reporting two years ago, we made public, Congress confirmed this email, that there's an email from January of 2017, the week that Donald Trump was about to become president, where Hunter Biden's business partner, Eric Schwerin, someone that Congress is trying to get to cooperate, wrote Hunter Biden to say, hey, Hunter, you never declared $400,000 of income and not any income, the income from that controversial deal from Burisma Holdings in Ukraine.
00:25:11.000And it's three years later, Hunter, you got to get right.
00:25:13.000You got to declare the income and pay some taxes.
00:25:15.000$400,000 would be a much more serious charge.
00:25:18.000That's not in the current discussions.
00:25:20.000And yesterday, Congressman Scott Perry from Pennsylvania wrote a letter to all the committees in Congress, Senate and House saying, hey, look at this.
00:25:27.000There's this email saying he did this.
00:25:39.000And that is circulating around today with a lot of fervor.
00:25:42.000A lot of people asking the right question now.
00:25:44.000Why isn't that Burisma stuff on the table, according to the media?
00:25:47.000Did the statute of limitations be allowed to expire?
00:25:51.000That could be a big scandal going forward.
00:25:53.000This sounds like a lot of paperwork stuff, and I'm not making it insignificant, but what about the influence peddling?
00:25:59.000I mean, and is any of this actually going to point to the big guy, or it seems as if they're angling it in such a way where they could just kind of go, okay, paperwork.
00:26:07.000You know, he could plea down to a couple felonies and then again, get community service, you know, a slap on the wrist where they could say, we'd been there, done that.
00:26:17.000I'm not getting my hopes up here, John, that this is going to be the accountability of the Biden crime syndicate.
00:26:24.000Again, we're talking about that 2018 window again, right?
00:26:27.000And that's why there's a red flag here.
00:26:29.000A lot of that influence peddling stuff, right, occurred in 13, 14, 15, 16, when Joe Biden was still vice president and still had juice, right?
00:26:36.000And Hunter Biden was, by his own admission in his own email, trading on his name, right?
00:26:40.000He writes his colleague one time, they're not interested in my skills.
00:26:47.000And that raised, I think that further accentuates the concern that some Republicans in Congress in the know have that maybe the most serious stuff, the influence peddling stuff, the earlier tax issues with Burisma, if those emails are to be believed, that they're off the table because Justice Department did something like let the statute of limitations expire.
00:27:05.000And therefore, Hunter Biden couldn't be hit harder with these sort of allegations from before.
00:27:10.000That is the question that lawmakers like Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, James Comer, and Jim Jordan are currently trying to answer.
00:27:17.000When we see, if there is an indictment and we see what it is, we'll know what the government focused on.
00:27:22.000And then the real questions will begin, which is why weren't these other issues, which have been in the public for three years now, why aren't they addressed in this indictment?
00:27:30.000I suspect, and again, I don't know anything, but I suspect the IRS whistleblower may be able to provide us an answer about why some of the more explosive stuff that we currently know about isn't in the discussion on the indictment.
00:27:41.000Maybe the whistleblower can give us some visibility into that.
00:27:44.000That means the Hunter Biden scandal will become more than influence peddling.
00:27:47.000There'll now be a question of whether there was a protection racket or a cover-up going on.
00:27:51.000Expect that to happen in the next couple of months, that debate to flip on its end.
00:28:19.000Meanwhile, Chuck Grassy, Ron Johnson dropped the bombshell letter yesterday saying, hey, you gave us some testimony back in 2020, Anthony Blinken, just before you became Secretary of State, and you lied to us.
00:28:29.000You told us you didn't have written or text or email communications with Hunter Biden.
00:28:34.000We found in communications, and we also saw communications to your wife, who was working with you at the State Department.
00:28:46.000I want to keep you for another segment and also just remind people about your very important book, Hidden Headlines, a Seymour Clues Mystery.
00:29:02.000The last few hours, we've had hundreds of parents and children come for storytime.
00:29:07.000This is ground zero of the next America, the next generation of America, instilling values like this book here, Hidden Headlines, my newest book.
00:29:14.000I wanted to tell a story of why the First Amendment matters, why it was first.
00:29:18.000So many children and young adults didn't get that lesson in school.
00:29:21.000We have a chance to influence our children, to teach them about freedom, about faith, about the values and greatness of America.
00:29:27.000Something they're not getting often in their schools today.
00:29:30.000John, how are sales going of your new book?
00:29:53.000And I just, it struck me as someone just in everyday life trying to manage two children to say that and realize that the moment in America to fight for freedom, for liberty, for the America that we've had, but might not have in the future is upon us.
00:30:06.000It was really a touching moment to meet so many great parents on the front line saying, I'm going to protect my children from silliness.
00:30:12.000I'm going to get America back to common sense.
00:30:36.000Well, listen, the mother feels like the mother of Hunter's child in Arkansas feels like he is not showing the rest of his income to us because he might be making a lot more money and trying to cheat the child or the court out of money.
00:30:50.000So the judge agreed in this sense and said, listen, Mr. Biden, you have to produce these records, including all sources of income and all gifts you got and anyone who bought your photos and how much you got for them.
00:31:02.000And so Hunter Biden now will have to reveal whether he's gotten any gifts that he's been living off of.
00:31:11.000Those records won't only be important to the paternity case, but as you pointed out in the Fox News clip, they could be important to congressional investigators.
00:31:18.000And I want to tell you about something else.
00:31:28.000I think later today, we're going to learn about the existence of an FBI document that alleges a pay-to-play influence peddling scheme, meaning not tax evasion, which Hunter Biden is expecting to potentially be indicted for, but actually Joe Biden and the family trading policy for money.
00:31:45.000We understand there's an FBI document that's been out there.
00:31:48.000I think that's going to burst out into the scene later today or tomorrow.
00:31:51.000One of the many whistleblowers, not the IRS whistleblower, but an FBI whistleblower.
00:31:55.000That could have a profound effect because it'll turn the attention where it ultimately needs to be.
00:32:00.000Hunter Biden is not the ultimate public interest here.
00:32:03.000It's President Joe Biden and what he may have done to sell his office.
00:32:06.000I think we're going to get some explosive allegations in a few hours.
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00:34:16.000And Gen Z is watching the Republican Party extremely closely as they destroy our environment, take rights away from women, do nothing about kids being shot in schools.
00:34:24.000And if they think they can give the middle finger to our generation and get away with it, they're sorely mistaken.