Arielle Davidson and Peter Schweitzer discuss the latest in the Biden/Russia scandal, the CNN debate, and the town hall debate with Bill O'Reilly. Plus, we talk impeachment, Turkey, Syria, and transgenders.
00:00:00.000Man, this is a whirlwind show today. We have Ariel Davidson on. She's going to spend a few minutes talking about what's happening with Trump and Turkey.
00:00:08.540It's a whole different look at things. We're just going to go through the insanity of the CNN debate last night.
00:00:16.360Also, O'Reilly. We talk impeachment, Turkey, Syria, town hall on trans-gendered people.
00:00:24.200What the president, he says the president is changing and he thinks that it is dangerous for the president.
00:00:32.480I happen to agree with him. I've seen it. When you hear him talk about it, you'll understand.
00:00:36.360And Peter Schweitzer is here to tell us all about the actual story behind Joe Biden and his son.
00:00:43.280It seems like that isn't such an open and shut case. You'll hear about it all on today's podcast.
00:00:54.200All right. I just want to go through some audio here because this is crazy what has been going on.
00:01:13.600Let's first of all, let's start with the impeachment. Here's Mike Pompeo.
00:01:17.200He hits back on a PBS host who says there's no proof of Biden wrongdoing.
00:01:25.220I just finally, you know that there's been no proof of any misdoing on the part of Vice President Biden.
00:01:31.480You all keep repeating that line as if you're working for the DNC.
00:01:34.540I'm definitely not working for the DNC. I'm an independent journalist.
00:01:38.340But the European Union, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations felt that that prosecutor was corrupt and thought he should be removed.
00:01:51.820There's no evidence that what Vice President Biden was doing was corrupt in some way.
00:01:58.280By the way, it's now the prosecutor that they all cheered for.
00:02:04.160They all cheered for Lusanko to come in and replace Shokin.
00:02:09.160He was the savior. This is the guy who's going to.
00:02:11.320No, this is the guy you get 1.8 million billion dollars if you go ahead and replace Shokin with Lusanko.
00:02:17.280It's Lusanko who's saying he's dirty and we need to investigate.
00:02:21.220It's crazy. Yeah, I mean crazy. And by the way, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, the U.S. Embassy, the ambassador is dirty.
00:02:33.400She was just fired. And when you if you just watch.
00:02:36.560Look, sweetheart, I know you're a PBS. You've been there since the I think you were there before they even had radio.
00:02:43.760And I appreciate all the hard work that you've done. But listen, sweetie, just watch.
00:02:49.920Is that too demeaning? It does seem like you're being a tad demeaning.
00:02:53.580Yeah, that's unfortunate. I certainly.
00:02:57.440Certainly would be disappointed if they would take it that way.
00:03:00.520Just watch the chalkboard because the evidence is all there.
00:04:48.120Thank you. Hi, Christina McFarlane, CNN.
00:04:51.000The NBA has always been a league that prides itself on its player and its coaches being able to speak out openly about political and societal affairs.
00:04:58.960I just wonder after the events of this week and the fallout we've seen, whether you would both feel differently about speaking out in that way in future.
00:05:08.260Excuse me, we'll take the basketball questions only.
00:05:36.840But when it comes down to the social justice of all these people they supposedly care so much about in China, all these fans that they're so worried about, as their entire society is turning into an episode of Black Mirror, they don't seem to be worried about it at all.
00:07:39.160You don't know David Stern, but you have a couple of separations from him.
00:07:45.440So anyway, so David went in the 1980s and he went to China and he saw their love for basketball and he said, you know what?
00:07:56.260Why don't you guys play highlight clips?
00:07:58.140And he actually would mail the highlight clips to China once a week and they would play it on state television after the censors made sure they cut out everything that might be, you know, bad.
00:12:44.100Well, when I initially heard that Trump was pulling troops out of northern Syria, and I saw sort of the media have a collective meltdown, my initial reaction was, there's more to this story than we are hearing.
00:12:56.880And I think that's why this piece has resonated with people, because they sort of went through a very similar thought process.
00:13:03.020Essentially, what happened in Syria, in order to understand what Donald Trump's moves are, you have to understand kind of why we got to the place we are.
00:13:12.680And the reason we're in the situation we are in is because back in 2010, when Obama was calling, or back in the mid-2010s, when Obama was calling ISIS the JV squad, and he realized that ISIS was a much bigger threat than he anticipated, he had to choose allies in the Middle East in order to combat ISIS.
00:13:32.160And he chose to align the United States with the YPG, which was basically a group of pro-Assad Syrian Kurdish forces.
00:13:42.280Now, the issue with that alliance is that those particular groups of Kurds were seen basically as a terrorist organization by the Turks.
00:13:50.140Yeah, if you remember, the GOP got involved in this as well.
00:13:53.380You know, John McCain was seen with these terrorists, and we're like, what are we doing?
00:15:59.460And I don't like being in bed with him in the first place.
00:16:01.780What gives me pause on this is when you first hear about it, you're like, wait a minute.
00:16:08.220These were people that we had said are our partners.
00:16:12.700Well, yes, but I've I've come to look at it in the last couple of days in the same way that the Soviet Union was our partner against Hitler.
00:16:53.100I mean, I think that's a really apt analogy.
00:16:54.920But I'm sort of in I'm in the camp of leaving a minimal amount of troops as sort of a deterrent boots on the ground.
00:17:02.140You know, I don't I think this idea that we can stay there indefinitely and have massive amount of troops there is just not it's illogical.
00:17:29.460But my I'm saying that it's OK to leave a small number of troops in northern Syria in order to act as a deterrent in order to show also that we don't abandon our allies completely.
00:17:40.760So this is this is again the quagmire that we are in is that we've allied ourselves, like you said, with some not so great actors.
00:17:49.320But at the same time, we also send a message in the Middle East that we're not good on our word.
00:17:53.380And I think there is a happy medium between the two.
00:17:56.840This is something that Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz, tried to hit upon on one of his tweets a couple of days ago where he talked about how balancing our international image is also really important.
00:18:09.520But bringing the troops home is important as well.
00:18:11.800And so I think, you know, we do need to recognize that when we enter into alliances, for better or for worse, I mean, these people did lose thousands of lives fighting next to us and joining a war that we told the entire international community was necessary to fight for our national security interests.
00:18:27.320Did we did something that's worth thinking about?
00:18:31.220But again, you know, what I wanted to highlight in the piece was that the media treating this as a situation where Trump went rogue or lost his mind is just completely untrue.
00:18:41.780And it just shows, again, how much the media will avoid talking about Obama's foreign policy legacy, because they know if they did, it would show how poor it was.
00:18:55.280They're constantly, I call the media the janitors of the Obama legacy.
00:18:58.620You'll notice that most of these pieces don't bring up the fact that the reason we're in this situation is entirely because of specific choices Obama made to prop up the Iran deal.
00:19:08.920And getting in bed with the wrong people at the time, which the conservatives were at the time against these people.
00:19:15.220We were against getting into bed with these people and arming them and training them.
00:19:20.440We were, at least I was, I was speaking out.
00:20:09.720Because he said, if you start going after the Kurds, we're going to crush your economy.
00:20:15.660Do you believe that there is a trip wire that we should look for?
00:20:20.940So there's two things that I think are important.
00:20:25.620The first one is that Erdogan is supposed to visit the White House in November.
00:20:31.100And I think he has that provide some sort of motivation.
00:20:34.040That's sort of a carrot for him to behave himself.
00:20:36.620And I do think that it might temper him a bit and it might force him to hold back, which would be helpful, obviously.
00:20:45.140And the second thing I'll say is that Congress is already busily proposing bills to slap sanctions on Turkey.
00:20:51.940And I think that's great because as many, you know, this sort of disgruntled pushback from Congress in terms of Trump's move to pull troops out of Syria.
00:25:25.120They're trying to ruin me in another way.
00:25:27.580And I've got to fight everybody all by myself.
00:25:32.000That's a real tough place to be as a human being.
00:25:35.340And I want all your listeners, who I think most are fair-minded, you know, to step back and say, you know, there comes a point in a country's history where the people have to rise up and say, enough.
00:29:22.920You know, you did a lot of good work on this and people should take it seriously and look at it.
00:29:27.520But you say that this is a coordinated effort.
00:29:31.920And I don't know whether that's true on a micro level, but I do know that the press and the Democratic Party are working together on this impeachment thing.
00:29:43.780They coordinate, OK, through K Street.
00:29:47.540K Street is a famous avenue in Washington, D.C., where the political action committees are.
00:29:56.300And there are organizations that coordinate information between Democrats and the press.
00:30:32.660This goes into her lineage of Native American.
00:30:37.180So she is, you know, going to get destroyed if she gets the nomination.
00:30:43.440Biden, he's already he's been the major casualty of Ukraine.
00:30:48.920So next Tuesday night, when The New York Times and CNN team up to moderate the debate, the Democratic debate, the fascinating part of that will be, are you going to ask Biden about his son and all of this stuff in China and Ukraine?
00:31:04.880Are you going to follow up with questions because, you know, Biden's going to have a prepared answer?
00:31:08.700Are you going to ask Elizabeth Warren about this other bogus pregnancy thing?
00:31:35.460And if that happens, there's going to be an outcry in the conservative media, which is primarily talk radio, Internet, because Fox News is not in the conservative media anymore.
00:31:51.880Well, it used to be that Fox News had a traditional slant, which means this.
00:32:00.100It's that the guy who ran the place, Roger Ailes, basically his philosophy was conservatives and traditional Americans are not heard in the media.
00:33:06.900Well, instead of doing a factual lash out, like he should have done, and say, did you know that the Fox News poll questions 8% more Democrats than Republicans on impeachment?
00:33:21.280If you look at the methodology, the Fox News poll asked 8% more Democrats than Republicans.
00:33:30.640And guess what the margin was for impeachment?
00:34:52.660But the European Union, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the International Monetary Fund, and other international organizations felt that that prosecutor was corrupt and thought he should be removed.
00:35:06.240There's no evidence that what Vice President Biden was doing was corrupt in some way.
00:35:12.600Well, Peter Schweitzer, how would you respond to that?
00:35:18.620Well, what they want to do is they want to go to the firing of the prosecutor.
00:35:22.140They don't want to talk about the underlying financial arrangements that the Biden family had in Ukraine.
00:35:55.480Literally two months after that fact, Glenn, his son, Hunter Biden, becomes a board member of Burisma, this corrupt Ukrainian energy company.
00:36:06.960It's headed by Zlachevsky, this corrupt oligarch who was in the Yanukovych pro-Russian government to begin with.
00:36:14.860And they pay Hunter, according to the banking records, $83,000 a month.
00:36:20.360And he takes over $3 million in total from this Ukrainian company.
00:36:38.000His background, and I'm sure you've done enough reporting to know his background, especially at that time, he is a very unstable individual.
00:36:48.500Yeah, I mean, you know, we obviously don't like to get into the personal situation.
00:36:55.020And I don't want to say, I don't want to, look, I'm an alcoholic, so I don't want to denigrate him for that.
00:36:59.540What I want to say is, he doesn't have any skills.
00:37:02.240And at the time, he's also an unstable alcoholic and drug guy that has, if you were going to put somebody on the board, if he wasn't, if he didn't bring anything special, he didn't bring anything, any experience, and he was unstable, why would you hire this guy other than he's the dad of the vice president?
00:37:46.020Now, the response from a lot of the press corps, not all of it, but a lot of it, has been, well, this goes on all the time, as if that's A, acceptable, or B, if that's actually true.
00:38:17.200There's this bank account that I think we've shared with you, Glenn, this Morgan Stanley account where Hunter Biden was drawing cash out of.
00:38:24.180We got access to this bank account because of a criminal case involving Hunter Biden's business partner.
00:38:30.040And that shows money coming from a Kazakh oligarch during this same period.
00:38:34.120It shows money coming from anonymous Swiss bank accounts, particularly a small Swiss bank that has been implicated in money laundering in five countries.
00:38:44.700So, I mean, to say, oh, well, nothing's been proven that it's wrong here is just laughable.
00:39:31.920It's a key point to say, on the one hand, if people think the prosecutor should be fired and to say, on the other hand, that it is entirely inappropriate for Joe Biden to get this guy fired.
00:40:12.420And even the Burisma Company's lawyer, a guy named Mr. Beretta, who was hired in part at the suggestion of Hunter Biden, said the investigation was ongoing at this time.
00:41:38.340In fact, he has in his office a large fish tank that has sharks swimming in it.
00:41:43.960I'll just sort of tell you how this guy rolls.
00:41:46.900And he owns Prevat Bank, which is this large Ukrainian bank, which U.S. and Western aid dollars and loan guarantees are sent into.
00:41:55.460And the problem is that a large chunk of that money disappears, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups have sort of traced what happened to the money.
00:42:06.560And they make, I think, a very convincing case that Kolomoisky and his team set up a bunch of LLCs and siphoned off that money.
00:42:14.560So now you have a situation of missing aid dollars that seem to have benefited Kolomoisky, who is paying, involved in the payments, to Hunter Biden of these board fees, $83,000 a month.
00:42:28.740And Kolomoisky is also a guy who, before the Bidens arrived, was known as such a bad Bond villain that he is on a do-not-enter, no-visa list.
00:42:42.280He cannot get a visa to come to the United States.
00:42:45.060But in the month that we discover, oh, the money is missing, somehow or another, this guy gets a visa to be able to travel to the United States.
00:45:30.020That was all fact-checked by the New York Times.
00:45:32.920So there's really no dispute that these facts are there, the payments are there, the relationships are there.
00:45:40.220But again, the Bidens don't want to respond about this.
00:45:42.960Why do they not simply sit down, have Hunter come in, and he and his father say, we are going to take questions for two hours on this, and then we don't want to talk about it anymore?
00:45:53.500That would be the simple, direct way to deal with it.
00:45:55.700But they're not going to do that because there's not good or even great answers to these questions.
00:46:03.880And even if it was, even if he was completely innocent of everything, you can't.
00:46:09.700This, when, I mean, he was a mess, and he was married, and he was a mess.
00:46:14.940And all throughout this, he was an active alcoholic.
00:46:17.620Then he cleans himself up, his brother dies, he grieves, but he grieves with his widow, and then starts hooking up with his widow, gets a divorce from his first wife, marries his brother's widow, then starts having an affair with another woman, divorces her.
00:46:39.640No, he doesn't have an affair, he just divorces the widow, leaves behind the widow, and now is married again after meeting this woman for 10 days.