Glenn Beck talks about the government shutdown, the bizarre things happening up in Alaska, and the strange goings-on of Russell Brand and others. Also, a new book out from an insider in the intelligence community, an insider that has worked in the Pentagon and the White House.
00:00:00.000There's a new book out from an insider that knows he's worked in the intelligence community, he's worked in the Pentagon, he's worked at the White House, 16 years under both administrations, and he watched The Deep State.
00:00:15.120He's exposing it all in his new book, and he's on today, Kash Patel.
00:12:00.740The country's fighting for its survival, bankrolled in large part by U.S. taxpayers.
00:12:07.200The outcome may be decided by America's willingness to keep paying.
00:12:11.940Some Americans say we're very sympathetic to you Ukrainians, but we're going through tough times at home, and we just can't afford to keep on supporting you.
00:13:41.500And I think, you know, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I think even the liberals in the media are disgusted with this president.
00:13:51.720And they see the fact, and even if they're not disgusted, they understand he's a problem.
00:13:57.300And he might not win because people are seeing how compromised he is mentally and physically.
00:14:02.880And so this might be part of encouraging him to exit.
00:14:09.280By the way, we now have photos of the ambassador, the American ambassador, ambassador that was over in Ukraine meeting twice with the Burisma official after being told the firm was corrupt.
00:14:25.400So we were told that they didn't know anything.
00:14:32.780It's impossible to not know that Burisma and the head of Burisma was a total oligarch that literally beheads the people that are in his way.
00:14:44.820And our American ambassador was told, as was Joe Biden, don't meet with these guys, don't, they're really, really bad.
00:14:54.340But the Burisma official who worked closely with Hunter Biden was invited to two separate events by the U.S. ambassador.
00:17:41.900I mean, this year started with so much promise and opportunity to have a real debate about what can weaponized defunding of the bureaucracy.
00:17:52.300And Kevin McCarthy basically threw that out the window of the negotiating table when he decided he was going to be in coalition with Hakeem Jeffries.
00:17:59.120And then he used as an excuse, he said, oh, we'll do it during the appropriations process.
00:18:03.980None of us believed it at the time, but that was his argument.
00:18:07.120And now, lo and behold, by the way, he moved none of the or one of the appropriations out of the many appropriations bills and intentionally created a pile up at the end of the fiscal year to jam conservatives.
00:18:20.760And now conservatives are saying we're not doing that.
00:18:24.360We're going to insist on doing appropriations bills, and then we're going to insist on policy riders to defund the weaponized portions of the federal government under the banner of no security funding.
00:18:36.080And that would apply to border security, energy security, ensuring the rule of law, the Department of Justice.
00:18:41.700And that's going to be an important debate as we head towards this leverage point at the end of this week with regard to the lapse of the annual fiscal year.
00:18:51.520Could you explain for the average person that may not know what a CR is and not know that how a how our Constitution says we're supposed to work as a country?
00:19:04.540In the jargon of budget speak, a continuing resolution basically says we're just going to continue you at last year's funding level, and we may make a few changes on top of it.
00:19:17.520But it ends up being a very small bill because you're extending all of, in this case, Biden federal government spending, which is militant.
00:19:30.920The way it's supposed to work is that you have an annual debate on the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, the Department of Defense, and we've gotten out of the business of having that debate on the House floor.
00:19:47.100And what ends up happening is that it's all crafted behind closed doors.
00:19:53.120And it's just they put them all together.
00:19:55.800You'll hear another word called the omnibus bill.
00:19:59.120They'll put it together, and then they'll attempt to just jam it through in the night of day and late at night and expect members to not have read it.
00:20:09.620And what these members are saying is we're done.
00:20:12.160It's not we're not doing that process anymore.
00:20:16.360It's about, to your point earlier, using this leverage point to actually save the country because this is the last leverage point that we have heading into next year because of some of the other decisions that Kevin McCarthy has made.
00:20:30.540And what are those decisions that he's made?
00:20:34.360He extended the debt limit to the new administration.
00:20:38.080And so when you take essentially one of your few leverage points and push that past into 2025, now you're left only with funding leverage.
00:20:50.820And in Congress, there are very few must-pass bills.
00:20:54.280We call them must-pass bills that forces the cartel to act.
00:20:59.320And the cartel hates these because they then have to stop governing behind closed doors at agencies where they legislate apart from Constitution, apart from the Congress.
00:21:10.560They have to come in to Congress and get these things passed.
00:21:14.580And we only have about two or three of them.
00:21:17.060This is one of the last impactful one to be able to defund the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.
00:21:27.960And why did they do a continuing resolution in 2008?
00:21:34.280Yeah, I mean, this has been a problem that is growing for years.
00:21:39.580Each year is a little differently based on the interest of what's going on in play.
00:21:46.100Sometimes a continuing resolution is better than an omnibus but still bad.
00:21:52.240And so it's hard to say what was going on.
00:21:54.340But all of it is a natural progression of the cartel year in, year out, to basically avoid the House floor, avoid debate amendments and doing real budgets,
00:22:07.020and to push it behind closed doors in that fashion and to make it so that it's very, very painful and stark.
00:22:14.880So we just found out from 60 Minutes this last weekend that we are now paying for every firefighter in Ukraine.
00:22:25.540You know, we're paying for their equivalent of Social Security.
00:22:29.300Many of their agencies we're paying for.
00:22:32.620But we're also paying for their small businesses and bailing out all of their small businesses.
00:22:38.720All of that causes inflation to an incredible degree here in America.
00:22:48.700Well, I think we've had suspicions about what has been all of these taxpayer dollars been used in Ukraine.
00:22:57.560We're now hearing more and more reporting of it.
00:22:59.760But this is the fundamental problem when you are cutting these enormous checks for Ukraine,
00:23:04.600and you're putting yourself in a position that the country will help escalate a war in Europe at the expense of our taxpayers and our consumers here in this country.
00:23:18.100And then you find out it's not just for weapons that are going to be hard for us to replace on our own stockpile,
00:23:24.280but it is for basically the funding of their domestic economy.
00:23:29.940And it's one of the reasons why I think we're going to have a big fight this week on whether Kevin McCarthy has to stick by his commitment to strip out all the Ukraine funding.
00:23:39.680I think that'll be one of the points of drama that we look to this week.
00:23:43.280And I'm thankful that some of this reporting has come out because this is, you know,
00:23:47.520the country is increasingly outraged by our spigot with regard to funding Ukraine.
00:23:54.040And it puts them in a situation where it's not unlike the Fed, right?
00:23:58.080When the Fed has low interest rates for far too long, people make bad investment decisions and you have a bubble.
00:24:05.620This is like the foreign policy version of it.
00:24:07.920When we don't force them to make their own determinations by their own resources,
00:24:13.680they have an overextension of what they feel they can get away with, and they don't make good decisions.
00:24:20.220And so it doesn't help them, and it certainly doesn't help us.
00:24:22.700So you put out seven points on the things that you think should transpire since they don't have the votes for a CR, right?
00:24:35.120So we know that they can't do a continuing resolution, and that could open us up to a government shutdown.
00:24:45.160Do you have any idea of how solidified the Republicans are on this showdown with the left?
00:24:57.100The House conservatives are very solidified, and as a result, because of the slim majority, we're going to have a shutdown.
00:25:07.240There are certainly huge portions of the majority, the House Republicans, that want to avoid that at all costs, and most of the Senate.
00:25:15.800The Senate will be criticizing anything that the House does that is at all righteous.
00:25:19.880And so I do think there will be a shutdown.
00:25:23.680I do think that the House conservatives have the ability this time, because McCarthy's political capital is so depleted from the previous debt deal,
00:25:32.660that they will be able to force this fight, and the question will be, at that point, execution,
00:25:39.440and being able to hold strong, hold the line, and be able to really message to the American people what this debate is about.
00:25:47.480And really, I think it's about this, do they feel secure on the host of issues facing them from this government?
00:25:55.800And I think that answer will be a resounding no, and I think that's an opportunity to win a debate like this
00:26:02.980and manage the political risk that comes from it.
00:26:05.660But I always think that political risk is overblown, quite frankly, from a shutdown.
00:26:09.380When Republicans and conservatives fight, the voters reward them in the next election.
00:26:15.120And I think we will see that in this case as well.
00:26:18.380So tell me, this job then, if we shut down the government, I mean, we can pay our bills, we're not going to default,
00:26:27.380all of these things that they've been saying for so long that are just untrue.
00:26:31.820But it is your former job, right, the office of OMB, to make the money that we do have work and keep critical things open.
00:28:02.860Why aren't they using the we're going to default argument this time?
00:28:09.960Well, the default argument is largely one with regard to the debt limit.
00:28:13.620And so when you're a funding situation, now you're, you know, the framing of the attack changes to one about here's here's ex-government services and it's no longer available to you.
00:28:56.040He is the president of the Center for Renewing America.
00:29:00.440He's also the former Office of Management and Budget, the former director of of that.
00:29:06.300So what should they be aiming for and what do you think they could get if they stand firm?
00:29:13.560So what we've called on them to do is to ensure that, you know, that we crush the woke and weaponized bureaucracy with a major cut to non-defense spending and bringing it back to pre-COVID levels, which would be about a 20 percent cut.
00:29:26.680And obviously, you and I could do much more cutting in a long weekend.
00:29:31.880But in terms of really sending a massive signal to the bureaucracy, it would be about a 20 percent cut.
00:29:47.860None of the funds can be used for disinformation campaigns that are used against conservatives.
00:29:55.100None of the funds can be used by the FBI to target conservatives or any really anyone from the standpoint of just living their life and trying to express their viewpoints under the First Amendment.
00:30:05.540So that's the type of things that we would be aiming for and we're encouraging them to do is to say, when you fund this stuff, you are funding your this federal government to be aimed at you.
00:30:17.860And that's that honestly, that is something that is a penny that is finally dropped with the with much of these this this Congress to understand, like, let's stop focusing on the spending that's on autopilot when you at the exclusion of the stuff that you vote on every year in budget language.
00:30:36.340And that's the federal government we interact with on a daily basis that needs to be defunded.
00:30:42.100And we need to be having a debate about the fact that we are funding gay pride of activists in Senegal.
00:30:47.860Gay pride events in Prague that we're funding the NASA space of camp in Pakistan.
00:30:53.640These are these are totally winnable debates on each and every day if they choose to have them and explain to them what their tax dollars are going to be able to be funded with.
00:31:04.900It is shocking to me that they are willing to let the government shut down over a fight of 20 percent cuts and not 20 percent cuts to bring us back to 2010, but just to bring us back to the outrageous spending levels that we had before covid.
00:31:29.320That that's incredible that we won't cut back 20 percent that we gained in covid.
00:31:37.880If you can't win that debate, Glenn, I don't know why we send Republicans to Congress.
00:31:43.420I mean, if you can't use a leverage point to have that very simple debate and bring it back and send that message to the bureaucracy, I mean, it's just unjustifiable.
00:31:54.300Unbelievable. Do you think they're going to stand and do it?
00:32:01.660I think right now we're in a really good place with conservatives united to try to force this as a leverage point.
00:32:10.440You know, the establishment is powerful that they work.
00:33:52.720So Donald Trump said he's going to use this book as a blueprint to help take back the White House and remove these gangsters from government.
00:34:10.920I wish I didn't write a book called Government Gangsters about taking out the deep state.
00:34:15.040I served for 16 years in Democratic and Republican administrations and the entrenched class that I saw rise up the ranks and make themselves public.
00:34:22.660When Donald Trump was the president, the United States was not anything I expected in the United States of America.
00:34:29.580Doesn't matter if they were Republican or Democrat.
00:34:31.420More than we fought the levers of Congress, more than we fought the mainstream media and more than we fought the political enemies that Donald Trump had.
00:34:39.680They think the levers of government and positions are there to serve their own egos.
00:34:43.760And I was shocked that you saw it, not just in DOD, but at DOJ, FBI, NSA.
00:34:49.280And, you know, a good friend of mine was like, look, this is a moment in time in history where you have to put it out there for the American people to digest and understand in a credible fashion and not use hyperbole.
00:34:59.440And that was the mission with government gangsters.
00:36:50.620All the administrative places, legislative, executive, even the judiciary.
00:36:54.620Now we've seen one of the moves I call for in government gangsters is we've seen those that don the black robe of justice on the bench mediate judicial rulings based on political ethos.
00:37:05.060And so I would say it takes up about 10 percent of all government bureaucracy, the deep state, the entrenched class.
00:37:11.680And that's why I think we have the ability to remove them and secure this country and the levers of justice again for the American people.
00:37:19.020If it was any more than that, we'd have a whole nother problem.
00:37:21.620But that 10 percent has become so powerful.
00:38:56.140When a political narrative is out there that they want to defeat, they call their few friends in government and they say, OK, what do we want out there?
00:39:03.980How do we help defeat Donald Trump's agenda?
00:39:06.020How do we help defeat the conservative movement?
00:39:08.160And that is how they operate, because they get full cover in this two tier system of justice.
00:39:12.020Because they know they are never going to get prosecuted internally as long as they are serving the mission of the government gangsters.
00:39:18.320And again, it's not a Republican-Democrat thing.
00:39:20.800In my book, I probably call out more Republicans than I do Democrat in the back index where I name every government gangster.
00:39:39.900And have you connected them to each other?
00:39:45.420Or is this just look at what they're doing?
00:39:48.800That must mean they're in the deep state.
00:39:51.760I will give you that was a great point.
00:39:54.160I've connected them and I'll give you a fantastic example.
00:39:56.740Rob Rosenstein, who wrote the unlawful FISA warrant against President Trump, who covered up the Devin Nunes and I's investigation on Russiagate when Chris Wray was the FBI director and they threatened to investigate us.
00:40:08.160I'll let a story for another day, but they actually did subpoena my records when I was a senior staffer on Capitol Hill.
00:40:13.680And Gina Haspel, who was the CIA station chief in London, who authorized the launch of Russiagate, later became a CIA director.
00:40:20.720Do you know where Gina Haspel and Rod Rosenstein work today?
00:40:23.460At Christopher Wray's old law firm in Washington, D.C.
00:40:31.820Is the next president, no matter who he is, is he going to be able to do this?
00:40:36.600I mean, if 10 percent of the government and all of the media, how does a president even begin to to operate and and shut these things down?
00:40:51.760It's a multi pronged sort of game that you have to level.
00:40:58.440And the one thing that you have to start with is personnel.
00:41:00.680I think the one thing the Trump administration learned in the first term was you can't trust these entrenched government bureaucrats and anyone that they've ever talked to and anyone that recommended them is out.
00:41:11.840I'm obviously in all in for President Trump on the personnel package that should come with him should he win the presidency.
00:41:18.100But also what you need is Congress to come in and suspend the budgets of the people that have robbed us of our two tiers of our system of justice at the FBI, at DOJ and zero out these line items and eliminate the seats and the billets, as we call them, that just endlessly grow government morass to no end to feed places like the defense industrial complex.
00:41:37.660You have to have all three branches firing at the same time, but it starts with a huge personnel package and it starts with a massive, massive funding expenditure removal based on corruption.
00:41:49.740When you're looking at the FBI, DOJ, CIA intelligence, can they be fixed?
00:42:02.000I'll give you a little example I talk about in government gangsters.
00:42:04.180When I was deputy director of national intelligence, we cut 10 percent of that workforce, even though everybody told us you can't fire anyone in government.
00:42:29.760We had guys like Barr and Esper and Gina Haspel blockading the Trump administration's agenda and keeping their personnel protected.
00:42:38.240They all were talking to each other continuously.
00:42:40.780And remember, Rod Rosenstein agreed to wear a wire because the deputy director of the FBI, Andy McCabe, told him to do it against the sitting president.
00:42:47.760And this is the levels of corruption we have to fight against.
00:42:52.300But the bench, the good news is the bench exists.