An Arizona man s emotional support animal is creating quite a buzz. A man registered a swarm of bees as his service pet and it worked! That s kind of weird. Emotional support, bees and the new space force? All on today s program.
00:00:00.440Hey, welcome to the podcast. It's Thursday. And what a Thursday it's going to be. We have the the house debating impeachment articles and voting on it. Stu, what will they do? I am completely at odds with an opinion on we are on the edge of our seat. We just can't wait. Do you have free will? Or are you being manipulated?
00:00:27.480Crowder on the YouTube purge. That's kind of weird. Emotional support bees. And the new Space Force. All on today's program.
00:00:45.920You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:00:50.080An Arizona man's emotional support animal is creating quite a buzz.
00:01:02.520Prescott Valley, Arizona resident David Keller thinks the application process to register an emotional support animal is too easy.
00:01:10.280So he's tried to register a swarm of bees as his service pet.
00:01:29.480We recently went on a website called USA service dog registration dot com and successfully uploaded a random photo of a beehive as a service animal to bring awareness to the issue that anyone could do this.
00:01:42.420So now I want you to I want you to understand he went to the USA service dog registration dot com and he registered a beehive.
00:03:47.240And, you know, they are trained, uh, and, you know, they're really, really good.
00:03:53.320Uh, and for the very first time, you know, he's got the vest and everything and it's even red for Christmas time.
00:03:59.140But we, you know, we, we bring him with the family, usually wherever we go, unless we have been flying, you know, commercially, we'll take him in the car or if we're lucky enough to fly privately or whatever, we'll do that.
00:04:12.280But we've not taken him on the plane until they started loading horses on the plane.
00:04:18.500And then I'm like, you know what, I, this is an actual service to the family.
00:04:26.700And so we took him and, you know, he's clearly a service dog and he's like a hundred pounds, but he has to sit at our feet and getting him to sit.
00:04:46.940Uh, and he sat and just laid underneath our feet the whole time.
00:04:51.880It was uncomfortable him for uncomfortable for us, but that's a service dog.
00:04:58.400I see these dogs walking in the airport now and I see all these things that I'm like, okay, that's, that's not a service dog, but I'm not going to complain.
00:07:02.140If you have trouble flying and it will be a little easier for you to, if you can pet your dog on the flight, give you a little emotional support.
00:07:09.960An emotional support dog, sure, whatever.
00:07:12.060That's, generally speaking, the attitude here.
00:07:14.340And then you have people who are going to take it to the bee level.
00:07:16.940Because there's so many people who just like their dog and want it on the flight.
00:07:20.740Which, again, is, I mean, I guess it's up to the airline or whatever.
00:07:51.360It's just like, it's going to be like a bus from Indiana Jones where there's just chickens all over the place and feathers flying in your face.
00:08:14.320Then we're coming back with Ben Sasse.
00:08:16.000He has caused a, I don't know how many liberal heads to explode with his questioning yesterday on the FISA abuse accusations.
00:08:29.760And I just want you to listen to him because he's not a guy who's been, you know, exactly all over Donald Trump as we got to support him no matter what.
00:08:41.360And they are hammering Ben Sasse and saying, well, looks like he just turned into a Trump guy.
00:08:48.340I want you to listen to his testimony and tell me how this can be interpreted at all about anything at all about Donald Trump.
00:09:05.420This, there's, I don't think I have seen a more important hearing and trial than this impeachment trial and all of the other things now with the IG report.
00:09:30.460If they'll do this to a president and to a presidential campaign where they know everybody's going to be looking into it, what do you think they're going to do to you?
00:10:37.660Mr. Horowitz, thank you for being here and to all of your team.
00:10:41.620You've done important work, so thank you to all of you in the rows one and two as well.
00:10:46.300There are a number of things that are really troubling, but some of them have been unpacked pretty fully so far.
00:10:52.340So I'm going to pick up some loose ends.
00:10:55.700Bruce Orr, who is he and what's his role at the department?
00:11:00.180And then let's ask some questions about the bizarre pathway by which he became involved in this investigation.
00:11:05.520So at the time of these events, he was an associate deputy attorney general and the head of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, working out of the deputy attorney general's office.
00:11:14.760The Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force.
00:11:17.740And that's connected to election interference by the Russians how?
00:11:23.720That was precisely the concern that we lay out here.
00:11:28.360He had no role in any of the election interference matters.
00:11:35.280We have a bunch of people in the media who wanted to read this as a Rorschach test,
00:11:39.620and they wanted to have a predetermined answer for exactly how to interpret each piece of this.
00:11:44.160And so as the chairman began today, he said, you know, predicate of investigation, appropriate, but some minor mistakes and errors were made.
00:11:53.720You've outlined in this 478 or 434, depending on whether we count all the Roman numerals, page report, 17 significant errors in this investigation.
00:12:04.020Bruce Orr, who has a very significant senior role, ODAC, for those who don't know, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General,
00:12:11.080has primary oversight of all law enforcement agencies in America.
00:12:14.420So if you're in the FBI and you might make a mistake in your investigation, the people you'd be in trouble with normally are in the Deputy Attorney General's office.
00:12:23.940And here's a guy in the Deputy Attorney General's office who ultimately gets involved, inserts himself into this investigation.
00:12:30.060And I think it's pretty important to recognize we've got a massive cultural systemic failure.
00:12:34.840If a guy from ODAC, who should be doing oversight of this case, if he weren't off on another assignment about organized crime and drug trafficking,
00:12:42.720if he were going to get involved in this, he should be checking the work of the people who were doing the work.
00:12:47.900And there are a whole bunch of department protocols and provisions that were violated throughout this.
00:12:51.980But Bruce Orr, he ultimately decides to get extra information out of Christopher Steele after Christopher Steele or his employer, Fusion GPS, had been cut off by the FBI.
00:13:05.020Why did the FBI decide to no longer listen to Christopher Steele?
00:13:08.940So he was closed in November of 2016 after the FBI learned of his disclosure to Mother Jones magazine that he had been working with the FBI previously.
00:13:20.540And we know from the evidence that Senator Cruz went through, there were a whole bunch of subsources that Christopher Steele was summarizing.
00:13:29.540And the FBI at that point was believing he might be a credible guy.
00:13:33.120And they ultimately realized that this is a bunch of BS.
00:13:35.820And his subsources are saying, I said some of this in jest and some of it's stuff that I overheard in a bar.
00:13:41.120None of it is information that I had firsthand knowledge of.
00:13:43.860And so the FBI decides reasonably that Mr. Steele's information isn't credible, right?
00:14:09.280That's the concern is that they are doing it.
00:14:10.680Well, then Bruce Orr, who doesn't have any responsibilities in this area, decides he'll insert himself into the investigation and go get additional information from or about Christopher Steele and the people who are funding Christopher Steele.
00:14:22.600Can you just remind us, who's Bruce Orr married to?
00:14:26.520Bruce Orr's spouse, Nellie Orr, had formerly been, at the time he started interacting in November 2016 with Steele, had been a former independent contractor for Fusion GPS.
00:14:40.640So, in other words, Bruce Orr decides to insert himself into an investigation after the professional agents involved in this investigation said, Mr. Steele isn't reputable, isn't credible, and has been talking to the media.
00:14:53.000So we're now not going to talk to Christopher Steele anymore.
00:14:57.080And he meets with these people who are funding or who are the employers of Christopher Steele or own his dossier, who's also Bruce Orr's wife's source of compensation.
00:15:10.080As of, I think, September 2016, she had no longer been an independent contractor.
00:15:16.220And I want to also, I think it's important to be clear, because this is relevant, again, to the significance of some of the inappropriate actions here.
00:15:24.540The FBI was not a reluctant participant in this relationship that was the conduit from Bruce Orr, through Bruce Orr, to Steele, as we lay out here.
00:15:47.280Because this is only one of the problems.
00:15:49.940That's the first one he concentrated on, Ben Sasse.
00:15:52.360Is that a problem that the FBI says, no, we can't talk to him, but only because he's talking to the press, not because they know the information he has given them is inaccurate.
00:16:06.300They know it, and they don't get rid of him for that.
00:16:11.220They get rid of him because he's talking to the press.
00:16:14.360Then they say, hey, by the way, and I know we're not supposed to be talking to him, but if you get any information from him, just pass it on through to us.
00:16:31.660I want to just say that I wish Mike Lee weren't sitting here, two people away from me right now, because as a national security hawk, I have argued with Mike Lee in the four and a half or five years that I've been in the Senate, that stuff just like this couldn't possibly happen at the FBI and at the Department of Justice.
00:16:50.000So as somebody who is embarrassed on behalf of the FBI about your report, because I believe that it is critically important that we have the FISA statute, I think the FISC is an incredibly important court.
00:17:02.400The approval rating of applications that come before the FISC are off the charts.
00:17:06.720I don't know the current numbers, but a couple years ago when I saw them, I think it was 97.9%.
00:17:24.780I'm saying that the good answer is in an ex parte, I'm not an attorney, but in an ex parte proceeding before the court, when you, the American citizen who might be being surveilled or be suspected of something that would open a surveillance warrant against you, the assumption would be if you can't be there to defend yourself, it's because the department's lawyers are so super scrupulous
00:17:47.120that if there's any information that might exonerate you or that might counteract the view that led them to first pursue a theory of the case that had them wanting to surveil you,
00:17:56.180they would say the bar is so high here, we'll always err on the side of privacy unless we believe there's a good reason to pursue this investigation.
00:18:03.280And so Mike Lee has warned me for four and a half years, the potential for abuse in this space is terrible.
00:18:08.840And I constantly defended the integrity and the professionalism of the Bureau and of the department that you couldn't have something like this happen.
00:18:19.400I don't want to talk about the conversations that you and Ben Sass had, but I know you're not happy that he had to say that or felt compelled to say,
00:18:27.660crap, I was wrong, Mike was right, this is not good for America, Mike, at all.
00:19:54.020And, you know, what this tells us is something very significant.
00:19:59.800Faced with the facts in this report, the supporters of the spying that occurred on the Trump campaign must admit,
00:20:06.360first, either that these FBI agents purposely used the power of the federal government to wage a political war against a presidential candidate they despised,
00:20:15.400or that these agents were so incompetent that they somehow allowed a two-bit foreign political operative to weaponize the FISA program into a spying operation on a rival political campaign.
00:20:29.880Neither one of these can simply be tolerated by the American people, not for another day.
00:20:35.520Now, for years, as Ben Sasse alluded to, I've raised concerns that this FISA process is ripe for not just abuse like this, but abuse that is this, that's exactly like this,
00:20:46.840only to be told, just trust us, don't worry, we've got safeguards in place, don't worry, we've got really good people and internal procedures.
00:20:54.180But the finding contained in the IG report really does prove my point, and they can't get around that.
00:20:59.620So, Mike, I personally think the entire FISA court should be closed until we know what's going on,
00:21:08.880and I know that's dangerous for the country, they will say, but this is more dangerous.
00:21:13.760If we don't get this right, as Ben said yesterday in his testimony, when this gets sophisticated,
00:21:20.740this was a shoddy attempt, you know, Russia was clunky, and when it gets sophisticated, we're all in real trouble.
00:21:34.660As American citizens, all of us, if they'll do this to a case where they know they're going to be investigated,
00:21:42.940why don't we shut the FISA court down right now until we get, until we know?
00:21:47.440Well, this is what caused me yesterday at the hearing to raise the question of whether it's time for us to suspend the FISA program altogether,
00:21:56.620or at least to undertake a major overhaul, and perhaps suspend it while we overhaul it.
00:22:02.880Look, those who argue the other side of this will always say, well, you've got to balance your privacy against your security,
00:22:12.360and if you give people too much privacy, if you focus too much on things like the Fourth Amendment,
00:22:18.400you know, that pesky constitutional issue, then we will have diminished security.
00:23:38.880You know, he will ever, forever be under suspicion in the minds of a lot of people as working with the Russians.
00:23:45.720And they forged documents to make a FISA court think that he might be.
00:23:54.140This is what happens when you stand up to the deep state.
00:23:57.520This is what happens when you've got people inside the government who operate these levers of government control, who text things to each other like, we've got to make sure that this guy is an elected president and we've got to have an insurance policy.
00:24:12.160We can't take the risk that the American people would be so foolish as to elect someone we don't like.
00:24:17.620This is the sort of thing that happens.
00:24:19.420We've known that this was inhuman nature.
00:24:22.680Federalist 51 tells us that this sort of thing will happen.
00:24:26.180Madison meant it when he said if men were angels, they wouldn't need a government.
00:24:29.180If we had angels to run our government, we wouldn't need rules for government.
00:24:38.560And our laws can't allow them to be circumvented.
00:24:41.120So, Mike, I heard this morning, and I keep hearing back and forth, I heard this morning that the Senate is now thinking that they're not going to call any witnesses.
00:24:49.380They're just going to move past and just present documents that will move this impeachment forward.
00:24:56.260Mike, if we are to save the republic, all of this must come out full light of day and people must be held accountable for all of it or we will have no trust in any justice system.
00:25:09.100Yeah, I think that's a very fair point, and that's probably what's going to end up happening in the Senate trial.
00:25:16.660A lot of that is going to be left at the discretion of the president's very capable legal team headed by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, in whom I have a lot of confidence.
00:25:25.080He's prepared to go to trial, if necessary, tomorrow.
00:25:28.160If the impeachment articles were to come over to us tomorrow, he'd be ready to go.
00:25:51.700What do people – which way are we headed?
00:25:56.380A full open trial that will really expose this?
00:25:59.300You know, I want to be very careful that I not speak for anyone other than myself.
00:26:05.640I'll tell you, from my vantage point, I can see some advantage in doing a full trial because they haven't had an opportunity to call the witnesses they'd like to call,
00:26:15.180to cross-examine the witnesses they'd like to cross-examine in the House of Representatives.
00:26:19.880And that could be helpful to inform the public and bring the public along.
00:26:23.080The White House counsel's office and the president's defense team will have to make a judgment call as we're going through the process about what to do.
00:26:32.920And we get to a situation where if they believe they've got 51 votes to end the proceedings, whether they pull that lever.
00:26:40.920I'm here to support them regardless of what they do.
00:26:43.240But there's a part of me that would very much like to see a full trial for the very reasons you're describing.
00:26:48.060Why – explain to me a legal reason why you would just want this just quickly brushed under the rug and not expose all that has happened.
00:27:05.920And, again, I'm not saying this is the right thing to do.
00:27:08.620But if one were to reach that conclusion, if one were making that argument, what one might say was at any moment, if you believe you've got the case won,
00:27:16.380if you believe you've got 51 votes to end the proceedings, it might be tempting to pull that lever,
00:27:23.140even though there are additional gains that can be achieved by having a full trial.
00:27:28.900He died about 24 years ago, but he used to tell me when you've won your case in court, you sit down and you don't say another word lest you upturn the victory you've just achieved.
00:27:40.160And so that would be the strategy there.
00:27:42.160But, again, there are other considerations here, including the fact that the American people need to hear the whole story.
00:27:47.060That's why I'm very sympathetic to the view that maybe we ought to just have a full-blown trial.
00:27:50.360You know, and, Mike, I have to tell you, you know, there's a way of talking to Donald Trump that he relates to and understands.
00:28:00.120And only he could take this on, make sure American eyeballs are watching it,
00:28:08.940and he is in the unique position of truly draining the swamp.
00:28:15.240He becomes one of the greatest presidents in history just based on this one thing.
00:28:22.040If he exposes the media in this trial, if he exposes the deep state in this trial,
00:28:30.080if he exposes the DOJ and the way they have used FISA courts,
00:28:36.260only Donald Trump has been given this opportunity to turn this dirty system inside out.
00:28:44.000And, quite honestly, I don't believe the Democrats survive a five- or ten-year period after he does that.
00:28:52.600I think they go the way of the Whigs after he exposes what they have done.
00:28:57.840Yeah, that is an outstanding argument and one that I need to communicate to the president next time I talk to him.
00:29:05.260I know he's being very well advised on this.
00:29:36.080Let him be the guy who will forever be remembered as setting this corruption in its place and shutting this corruption down at the highest levels, exposing it.
00:29:49.960This is what people, everybody I talked to that voted for him, they all said, I just, you know, the system is so far broken, he'll just go in and burn the whole thing down.
00:29:59.680I thought that was a bad idea at the time, but I see what they're talking about.
00:30:04.820And that's what his voters want right now.
00:30:07.380They want him to burn the infection out.
00:30:13.100Yeah, the American people are starting to see what he saw from the beginning and what they what the people intuitively know, which is that American voters for too long have been asked to put too much faith and almost religious amount of faith in government.
00:31:42.580And this, I think, is the first time that I think we may have a disagreement on something.
00:31:46.760Um, you are, you are backing the, um, fairness for all act.
00:31:55.180And for people, I've been watching this for almost a year, uh, now.
00:32:00.140And, uh, it's, to me, it's disturbing.
00:32:03.580So tell me your point of view on it and, and let people know what it is.
00:32:10.000Yeah, look, so my point of view is that I come, I come at this entire debate from the perspective of a person who's a gay libertarian conservative.
00:32:18.420So I believe in both, uh, gay rights, but I also believe in religious liberty and the first amendment.
00:32:23.200So I'm one of these people that's not trying to force Jack Phillips to bake a cake or chase down Christian schools and force them to employ trans people.
00:32:31.160But I also don't think that a corporation like McDonald's should be able to hire some, fire someone just because they're gay or that a massive apartment complex should be able to evict someone because they're transgender.
00:32:43.520So that's why I wrote a column in support of the effort from Representative Chris Stewart from Utah, Utah's second district, I believe, who's actually a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has backed his bill, which essentially the Fairness for All Act, it tries to do the same thing that the Equality Act does, which is update the Civil Rights Act to include protections for gay and transgender people.
00:33:07.380But importantly, unlike the Equality Act, which crushes religious liberty and has no exceptions, this bill has very clear carve-outs, in my opinion, that adequately protect religious liberty, but also would add legal protections for LGBT people.
00:33:23.420So, Brad, when am I going to get protection for being a conservative, straight, old, white guy?
00:33:33.020There are many jobs I'm not even considered for.
00:33:36.180There is no way, and that I'm highly qualified for, but there is no way Netflix, Amazon would ever, ever hire me, even though I'd make them a ton of money, but they won't do it because I don't fit their message.
00:33:56.380Yeah, I mean, I think there's a difference, to be honest, between someone not hiring a person like me or you because we're conservative.
00:34:15.740It's like firing – I view it more as like firing someone for being black than firing someone for being Republican.
00:34:20.580But I do want to say one thing, Glenn, that this bill, the Fairness for All Act, actually would add some protections for people like you.
00:34:27.560You know, it goes out of its way to block the crazies like Beto O'Rourke and put into law that federal tax-exempt status can never be denied due to religious beliefs or practices regarding marriage or sexuality.
00:34:40.200It also includes specific provisions that prohibit the government from targeting or punishing religious individuals.
00:34:47.180So this act, actually – I spoke with Representative Chris Stewart about it, and he said that part of his motivation for doing this was that he thinks religious liberty is under attack.
00:34:56.640And I agree – this bill isn't just about LGBT rights.
00:35:00.400It's also about putting concrete rules for religious liberty in place.
00:35:04.520Here's my problem, Brad, because I agree with you 100 percent and Chris Stewart and the backers of this bill that this does protect religious liberty, but it leaves the door open for everyone else.
00:35:17.280So, you know, I appreciate the fact that it is protecting religious organizations, but what about just the idea that I have a guy who's running the front desk and my business, you know, is my business?
00:35:39.740And the guy decides that he's going to be married, and he comes to work in a dress, and he's a big guy, and I don't want him at the front desk.
00:35:52.440Look, I think if you're running – if you're talking about your church or you're talking about your Christian bakery, then that's one thing, and you'd be able to.
00:35:59.480But in a normal role where somebody – it's just a regular business, I don't think you should be able to fire someone because of something like that because ultimately it doesn't relate to the job, and you're firing them.
00:36:11.240I mean, it's honestly like – I'm sympathetic to this idea that business owners, you know, I'm libertarian-leaning, should have wide discretion and latitude.
00:36:19.460But I do believe in the Civil Rights Act.
00:36:21.220I don't believe that someone's right extends to fire someone for being black or fire someone just because they're a woman.
00:36:26.300And in the same sense, I really don't think that within reasonable exceptions like this bill lays out, you should be able to fire someone just because you personally disagree with an aspect of who they are.
00:36:38.080It's interesting, Greg, because I think one of the issues I've heard about this bill – because most – you know, 90 percent of the stuff I think you're saying here, everyone agrees with, right?
00:36:45.160Like, I mean, it's hard to argue with.
00:36:47.200It's ridiculous to throw someone out of their apartment because you don't like who they're interested in.
00:36:53.680But the – and you mentioned the cake thing, which is interesting.
00:36:58.320This has been one of the things I've heard pushback on, and maybe the bill deals with this directly in that it says – a lot of people say, okay, religious liberty sort of ends at the church.
00:37:08.860Yes, we'll protect you inside your church.
00:37:12.280This is sort of the left's approach to these issues.
00:37:14.240But when it comes out to you being in the public sphere, if you believe something that disagrees with these guidelines, well, you're kind of out of luck.
00:37:23.440Does the bill deal with that directly?
00:37:48.300But the idea is that Jack Phillips would be fine, but McDonald's would not be.
00:37:53.560The point is you have to have a line somewhere.
00:37:55.780And it's also – in terms of the public sphere, this bill also specifically sets up a system in which medical professionals are allowed to not provide certain services as long as they provide –
00:38:07.320I've always looked at it like this, like you shouldn't be able, if you're a general doctor, to not give someone their vaccines because they're gay.
00:38:14.160But you shouldn't be forced to give someone trans hormone therapy if you object to that.
00:38:18.660So it basically sets up that kind of equal access, but they can deny specific services.
00:38:24.140So it actually sets up in public life.
00:38:26.380Except that's what we had at the beginning with abortion, and now it doesn't matter what your religious belief is.
00:38:32.460I mean, these lines keep getting blurred because we keep making special exceptions.
00:38:38.020Look, everyone should have exactly the same rights.
00:40:33.020But whether – I think for the people facing the conservative movement, the trend of public opinion is that if you – we have to pass compromise legislation like this, because if not, we're going to be stuck under the Equality Act a decade from now.
00:40:45.840When there's a Democrat – next time there's a Democrat Congress, they're going to pass it.
00:41:03.500Let's pass something like this, because if you don't, unfortunately, the reality is you're going to be stuck under the Equality Act 10 years from now, I would bet.
00:41:11.540Brad, I don't want to leave this conversation with you thinking anything other than I really respect you.
00:41:16.440I respect you for coming on and debating this with me, and we're on different ends of the argument on this one.
00:41:22.980But I'd like to continue this conversation because maybe I'm just missing something.
00:41:28.060But as a libertarian, I don't like special rights ever for anyone.
00:41:36.180It is – it just – it shouldn't be that way.
00:45:09.860And if you want to protect the churches and you believe that working together and holding hands with people who are most times shown us to be wildly dishonest,
00:45:23.380and they are progressive, they take progressive steps,
00:45:28.800this then would only be a progressive measure.