Ron DeSantis enters the race to become the next president of the United States. Congressman Ben Kline joins Lou Dobbs on the Great America Show to discuss the latest in the ongoing scandal involving the FBI and the Trump administration.
00:06:19.520And Nancy Pelosi was helping him here for the past two years.
00:06:25.380And now he's got a House of Representatives full of and led by Republicans who recognize that all of this wasteful spending contributed to the inflation crisis that we see,
00:06:38.860contributed to Americans spending more at the pump, at the grocery store, farmers spending more on input costs.
00:06:45.360It means that we just can't keep spending the way we have been.
00:06:51.820And he's got to come to terms with the fact that we are not going to agree to increase this debt ceiling until we get a deal in place,
00:07:00.920reforms to rein in spending and actually reduce spending so that these trillion dollar deficits that we incur every year are not repeating themselves
00:07:12.520and driving us further and further off the fiscal cliff, driving us off a fiscal cliff, as you put it.
00:07:20.180But at the same time, insisting on raising taxes, which, again, if there is a reason in the world to raise taxes here,
00:07:28.600with all of the money that is being raised through taxes, I don't know where we're headed other than making this entirely a country of government.
00:07:40.820All of us will be federal employees in one way or another if this keeps up.
00:07:47.060We're talking about people paying 35, 40, 55 percent of their salaries every year going to the government.
00:08:18.840His budget that he put forward in the spring just is more of the same deficits into perpetuity, adding to the debt and more of this wasteful spending.
00:08:30.080You know, they called my bluff when I asked Speaker McCarthy to focus on the wasteful spending.
00:08:37.900They said, fine, we're going to put you on the budget committee and the appropriations committee and let you go to town.
00:08:43.520And I tell you what, pulling back the curtain on on this wasteful spending, it is abhorrent.
00:08:49.960The waste, the mismanagement that goes on, you know, we still have just billions in COVID dollars that haven't been spent, even though we've finished the pandemics over and the president signed the bill ending the pandemic.
00:09:09.140But we still have COVID money out there and he just wants to let them let these agencies continue to spend taxpayer dollars like they're not the hard earned dollars of taxpayers, but instead some kind of monopoly money that he can create out of thin air.
00:09:24.780And that's the main problem with the liberal left, these these ridiculous modern monetary theorists who have come out of, I don't know where, some fantasy land where they think that you can spend as much as you want because you can print as much as you want.
00:09:43.500And somehow it's not going to lead to inflation, interest rates going up, bank crises like we've seen, because you have poorly managed banks that are not anticipating these interest rate hikes.
00:09:56.860It's it's cascading across our economy and it's just got to stop.
00:10:04.180It'll either stop because of responsible management of fiscal policy or it will stop because of a disaster in our markets and economy.
00:10:15.500We and we have seen the early stages of that.
00:10:20.280And what is without question to me, hyperinflation, anything over five percent, I would consider hyperinflation.
00:10:27.920And I know people argue about the definition, but it's an extraordinary period where you have hyperinflation.
00:10:34.180And a federal reserve that is, for some reason, using just interest rates as a way to combat inflation inspired by Biden's mess.
00:10:46.860And by the way, that congressman, I would hope that Speaker McCarthy makes it clear to all Americans every day.
00:10:54.680This is Biden's mess and it's up to him whether or not he wants to fix it because he has gotten away with some of the most destructive, devastating policies, all of them, without being held to account.
00:11:12.000And this is one opportunity to make it clear to the country whose mess this is.
00:11:16.880And it is, without question, Joe Biden's.
00:11:19.920Absolutely. And, you know, we have two responsibilities here in Congress.
00:11:25.100One is to be appropriate and responsible stewards of the taxpayer dollars.
00:11:30.860And Lord knows we haven't done that in years.
00:11:33.320But the other is to provide oversight over the government and to hold the executive branch especially accountable for how these tax dollars are administered.
00:11:46.380And, you know, it concerns me that this administration has, over the last two years, engaged in activities across the board when it comes to either immigration, failing to enforce the laws.
00:12:04.280Because you talk about inflation and energy independence actually moving in the opposite direction to address inflation or energy independence, trying to make us more dependent on the Chinese and on the sheiks in OPEC.
00:12:21.620But then you have the weaponization of government in various agencies.
00:12:28.460Just about every agency has been weaponized to either target conservative viewpoints for destruction or essentially elimination or trying to pursue a woke agenda from the left,
00:12:46.560trying to take agencies that were never meant to engage in these woke behaviors like the federal insurance office, which is a legislation I've put in to eliminate this agency because it was created under Dodd-Frank 10 years ago.
00:13:01.900It was designed to really oversee insurance products in this country, which states were doing a fine job of initially.
00:13:13.260But now it's being weaponized to pursue a clean climate agenda to make sure that insurance products are green enough.
00:13:23.880And, you know, the agency is a good example of bureaucratic largesse that didn't need to be created in the first place.
00:13:33.760But now that it's being weaponized against small businesses and consumers and folks for a green agenda, it's a perfect example of the kind of agency that just needs to be eliminated entirely.
00:13:48.440You're listening to Congressman Ben Klein and when he said that Speaker McCarthy had called his bluff on on a number of his interests, including the appropriations process, the budget itself and the judiciary.
00:14:06.380Well, the congressman found himself one of the hardest working men in Congress on all three committees.
00:14:13.080We're going to talk about and three of the most important committees in the House of Representatives.
00:14:19.020We'll continue our discussion with him about what is ahead for the country and what this 118th Congress is doing about reaching a sensible budget and reaching, of course, some answers about weaponization of a federal government of America against American citizens.
00:14:38.340And continuing the investigation of what is a deep state that is obviously a raid against Republicans and conservatives, citizens all across the country.
00:14:50.560We'll continue with Ben Klein right after these quick messages.
00:16:18.220We're back with Congressman Ben Klein.
00:16:20.700And Congressman, before the break, I was talking about the number of committees you're on,
00:16:26.120and amongst those, the budget and appropriations.
00:16:29.740Give us your best judgment here about how much leverage the House of Representatives actually has
00:16:37.680to bring some sort of pressure on the bureaucracy to conduct itself appropriately to back away from what has been a period of political persecution
00:16:51.380on the part of the deep state and the Marxist-dim party for now, the better part of eight years.
00:16:58.380Well, the power of the purse is one of Congress's most important powers.
00:17:02.640It enables us, especially when you're facing a dynamic like we're facing with a conservative House
00:17:08.260facing off against a spend-happy Senate and a president that knows no bounds in deficits and debt.
00:17:19.680And we have the ability to essentially say full stop until we get some changes to what we want
00:17:31.140Now, usually we see a budget put forward by the president.
00:17:37.180He was late with his, and he pushed it into these debt ceiling talks.
00:17:41.920But then we see appropriations process take place, and then we see a reconciliation bill.
00:17:47.760All of that has been kind of dislodged by the debt ceiling fight.
00:17:51.660But we took it upon ourselves to recognize the threat that failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause.
00:17:58.580So we are the only body to have passed a debt ceiling increase.
00:18:03.400And we did it with a majority of Republicans.
00:18:08.160And it includes a number of important reforms.
00:18:11.740But the appropriations process is happening now.
00:18:15.560And the committees at work targeting all of the woke and weaponized government and using the power of the purse to either eliminate those programs
00:18:26.240or turn them in the right direction and really focus them on what they were meant for and not allow them to be mismanaged.
00:18:37.140You know, some of these projects that were approved by Nancy Pelosi's Congress, some of these earmarks were some of the most egregious, wasteful spending that we've seen.
00:18:48.420And not just because they were on projects that could be done by the private sector,
00:18:54.500but also because they were done in a way to force their either climate agenda, their liberal social agenda on the country, on hardworking Americans.
00:19:32.540And but you didn't mention the political corruption of our bureaucracy, the so-called deep state.
00:19:38.680We're looking at two examples very quickly.
00:19:42.280And that is the FBI and the Department of Justice.
00:19:45.500Most of the resources of the Department of Justice for two years were dedicated to the January 6th prosecutions and persecutions that is ongoing.
00:19:56.960It was devoted to a host of political purposes.
00:20:04.340And the FBI, we now know from the Durham report, we've known before that, but again, validated the level of corruption at the FBI.
00:20:12.560It is absolutely pervasive through those two institutions, and it reaches in as well to the court system itself, the federal court system.
00:20:24.020It's indeterminate right now, just how far it is, but it's extensive.
00:20:29.780Will you consider pulling the budgeting for the FBI, first and foremost, because it is a police arm of a surveillance state that is dedicated to the Democratic Party, to the Marxist Dems who are running this government and this White House?
00:20:54.000The greatest example of the weaponization of the government against conservatives is the misuse of power in the FBI and the Department of Justice.
00:21:03.560And so it's an honor for me to be on the Judiciary Committee with Chairman Jim Jordan, who has been fantastic in chairing this new weaponization subcommittee.
00:21:15.060And while I'm not on that subcommittee, he tasked me with chairing a smaller subcommittee that dovetails with it to essentially require compliance with the oversight, the information requests coming out of the weaponization committee.
00:21:32.020So as they've been sending out subpoenas, we are judging which agencies are working with us to provide us the information about schools in Loudoun County and Northern Virginia and parents that just want to testify at their school board meetings being targeted by the FBI as terrorists or Catholics in Richmond who are being targeted by the FBI for infiltration and investigation.
00:22:02.020Before they pulled that proposal back.
00:22:06.360But the Durham report is the latest example of the weaponization of the FISA process, the warrants that enabled the FBI to spy on millions of Americans.
00:22:21.480You know, the original numbers that were thrown out there were over a million warrants being requested.
00:22:32.700And now they're down to 200,000, which is still hundreds of thousands too many.
00:22:39.840But the idea for FISA was originally for foreign terrorists and not for domestic surveillance.
00:22:46.460So there's the question now that FISA needs to be reauthorized in the fall, whether the FBI should even be able to take advantage of it or whether it should be limited to just the CIA.
00:22:56.640And and I don't support reauthorizing FISA without major overhauls and restrictions so that the FBI can't do what they did to the Trump campaign back in 2016.
00:23:10.380Yeah, to me, Congressman, I have to say there is no way in the world that Congress should should renew this Section 702.
00:23:23.900That's this is a FBI that is out of control.
00:23:27.820And that in point of fact, all of our intelligence agencies seem to be.
00:23:31.380We've got 18 of the most of them in the Department of Defense and those I would probably leave alone.
00:23:38.780But everything else that is going on, there has to be a reckoning that this this reflex of the rhinos to say, well, we've got to do it because the national security depends on it is pure hogwash.
00:23:50.520Because it appears to me that the heads of the CIA, the the FBI, these these agencies have spent more time on domestic politics than they have foreign adversaries.
00:24:08.600I don't think there's any question about it.
00:24:10.940And it's it's deeply, deeply troubling to all Americans.
00:24:14.600And we can't just keep saying we're going to keep keep on doing what we've done.
00:24:59.020And the idea that back in 2016 that you had Comey and Page and McCabe and Strogg lying to the American people and essentially using a Steele dossier that they knew was false, that they knew was not reliable to obtain these warrants, to spy on the Donald Trump campaign, to interfere in the 2016 election.
00:25:24.300And then to find out not only that Hillary Clinton knew about it, but in Barack Obama's White House, that Vice President Joe Biden knew about it, too.
00:25:33.120They knew that it was all a baseless lie.
00:25:37.100And they continue to mislead and use the media to mislead the public by pushing this Trump Russia collusion for more than six years.
00:25:45.240We're talking with Congressman Ben Klein, and we have much more to discuss with him.
00:25:52.840Fascinating, hardworking representative of the of the great people of Virginia.
00:25:59.980It's just stunning the amount of work that he does put in serving on three committees.
00:26:04.380I don't know even how many subcommittees and caucuses, but we'll continue with Congressman Ben Klein here in just a moment.
00:26:14.020Stay with us. We're coming right back.
00:26:15.840We're going to find out just just what the Republican Party wants to do about a country that is in deep turmoil because of this impaired puppet president and his regime.
00:26:30.320We're back with Congressman Ben Klein.
00:26:38.500Congressman, we were talking about the Judiciary Committee chaired by, as you said, Jim Jordan, who is, I think, a congressional.
00:26:47.560He's a hero to to all of government and the American people for what he has been trying to do, as are you and your colleagues.
00:26:56.500What can be done here? What do you expect to be done when you have a border that is wide open through the what is a government being a presidency that is using the power of fiat rather than following the Constitution to open the border and to bring in what now are an estimated six to eight million illegal immigrants in this country without the approval or even notice to the U.S. Congress?
00:27:26.500Well, we have some tools at our disposal.
00:27:30.420The best tool that Americans have is the vote.
00:27:34.260And next November, we hopefully will have an administration that actually enforces the law rather than avoids the law and enforces the border and secures our border.
00:27:46.520But in the meantime, we have the power of the purse, which we are using aggressively to bring this administration to heal and to curb the wasteful spending and to make the spending that is there contingent on this administration reforming and changing the way that it operates.
00:28:06.000When you have a Republican Congress that wants to limit spending or house that wants to limit spending and an administration that wants to spend more, that dynamic essentially pushes us to make these spending changes contingent on reform.
00:28:24.200And the administration, if they want those dollars, which they love so much for their bureaucracy, they have to make these changes or they just won't see the types of spending that they want to see.
00:28:37.580And so we're doing our best to use the power of the purse.
00:28:41.680And then we're also using our legislative process with the media pushing back on this media narrative and essentially things that we didn't know whether we could get through or not.
00:28:59.160For example, this crime bill that rejected the District of Columbia's effort to reduce their mandatory minimum sentences and and reject cash bond and all of these changes that are really making D.C.
00:29:22.180Eventually, with enough pressure, we got the president to back off of his threatened to veto it and sign it.
00:29:28.600So we know that we can get his cooperation on these issues if we push enough.
00:29:36.080And then finally, we have a new tool, which Speaker McCarthy agreed to during his many rounds of elections, which essentially allow us to line item out individual salaries of bureaucrats in the administration.
00:29:50.560And so for someone, you know, for someone who may be egregious in his malfeasance, and I'm thinking of some individuals, whether it's in the FBI or the DOJ or the NIH.
00:30:07.480There are many people who we would like to relieve of duty and and by zeroing out their salaries, we could do that.
00:30:17.180So we've got many tools at our disposal.
00:30:24.480The power of the purse is the Appropriations Committee's drafting legislation that hopefully the American people can be proud of that will scale back spending.
00:30:35.300You know, we have not ever in the history of Congress reduced spending year over year.
00:30:42.980And that's pretty remarkable when you think about it.
00:30:45.240I couldn't believe it when I first heard it, but we're aiming to do that this year and we'll be able to do that if we flex our muscles and use this power of the purse.
00:30:56.440We look forward to you flexing that muscle assuredly.
00:31:01.240You were talking about the power of the purse and targeting line items down to salaries.
00:31:07.180The FBI has basically told you all to to go to hell.
00:31:11.160The Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, this this is a remarkable statement by the FBI.
00:31:20.040And it's and it's part of what has been the experience of Congress for the past eight years.
00:32:19.980We needed to impeach him a year ago when he was lying to Congress, when he was lying to the American people about his failures to secure our border, the effect of which is now clear.
00:32:33.400And it's created a situation where every community is now a border community, including mine in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where we have fentanyl killing people, where we have human trafficking, sex trafficking.
00:32:47.140You just talk to the troopers who pull over vans on the interstates that run through my district, and they'll tell you that the border is open and that it's contributing to some of the worst humanitarian crises we've ever seen.
00:33:03.520We will have Director Wray in front of us next month or two.
00:33:07.660And we are salivating at the chance to actually get some answers from him because his future also depends on how he answers the questions in front of the Judiciary Committee.
00:33:20.460And we have some talented attorneys who are ready and waiting to ask him those questions.
00:33:25.760And so we will have this administration be held accountable.
00:33:30.960We will find out just how much things went to the top and how much the president knew about what was going on, the abuses that were going on, and make sure that he is held accountable as well.
00:33:44.440And hopefully the voters will act to hold him accountable in November of next year.
00:33:51.540Well, you mentioned the president, referring to Joe Biden, I'm sure.
00:33:58.040But I believe firmly that President Obama had to be aware of what his intelligence chief, the DOJ, and the FBI were doing in framing President Trump going back to 2016, maybe as early as April of 2016.
00:34:56.520And this Congress, this House of Representatives, is pursuing a conservative agenda that is responsible, that is going to raise our debt ceiling responsibly with the necessary reforms,
00:35:09.840but also provide the oversight to make sure whether it's the Biden family, the China connections, the family business and their exploits, that they are held accountable,
00:35:22.540that our intelligence misactivities are held accountable, that we reduce spending and create an atmosphere that enhances freedom for Americans rather than aggressive government paternalism.
00:35:42.640Congressman Ben Klein, we thank you for being with us.
00:35:45.920You're a great American, and God bless you.