In this week's show, we discuss the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Biden administration's handling of the Ukraine crisis, and the revelation that the Department of Homeland Security has its own domestic spying agency. Our guest today is Rick Grinnell, who served as Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration and as U.S. Ambassador to Germany.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Great America Show.
00:00:03.140I'm Lou Dobbs, and thanks for being with us.
00:00:05.960We begin this week with uncertainty aplenty.
00:00:09.380In Ukraine, Russian missile strikes have hit power stations and other infrastructure as well as civilian targets.
00:00:17.140Russian troops have all but encircled the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut.
00:00:22.240The Ukrainians claim they've held much of the city amid reports they've also blunted the Russian attacks on the city to take control.
00:00:30.360The Russians are taking heavy casualties in this war, and it's clear the Russian forces mean to retake Bakhmut and the Donetsk region.
00:00:39.920And investors in U.S. markets are understandably unsettled today.
00:00:45.160Investors anxious in face of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the second biggest bank collapse in 14 years.
00:00:52.500Treasury Secretary Yellen says there will be no federal bailout of the bank, the bank's big money owners.
00:00:59.340Squealing now for that bailout that Yellen says won't be forthcoming.
00:01:03.940And Yellen maintains there will be no such federal giveaway to owners, but they will back up uninsured depositors of the bank.
00:01:13.440The big money owners are squealing for that bailout, but Secretary Yellen maintains there will be no such federal giveaway to the owners.
00:01:21.540The Fed and the FDIC can also backstop uninsured depositors, which they may well do in order to prevent runs on smaller banks and prevent a contagion across the country.
00:01:42.220There are reports an auction is underway to buy the failed bank, Elon Musk reportedly offering to buy SVB.
00:01:50.400But there's no reason not to expect considerable downward pressure and volatility in the markets today.
00:01:56.840In the Mideast, Saudi Arabia has clearly and dramatically pivoted away from the Biden regime, and it is now aligning with China and Russia in favor of Iran.
00:02:08.960China has brokered a deal for Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations with Iran.
00:02:16.300The Biden foreign policy is, in other words, in flames in Europe with the Russian war on Ukraine and being shredded in the Mideast and in suspense in the Asia-Pacific region,
00:02:28.320where China is on the march threatening to invade Taiwan.
00:02:31.720All this is the Biden regime has admitted the China virus originated in Wuhan in a virology lab there supported in part by Dr. Fauci and the NIH,
00:02:45.580the origin of the virus confirmed by the intelligence agency of the Department of Energy.
00:03:39.900I think that it's woefully lacking in Washington, D.C.
00:03:44.500Transparency is not political, not partisan.
00:03:48.040You're not helping one side or the other.
00:03:50.660You're helping the American people when you're transparent.
00:03:52.840And so I've long said that the intelligence community has a credibility problem.
00:03:58.840And I think Avril Haines, our current DNI, really needs to tackle this, be honest, and come forward.
00:04:05.040We've seen Republicans and Democrats going after Avril Haines because she's not transparent.
00:04:11.980This program in particular really needs the DHS secretary, needs the DNI to come forward and explain it.
00:04:20.280Parts of it, let me just say, I've got to be super careful here, but let me say it this way.
00:04:29.100Having perfect information is the goal.
00:04:33.460So the more information we can get, the better.
00:04:35.640Obviously, as I was talking about transparency is important, but when you're collecting information, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, from people who have a history of being involved in nefarious activities, it can be very important.
00:04:53.560But obviously, in America, this needs to be a transparent process.
00:05:01.600There needs to be oversight from Capitol Hill, aggressive oversight.
00:05:07.360And, of course, each individual should have their own attorney presence.
00:05:11.020Well, I think that makes all the sense in the world, Rick, and I would endorse your view.
00:05:19.560What I'm having trouble with right now is understanding the level of oversight from our Congress and from our Senate, because it seems woefully inadequate to the desires of the public, the American public, and their right to know.
00:05:35.880So the congressional committees, and I'm talking about everything from intelligence to the oversight committee itself, judiciary, subcommittees, are being told to go to hell by the Biden administration and absolute resistance against any meaningful oversight.
00:05:55.560Your thoughts about the state of current oversight and where we need to go?
00:06:02.900Well, I think you just hit it on the head.
00:06:04.740As I said, there's a trick that the administrations do, and I really tried to get around it, but it happens to be the rule, basically, for Congress.
00:06:17.080There's this thing, as you know, called the Gang of Eight, and it's the leaders.
00:06:21.180It's the eight leaders from the House and the Senate for leadership and for the Intelligence Committee.
00:06:27.400Just the leadership, eight people out of 535 members of the House and Senate.
00:06:32.980Eight people get briefed, and so the trick that the intelligence community does is that people like Averill Haynes will say, well, this is a huge concern.
00:06:44.600The media are focused on it sometimes.
00:06:47.140The right or the left are concerned about something.
00:06:49.780So she'll call a meeting with just the Gang of Eight to brief the Gang of Eight.
00:06:55.880Now, the problem is, is that when you give information to just them, it doesn't trickle down to the oversight committees.
00:07:17.640In practice, the Gang of Eight is a real problem because most of the time, the actual elected official doesn't show up.
00:07:26.880They send their chief counsel or their intelligence legislative assistant or their committee director.
00:07:34.580That's a big problem, and I can tell you from the congressional side of things, from the executive branch, that many times our congressional liaisons at the department, at DNI or CIA or any of the intelligence agencies would get extremely frustrated because they couldn't get to the member.
00:08:00.100If you're going to sit on the intelligence committee, you can't pull an Adam Schiff and pretend like you have full information when you are really articulating partial information, partisan information, and not being transparent with the American public.
00:08:15.240Yeah, and just to give the audience some sense of what we're talking about, on the current Gang of Eight, we're talking about Michael Turner, Republican in the House, Jim Himes, Mark Warner, Marco Rubio, Kevin McCarthy, Hakeem Jeffries.
00:08:33.380That's a small band of elites with which the intelligence community works.
00:08:39.480It is, to me, a terrible, terrible bargain that the Congress and the Senate have made.
00:08:46.820The leadership, I understand, and the concerns on the part of the intelligence community about maintaining classified information.
00:08:55.340But to your point about transparency, it's anything but, and it certainly doesn't seem to me, to comport to the ideals of oversight.
00:09:08.220It is not what the oversight committees are charged to do.
00:09:12.900They have a responsibility to dig deep on the agencies that they cover, and they're doing that to make sure that money is well spent, that programs are working, that successfully, you know, identifying a program gets, then that program gets more money.
00:09:33.700If a program is not successful, you cut the money, and this is the type of oversight that has to be done.
00:09:39.640Remember, in the last Congress, one-fourth of the Gang of Eight was Schiff and Pelosi.
00:09:47.800These are not the people that you would typically pick to be overseeing the intelligence community, which is a vast, as you know better than anyone, a vast enterprise, including, by the way, just mentioning the Department of Homeland Security.
00:10:07.220We find out there is a domestic intelligence program underway.
00:10:10.220We find out that because of the announcements from the administration on the issue of the origin of the China virus being in, of all places, China, in point of fact, Wuhan, China.
00:10:26.720The intelligence department resides in the energy department.
00:10:33.820This intelligence agency that files this report, I did not know that energy had an intel operation, and I think most Americans didn't.
00:10:54.900Look, I feel very passionate about this subject because I hope that our listeners here will go to the D&I website, pull up the April 30, 2020 statement that I negotiated.
00:11:13.340And remember now, I was acting D&I at the beginning of COVID and through the first four months of it.
00:11:21.060And it's incredibly important to look at this statement because this is what we call an IC-wide statement, meaning every single intelligence agency signed off on this statement.
00:11:36.460It's incredibly difficult to get done, to have every single intelligence agency sign off on it.
00:11:43.100And in this statement, in April of 2020, we made clear that China was responsible and that it was in Wuhan, at the Wuhan lab.
00:11:58.440And it was either, and this is what the intelligence community believed, either an accident in the lab or an animal-to-human transmission from the lab.
00:12:08.800And either way, whether it was an injected animal or a sloppy process that Wuhan had underway or an accident in the lab, either way, it was Wuhan and it was the lab.
00:12:32.340The most frustrating part of the last week for me is the lack of media scrutiny on Jennifer Granholm, who is the Secretary of Energy.
00:12:44.520No one has asked her, why are you just claiming this today when your entire team or the team at the Department of Energy signed off on the Wuhan responsibility for COVID in April of 2020?
00:13:17.400We also, for example, a parallel, I believe, to this is the statement by the FBI in August of 2021 that they had fully investigated January 6th and the protesters, demonstrators on that day and did not find any cohesion,
00:13:37.800cooperation, cooperation, or any conspiracy to do anything akin to what the January 6th committee declared the protesters to have done.
00:13:50.440It was settled, actually, by the FBI in August of 2021.
00:13:54.140But then we have to, for the purpose of the election in 2022, again, the Democrats exploited it mercilessly.
00:14:04.120And by mercilessly, I'm using the term advisedly.
00:14:07.160When you look at 900 people who are in the grip of a prisoner of war status because they have crossed Nancy Pelosi and the Marxist left of the Democratic Party.
00:14:19.840It's 100 percent clear that we were not told the full story.
00:14:25.740Selective footage was done in a primetime special.
00:14:29.300And we knew this was going to happen because when you have an investigative arm of Congress in a special select investigative committee, you should have a dissenting voice on that committee.
00:14:46.840It's a basic principle of the United States of America to have a dissenting voice.
00:14:51.220But, Lou, we saw for years this sham committee with no dissenting voice.
00:14:57.720They hand-selected two Republicans who believed like they did.
00:15:03.700And so I'm troubled because, you know, look, I travel the world and I meet with world leaders regularly.
00:15:10.040And the fact of the matter is we have a lot of people who look at what's happening in Washington, D.C., and they say, how can you tell us not to have sham committees if you're doing it?
00:15:23.380How can you tell us to be more transparent and open with the media when your media literally regurgitates what the regime says?
00:15:38.220Washington, D.C. types, the political types, the media types, the political class are ruining our reputation and our credibility by having this scam system where reporters pretend to be unbiased but they're totally partisan, where we have investigative committees that have no dissenting voice, completely un-American.
00:16:04.080And then we find out two years later that this huge committee never looked at all of the footage and didn't release it to the American people.
00:16:14.380Shame on reporters in Washington, D.C. for fighting against transparency.
00:17:20.600The oversight of these corporations, the board, the CEOs, the news directors, they're all very comfortable with presenting one-sided information as long as they can make money.
00:17:35.480And what needs to happen is that we need to have pushback from real journalists who will stand up and say, look, I'm going to present, you know, facts and fight against both sides.
00:17:52.840I'm going to be skeptical of both sides.
00:17:56.260But I got to tell you, Lou, you know, you're an old school journalist, but we have a whole crop of phony reporters in Washington, D.C.
00:18:06.860who have been trained to not call the sources, to take another outlet's story, rewrite it, and when they get in trouble, because they built their story on a faulty story from another reporter,
00:18:24.400when they get in trouble and you, you know, call them up and you say, why are you writing that?
00:18:50.140And I think it's a crisis in journalism.
00:18:52.320I think that the news editors should be held responsible, and we're going to have to make a change somehow so that there is a responsibility for media companies to give both sides or have the truth or be held liable if they're going to print something that is built on a fallacy.
00:19:16.000Well, the fallacies are actually being constructed by the editors whom you're describing.
00:19:22.980Jeff Zucker, in the last day or two, saying that we learned that he had told his news organization at CNN when he was running CNN to dismiss the origins of the Wuhan virus,
00:19:39.020that it was just basically not a story that was worthy of further discussion.
00:19:44.840That was Jeff Zucker, as the head of CNN, doing exactly what he was told by his corporate masters, most likely, at AT&T.
00:19:56.000These are outrages against even the idea of journalism in this country.
00:20:01.280We no longer have independent objective journalists.
00:20:04.920We have a group of pretend journalists doing pretend journalism when they particularly look at the White House press corps, Rick.
00:20:12.700These journalists are acting as if Joe Biden isn't an impaired puppet of the Marxist Dems who lead the Democrat Party.
00:20:23.520And then they pretend that what he's saying makes perfect sense and that they do not follow up to see what are the consequences of the policies,
00:20:31.380whether it's an open border to the South, whether it is an impending war involving U.S. troops as well as materiel and weapons in Ukraine.