Letitia James has finally filed a lawsuit against the former president. She has spent years trying to get him in jail and now she s suing him for fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement. Is this a political hit job?
00:04:58.560So, to have spent three years on this seems to me her trying to make good on a campaign promise that she was going to bring Trump down.
00:05:06.380So, are you suggesting no harm, no foul here?
00:05:10.140Well, I'm suggesting this is not the kind of case you would want to sink a lot of effort into.
00:05:14.440And I'm also saying that I think the proof is probably fairly paltry when it comes to Trump.
00:05:24.360But what persuades me that this is overreach is that she went after the children.
00:05:28.440She just says, you know, they conspired.
00:05:30.580She has no evidence that they played a role in this.
00:05:32.900If your parents were going to help you buy a car and they were going to guarantee it and submitted their financial statements and they had as complicated a financial situation as Trump, would you feel you had to go out and fly speck it and so forth?
00:05:50.900She's entitled to rely on the CFO and the accountants who prepared her father's statement.
00:05:56.680Now, I'm not even sure she has a good case against Trump himself, but what ultimately persuades me that this is a political hit job is she grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this.
00:06:10.400Yes, they had roles in the business, but this was his personal financial statement.
00:06:20.300But the children aren't going to know the details of that and be able and nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence and have it reviewed independently.
00:06:30.200And so this this to me looks like gross overreach, which I think is going to end up backfiring on them because I think it will make people sympathetic for Trump, that this is another example of people piling on because of Trump derangement syndrome.
00:06:44.400This, you know, this strong desire to, you know, to punish him.
00:06:48.300So once again, President Trump left to fight on.
00:06:53.400He's fought for six long years through hoax after hoax, frame up after frame up, false allegation after false allegation.
00:07:02.140But you and I know the persecutions of the past six years have only proved wrongdoing on the part of the Marxist Dems and the deep state.
00:07:10.720And produced never even one act of wrongdoing by President Trump in their six years of trying very hard.
00:07:19.400Joining us today is a man who spent four years working alongside President Trump.
00:08:42.620We're really in the midst of a cold civil war.
00:08:45.360And one of the reasons we are so divided is that we are facing, 75 million of us are facing the reality that the national security apparatus is,
00:08:54.520quite frankly, weaponized against us and considering us domestic terrorists.
00:08:59.540And that is done on behalf of this regime, of which Joe Biden is essentially in charge of it.
00:09:06.400But we have a hard time believing that he is fully in charge of it based on every public appearance that he makes and based on everything that he states with some degree of clarity seemingly being walked back by his staff.
00:09:18.600And so, you know, you can also get to the border, you can get to inflation, you can get to gas prices.
00:09:24.640But we are in a very rough situation headed into an election that I hope the American people are able to speak clearly and send the cavalry our way.
00:09:33.280And in that recent interview with, if you call it an interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, the president saying he would tell Putin that there will be consequences.
00:09:46.840It was a very threatening response to Pelley's question.
00:09:50.600The president did not bring it up, but Pelley did.
00:09:52.860And I have to say, with a man with his impairments, his obvious he's obviously compromised in a number of ways in countries, important countries on the globe.
00:10:06.800I just can't imagine him being a wartime president and the entire nation not diving for bunkers.
00:10:18.780No foreign leader can take him seriously.
00:10:21.180Obviously, our allies would not be confident in any sort of alliance in which we were leading that.
00:10:28.080And this president largely needs to take the strategy of speaking less to the American people because it just creates confusion every time he opens his mouth.
00:10:38.680And it's unfortunately something that he's just not fit for the presidency.
00:10:42.560And as we look at the legislation that he has pushed through, this is the national debt has risen to $31 trillion, now well in excess of the size of the annual GDP.
00:10:55.500He has been spending money left and right without seemingly any constraint whatsoever from the Congress or either party, really.
00:11:08.260And we are looking at very difficult times ahead with fiscal policy, if you can call it a policy, but fiscal actions that he's taken.
00:11:20.220Talk about a high inflationary environment.
00:11:22.960We're about to find out what one really looks like at this rate, don't you think?
00:11:27.620I do believe that, and I think that's another aspect of the interview that you mentioned, is that he tried to make it sound as if it's a status quo and they're not heaping on additional spending.
00:11:37.720But the reality is they cancel student loans to the tune of $1 trillion, and that alone is equal to about 75 basis points that the Fed has to then raise rates or do something in terms of their balance sheet to counteract.
00:11:54.160And the Biden administration is trying to say, hey, you know, Fed, you guys are independent, but they're just making life harder, and they're doing nothing to have a fiscal policy that would actually attempt to deal with the inflation, where we get back to balancing our books and being able to make wise decisions with the people's money.
00:12:13.880You know, we've had, it's been a long time since, you know, we had that kind of bipartisan consensus by Congress to come along and actually cut spending.
00:12:24.380It was, we tried to do it in the Trump administration, and Congress just resisted as every turn.
00:12:31.700He's led in the wrong direction, unilaterally and with his budgets, and we have inflation as a result of that.
00:12:38.120But any thoughts about why the Republican Party, and I'm not saying that they could have prevented or even slowed him down because of their, they're in the minority in both bodies, but there have not been even vocal on the issue to my way of thinking.
00:12:59.840My thoughts are a little complicated on this.
00:13:02.160In one sense, I think that the strongest fiscal conservatives for the last several years, when Trump was in charge, spent every waking moment rightfully trying to prevent a coup happening at the Department of Justice.
00:13:15.220And so the people most likely to pick a spending fight were, had higher priorities at that moment.
00:13:22.020The larger issue is that D.C. is basically a political cartel that likes to spend money on the bureaucracy that they are really a good part of directing on their behalf.
00:13:37.660They just give authority to agencies to pass laws, and then they use the spending process to keep them in check.
00:13:44.280And they've largely created this issue that all of us fiscal conservatives have to deal with, where they say it's not a good spending cut unless it's coming from entitlements.
00:13:54.240Well, entitlements need to be reformed over time.
00:13:57.740President Trump had a particularly good strategy of doing that.
00:14:01.000But we can't actually ever discuss cutting the spending that happens on an annual basis that members actually vote on.
00:14:11.520And yet that's the consensus that governs even people who want to deal with our fiscal imbalances.
00:14:20.320And so we've got a lot of work to do, Lou.
00:14:22.100I'm going to actually be doing a budget myself.
00:14:25.240The Center for Renewing America will put it out right in November, mid-November.
00:14:29.120We're going to show in a MAGA way, an America first way, how you balance the budget in 10 years with the right set of priorities that the American people would actually support.
00:14:49.200And I wish that I can't wait to see your work product on that, because to me, it's one of the most important issues facing the nation, certainly.
00:15:12.980And, of course, one of the other part of this is the politics of it all.
00:15:18.000While this president is sending out checks to just about everyone in advance of the election, $1,000 checks, $800 checks.
00:15:26.860For giving student loans to the tune, as you pointed out, of almost a trillion dollars, it's very hard to tell your campaign committees and your colleagues in Congress, if you're a Republican, that, all right, guys, we're going to balance the budget when we're going to be the responsible adults and leaders of this party and do that.
00:15:52.280But that is obviously exactly what the nation requires.
00:15:56.700It does, and their strategy seems to be, and I talk about this a lot, their strategy seems to just be to continue to lie to the American people and say that they are not the reason that inflation is where it is, that the war in Ukraine is, or gas prices.
00:16:12.960And I think they just, they're not being honest with the American people, nor have a healthy respect for, the American people are very bright.
00:16:23.780They have a great intuitive sense to them, and they know that when they're being lied to, and that does not cause them to have greater credibility for their government.
00:16:32.960That caused them to have increased resentment and bitterness, and that only leads to the further divisions in our country.
00:16:39.180Well, for example, when you accuse the Biden administration of lying, we really should look at the Deficit Reduction Act, the, excuse me, the Inflation Reduction Act.
00:16:53.000I guess they can use those terms interchangeably depending on the subject.
00:16:57.580But it's amazing to me that they have the gall, the temerity, to call that legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, even as they're spending $80 billion on 87,000 new IRS agents.
00:17:21.600You know, it certainly did not deserve to be called the Inflation Reduction Act, nor do they have any track record of reducing the deficit.
00:17:33.500This was a Green New Deal down payment bill.
00:17:36.640And they are starting to articulate now, now that they are past the couple of news cycles beyond the Inflation Reduction Act being signed into law.
00:17:44.820But it also put into place more apparatus that's really what I would call woke and weaponized.
00:19:02.020We have filed two complaints to the IRS to raise the level of awareness and to get some new precedent and investigations on the books at the IRS.
00:19:13.700Hopefully they do their job against Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, who donated $400 million to intervene in the last election.
00:19:25.080They gave money to C3, which are tax-deductible nonprofits for the purpose of educational, which are barred from participating or intervening in elections.
00:19:35.860And so they didn't just go out and create a PAC.
00:19:38.500They spent money, donated it, took the deduction, and was able to put money into these.
00:19:50.220The Center for Tech and Civic Life, Center for Election Innovation Research.
00:19:54.180They literally privatized the election apparatus into the hands of Democratic partisan operatives.
00:20:04.860And there's horror stories all over the place.
00:20:07.800They didn't just set up a program that says, hey, anyone that might have a hard time and need help in COVID to make sure the elections were safe and clean.
00:20:16.960They looked at the map and they said, these are the counties and these are the states where we need to hypercharge voter registration and create systematic voter fraud, really largely around mail-in voting.
00:20:28.060And they gave grants and they had very, very restrictive contract agreements with the grant recipients that said they had to be involved.
00:20:38.420They need to, on an ongoing basis, have the data.
00:20:43.740In one case, they had four out of five keys to all of the ballots being stored from absentee ballots.
00:20:50.080So this is a huge aspect of how the left rigged the last election, and we believe they did it illegally through the donations of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan that we have as a movement called Zuckerbucks.
00:21:08.640If the IRS is not willing to on this administration, the complaint will still be there for a future administration.
00:21:14.260And on that issue, when we talk about all that transpired in the 2020 election, also great suspicions about and charges about the president himself charging the electronic voting companies were part of a conspiracy and an operation to switch votes from him.
00:21:34.600At one point, he put it as algorithms that would drive those votes, and his attorneys put it that way.
00:21:44.680Your thoughts about the role of the electronic voting systems and why we've never had in, what, two years, we haven't had a real investigation of what transpired in that election, whether it's electronic voting, whether it's mail-in voting.
00:22:01.880We've had superficial and very spotty reports, but nothing holistic in the way of an investigation or a conclusion.
00:22:13.960Yeah, I mean, it's something that we definitely need more information about.
00:22:17.060I think we know enough that we've got to get back to mail-in voting, or away from mail-in voting, and we've got to get back to in-person voting and paper ballots.
00:22:26.180Those are the things that we can have greater confidence as an American people about being able to go to the polls and having every vote counted.
00:22:37.540And our view, and I think the President Trump's view, is that we need to have more audits.
00:22:44.360And how are we going to be able to fix this stuff if we don't continue to mine into the last election?
00:22:52.300And so that's what we really have done in our sister organization, the Election Integrity Network by Cleta Mitchell.
00:22:58.460What we really do is we try to keep mining.
00:23:01.680And then as we find things, we make these issues national issues.
00:23:05.640So we discovered ongoing systemic voter fraud in North Carolina, where they were pre-populating the driver's license for people to be able to, when you come to get applications for a driver's license, pre-populating them to be as citizens to go vote in North Carolina elections.
00:23:22.800And they said, well, we solved the problem.
00:23:24.880And we said, no, we don't believe that you've actually looked at the problem statewide.
00:23:28.660And so those are the kinds of things that we've got to get a handle on.
00:23:31.820And I would include, like your question, one of those has to be the machines over time to really be able to connect all of the dots in the way that we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence, according to.
00:23:42.680I've been covering electronic voting skeptically, to put it kindly, skeptically, for almost two decades now.
00:23:51.200And we are sitting here now with the Department of Homeland Security and its agency, the election assistance group.
00:24:02.220Homeland Security really is nothing more than a outsourcer and a functionary of some sort of hub, if you will, for surveillance of the electronic voting machines themselves.
00:24:16.760But there's no actual understanding of what's happening in each jurisdiction, standards that have to be complied with.
00:24:50.720I mean, we've got, we've had kind of a, it's unfortunate, I'm going to say once in generation, but we know if you've been following elections historically, there's voter fraud, systemic fraud that goes back generations.
00:25:04.960And we saw a tsunami of it in this last election, and there's so many threads that we got to run down.
00:25:12.340And the answer is not, let's stop talking about it.
00:25:15.020The answer is continue to refine and investigate, smoke out and fix so that we can have confidence when we go to the polls.
00:25:23.120And it's, it's interesting that the Democrats were screaming about voter fraud in 2016.
00:25:33.380But in 2020, they want to say that everything is just fine, and let's move all, move along here.
00:25:41.860It's quite a change in attitude when the Democrats, in terms of electronic voting, I will say this, the Democrats were the greater critics of electronic voting over the course of most of that 20 years, right up to 2020.
00:25:55.840In 2019, they were still leading senators, Democratic senators, were complaining about the failure to replace old machines and to assure the integrity of those machines.
00:26:10.000And suddenly, in 2020, oh, everything is fine here, and again, just move along.
00:26:18.480And so, as a result, we are always, the conservatives, the Republicans, are always behind the eight ball, because there is a fear to be able to do what is, what's necessary from a public policy standpoint or an oversight perspective, to do what's necessary in that moment to save the country, as opposed to making sure that you're 100% in line with everything you've ever said before.
00:26:44.360The left doesn't think that way, they get away with it from the media, but until we get that approach, we're going to have a hard time beating them back.
00:26:52.340You know, that's a terrific way to say that, Russ, and I have not heard anyone else put it that way.
00:26:58.060Could you repeat that for the audience?
00:27:00.100Because I think that is a profound statement for what is a complete differentiating element between the two parties.
00:27:11.440Sure. You know, if my interest is to get a raise, what's the reason I want to get that raise?
00:27:17.520If my position is I want to get a raise, well, I want that raise because I want to spend more time with my family and go on vacations and spend time with them.
00:27:25.120And if I get the raise, but I have to work a lot longer, I've gotten my position, but I've hurt my interests.
00:27:31.660And so those two things have been separated.
00:27:34.180The left never is away or separated from their interests.
00:27:39.080They always make sure that their positions are aligned with their interests so that if they get what they want, they have actually served their strategic purpose.
00:27:48.480And I think that's the thing that our guys are just not savvy enough and or is part of the way they play the game is that they can actually get what they've said that they were going to try to do for their voters.
00:28:00.580But at the end of the day, they are not really here to actually save the country, which is what we all put them in office to do.
00:28:19.760The question of IQ in the party, the party leadership, I'm not going to, I'll ask you, I know you have to live and work in Washington, D.C., but I've got to put it this way.
00:28:31.980You obviously have the courage of your principles and your and your philosophy.
00:28:37.340You're not going to be too worried about what I'm going to ask here.
00:28:41.220But the IQs, there just seems to be an IQ differential again between the leadership of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
00:28:51.460Is that just a just a superficial appearance or is there something to it?
00:28:58.780Well, I think about it a little more institutionally and I think about it that from the standpoint of that Washington, D.C.
00:29:05.820is essentially a political cartel where the uniparty establishment is what we typically would call them basically leaves policy points on the board
00:29:15.500intentionally because it involves risk and that risk means that they are less likely to have the same amount of status quo.
00:29:23.840So they would rather say, no, we are not going to have a debate about what's actually happening with the invasion along the border and use the word invasion.
00:29:32.920They don't want to have a conversation about what Planned Parenthood was doing with the federal funding that they were receiving because there's risk involved in that.
00:29:46.020And to be able to articulate to the American people, you can you have to do that to accomplish your objectives.
00:29:52.040But here's the thing. There's a vast supermajority out there for the America first objective America first agenda, the cultural issues that Donald Trump ran on.
00:30:00.280There's a supermajority out there that he was just beginning to crack and that involves risk.
00:30:05.860But it's such high reward and it's the only thing that's going to save the country.
00:30:08.980So to your question, I look at it institutionally to say it's intended.
00:30:15.100It's intended to be able to keep people away from the issues that are also the cartel busting issues.
00:30:23.020They can't go back and explain why they're not willing to use the word invasion and invoke it to their voters.
00:30:28.960So they've got to come up with shiny objects that distract from those cartel busting issues because those are most critical to preserving their power.
00:30:37.480And again, that power is rising dramatically in Washington, D.C.
00:30:44.360for the what I call the Marxist Dems who control the Democrat Party and the Marxist Dems who are the masters of what I consider to be the first puppet president in this country's history.
00:30:56.620It is it's it's an extraordinary time.
00:30:59.540And I really don't know how to get at it.
00:31:06.260We have no corporate legacy media willing to investigate anything.
00:31:12.820They're not going to follow even the most apparent transgressions of the party.
00:31:20.300And so without oversight of either the government or the oversight of our what used to be the fourth estate, we're we're just in real trouble here, aren't we?
00:31:33.740We are. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think it's so important to create new institutions that are not kind of warped by last 40, 50 years of kind of the incoherencies of of a particular view of conservatism.
00:31:47.760I think you need new legal paradigms that be that go back to the reality of what the founders, not just the words that they use in their original meaning, but their original understandings of what those of the separation of powers, if they were in these positions, how would they respond?
00:32:04.660They would respond fundamentally differently than our our our two sides, because they they had they they meant for titanic struggles between the branches, between the feds and the states.
00:32:17.680And that's what we need to get back to. And we need new legal paradigms to do that.
00:32:21.940And that's one of the reasons that we've started our center is to help them think through that and not just be scared by, oh, there's four circuit opinions, none of which have been opined by the Supreme Court.
00:32:32.720And they would suggest that you don't have this ability, even though the plain words of the Constitution would allow you to think in these terms.
00:32:40.620So that's how we think about it. And the beauty of it is that they've never the left has only just done incremental reform for the last hundred years.
00:32:49.100And there's no reason that we can't just adopt fundamentally radically new paradigms that are fundamentally consistent with the our American founding.
00:32:57.220On a somewhat more granular level, what does that mean for the judiciary that is now peopled to a quickly rising ratio of Dems to Republican appointed judges?
00:33:16.380What does it mean for the the attitude of the D.C. courts sitting in D.C. rather than Omaha, Nebraska?
00:33:26.800It's very hard to find a jury that is even remotely, remotely tolerant of Republican or conservative views.
00:33:36.340Well, you know, part of my last comment was getting at the notion that the branches have lost their fear of each other.
00:33:42.400And the main culprit has been the judiciary branch.
00:33:45.140I mean, they they don't fear the other two bodies because the other two bodies have not used their constitutional authorities to give pause to their other their other branch.
00:33:57.480And so that's, you know, when was the last time Congress even had a debate about taking away the jurisdiction or reforming the courts to be able to deal with certain issues that where they have been out of bounds?
00:34:09.920Or take the just rampant abuse of national injunctions that we saw in the Trump administration, how ludicrous is that you can have a judge in California put an entire national injunction on everyone impacting flyover country and North Carolina and everywhere else?
00:34:28.640And so those are the kinds of debates that we need to have that a lot that allows there to be some some pause by the court system to say, you know what, we need to rein it in here and not be so flagrant across the board.
00:34:42.720I mean, you see that on the policy issues, but you also see with it with how they're dealing with the J6 prisoners and some of the procedural decisions there.
00:34:52.240I mean, everywhere you look, you have the justice system outside the bounds in temperament and aggressiveness than I think their founders would have ever expected.
00:35:03.540Let me ask you again, one more question on that issue, and that is the lawfare group that supports the Marxist Dems in every way and from whom they draw immense talent and huge numbers to people, their tactical squads in an election.
00:35:24.600It's the Republicans, Ronald McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, coming out talking about hallmarks of progress and 30,000 of this and 34.
00:35:38.020And meanwhile, we find out a bunch of people don't have anybody peopling their precincts right now in jurisdictions all over the country.
00:35:46.500We've got to square up lawfare elections and support, and it seems madness to me that here we are in 2022 with what looks to be a red wave.
00:35:59.120Every poll, well, not every poll, but the polls I respect showing that still.
00:36:05.060And I'm not sure because I don't think the Republicans have done enough to assure the integrity of this election.
00:36:12.660Well, we have taken it upon ourselves and our sister organization, Election Integrity Network, to make sure that we're creating the same kind of networks of poll watchers in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida.
00:36:28.800And this is all done through our C4, the Citizens for Renewing America.
00:36:33.260And what we're doing is taking the model of the Virginia election.
00:36:37.460And the Virginia election, which I honestly didn't think we were going to win, Lou.
00:36:43.900Because I thought that their systemic voter fraud would get them across the finish line.
00:36:48.140But the reality is that there had been this coalition stood up of just nonpartisan poll watchers that were able to keep it in check.
00:36:56.880And that same model is being exported to states across the country.
00:37:01.400And we won't get it all the way there for this next election, but it's meant to be a permanent infrastructure that doesn't rely on parties that come and go with different leadership, different interests, and to make sure the American people have something that is a little more permanent and to make sure that this is here to stay with people who know their precincts and know what is the games that are played at the county level across the country.
00:37:27.640Your thoughts, as we're wrapping up here, Russ, your thoughts about your confidence in this election being fair and square?
00:37:40.820I don't think that they can pull off what they pulled in 2020 again.
00:37:54.540They're trying to, instead of having Zuckerberg, they're trying to spend billions in voter registration at federal agencies.
00:38:00.500We have a strategy in place to prevent them.
00:38:02.620But at the end of the day, I think that people need to get out there and vote because I don't think that they will be able to get away with it given the amount of increased eyes that the conservative movement is flooding the zone to make sure is everywhere and the amount of eyes and attention.
00:38:44.200And Russ has made a reference, an allusion to the Biden White House and its efforts to replace Zuckerberg, private capital, high-tech, big tech, big social media with its own get-out-the-vote initiatives that are well-funded, have a natural infrastructure, and doing so with taxpayer dollars.
00:39:12.380Is there no way that a successful emergency lawsuit couldn't try to stop these folks doing exactly what they clearly now plan?
00:39:25.740And I say clearly, they are not being transparent at all, but it's clear that they mean to use federal money, federal resources, and federal taxpayer money and federal employees to get out the Democrat vote.
00:39:42.760We're certainly looking to all options being on the table.
00:39:47.620Right now, we've focused on letting them know, letting all the bureaucrats know that they don't have the appropriations, the spending authority from Congress to do what they're being told to do, and that there's criminal penalties associated with them.
00:40:00.940And if they don't think those will be enforced by a future conservative administration, they should think twice and go and check with their general counsel.
00:40:07.240So we want that to have a chilling impact.
00:40:09.720Secondly, a lot of these strategies by the left are based on the foundation of the motor voter law, which, yes, provided a mandate as to the departments of motor vehicle, but did not provide a mandate with regard to the other partnerships that state job centers could have with job poor centers at the Department of Labor or the housing authorities.
00:40:30.680And so we're asking governors and state secretaries to say, we revoke that discretionary authority, and we are not going to participate in your scheme to have partisan activity done with federal taxpayer dollars.
00:40:45.780So we believe those two things right now can have an immediate impact to stop this in its tracks while we pursue any and all legal strategies.
00:40:53.900Russ Vogt, Center for Renewing America, doing amazing things, thinking about issues that are critically important to the nation's future and, in point of fact, the nation's present.
00:41:09.860Russ, we always give our guests the last word here.
00:41:13.920So if you would, your concluding thoughts.
00:41:17.160No, I appreciate the time to talk about where we are on America First perspective.
00:41:22.220Lou, you have been a hero and a leading thought leader in that movement, and so it's a real privilege to be back on your show and to talk through to your audience all the things that we're working on.