The latest on the Biden/Pence/Biden scandal and how it relates to the latest in Hollywood s campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett KAVANAUGH. Megynkellek and Victor Davis Hanson join me to discuss the latest developments.
00:01:09.400But joining me first, Victor Davis Hanson.
00:01:12.460Victor is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
00:01:15.580He hosts his own podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show.
00:01:19.000And he is author of the great book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
00:01:29.840VDH, great to have you back on the show.
00:02:07.960Well, they were different, but I think the difference doesn't favor Biden at all because Joe Biden ran for president and he was elected president and he served as president the entire time.
00:02:20.160He knew that he had unlawful documents in his possession.
00:02:24.160And that if you go back to the Senate, it's 15 years in five or six different places.
00:02:29.420So if you calculate the factors of time and space, there was far more opportunity to access them for people who should know than Mar-a-Lago for 19 months.
00:02:40.520I think anybody who looked at the garage or their homes, nobody in their right mind would think it'd be easier to get into Mar-a-Lago than to those places.
00:02:48.880And then you have the whole FBI performance art.
00:02:51.220I mean, they went into Trump's with a black SUV.
00:03:13.140He didn't report it when he was a senator, when a private citizen, when he was a candidate, when he was elected, when he was president.
00:03:18.780And he only reported it because either he thought somebody was going to leak it or when Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, people felt, you know, hey, Joe, do you have exposure?
00:03:33.060And they only did it when it was in their interest, and they only did it after the midterms were over, so it wouldn't hurt their chances in their midterms.
00:03:41.020And then the other thing is, with Trump, he's been so investigated that this trove is not going to lead to any big new disclosures.
00:03:51.020I mean, they can lie and say, well, we leaked it, and there's nuclear codes or nuclear secrets, but nobody really has any proof of that.
00:04:00.440But with the Biden family, this is sort of like the Watergate break, and it leads to all sorts of different explorations.
00:04:08.820I mean, why was the Chinese Communist Party fueling this pseudo think tank with millions of dollars?
00:04:16.620And did Hunter, it seems like Hunter had access to the garage and the dwelling where these documents were there.
00:04:23.740And I think Miranda Devine has suggested that some of the emails that Hunter sent didn't look like Hunters, that they had government ease in them, the language and the intelligence.
00:04:36.260And are the FBI taking fingerprint tests on all these documents?
00:04:39.820Because, you know, there's one red line that we don't talk about.
00:04:42.460And that red line is, if Hunter Biden had access to these unlawful documents, and that would be provable, I think the Biden presidency is finished.
00:04:52.220Because that would show you that Joe Biden deliberately broke the law to bring out classified documents so that his family consortia could get classified information about potential business rivals or business associates.
00:05:06.280And I think that's what they're paranoid about.
00:05:10.800And actually, it's not that far out of the question, because we know, I mean, the House is going to investigate Hunter Biden, and they're looking into this influence peddling scheme that may involve Joe Biden as the big guy getting 10% of whatever Hunter managed to get dealing with the Chinese dealing with Ukraine and so on.
00:05:30.520But it does raise serious questions, because we know Hunter was in the House where those documents were kept.
00:05:35.860And nobody who's got any sense at all trusts Hunter Biden not to do something nefarious, not to do something illegal.
00:05:42.540Nobody, if you've been paying any attention at all.
00:05:45.020And that's why you've got the House Oversight Committee chairman giving an interview to Maria Bartiromo over at Fox, James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, saying the following.
00:05:53.600This has gone from just simply being irresponsible to downright scary, saying we really need to know who had access to those documents in the Biden home, because this is an ongoing investigation for influence peddling.
00:06:09.460And so now it's starting, as I've been saying all along, you can't get Biden out of running for a second term or out as the nominee because he had a couple of documents that are classified.
00:06:19.840You know, that that will, I believe, stop the Trump prosecution.
00:06:22.540But I didn't see it as a big political problem for him.
00:06:24.740But if you enlarge the circle to who had access, was it intentional, were they used in an improper manner?
00:06:35.600I mean, you look at the emails that were found and publicized on the laptop and they're semi literate.
00:06:40.740And then Miranda Devine quotes or produces this 13,000 word email that is very elegant and detailed and is informed about all of the geostrategic implications of sanctions and what would happen Ukraine vis-a-vis Britain and Russia.
00:07:04.420So maybe, maybe he had, he was reading The Economist or something, who knows, but you can't make an allegation without absolute proof.
00:07:12.280But all the FBI has to do is take five sentences and run them through an electronic search of all the classified documents.
00:07:19.520And if that word and that phraseology turns up, I think they're, they're done with because that shows you a deliberate intent and to use government documents for personal profit.
00:07:32.140They're not scared about the documents per se.
00:07:34.720They're, they're scared that what, what's on the documents and why they were taken and Hunter's role in all of this and why the Ukrainians would hire this guy when he was such a liability, even though his father had been vice president, might be a presidential candidate.
00:07:52.780But when you read that, that long email that Hunter wrote to his associates, it sounds as if he's John Bolton or somebody, you know, hypotheticals, what if, but very detailed and very exact with a lot of knowledge.
00:08:07.360And it doesn't, it's not typical of what is in that trove.
00:08:10.520Hmm. The, on the subject of, was it intentional or not?
00:08:15.020Here's just a little bit of how the white house sounds on this issue right now.
00:08:18.480The, the distinction they're trying to draw, I guess this is where they're going.
00:08:22.920You know, we've been wondering how are they going to try to land this?
00:08:25.040What, what, how are they going to try to distinguish this?
00:08:27.100And of course, Trump's case is different.
00:08:28.740He submitted a signed affidavit or declaration, same thing, from a lawyer saying all documents had been returned when in fact now we're told they hadn't been.
00:08:37.380He hasn't been afforded the chance to defend that claim in court yet.
00:08:49.980We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced.
00:08:57.300The Biden approach was very different in the sense that it looks, as far as we can tell, that it was inadvertent.
00:09:05.480This was just an inadvertent matter of filing in sharp contrast to his predecessor.
00:09:11.880So none of that is relevant legally, not even a little.
00:09:15.380The law does not care whether you did it accidentally or intentional.
00:09:19.820So they must think that this somehow helps them, does it?
00:09:23.500No, I mean, when you look at the pictures next to the Corvette of these lopsided boxes that are askew, and you think that's an inadvertent filing.
00:09:32.360It's just somebody had a bunch of stuff and threw it in the garage, and then it appears in a library, it appears in another room, it appears everywhere.
00:09:38.460And they don't, I don't even think they, and it appears at the Biden Center, and where was it before, how did it get, there's a kind of a chain of passage where we don't know how it gets to the Biden Center from, you know, the classified document trove in the vice president's possession.
00:09:57.980Lawyers obviously didn't bring them there.
00:10:02.040So it wasn't just inadvertent, it was deliberate, and they wanted to take them out.
00:10:06.880And they floated, if you remember, at the very early when the news first broke, they floated this balloon, trial balloon that said Joe Biden was really rushed, and it was chaotic when he left the vice presidency.
00:10:17.300Or he was, at the time, engaged writing his memoirs, and he needed, they've tried everything, and then they sort of quiet it down.
00:10:24.780But I think the more that the details come out, the more concerned they really are, and they're paranoid that Joe Biden took these things out, and he examined them,
00:10:37.120and he either informed Hunter about some information on them, or Hunter had access, either knowing access from the vice president or Joe Biden when he was a private citizen,
00:10:48.500or he just, he just took them and read them, because, and it was not inadvertent.
00:10:54.640Well, and here's the thing, if you, if you, if you look at what they're saying, the last tranche of documents to have been found,
00:11:00.900and we don't know how many are in there, include documents from when he was a senator, as you point out, 15 years ago.
00:11:06.640Now, my understanding is, if you are a senator, you don't get to look at classified documents without the person who's got the clearance,
00:11:15.520who's there as the security enforcer, coming to you, showing you the document, and taking the document back, and then walking away.
00:11:21.400You don't get to keep it for homework.
00:11:23.720You don't get to ride on the train home to Delaware, perusing it as a Senator Biden.
00:11:52.460The only defense that Joe Biden has that's credible is that he's non-composmentes.
00:11:57.000In other words, he's not cognitively aware of things, and then you kind of use that.
00:12:01.900So if you have a president that shakes hands with an imaginary person or doesn't address as somebody who's dead, and then the person said, well, I didn't know anything, that's a compelling argument, but that's the only one.
00:12:14.860If they were smart, they would say, as you know, Joe Biden is cognitively impaired, therefore you can't hold him to be responsible, because he has no idea where he is.
00:12:23.140And he has no idea where his house is.
00:12:29.500And they may have to, they may resort to that.
00:12:34.100But, you know, another thing is that you're not supposed to comment on an ongoing investigation.
00:12:39.180So here you have Joe Biden, and before the special counsel is appointed, and Joe Biden's DOJ, and Merrick Garland, and the FBI, and he's asked on 60 Minutes, and he says, it's totally irresponsible.
00:12:49.980In other words, he's tried and convicted Donald Trump of being irresponsible, and it's impossible to imagine, when we don't really know the degree to which some of these documents were declassified, and it's being adjudicated.
00:13:06.580And then when he talks about himself, and there's an ongoing investigation, what does he say?
00:13:13.020So you've got to, you can't have the President of the United States editorializing about respective ongoing investigations.
00:13:20.660We should also remember, Megan, that the subtext of the first impeachment was that Donald Trump used his office as president to delay aid, which was granted, and which had not been approved, in fact, by Obama.
00:13:36.420It's much more generous to Ukraine than the Obama people did.
00:13:40.240But he delayed that for personal interest by harming or investigating a potential Democratic rival to himself.
00:13:51.640That's what the written said, that he was punishing the Bidens, or he wanted them investigated because Joe Biden would be a candidate in 2020.
00:13:59.260That's exactly what Joe Biden is doing.
00:14:01.200He's been investigating Donald Trump on these allegations, and he's commenting on it when he knows that Donald Trump was a likely and now a confirmed candidate for President of the United States.
00:14:14.860So it raises all these symmetrical questions, and it's just not a fair application of the law.
00:14:21.540Whatever you think about Trump or Biden, the way the FBI has handled it, the way the DOJ has handled it, it's just so asymmetrical.
00:14:28.840And that's been characteristic of the Bidens for a long time.
00:14:32.820They've let Biden, you know, Biden, of course, continues to say he handled these appropriately and that they handled it appropriately.
00:14:39.980And we know now we talked about this yesterday that, in fact, what they did was they didn't find these documents and immediately called justice.
00:14:45.960They called his personal lawyers called the White House.
00:14:49.520That's who they called the White House, not justice, not the National Archives.
00:14:54.500It would be as if I called the local Fresno County sheriff and said, you know, 10 years ago, I stole some stuff, and it's in my living room under the couch, and you can come and get it now.
00:15:04.040And they would say, Victor Hansen called the sheriff to report, you know, that he did something wrong.
00:15:09.020But I didn't do it 10 years ago, did I?
00:15:56.880We do not have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or the powerless, different rules for the rich or for the poor.
00:16:05.120We apply the facts and the law in each case in a neutral, nonpartisan manner.
00:16:12.320OK, now that's a boilerplate statement for somebody like him.
00:16:14.940He wants to convince us of that, even though many of us would question it in his case.
00:16:19.060But Merrick Garland, being a what I think is a hard partisan, do you think there will be a way where he will try to do what we're seeing some of these Democrats do and say inadvertent, different situation because of the signed affidavit in the Trump case?
00:16:36.520You know, they'd love to get out in any way they can.
00:16:39.800Do you think he will do this just because of his hard partisanship?
00:16:43.900I do, because he's done a lot of very stupid things.
00:16:46.700He's allowed he's sick, the FBI on parents in Virginia.
00:16:50.320He's had these performance art arrests of people like, you know, John Eastman taking his cell phone, big public, kind of a ceremonious type of encounter.
00:17:01.060He's done the same thing with Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon.
00:17:10.780He took him out as an underwear in two in the morning for the crime of having Ashley Biden's diary either in his possession or at one time he had looked at it.
00:17:48.420So the James O'Keefe case and this case, the Trump Mar-a-Lago raid, both have something in common, which is suddenly the New York Times and the Washington Post had the story like that.
00:17:57.140I covered justice for a number of years when I was at Fox and I was covering the Supreme Court.
00:18:00.880I did a lot of justice reporting as well.
00:19:08.120So all of this stuff shows us that we have a politicized DOJ and FBI.
00:19:14.680And but really, I think this is a DOJ call.
00:19:16.540I don't think the FBI would be randomly leaking.
00:19:18.240I think this came more likely from the top.
00:19:21.100And it does make me second guess my own predictions about what they'll do to Trump, because he's just got such a proven history of being a partisan as opposed to what he just said in that statement.
00:19:34.280I mean, if you look at the last four directors, Mueller claimed under oath that he didn't know what the dossier was infusing GPS, which were the two pillars of his investigation that prompted it.
00:19:46.800And then we had the next one, Comey, who under oath claimed 245 times he didn't know anything.
00:19:52.740And then we had the third one, Andrew McCabe, who confessed that he lied four times to a federal investigator.
00:19:58.840And why Bill Barr did not indict him, I don't know.
00:20:00.900And then we had Christopher Wray that said he couldn't really talk much because he had an appointment, which was a private trip to his home in the area on docks.
00:20:10.200And when you look at what what will the FBI not do, Megan, they they wiped the data of the Mueller investigation, those cell phones that were subpoenaed.
00:20:22.660They staggered the firing of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
00:20:26.200So it looked like there was no connection between the two.
00:20:28.560They altered a FISA document with Clinesmith.
00:20:32.540And I just it's very weird what's happened in the United States.
00:20:36.900We on the traditional side were big supporters of law enforcement, the FBI and the left was very critical.
00:20:42.140Now the left has adopted the FBI because they feel that they can avoid the logjam of the legislative branch and they can just enact social change very quickly.
00:20:52.040And you could really see that when Andrew McCabe was quoted in the Page Strzok exchange as if Andy won't let this happen, there's no way we're not going to let this happen with Donald Trump.
00:21:03.920That was very scary because it was almost a coup.
00:21:06.800Then we get into Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe discussing whether to wear a wire to entrap the president of the United States.
00:21:14.120So the FBI has been and then that's not even getting into Michael Flynn and their sort of boast how they easily ambushed him.
00:21:20.380Or the fact that the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop since, what, April of 19 and did absolutely nothing to investigate it and then ran around telling all the social media companies we were expecting some disinformation from Russia to hit soon.
00:21:43.160And so I have no confidence in the FBI and they have to get rid of that entire Washington cadre.
00:21:50.940If it was, if I had any say in it, I would break up the FBI and I would move it and form it out to a different cabinet, the Homeland Security or Treasury.
00:22:04.240But do not concentrate that level of power in Washington, D.C.
00:22:11.800We had a we had a former FBI guy on last week and I was asking him, what would you do to find the Supreme Court leaker?
00:22:17.420You know, what we've gotten on the leaker is, oh, oh, Gail, who's got a background as a lawyer who's now pretending she's an FBI agent, wasn't able to get to the bottom of it.
00:22:40.560And I asked him, could the FBI actually get to the bottom of this?
00:22:43.100And he said, as a former FBI guy, he said, yes, but I wouldn't use the Washington field office, especially on something like Supreme Court leaker.
00:23:02.040If you remember what they're doing with the leaker and then Chuck Schumer right at the doors of the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Gorsuch, you won't know what hit you.
00:23:11.780You've sowed the wind and you're going to reap the whirlwind.
00:23:15.220That was almost a direct personal threat.
00:23:16.860And then we had this new leftist pattern of swarming their homes, an assassin turned up in one of them.
00:23:23.960And then Gorsuch couldn't even, I mean, Kavanaugh couldn't even eat.
00:23:36.280They confronted senators in the elevator.
00:23:38.820They followed Sinema on a plane into a bathroom.
00:23:42.560And it's also weird because the whole January 6th prosecution and hysteria was based on the idea that people improperly went into the Capitol to influence a political decision, which they did, and they should be prosecuted.
00:23:57.440But the fact that you had a U.S. senator threatening personally, the Supreme Court judges, it's against the law.
00:24:04.020It's a federal law that you cannot go to a Supreme Court person's justice's house and demonstrate to influence a case.
00:24:43.880It's yet another attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh in a different way.
00:24:49.220So the title of this documentary is Justice, and no one's seen it other than the people who were shown it on a surprise basis at the Sundance Film Festival, where apparently they just surprised the audience of some 300 people with it.
00:25:02.140You can't find it online, but they're looking for funding.
00:25:04.760And I'm sure it will hit because this is, you know, of all the things you just said and the way that left feels about Kavanaugh is produced by Amy.
00:25:28.600I mean, he's got an impressive resume.
00:25:31.180This Herdy calls herself an investigative journalist, which would normally mean you have some fealty to the facts no matter where they take you.
00:26:21.080So should they come out now with this documentary where they're going to recirculate things we've already heard, Victor?
00:26:29.660Apparently it's not based so much on Christine Blasey Ford.
00:26:32.020It's based on this other woman, Deborah Ramirez, who already came forward.
00:26:35.440We already heard her testimonial during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
00:26:37.980She was the one who claimed that Kavanaugh, back when they were at Yale, allegedly exposed himself to her in a drunken circle of, like, Yalies playing some game.
00:26:47.060But she remembered the same woman who couldn't remember it.
00:26:49.000She actually didn't remember that until she sat for days with her lawyer.
00:26:52.100And then suddenly it came back to her.
00:27:05.020Yeah, you know, I think what's happened, though, with this new Republican, even though they have a small margin, they've decided that you're never going to have symmetry or equity in the application of the law or procedures unless you give a dose of it back to them.
00:27:21.240So that's just why McCarthy is barring Chiff and people from the committees the way that that happened on the January 6th.
00:27:27.900I think they're going to do the same thing.
00:27:29.400They're going to say, you know what, if you're going to keep doing all of this stuff, we're going to open up the Delaware papers of Joe Biden.
00:27:36.340We've got hundreds and thousands of papers that have been esconced.
00:27:41.140And because we're going to get a subpoena, we're going to see that we're going to look at the terror read.
00:27:45.480And so I think they're going to do each tit for tat until the left understands that there's consequences, whether that's, you know, on committees or the way that they ran the House or Adam Schiff's behavior.
00:27:56.620And the thing about Kavanaugh is it's all confined to basically they're saying here was an upper middle class Catholic preppy who went to prep school in Yale and he drank a lot for two or three years.
00:28:25.080And I think the strategy is they always do this.
00:28:28.540They do two things when they get a John Paul Stevens or Brennan or Souter.
00:28:33.120They either try to flatter a Republican appointee and have the whole Georgetown circuit dinners to coerce them or flatter them or win them over to flip them.
00:28:45.540And they've been very successful, you know, Eisenhower and Nixon and Jerry Ford and Bush appointees have been they've gone very hard left or when they can't do that, then they reverse it and use not the carrot, but the stick.
00:29:00.900And they go after Clarence Thomas or Kavanaugh or they went after Gorsuch, too.
00:29:07.660But and then the rules of them, the rules, the implicit rules that we're supposed to tolerate, Megan, or you don't do that to left wing judges.
00:29:33.020I mean, the man was subject to an attempted assassination.
00:29:36.120I mean, the guy self-reported, but he was on his way to go kill Justice Kavanaugh.
00:29:40.440He was the subject of the conservatives were of this unprecedented leak, which further endangered them.
00:29:46.880They were not enforcing the laws against protests around the justices houses.
00:29:49.660They were not running to fortify security around them during that period of the leak versus when the opinion actually came out reversing Roe versus Wade.
00:29:58.200They seem to want to get these guys hurt.
00:30:01.440I mean, if you wanted to get them hurt, would you behave any differently?
00:30:06.640I think if they don't want them to get hurt, they want to so intimidate them that I guess what they're thinking is that Gorses will go home to his wife and say,
00:30:15.820my gosh, I have to worry about the safety of our family.
00:30:19.200Any moment we're in danger, an assassin turned up.
00:30:33.740He turned out to be the most adamantly conservative justice on the court.
00:30:38.820And so so that they're they're Jacobins are capable of anything because they believe that they're so morally superior to all the rest of us that any methods or any methods are necessary and approved because the ends are so noble.
00:30:54.560And once you get into that frame of mind, they'll do anything.
00:32:15.400And here's here's just a little more on the movie per The Washington Post.
00:32:19.440Um, they intersperse archival footage with testimonies from Christine Blasey Ford, her friends and from this woman, Deborah Ramirez.
00:32:28.960Um, they the big reveal is a tip to the FBI from some guy who claims to have gone to Yale with Kavanaugh.
00:32:41.120And this guy, his name is Max Steyer claims in this.
00:32:46.260This is the big moment claims that, uh, and in this, again, tip to the FBI that he heard, did not witness about this alleged party incident with Ramirez 35 years ago that he heard about it too.
00:33:02.560So he's offering some support for Ramirez, having seen Kavanaugh expose himself.
00:33:06.480And then secondly, he says that he had witnessed firsthand a separate incident of Kavanaugh exposing himself.
00:33:13.480What is less clear is that the this man, Max Steyer, number one, is a former Clinton lawyer.
00:33:24.360Number two, he declined the filmmaker's request to comment on the contents used in that film.
00:33:32.160And he was not directly interviewed for the film and really wasn't participating in the film.
00:33:36.760So you tell me, Victor, whether any stock should be put into the call to the FBI from this Democratic operative, clearly trying to stop Brett Kavanaugh, because he remembers the incident.
00:33:49.460Deborah Ramirez couldn't remember until she sat for days with her lawyer.
00:33:53.840And based on that and his reluctance to actually say it on camera where he could be held to account, this is the big reveal.
00:34:00.680And yet this is what the publications are going to go with, like new, new evidence, FBI tipster.
00:34:07.340I know we've already been through this with Michael Avonati.
00:34:10.140Remember this, the future presidential candidate?
00:34:28.240And they are paranoid now because you have a strong conservative majority in the way that they had a strong liberal majority for years, but they're asymmetrical.
00:34:39.320If the court is not left wing, then it's illegitimate and we can't change it.
00:34:45.000So we're going to go after individual conservative judges and so intimidate them and browbeat them and threaten them that they will, in very nuanced ways, will sort of pull back and rule in a way that we've had a good record before of flipping Republican judges.
00:35:08.280I can make millions of dollars in private practice.
00:35:11.920I don't need a public servant's salary and constant threats at my house calling to cut my time short in front of my young children, my kids.
00:35:21.040And so, like, I'm sure he, this happened to Amy Coney Barrett, who's got young kids at home.
00:35:38.160You'll find an article every two or three weeks about how unfair it is that there hasn't been a Biden appointee and they've only got two years left.
00:35:48.760And maybe this particular judge, Kagan, should step down and get a more radical person, a younger person.
00:35:55.360So, they think about this nonstop because the court is, in their way of thinking, has been anti, in a way, anti-democratic in the good sense.
00:36:22.440If you just said, pack the court, that was kind of a disgraceful moment in FDR's administration.
00:36:29.140And everybody, every historian knew that.
00:36:30.800And all of a sudden, they recalibrated that as something that was good because it intimidated the Roosevelt-era judges that after that failed, it kind of won.
00:36:40.480They keep fighting and bragging about now, well, we didn't pack the court.
00:36:43.680But if you look at subsequent FDR-era Supreme Court rulings, they approve most of this New Deal after that.
00:36:52.300And that's what they think is a good formula.
00:37:04.580This is their report about this Deborah Ramirez.
00:37:06.600Again, who couldn't even remember the incident until all the days with their lawyer.
00:37:09.800This is the Washington Post's take on it.
00:37:11.760Though the interview doesn't contain much that hasn't already been reported, it's powerful to hear someone who doesn't enjoy being in the spotlight tell her own story with all the anguished starts and stops that come with trying to recall a nearly 40-year-old traumatic event.
00:37:31.860So traumatic, she couldn't remember it at all for 40-plus years.
00:37:37.940And even then, after witnessing Christine Blasey Ford come forward, it took her quite a bit.
00:37:44.980As a lawyer, there's a reason we have statutes of limitation.
00:37:47.940It's because memories become unreliable and because it is unfair to the defendant, after a certain amount of time passes, to ask them to defend charges like this.
00:37:57.440They, too, lack the ability to go back and find contemporaneous witnesses and prove where they were on any given night.
00:38:03.320The system recognizes that would be an injustice to the accused.
00:38:08.100And to do via media what we are not able to do via a court of law is deeply unfair.
00:38:15.440When you are an investigative journalist like this woman claims, you have an even heightened responsibility to make sure you are careful and judicious in the approach.
00:39:04.920All told, with U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and others expected announcements, Ukraine can expect to receive hundreds of tanks, which it does absolutely need if it wants to try to regain the upper hand in this war.
00:39:19.280However, the U.S. is going to train the Ukrainian troops.
00:39:22.900That was one of our concerns, that we didn't think they'd know how to use them.
00:39:26.240They're rather sophisticated pieces of machinery.
00:39:28.880The reporting is that it's not going very well over there.
00:39:34.260The reason it wasn't a quick victory for Russia is the rest of us helping Ukraine, but that we may be looking at a sort of do or die spring for the Ukrainian troops.
00:39:44.660So where do you stand on the United States now?
00:39:46.700I mean, this is a significant escalation, sending 31 tanks to Ukraine.
00:39:51.740Yeah, this is the largest conventional war since the Korean War, or maybe Vietnam wasn't.
00:39:58.820I mean, it wasn't a conventional war like this.
00:40:00.660This is sort of a World War II curse, World War I Verdun.
00:40:05.260And we forgot in our euphoria, because everybody admires Zelensky and, you know, that he was invaded.
00:40:12.740But the idea that he was going to stop Russia that has 10 times the GDP and almost four times the population, 30 times the territory,
00:40:24.500was always predicated on the Europeans and the Americans matching that and trumping that advantage that Russia intrinsically enjoyed.
00:40:33.460So that means that for him to continue to fight, we have to support him at the continuous level or escalate.
00:40:41.440And the second thing he has to do if he wants to win, and he's defined victory, Megan, as getting every single Russian out of Ukraine and going back to the pre-2004 borders.
00:40:54.400That is, before, during the Obama administration, they took eastern Ukraine, Crimea.
00:40:58.560But to achieve that grandiose strategic game, he's going to have to sink more ships of the Black Sea Fleet.
00:41:06.080He's already conducting raids 400 miles into Russia with drones and missiles to hit depots and supply areas.
00:41:15.080And I think there's going to be a level of escalation that at some point we're in a paradox because we have, he has to escalate to achieve his strategic aims.
00:41:29.220But the very fact that he escalates is going to be considered intolerable at some point by the Russians.
00:41:35.100And I think they're going to say, well, yeah, during the Cold War, you guys supplied the people in Afghanistan to hurt us.
00:41:43.540We supplied the Vietnamese to hurt Chu.
00:41:45.600We supplied the Koreans during the Iraq War.
00:42:16.360They're there for a reason in case there's a war and Israel runs out and they need 155 millimeter shells.
00:42:22.920And when we give them an Abrams tank, the Abrams is the best tank in the world, but it has one great liability.
00:42:28.600It has a gas turbine engine and it's a gas hog.
00:42:31.020So we have to bring them special tankers and protection of the tankers, a whole subsidiary army, basically, to allow these superb tanks to operate.
00:42:42.180And I think we're about five years now it will take to restock the Javelin supply depot.
00:42:50.960And when this is all happening, we've got the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Australians, the Taiwanese are saying, are you able now to supply us if this same thing happens to us?
00:43:08.480And it's very funny for the left to have this cause celeb and say, you know what, you've got to give everything to Ukraine.
00:43:13.200But they've been opposing the defense budget and cutting it under Obama and now on Biden.
00:43:17.560And for Ukraine to be viable, you would have to have spending five or six percent of GDP on defense to rebuild all of our munitions so that we would be safe.
00:43:28.780They would have adequate weapon and all our other allies could draw on them when they have their own Ukraine.
00:44:14.880And I think American people are thinking about how they're starting to have questions.
00:44:19.500It doesn't mean that they don't support Ukraine, but they're questioning at what level of support is necessary for Zelensky's strategy to work and how dangerous is that to the United States?
00:44:30.180And what are we doing elsewhere that's not in our interest, whether it's our own border or shorting our allies of specific weapons that we'll need to give them in the same situation?
00:44:42.500We're much closer to Japan and South Korea and Australia and Taiwan and Israel than we are to Ukraine.
00:44:48.420But yet we've taken this one country and we've told the other allies, we're not going to have enough to supply you.
00:44:53.920In fact, we're going to take 300,000 shells out of Israel, which were there for your safety in case you've got an extremist in a war with Iran or the Arab world.
00:45:02.720So these questions are not going to go away.
00:45:06.500And it doesn't do any good to call people names, which the left is doing now.
00:45:11.680I should remind our audience, this is probably obvious, that Victor is also a war historian and knows what he's talking about, written about several wars and teaches this for a living as well.
00:45:20.460Um, the, the escalation concerns me as an American citizen, as a mom, as you know, we're now doing the thing that Germany thought would get it in trouble with Russia.
00:45:31.620They didn't want to be the ones to support, to supply the majority of the tanks.
00:45:35.060And now we're doing it and they're coming, they're backdrafting, but not as big a commitment as we are.
00:45:39.860The Russians are angry and all of everything we continue to do, because we, it's like, we can just, you know, we can get them just over the line.
00:45:46.660We're just like, this could be the deal breaker. This could be the thing that turns the tide in favor of Ukraine.
00:45:52.220And I don't know, I'm not sure whether we can turn the tide in favor of Ukraine.
00:45:56.680I hear all the reports you hear about the struggling Russian army, but Putin's got forces and they continue to replenish.
00:46:04.220And what I, according to what I read, this is the attempt to sort of get ahead of some of that replenishment coming in the spring with these tanks.
00:46:09.900But what if they don't win? What if the tanks don't work out?
00:46:14.800What if the Russians are as angry as they say about the 31 or the 30 tanks that we're providing?
00:46:20.580How in danger are the American children as a result of this?
00:46:25.880Well, that's a good point, because what's the next step?
00:46:28.600Because Russia has 144 million people and Ukraine has 40.
00:46:32.660So you can kill 300,000, they've still got more available manpower than does Ukraine.
00:46:38.740And they're going to use it because it's an existential war they feel now at this point.
00:46:43.500And so we always say this is the ultimate weapon.
00:46:47.140The patriots are going to solve things.
00:46:55.000And at some point that we had a member of the parliament in Russia say that he wanted to destroy Berlin today with a nuclear weapon.
00:47:03.400And we've had Turkey now threatening Greece and saying, you know, Greece, you're going to wake up some morning and there's going to be a missile coming into Athens over the dispute of the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey that have been Greek since antiquity.
00:47:16.960So the point is that this war is lowering the bar of international threats.
00:47:39.760It is getting dangerous and you can feel it.
00:47:41.280So stand by Victor stays with us for another block as we take a quick break and then resume on immigration and a horrendous crime that just happened in California.
00:47:55.440So, Victor, I don't have to tell you that the immigration situation is getting even worse than we thought it could.
00:48:03.760The numbers are absolutely devastating.
00:48:05.760And Fox News has been doing a good job reporting on some of them, just a couple to bring it home.
00:48:10.420Border Patrol in Del Rio continuing to arrest sex offenders, according to Bill Malugian of Fox.
00:48:17.860Ten sex offenders arrested so far in just January.
00:49:26.000And, you know, it filters into people's lives.
00:49:30.640I live 300 miles north of the border in California.
00:49:35.040But I can say I have to be very careful because I live in a rural area, but I don't want to endanger my family.
00:49:42.320But I can say that within a two-mile radius in the last three years, there's been three SWAT raids on homes where there were gang members that had a shootout.
00:49:57.160I had a group of people who created a prostitution ring inside an orchard, and they were so bold, they put it on the Internet, but they got the wrong address.
00:50:10.480So for a year, we had people showing up, not speaking English, looking for women at my home, even though we were at least a quarter mile away from where this illegal operation was running.
00:50:25.320A month ago, I had a person come out in the driveway with a Glock tucked in his pants, and he was looking for his three-wheeler, he said, which I was told later by the law enforcement that he had stolen it and had broken down somewhere in a field nearby.
00:50:44.840I've had a person with an AR-15 speak a language.
00:50:49.400It was some Oaxacan indigenous dialect, but it wasn't Spanish.
00:50:53.860And so these are things that people in rural California deal with all the time.
00:50:58.260You don't dare, Megan, go up into the Sierra Nevada in certain areas and hike, because it's not that you will run into a marijuana farm run by hippies.
00:51:10.360You will run into a marijuana farm run by the cartel.
00:51:17.980It's changed everybody's life, and we don't know why.
00:51:21.140The left is doing this, but is the purpose to import voters?
00:51:26.940Is it to help Mexico get the $60 billion, excuse me, in remittances that we offer generous entitlements, health, education, housing, food subsidies, so that that frees up cash to send back to Mexico, its largest source of foreign exchange, $60 billion?
00:51:45.340I don't know what the idea is, but it's really destroying the United States.
00:51:51.420And people in our community that are mostly Mexican-American are the most adamant against it.
00:51:57.480You said they're more likely to run into, what would you say, a marijuana field being operated by the cartels?
00:52:01.840Yes, yeah, and that would be a good scenario rather than a meth lab or fentanyl distribution point.
00:52:11.060But they're all over the Sierra Nevada, and it's not just the old guys 10 years ago that were back to nature hippies growing pot up among the redwoods or the cedars or the pines.
00:52:23.320It's serious, and they don't fool around.
00:52:27.280The town of Goshen is about 15 miles from where I speak, and two weeks ago they went into a house and executed six people, including a woman and her children, shot them in the head.
00:52:37.240This is the crime I wanted to bring up to you.
00:52:39.540But before I do, I'll just set the table this way.
00:52:41.860Hearing you talk about what you've experienced as somebody who is close to the border,
00:52:45.620it puts the lie and the absurdity to the things we were hearing from those Martha's Vineyard residents,
00:52:52.940like in the 36 hours they had some unlawful immigrants there.
00:53:55.160This is how the article describes the mother and the baby being killed.
00:53:57.920The woman's name is Alyssa Paraz, 16, who tried to flee, only to be cornered by a gunman who stood over her as she clutched her baby, Nicholas,
01:11:56.880There's one of the stories making headlines is about possible talk during a Trump administration or with President Trump about replacing Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley.
01:12:10.160Chief Kelly, then the chief of staff for the president, General Kelly, called me one day and he said that one of the ambassadors, one of my ambassadors, Ambassador Haley, had been in with the president.
01:12:19.500She told me she was going in for a private matter, but that he had later learned that she had gone in with Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and they were talking about replacing the vice president on the ballot in the 2020 election.
01:12:35.440He wanted to make sure that when an ambassador was in there talking about foreign policy that I had the secretary of state was aware of it.
01:12:41.640And so he said, Mike, I didn't get it done.
01:12:43.560That's how that story came to my attention.
01:12:45.620I wrote it, Megan, actually, for a different reason.
01:12:47.340I wrote about that story because in the Trump administration, we had lots of turnover.
01:12:52.000We had lots of people who not only got fired, but a lot of people who gave up and quit.
01:12:55.860They were trying to protect their reputation.
01:13:29.900Think about the people who weren't working on the team, Megan.
01:13:32.520They were supposed to be part of the team.
01:13:34.040He leads the administration and writes a book talking about intimate details about what happened in the White House while we're still in office.
01:13:40.680So imagine my next trip abroad where the foreign leader says, I could be a friend or an adversary, I suppose, for that matter.
01:13:48.420Hey, you've got a national security advisor that just wrote a book about what you and President Trump are doing.
01:13:53.200You think they're going to tell me something secret, dark, troubling, quiet, something they don't want shared?
01:13:58.380No, it is indecent to leave an administration and write a book about it while the president is still directing the nation.
01:14:06.000Did you get along with him when you were both in office and serving Trump, the administration?
01:14:32.680The he's responded and Nikki Haley's responded to these claims we've just discussed.
01:14:37.660And here is a soundbite showing both of those a bit.
01:14:40.180My book went through a four month long pre-publication review process precisely to make sure there was no classified information in the book.
01:14:50.780This is entirely consistent with Trump behavior trying to suppress other books.
01:15:16.320And, you know, Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true.
01:15:20.820I never had a conversation with Jared Ivanka or the president about the vice presidentship.
01:15:26.840And, you know, what I'll tell you is it's really sad when you're having to go out there and put lies and gossip to sell a book.
01:15:32.200I mean, I don't know, you know, why he said it, but that's exactly why I stayed out of D.C. as much as possible to get away from the drama and get away from the gossip.
01:16:07.640I wrote a story about an administration that was working against the tide of the mainstream media that suffered under the Russia hoax, that had many conservatives that just didn't want to be part of the team.
01:16:18.480They didn't want to be around Donald Trump.
01:16:32.360I knew that America mattered too much.
01:16:33.840And for those folks who either didn't want to be part of the team or didn't want to work on behalf of America or who had important jobs, or so they say, the jobs were important and then quit, I had no time for those folks.
01:16:44.840So what's your level of confidence on the Nikki Haley conversation?
01:16:47.280Because she says Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true.
01:16:50.280And you say John Kelly is the one who told you it happened.
01:17:10.880Because I've heard you suggest that, well, in the book, he should be in jail for spilling classified information and accusing him of treason.
01:17:18.920You heard his response that he didn't disclose any classified information, that there was a long pre-publication review.
01:17:41.380Now, both of these people are, we know, in John Bolton's case, we suspect in Nikki Haley's potential presidential contenders, Bolton announced on Good Morning Britain.
01:18:53.200But I think the American people also need to know who was there, who was prepared to actually work every day for four years to get good outcomes for them.
01:19:00.760Now, one person we know is running for president in 2024, forgive me a little walk down the lane of presidential politics while we're there, is Donald Trump, your old boss.
01:21:17.100And unlike President Biden, I would regret having done that, having failed to protect that information.
01:21:22.400I handled lots of it, and we kept it secret for a reason, and we have every obligation to try and get it right.
01:21:28.540How does a senator get a classified document in his home?
01:21:34.820That one's very puzzling to me, Megan.
01:21:36.860I served on the House Intelligence Committee, and House members don't have skiffs in their home.
01:21:42.140When you read classified material as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, it is in the basement of the Capitol in that secure environment.
01:22:06.280At this point, what's your take on, I mean, you're a lawyer, on whether Trump gets prosecuted in light of all we've seen with Biden and now Pence?
01:22:16.340Oh, you know, I don't want to predict what they'll do.
01:22:19.700They've behaved politically in raiding their home.
01:22:21.820I was on the Benghazi Committee, Megan.
01:22:35.220So I hope when they make decisions about whether they're going to file claims or administrative or prosecute, I hope that they will do it not based on politics, but based on the law.
01:23:01.340I realize there may be a partisan goal of getting Trump.
01:23:04.220But but realistically, how is the American public going to respond if, you know, everybody and their brother has classified documents coming out their ears who used to serve in the administration?
01:23:33.420I handled classified information then, too, as a lieutenant in the United States Army.
01:23:37.560I watched other folks in my unit prosecuted for mishandling of information.
01:23:42.060We should make sure not only that we don't divide left, right, Democrat, Republican, but that we don't let senior officials off the hook when we prosecute more junior people for their mishandling of classified information.
01:23:58.160Let me shift gears back to Victor Davis Hanson, since you say you heard part of that and that the last part was about immigration and how bad it is.
01:24:06.360And you have an interesting anecdote in the book about Trump and immigration.
01:24:12.060You write, between the border and trade issues, we talked about Mexico almost daily.
01:24:16.920Early on at one presidential daily briefing, the president was trying to get a sense of Mexico's capabilities relative to those of the U.S.
01:24:23.900Mike, he mused, how would we do it if we went to war with Mexico?
01:24:27.680Sir, I quipped, they'd come in second.
01:26:33.620So I think there is a commercial aspect to this as well.
01:26:36.620And I think that toxic mix, mostly on the left, drives their set of policies where they have absolutely no intention of securing our southern border.
01:26:44.680All right, let's move on to China, because there's an allegation that you were told in your book by Trump to stand down on some of your criticisms of China or Xi Jinping by Trump because he needed to have a relationship with them and getting, if I remember correctly, PPE supplies from China during the COVID pandemic.
01:27:05.120So is it true he told you to lay off your criticisms of the Chinese?
01:27:23.840I am full-throated in my view that the Chinese Communist Party is the singular threat to the United States of America.
01:27:29.900Just like we took down the Soviet Union, we're going to have to defeat the Chinese Communist Party as well.
01:27:35.120And we were at this critical moment when we had the Wuhan virus spreading across America, and we needed stuff out of China.
01:27:42.800Think masks, think gloves, think ventilators, think all of that kind of protective gear.
01:27:47.720And Xi Jinping basically threatened the United States and said, if Secretary Pompeo continues to talk the way he is, I won't let that equipment out.
01:27:54.760And so it was late at night, Washington time, if I remember right.
01:27:58.560And President Trump called me back afterwards and said, man, that guy effing hates you.
01:28:03.360And from what Xi Jinping has said, I think that is a fair summary of his views of me.
01:28:10.540They've now sanctioned me, confirming just exactly that.
01:28:13.320And the president basically said, hey, we've got to get this stuff in.
01:28:32.100I think we should have taken even stronger actions to get that stuff out.
01:28:36.760It was stuff we bought, stuff we purchased.
01:28:38.660Most of it was coming from companies that were American companies operating inside of China.
01:28:43.560The fact that we let ourselves to get into that place, to be dependent on China, to have this stuff, pharmaceuticals included, that we needed was tragic.
01:28:50.020But in that moment, it may well have been the right decision.
01:28:53.380Trigger, trigger the talk about masks and PPE equipment.