The Megyn Kelly Show - Kavanaugh Character Assassination, and America's Place in the World, with Victor Davis Hanson and Mike Pompeo ｜ Ep. 479

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.700 Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.240 Trump, Biden, Pence, you and I, all of us apparently have classified documents everywhere.

00:00:21.360 Do you do, right? Raise your hand. No.

00:00:23.480 It's really become absurd now.

00:00:25.600 The story is continuing to grow more ridiculous by the day.

00:00:30.000 So we'll get into the very latest twists on all of that.

00:00:32.820 And this is unbelievable.

00:00:35.300 Hollywood filmmakers reigniting their never-ending character assassination against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

00:00:44.100 Despite apparently revealing nothing new, the film's producer is now claiming tips about Kavanaugh are pouring in.

00:00:52.700 And they're reopening their, quote, documentary to add more accusers, potentially.

00:00:59.260 Okay, sure.

00:01:01.220 Later, former Secretary of State Mom Mike Pompeo will be here. 0.97

00:01:04.680 He's going to disclose all the confidential classified documents he's been hiding.

00:01:08.520 JK.

00:01:09.400 But joining me first, Victor Davis Hanson.

00:01:12.460 Victor is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

00:01:15.580 He hosts his own podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show.

00:01:19.000 And he is author of the great book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

00:01:29.840 VDH, great to have you back on the show.

00:01:31.860 There's a lot to go over today.

00:01:34.000 So let's start with Pence has got the classified documents, too.

00:01:37.540 And now what we're hearing in the press is, well, you see, it's different because what Trump did was advertent.

00:01:46.060 It was intentional.

00:01:47.640 And what Biden did and what Pence did was inadvertent.

00:01:51.700 You see, they were just clumsy.

00:01:53.360 They were just careless.

00:01:55.100 But Trump, he meant to steal.

00:01:57.480 It was theft.

00:01:58.880 This is what we're hearing from the left, people like Mehdi Hassan over on MSNBC.

00:02:01.980 And therefore, we really can't make any comparisons between these cases.

00:02:06.120 What do you think?

00:02:07.960 Well, 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.

00:02:20.160 He knew that he had unlawful documents in his possession.

00:02:24.160 And that if you go back to the Senate, it's 15 years in five or six different places.

00:02:29.420 So 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.

00:02:40.520 I 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.

00:02:48.880 And then you have the whole FBI performance art.

00:02:51.220 I mean, they went into Trump's with a black SUV.

00:02:54.320 Some people were armed.

00:02:55.980 They did that photo op where they scattered things on the ground to make it look like it was sloppy vis-a-vis Joe Biden.

00:03:03.580 They came lightly and very lately to the Biden investigation.

00:03:08.020 It was a big myth also, Megan, that Joe Biden reported this.

00:03:11.840 He didn't report it.

00:03:13.140 He 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.

00:03:18.780 And 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?

00:03:28.820 Because we'll look hypocritical.

00:03:30.240 So they didn't report it for years.

00:03:33.060 And 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.

00:03:41.020 And 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.

00:03:51.020 I 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.

00:03:58.960 And that story's kind of dropped.

00:04:00.440 But with the Biden family, this is sort of like the Watergate break, and it leads to all sorts of different explorations.

00:04:08.820 I mean, why was the Chinese Communist Party fueling this pseudo think tank with millions of dollars?

00:04:16.620 And did Hunter, it seems like Hunter had access to the garage and the dwelling where these documents were there.

00:04:23.740 And 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.

00:04:36.260 And are the FBI taking fingerprint tests on all these documents?

00:04:39.820 Because, you know, there's one red line that we don't talk about.

00:04:42.460 And 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.

00:04:52.220 Because 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.

00:05:06.280 And I think that's what they're paranoid about.

00:05:08.340 So that's next level stuff.

00:05:10.800 And 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.

00:05:29.040 So that's happening.

00:05:30.520 But it does raise serious questions, because we know Hunter was in the House where those documents were kept.

00:05:35.860 And nobody who's got any sense at all trusts Hunter Biden not to do something nefarious, not to do something illegal.

00:05:42.540 Nobody, if you've been paying any attention at all.

00:05:45.020 And 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.

00:05:53.600 This 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.

00:06:09.460 And 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.

00:06:19.840 You know, that that will, I believe, stop the Trump prosecution.

00:06:22.540 But I didn't see it as a big political problem for him.

00:06:24.740 But if you enlarge the circle to who had access, was it intentional, were they used in an improper manner?

00:06:33.400 Totally new ballgame.

00:06:35.320 Yeah.

00:06:35.600 I mean, you look at the emails that were found and publicized on the laptop and they're semi literate.

00:06:40.740 And 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.

00:07:01.960 And it's not even written by him.

00:07:03.620 You can tell it's not.

00:07:04.420 So maybe, maybe he had, he was reading The Economist or something, who knows, but you can't make an allegation without absolute proof.

00:07:12.280 But all the FBI has to do is take five sentences and run them through an electronic search of all the classified documents.

00:07:19.520 And 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.

00:07:30.000 So I think they're very scared.

00:07:32.140 They're not scared about the documents per se.

00:07:34.720 They'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.

00:07:52.780 But 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.

00:08:07.360 And it doesn't, it's not typical of what is in that trove.

00:08:10.520 Hmm. The, on the subject of, was it intentional or not?

00:08:15.020 Here's just a little bit of how the white house sounds on this issue right now.

00:08:18.480 The, the distinction they're trying to draw, I guess this is where they're going.

00:08:22.920 You know, we've been wondering how are they going to try to land this?

00:08:25.040 What, what, how are they going to try to distinguish this?

00:08:27.100 And of course, Trump's case is different.

00:08:28.740 He 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.

00:08:37.380 He hasn't been afforded the chance to defend that claim in court yet.

00:08:40.540 Just know what we read in the papers.

00:08:43.080 But here is the new line of defense from Kareem Jean-Pierre.

00:08:47.140 This is Soundbite 3.

00:08:49.980 We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced.

00:08:57.300 The Biden approach was very different in the sense that it looks, as far as we can tell, that it was inadvertent.

00:09:05.480 This was just an inadvertent matter of filing in sharp contrast to his predecessor.

00:09:11.880 So none of that is relevant legally, not even a little.

00:09:15.380 The law does not care whether you did it accidentally or intentional.

00:09:19.820 So they must think that this somehow helps them, does it?

00:09:23.500 No, 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.

00:09:32.360 It'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.

00:09:38.460 And 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.

00:09:56.680 We don't know who brought them there.

00:09:57.980 Lawyers obviously didn't bring them there. 0.81

00:10:02.040 So it wasn't just inadvertent, it was deliberate, and they wanted to take them out.

00:10:06.880 And 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.

00:10:17.300 Or he was, at the time, engaged writing his memoirs, and he needed, they've tried everything, and then they sort of quiet it down.

00:10:24.780 But 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,

00:10:37.120 and 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,

00:10:48.500 or he just, he just took them and read them, because, and it was not inadvertent.

00:10:54.640 Well, 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,

00:11:00.900 and we don't know how many are in there, include documents from when he was a senator, as you point out, 15 years ago.

00:11:06.640 Now, 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,

00:11:15.520 who's there as the security enforcer, coming to you, showing you the document, and taking the document back, and then walking away.

00:11:21.400 You don't get to keep it for homework.

00:11:23.720 You don't get to ride on the train home to Delaware, perusing it as a Senator Biden.

00:11:30.300 And so that raises real questions.

00:11:32.180 How many of those were there, exactly?

00:11:34.620 And how did he get documents out there?

00:11:36.640 Out of these secured facilities, and out of the watchful eye of the person overseeing them, back when he was a U.S. senator.

00:11:43.120 How is that consistent with the, as you know, I take these documents very seriously, I take classified information very seriously, line?

00:11:51.240 It isn't.

00:11:52.460 The only defense that Joe Biden has that's credible is that he's non-composmentes.

00:11:57.000 In other words, he's not cognitively aware of things, and then you kind of use that.

00:12:01.900 So 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.

00:12:13.820 And they haven't quite made it yet.

00:12:14.860 If 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.

00:12:23.140 And he has no idea where his house is.

00:12:26.000 Everyone would believe that.

00:12:27.660 They would.

00:12:28.580 They would.

00:12:29.500 And they may have to, they may resort to that.

00:12:34.100 But, you know, another thing is that you're not supposed to comment on an ongoing investigation.

00:12:39.180 So 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.

00:12:49.980 In 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.

00:13:06.580 And then when he talks about himself, and there's an ongoing investigation, what does he say?

00:13:11.880 He says, there's no there or there.

00:13:13.020 So you've got to, you can't have the President of the United States editorializing about respective ongoing investigations.

00:13:20.660 We 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.

00:13:36.420 It's much more generous to Ukraine than the Obama people did.

00:13:40.240 But he delayed that for personal interest by harming or investigating a potential Democratic rival to himself.

00:13:51.640 That'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.

00:13:59.260 That's exactly what Joe Biden is doing.

00:14:01.200 He'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.

00:14:14.860 So it raises all these symmetrical questions, and it's just not a fair application of the law.

00:14:21.540 Whatever 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.

00:14:28.840 And that's been characteristic of the Bidens for a long time.

00:14:32.820 They've let Biden, you know, Biden, of course, continues to say he handled these appropriately and that they handled it appropriately.

00:14:37.860 They notified the proper authorities.

00:14:39.980 And 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.

00:14:45.960 They called his personal lawyers called the White House.

00:14:49.520 That's who they called the White House, not justice, not the National Archives.

00:14:53.740 That's a really good point.

00:14:54.500 It 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.

00:15:04.040 And they would say, Victor Hansen called the sheriff to report, you know, that he did something wrong.

00:15:09.020 But I didn't do it 10 years ago, did I?

00:15:11.320 I didn't inform them.

00:15:12.600 So he's had plenty of opportunities, and now when it's politically expedient and necessary, his team decided it was fine.

00:15:22.100 After probably over a decade and a half, it was time to come clean and then say that they brought forth this information voluntarily.

00:15:28.700 They didn't.

00:15:29.580 If they did, they would have told us before the midterms, if not years earlier.

00:15:34.220 I do think it's interesting.

00:15:35.060 I don't think there's any way Merrick Garland can prosecute Donald Trump after this.

00:15:40.880 I've been saying that for a while.

00:15:42.900 But we did get our first statement from Merrick Garland Monday on this, and this is what he said.

00:15:50.400 This is, of course, after the FBI conducted the most recent search of Joe Biden's home and did, in fact, find more documents.

00:15:56.320 Merrick Garland says,

00:15:56.880 We 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.

00:16:05.120 We apply the facts and the law in each case in a neutral, nonpartisan manner.

00:16:10.940 That is what we always do.

00:16:12.320 OK, now that's a boilerplate statement for somebody like him.

00:16:14.940 He wants to convince us of that, even though many of us would question it in his case.

00:16:19.060 But 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?

00:16:36.520 You know, they'd love to get out in any way they can.

00:16:39.800 Do you think he will do this just because of his hard partisanship?

00:16:43.900 I do, because he's done a lot of very stupid things.

00:16:46.700 He's allowed he's sick, the FBI on parents in Virginia.

00:16:50.320 He'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.

00:17:01.060 He's done the same thing with Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon.

00:17:04.580 He's been a hard.

00:17:05.660 He's James O'Keefe.

00:17:07.060 Look what they're doing to James O'Keefe right now.

00:17:09.720 Yeah, absolutely.

00:17:10.780 He 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.

00:17:20.700 And so, yeah, he's capable.

00:17:22.320 I think he's been traumatized because of his experience years earlier when he was a nominee.

00:17:28.160 And Mitch McConnell just squashed that using the Biden rule that he would not come up for confirmation on the language section.

00:17:34.640 And ever since then, he's been on the warpath.

00:17:37.520 He's a he's a rank partisan.

00:17:39.020 I think everybody knows that, that he acts like he's sober and judicious and elegant.

00:17:43.100 It doesn't matter.

00:17:44.760 I think he's going to be very unfair.

00:17:47.280 There's another piece of that.

00:17:48.420 So 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.

00:17:57.140 I covered justice for a number of years when I was at Fox and I was covering the Supreme Court.

00:18:00.880 I did a lot of justice reporting as well.

00:18:02.700 They don't leak.

00:18:03.740 It's impossible to get leaks out of justice.

00:18:05.640 If you get something out of them, it's definitely by design and it's blessed at the highest level for good reasons in their views.

00:18:12.080 Yes.

00:18:12.580 So you remember the Roger Stone thing where they Roger Stone, CNN was waiting there when the SWAT team came up.

00:18:19.840 There's another one there.

00:18:21.280 They leak.

00:18:21.740 And who who how did we learn that Donald Trump supposedly had nuclear codes that came from the FBI?

00:18:27.120 They deliberately leaked that.

00:18:28.720 Yeah.

00:18:28.920 And they delete they leaked that photo op picture with scattered and they didn't have any context.

00:18:33.280 So the average American look and said, oh, my God, Donald Trump had classified documents spread all over the closet floor.

00:18:40.080 The FBI showed that to us.

00:18:41.780 That was all photo op.

00:18:43.400 And the James O'Keefe raid that the FBI did because he had gotten access to Ashley's diary, which he did not wind up publishing.

00:18:49.560 It is not a felony for a reporter to have stolen goods in his or her possession as long as he or she did not assist with the stealing.

00:18:57.560 But they raided him in the middle of the night.

00:18:59.160 And you know who had the story within a couple of hours?

00:19:01.700 The New York Times.

00:19:03.140 And there's a reason.

00:19:04.180 It's not like James called them.

00:19:06.000 The feds clearly let them in on it.

00:19:08.120 So all of this stuff shows us that we have a politicized DOJ and FBI.

00:19:14.680 And but really, I think this is a DOJ call.

00:19:16.540 I don't think the FBI would be randomly leaking.

00:19:18.240 I think this came more likely from the top.

00:19:21.100 And 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.

00:19:32.660 I wouldn't let the FBI off.

00:19:34.280 I 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.

00:19:46.800 And then we had the next one, Comey, who under oath claimed 245 times he didn't know anything.

00:19:52.740 And then we had the third one, Andrew McCabe, who confessed that he lied four times to a federal investigator.

00:19:58.840 And why Bill Barr did not indict him, I don't know.

00:20:00.900 And 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.

00:20:10.200 And 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.

00:20:21.000 We didn't have any of them.

00:20:22.660 They staggered the firing of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

00:20:26.200 So it looked like there was no connection between the two.

00:20:28.560 They altered a FISA document with Clinesmith.

00:20:32.540 And I just it's very weird what's happened in the United States.

00:20:36.900 We on the traditional side were big supporters of law enforcement, the FBI and the left was very critical.

00:20:42.140 Now 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.

00:20:52.040 And 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.

00:21:03.920 That was very scary because it was almost a coup.

00:21:06.800 Then we get into Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe discussing whether to wear a wire to entrap the president of the United States.

00:21:14.120 So the FBI has been and then that's not even getting into Michael Flynn and their sort of boast how they easily ambushed him.

00:21:20.380 Or 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.

00:21:35.740 They hired and they hired him.

00:21:37.320 They paid him three million dollars as a contractor to suppress the truth.

00:21:42.080 Absolutely.

00:21:42.500 That's a good point.

00:21:43.160 And so I have no confidence in the FBI and they have to get rid of that entire Washington cadre.

00:21:50.940 If 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.

00:22:04.240 But do not concentrate that level of power in Washington, D.C.

00:22:08.820 It's just a prescription for abuse.

00:22:11.800 We 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?

00:22:17.420 You 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.

00:22:26.920 Or so they would have us believe.

00:22:28.160 And then they bring in Michael Chertoff to fig leaf it.

00:22:30.480 Oh, I also see nothing little Gail could do.

00:22:33.840 I guess we just have to throw up our hands and say, sad face, single tear.

00:22:38.440 No, no.

00:22:39.240 We'll never know.

00:22:40.560 And I asked him, could the FBI actually get to the bottom of this?

00:22:43.100 And 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.

00:22:51.260 No, I would.

00:22:51.960 I don't know what's happened to the left.

00:22:53.380 They used to idolize the Warren Court, and that was they felt that they could fast track social change without legislative impediment.

00:23:00.360 And it's very strange what happens.

00:23:02.040 If 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.

00:23:11.780 You've sowed the wind and you're going to reap the whirlwind.

00:23:15.220 That was almost a direct personal threat.

00:23:16.860 And then we had this new leftist pattern of swarming their homes, an assassin turned up in one of them.

00:23:23.960 And then Gorsuch couldn't even, I mean, Kavanaugh couldn't even eat.

00:23:27.620 They went into a restaurant.

00:23:29.360 So the leftists had these very strange tactics of, you know, they invaded the Kavanaugh hearing.

00:23:34.520 They were boisterous.

00:23:35.280 They had to get kicked out.

00:23:36.280 They confronted senators in the elevator.

00:23:38.820 They followed Sinema on a plane into a bathroom. 0.99

00:23:42.560 And 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.

00:23:57.440 But the fact that you had a U.S. senator threatening personally, the Supreme Court judges, it's against the law.

00:24:04.020 It's a federal law that you cannot go to a Supreme Court person's justice's house and demonstrate to influence a case.

00:24:11.320 And they were just exempt.

00:24:13.580 It was just amazing.

00:24:14.960 And they're going to keep doing that.

00:24:17.020 Well, that's a great segue into the Kavanaugh discussion because once again, once again, he's being targeted.

00:24:23.100 I mean, this guy, you'd think he took his licks in that confirmation hearing, which was unlike anything we'd ever seen before.

00:24:29.760 As bad as the Clarence Thomas hearing was, it didn't hold a candle to what they did to Kavanaugh.

00:24:34.880 And now they're coming out.

00:24:36.620 I love that they continue to call these things documentaries.

00:24:39.940 They're nothing of the kind.

00:24:41.280 They're just opinion pieces.

00:24:42.740 They're assassinations.

00:24:43.880 It's yet another attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh in a different way.

00:24:49.220 So 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.

00:25:02.140 You can't find it online, but they're looking for funding.

00:25:04.760 And 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.

00:25:13.140 Amy, is it Herdy, H-E-R-D-Y?

00:25:16.960 It was directed by the Bourne Identity Director, Doug Lyman.

00:25:21.460 And these people have connections as well to, like, Lyman.

00:25:26.200 He did Swingers.

00:25:27.320 He did Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

00:25:28.600 I mean, he's got an impressive resume.

00:25:31.180 This Herdy calls herself an investigative journalist, which would normally mean you have some fealty to the facts no matter where they take you. 0.97

00:25:39.100 Not so in her case, from what I read.

00:25:40.660 She served as the producer for the documentary Allen vs. Farrow.

00:25:44.860 This is the claim that Woody Allen molested his, Mia's daughter, whatever, their daughter together, Dylan Farrow.

00:25:55.240 And even The Guardian, far left publication, said that that whole film was pure PR.

00:26:01.220 Why else would it omit so much?

00:26:03.060 So this is her history.

00:26:04.880 So, and I could go on about her.

00:26:06.640 She did this whole thing, like, bashing the college sexual assault process as being unfair to the women. 1.00

00:26:13.480 The problem is exactly the opposite.

00:26:16.120 And did a film that was criticized even by Slate, even by lefties.

00:26:19.940 So that's this woman's history. 1.00

00:26:21.080 So should they come out now with this documentary where they're going to recirculate things we've already heard, Victor?

00:26:29.660 Apparently it's not based so much on Christine Blasey Ford.

00:26:32.020 It's based on this other woman, Deborah Ramirez, who already came forward.

00:26:35.440 We already heard her testimonial during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

00:26:37.980 She 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.

00:26:47.060 But she remembered the same woman who couldn't remember it.

00:26:49.000 She actually didn't remember that until she sat for days with her lawyer.

00:26:52.100 And then suddenly it came back to her.

00:26:53.840 The whole film is based on her.

00:26:56.420 And they're saying that they've got a tip line over.

00:26:59.140 They're getting tons of tips now on Kavanaugh from people who don't feel like he's been adequately investigated.

00:27:03.820 They'll never let up on this guy.

00:27:05.020 Yeah, 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.

00:27:21.240 So that's just why McCarthy is barring Chiff and people from the committees the way that that happened on the January 6th.

00:27:27.900 I think they're going to do the same thing.

00:27:29.400 They'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.

00:27:36.340 We've got hundreds and thousands of papers that have been esconced.

00:27:41.140 And because we're going to get a subpoena, we're going to see that we're going to look at the terror read.

00:27:45.480 And 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.

00:27:56.620 And 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.

00:28:13.420 He was kind of rowdy.

00:28:14.940 And I don't think American people are going to get too upset about that unless he did something criminal.

00:28:20.440 There's been no evidence he ever did.

00:28:22.200 And they have to go so far back.

00:28:25.080 And I think the strategy is they always do this.

00:28:28.540 They do two things when they get a John Paul Stevens or Brennan or Souter.

00:28:33.120 They 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.

00:28:45.540 And 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.

00:29:00.900 And they go after Clarence Thomas or Kavanaugh or they went after Gorsuch, too.

00:29:07.660 But 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.

00:29:16.000 You can't do that.

00:29:16.800 If you're doing that, it would be sexist, racist, whatever.

00:29:20.060 But I think a lot of people are understanding is they're never going to learn if you continue to play by the markets of Queensbury rule.

00:29:27.740 Yeah, exactly right.

00:29:28.820 But to me, it's amazing that.

00:29:31.080 They won't they won't let up.

00:29:33.020 I mean, the man was subject to an attempted assassination.

00:29:36.120 I mean, the guy self-reported, but he was on his way to go kill Justice Kavanaugh.

00:29:40.440 He was the subject of the conservatives were of this unprecedented leak, which further endangered them.

00:29:46.880 They were not enforcing the laws against protests around the justices houses.

00:29:49.660 They 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.

00:29:58.200 They seem to want to get these guys hurt.

00:30:01.440 I mean, if you wanted to get them hurt, would you behave any differently?

00:30:04.900 No, you wouldn't.

00:30:06.640 I 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,

00:30:15.820 my gosh, I have to worry about the safety of our family.

00:30:19.200 Any moment we're in danger, an assassin turned up.

00:30:22.260 You know what?

00:30:22.700 On this next case, I'm going to pull back a little bit.

00:30:25.320 I'm going to do a David Souter.

00:30:26.440 I can't I can't afford it any longer.

00:30:28.000 I can't take this.

00:30:29.160 That's their strategy.

00:30:30.100 I don't think it's going to work.

00:30:31.480 They tried it with Clarence Thomas.

00:30:33.000 It backfired.

00:30:33.740 He turned out to be the most adamantly conservative justice on the court.

00:30:38.820 And 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. 0.99

00:30:54.560 And once you get into that frame of mind, they'll do anything.

00:30:57.560 Well, look at this.

00:30:58.900 Look at this.

00:31:00.100 Just this past Sunday.

00:31:01.640 OK, we thought this was over just this past Sunday.

00:31:04.520 There are still these people out there.

00:31:05.660 It's not huge, but it's here.

00:31:07.500 They are out in front of justices.

00:31:09.160 Justice Kavanaugh's house.

00:31:10.500 Listen, they should not rule the court.

00:31:13.240 Cut his time short.

00:31:15.020 A rapist should not rule the court.

00:31:16.940 Cut his time short.

00:31:18.740 A rapist should not rule the court.

00:31:20.640 Cut his time short.

00:31:22.400 A rapist should not rule the court.

00:31:24.260 Cut his time short.

00:31:25.820 A rapist should not rule the court.

00:31:27.880 That's enough of that.

00:31:29.580 Yeah, I mean, they won't.

00:31:32.080 And what does cut his time short mean, by the way?

00:31:34.440 OK, because that's threatening, too.

00:31:37.300 Yeah, I mean, it's a felony to go in front of a justice's home and be threatening to influence his ruling on a case.

00:31:44.980 And that's what that was.

00:31:46.080 They say they're just generically demonstrating.

00:31:48.720 No, it's always about a particular case such as abortion.

00:31:52.240 Wait till the affirmative action case comes down.

00:31:54.480 And I think that's one of the things they're thinking about.

00:31:57.400 We're going to really intimidate these people and say, you know what?

00:31:59.800 Abortion was nothing if you overturn affirmative action. 0.67

00:32:02.700 And it's very scary because very third world is what happens in the outside the United States.

00:32:10.740 And well, and it's it's on that point.

00:32:13.080 It's propaganda what they're doing.

00:32:15.400 And here's here's just a little more on the movie per The Washington Post.

00:32:19.440 Um, they intersperse archival footage with testimonies from Christine Blasey Ford, her friends and from this woman, Deborah Ramirez.

00:32:28.960 Um, they the big reveal is a tip to the FBI from some guy who claims to have gone to Yale with Kavanaugh.

00:32:41.120 And this guy, his name is Max Steyer claims in this.

00:32:46.260 This 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.

00:33:02.560 So he's offering some support for Ramirez, having seen Kavanaugh expose himself.

00:33:06.480 And then secondly, he says that he had witnessed firsthand a separate incident of Kavanaugh exposing himself.

00:33:13.480 What is less clear is that the this man, Max Steyer, number one, is a former Clinton lawyer.

00:33:22.280 So he's a Democratic operative.

00:33:24.360 Number two, he declined the filmmaker's request to comment on the contents used in that film.

00:33:32.160 And he was not directly interviewed for the film and really wasn't participating in the film.

00:33:36.760 So 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.

00:33:49.460 Deborah Ramirez couldn't remember until she sat for days with her lawyer.

00:33:53.840 And based on that and his reluctance to actually say it on camera where he could be held to account, this is the big reveal.

00:34:00.680 And yet this is what the publications are going to go with, like new, new evidence, FBI tipster.

00:34:07.340 I know we've already been through this with Michael Avonati.

00:34:10.140 Remember this, the future presidential candidate?

00:34:12.140 He went through all of this.

00:34:13.460 He brought them in.

00:34:14.240 It was total fraud.

00:34:15.260 Then we had Mark Judge.

00:34:16.460 They tried to destroy his career and his life.

00:34:18.660 He wrote a book about it.

00:34:19.960 So it's all been discussed.

00:34:21.600 It's all been out there.

00:34:23.400 It's been character assassination.

00:34:25.220 It didn't stick.

00:34:26.000 He's the Supreme Court justice.

00:34:28.240 And 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.

00:34:38.540 And they think, you know what?

00:34:39.320 If the court is not left wing, then it's illegitimate and we can't change it.

00:34:45.000 So 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.

00:35:03.240 And they do.

00:35:03.760 Or if you're Kavanaugh.

00:35:05.320 Yeah.

00:35:05.520 It could be, I'm leaving.

00:35:08.280 I can make millions of dollars in private practice.

00:35:11.920 I 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.

00:35:21.040 And so, like, I'm sure he, this happened to Amy Coney Barrett, who's got young kids at home.

00:35:26.300 The address is online.

00:35:27.420 Especially during a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, because they'll get another appointment.

00:35:32.660 And it wouldn't matter if there's a Republican president and Senate, but now they have an opportunity.

00:35:37.420 They write that out.

00:35:38.160 You'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.

00:35:48.760 And maybe this particular judge, Kagan, should step down and get a more radical person, a younger person.

00:35:55.360 So, 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.

00:36:05.360 It bypasses the legislature.

00:36:07.160 It makes laws and it always makes laws in the progressive mode.

00:36:11.480 And they really like that.

00:36:12.580 And they think that they've lost that lever and they want it back at any cost.

00:36:16.680 And so, that prompts all these other subsidiary discussions.

00:36:20.820 We need to pack the court to 15.

00:36:22.440 If you just said, pack the court, that was kind of a disgraceful moment in FDR's administration.

00:36:29.140 And everybody, every historian knew that.

00:36:30.800 And 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.

00:36:40.480 They keep fighting and bragging about now, well, we didn't pack the court.

00:36:43.680 But if you look at subsequent FDR-era Supreme Court rulings, they approve most of this New Deal after that.

00:36:52.300 And that's what they think is a good formula.

00:36:55.080 Yeah.

00:36:55.500 Well, I mean, they're getting an assist, of course, from their media brethren, as they so often do.

00:37:00.900 The propaganda is already out on this.

00:37:03.040 I mentioned the Washington Post.

00:37:04.580 This is their report about this Deborah Ramirez.

00:37:06.600 Again, who couldn't even remember the incident until all the days with their lawyer.

00:37:09.800 This is the Washington Post's take on it.

00:37:11.760 Though 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.

00:37:31.860 So traumatic, she couldn't remember it at all for 40-plus years.

00:37:37.940 And even then, after witnessing Christine Blasey Ford come forward, it took her quite a bit.

00:37:43.540 I will say this.

00:37:44.980 As a lawyer, there's a reason we have statutes of limitation.

00:37:47.940 It'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.

00:37:57.440 They, too, lack the ability to go back and find contemporaneous witnesses and prove where they were on any given night.

00:38:03.320 The system recognizes that would be an injustice to the accused.

00:38:08.100 And to do via media what we are not able to do via a court of law is deeply unfair.

00:38:15.440 When 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.

00:38:25.180 And this ain't it.

00:38:27.400 Victor, stand by.

00:38:28.380 There's much, much more to get to with you.

00:38:29.880 We'll pick it up right after this quick, quick break.

00:38:31.780 So, Victor, this is just breaking.

00:38:38.160 The United States is agreeing to send tanks to Ukraine.

00:38:43.400 31 of them.

00:38:44.400 31 Abrams MI tanks to Ukraine.

00:38:47.120 Germany is sending 14.

00:38:49.600 We wanted to get them to do it.

00:38:51.220 They said, we're not doing it unless you do it.

00:38:52.980 We don't want to look like the main aggressors in this thing.

00:38:55.380 Otherwise, Russia is going to set its sights on us.

00:38:57.700 So, like we've been doing so often, we put our tail between our legs, came back home and said, all right, we'll send 31.

00:39:03.940 That's my editorial.

00:39:04.920 All 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.

00:39:19.280 However, the U.S. is going to train the Ukrainian troops.

00:39:22.900 That was one of our concerns, that we didn't think they'd know how to use them.

00:39:26.240 They're rather sophisticated pieces of machinery.

00:39:28.880 The reporting is that it's not going very well over there.

00:39:32.540 It's going.

00:39:33.620 It's ongoing.

00:39:34.260 The 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.

00:39:44.660 So where do you stand on the United States now?

00:39:46.700 I mean, this is a significant escalation, sending 31 tanks to Ukraine.

00:39:51.740 Yeah, this is the largest conventional war since the Korean War, or maybe Vietnam wasn't.

00:39:58.820 I mean, it wasn't a conventional war like this.

00:40:00.660 This is sort of a World War II curse, World War I Verdun.

00:40:05.260 And we forgot in our euphoria, because everybody admires Zelensky and, you know, that he was invaded.

00:40:12.740 But 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,

00:40:24.500 was always predicated on the Europeans and the Americans matching that and trumping that advantage that Russia intrinsically enjoyed.

00:40:33.460 So that means that for him to continue to fight, we have to support him at the continuous level or escalate.

00:40:41.440 And 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. 0.92

00:40:54.400 That is, before, during the Obama administration, they took eastern Ukraine, Crimea.

00:40:58.560 But to achieve that grandiose strategic game, he's going to have to sink more ships of the Black Sea Fleet.

00:41:06.080 He's already conducting raids 400 miles into Russia with drones and missiles to hit depots and supply areas.

00:41:13.780 He's going to have to increase that.

00:41:15.080 And 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.

00:41:29.220 But the very fact that he escalates is going to be considered intolerable at some point by the Russians.

00:41:35.100 And I think they're going to say, well, yeah, during the Cold War, you guys supplied the people in Afghanistan to hurt us.

00:41:43.540 We supplied the Vietnamese to hurt Chu. 1.00

00:41:45.600 We supplied the Koreans during the Iraq War.

00:41:48.040 We supplied the Taliban. 1.00

00:41:49.820 That's how it goes.

00:41:50.640 But this is different.

00:41:51.800 It's right on our border.

00:41:53.300 And this is a huge conventional army.

00:41:55.540 And Ukraine used to be part of Russia.

00:41:58.120 We're making new rules now about aiding a third party or a proxy war.

00:42:04.020 And we don't, the thing that's striking about it, we don't take that seriously.

00:42:08.540 We just say, ah, he's just talking.

00:42:10.340 He'd never use a tactical nuclear weapon.

00:42:12.600 And so we just pour this stuff in.

00:42:14.260 We take 300,000 shells from Israel.

00:42:16.360 They're there for a reason in case there's a war and Israel runs out and they need 155 millimeter shells.

00:42:22.920 And when we give them an Abrams tank, the Abrams is the best tank in the world, but it has one great liability.

00:42:28.600 It has a gas turbine engine and it's a gas hog.

00:42:31.020 So we have to bring them special tankers and protection of the tankers, a whole subsidiary army, basically, to allow these superb tanks to operate.

00:42:42.180 And I think we're about five years now it will take to restock the Javelin supply depot.

00:42:50.960 And 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?

00:43:02.200 And the answer is no, we're not.

00:43:05.700 We've depleted our stocks.

00:43:08.480 And 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.

00:43:13.200 But they've been opposing the defense budget and cutting it under Obama and now on Biden.

00:43:17.560 And 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.

00:43:28.780 They would have adequate weapon and all our other allies could draw on them when they have their own Ukraine. 0.94

00:43:33.980 And they're not doing any of that.

00:43:35.340 It's almost as if, well, we fail with Russian collusion, but we know Putin is evil.

00:43:41.160 So we're going to transfer all of our exuberance over to Ukraine, and it's not going to be negotiable.

00:43:46.680 You cannot discuss anything unless you're 100 percent, get every Russian out at any cost. 1.00

00:43:52.420 Then you're somehow an appeaser or you're pro-Putin.

00:43:55.940 And I don't think Americans are going to accept that, not with an open border when you had five million entries.

00:44:01.880 And we're over there to defend the sovereign borders in Ukraine.

00:44:05.000 And we're being attacked with 100,000 fentanyl deaths in the United States, most of it coming, the drug coming from Mexico.

00:44:12.300 So they don't think this out.

00:44:14.880 And I think American people are thinking about how they're starting to have questions.

00:44:19.500 It 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?

00:44:30.180 And 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?

00:44:42.500 We're much closer to Japan and South Korea and Australia and Taiwan and Israel than we are to Ukraine.

00:44:48.420 But yet we've taken this one country and we've told the other allies, we're not going to have enough to supply you.

00:44:53.920 In 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.

00:45:02.720 So these questions are not going to go away.

00:45:06.500 And it doesn't do any good to call people names, which the left is doing now.

00:45:11.680 I 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.

00:45:20.460 Um, 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.

00:45:31.620 They didn't want to be the ones to support, to supply the majority of the tanks.

00:45:35.060 And now we're doing it and they're coming, they're backdrafting, but not as big a commitment as we are.

00:45:39.860 The 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. 1.00

00:45:46.660 We're just like, this could be the deal breaker. This could be the thing that turns the tide in favor of Ukraine. 0.95

00:45:52.220 And I don't know, I'm not sure whether we can turn the tide in favor of Ukraine. 0.92

00:45:56.680 I hear all the reports you hear about the struggling Russian army, but Putin's got forces and they continue to replenish.

00:46:04.220 And 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.

00:46:09.900 But what if they don't win? What if the tanks don't work out?

00:46:14.800 What if the Russians are as angry as they say about the 31 or the 30 tanks that we're providing?

00:46:20.580 How in danger are the American children as a result of this?

00:46:25.880 Well, that's a good point, because what's the next step?

00:46:28.600 Because Russia has 144 million people and Ukraine has 40. 0.89

00:46:32.660 So you can kill 300,000, they've still got more available manpower than does Ukraine.

00:46:38.740 And they're going to use it because it's an existential war they feel now at this point.

00:46:43.500 And so we always say this is the ultimate weapon.

00:46:47.140 The patriots are going to solve things.

00:46:48.740 The drones are going to solve things.

00:46:51.180 The tank, the Abrams, they're not.

00:46:52.980 It's just another escalation.

00:46:55.000 And 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.

00:47:03.400 And 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.

00:47:16.960 So the point is that this war is lowering the bar of international threats.

00:47:23.260 And I call it nuclear porn.

00:47:25.440 People are talking about nuclear weapons in a promiscuous fashion that they haven't since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:47:31.460 And all of our bipartisan establishment just pooh-poohs out and says, oh, it doesn't matter.

00:47:36.280 It does matter.

00:47:37.480 And it's getting dangerous.

00:47:39.760 It is getting dangerous and you can feel it.

00:47:41.280 So 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.

00:47:55.440 So, Victor, I don't have to tell you that the immigration situation is getting even worse than we thought it could.

00:48:03.760 The numbers are absolutely devastating.

00:48:05.760 And Fox News has been doing a good job reporting on some of them, just a couple to bring it home.

00:48:10.420 Border Patrol in Del Rio continuing to arrest sex offenders, according to Bill Malugian of Fox.

00:48:17.860 Ten sex offenders arrested so far in just January.

00:48:20.740 Thirty-eight since October 1st.

00:48:23.200 Majority are pedophiles convicted of sex crimes against children.

00:48:28.000 Terror watch list names also crossing the border at record rates.

00:48:33.860 In fiscal year 2023, 38 so far.

00:48:39.300 Okay, that began on October 1st.

00:48:41.040 Thirty-eight so far.

00:48:42.260 In fiscal year 22, it was a total of 98.

00:48:45.240 Just to go back to 17, there were two.

00:48:47.780 Eighteen, there were six.

00:48:48.980 Nineteen, there were zero.

00:48:50.800 So last year we're at 98.

00:48:52.240 And this year so far, just since October, we're at 38.

00:48:54.740 So we're letting terrorists cross the border and we're letting child molesters come in.

00:49:00.260 And then we're putting them through a criminal justice system that has really no desire to prosecute anyone.

00:49:05.540 How's that going?

00:49:06.100 Yeah, I don't know.

00:49:08.060 I don't understand it.

00:49:09.060 I mean, there used to be the argument over there was a secure border, but the left wanted to have more people cross it.

00:49:15.800 But there is no border now.

00:49:18.220 It doesn't exist with five million entries.

00:49:20.760 It's almost postmodern.

00:49:22.600 They've just destroyed the border.

00:49:24.240 It does not exist as we know it.

00:49:26.000 And, you know, it filters into people's lives.

00:49:30.640 I live 300 miles north of the border in California.

00:49:35.040 But 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.

00:49:42.320 But 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.

00:49:53.380 I could hear them shooting.

00:49:55.280 There were chop shops.

00:49:57.160 I 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.

00:50:09.300 So it was at my address.

00:50:10.480 So 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.

00:50:23.160 And it's on and on.

00:50:24.300 We've had a chop shop.

00:50:25.320 A 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.

00:50:44.840 I've had a person with an AR-15 speak a language.

00:50:47.940 I didn't know what the language was.

00:50:49.400 It was some Oaxacan indigenous dialect, but it wasn't Spanish.

00:50:53.860 And so these are things that people in rural California deal with all the time.

00:50:58.260 You 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.

00:51:10.360 You will run into a marijuana farm run by the cartel.

00:51:15.700 That's a little different experience.

00:51:17.980 It's changed everybody's life, and we don't know why.

00:51:21.140 The left is doing this, but is the purpose to import voters?

00:51:26.940 Is 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?

00:51:45.340 I don't know what the idea is, but it's really destroying the United States.

00:51:51.420 And people in our community that are mostly Mexican-American are the most adamant against it.

00:51:56.440 You faded out for one second.

00:51:57.480 You said they're more likely to run into, what would you say, a marijuana field being operated by the cartels?

00:52:01.840 Yes, yeah, and that would be a good scenario rather than a meth lab or fentanyl distribution point.

00:52:11.060 But 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. 0.64

00:52:23.320 It's serious, and they don't fool around.

00:52:27.280 The 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.

00:52:37.240 This is the crime I wanted to bring up to you.

00:52:39.540 But before I do, I'll just set the table this way.

00:52:41.860 Hearing you talk about what you've experienced as somebody who is close to the border,

00:52:45.620 it puts the lie and the absurdity to the things we were hearing from those Martha's Vineyard residents,

00:52:52.940 like in the 36 hours they had some unlawful immigrants there.

00:52:58.080 They enriched our lives.

00:53:00.020 That was actually a quote.

00:53:01.800 They enriched our lives.

00:53:04.100 Well, that's not the experience of actual border states who have to deal with these people who tend to be criminals.

00:53:11.440 Like we just pointed out, a lot of them are criminals.

00:53:12.940 The pedophiles, the terror watchlist people, the criminals, the people associated with the cartels.

00:53:18.420 And that brings us to Goshen.

00:53:19.740 Okay, so Goshen, California, town of 5,000, straddles State Route 99, which is a heavily trafficked commercial corridor, I'm told,

00:53:27.900 connecting Interstate 5, which goes from the Mexican border.

00:53:29.800 I live one mile from the 99, so.

00:53:32.320 Okay, so this is Bayou.

00:53:34.240 This is just January 16th.

00:53:36.340 3.38 in the morning, six people shot dead execution style.

00:53:40.380 A 72-year-old woman who was asleep in her bed, a teenage mother and her baby, who were each shot point-blank in their heads,

00:53:48.660 and a 19-year-old man who often stayed up late playing video games.

00:53:53.000 The baby was 10 months old.

00:53:55.160 This is how the article describes the mother and the baby being killed.

00:53:57.920 The 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,

00:54:09.660 and fired rounds into their heads.

00:54:12.440 Four generations of a single family murdered.

00:54:15.060 Now, the acknowledgement is there that some of the members of this murdered family had been involved in gangs,

00:54:20.360 according to the police, who also say these murders are the calling card of the Mexican drug cartels,

00:54:26.420 that their tentacles have extended in recent years from the border regions and up and up and up into the farthest reaches of the country.

00:54:34.000 This is cartel action in a U.S. state.

00:54:38.260 And it's unusual, correct me if I'm wrong, because normally even the cartels don't kill the women and the babies.

00:54:43.640 I think that's kind of not operative, that idea anymore.

00:54:51.100 The cartels, I think, are capable of anything.

00:54:53.460 And the biggest thing that I find frightening is that no one wants to talk about it,

00:54:59.100 because, and I'll give you an example, I have to be very careful,

00:55:02.260 that there's a person that I know who works in my town, Mexican-American,

00:55:08.160 and she told me that a gang member was attacking her son because he didn't speak Spanish.

00:55:16.260 She got angry and reported that person as illegal. 0.76

00:55:20.420 That person went back to Mexico and called her on a cell phone and said,

00:55:25.720 we know where you are, we know your house, and we're coming.

00:55:29.460 And she's terrified.

00:55:30.740 And so there's a new atmosphere in rural California that either law enforcement can't handle it

00:55:39.040 or won't handle it or scare themselves of it, but there's no protection.

00:55:45.920 What I'm getting at is if you do something, if you're a drug dealer and you work with the cartels

00:55:54.200 or you're doing what I'm doing right now, talking, and you mention the cartels in any detail,

00:55:59.700 then that's a very dangerous thing to do, because there's not going to be anybody on the American

00:56:03.260 side of law enforcement that can protect you.

00:56:06.660 Even if they want to, they can't.

00:56:08.540 And this is all a result of sending 5 million people into the United States 1.00

00:56:13.960 since Joe Biden took office and not deporting anybody.

00:56:18.180 And the thing about Trump was that he tried and tried and tried,

00:56:21.920 and he was undermined by people within his own administration, the courts, the left.

00:56:26.280 But finally, right on the eve of COVID, he was successful.

00:56:30.040 I mean, he pretty much had a secure border.

00:56:32.080 And once you have a secure border, then you can go back and adjudicate this person,

00:56:37.060 that person, should we deport them?

00:56:38.880 You have a finite number you can deal with, but we don't now.

00:56:42.620 And you have no idea.

00:56:44.280 So what I'm getting at is I walked my dogs before we came on the air, Megan,

00:56:48.560 and there's a whole dryer.

00:56:51.400 Somebody just came into the orchard and dropped a dryer,

00:56:54.280 and that sits next to a refrigerator.

00:56:56.420 And if I don't get that out very quickly,

00:56:58.780 then the word will get out in the illegal community

00:57:01.540 that they can dump trash at this particular spot.

00:57:04.520 A month ago, I walked out,

00:57:06.260 and there was somebody who didn't speak English with an AR-15

00:57:10.340 from my rudimentary Spanish.

00:57:12.640 He said he was out shooting squirrels for bounties.

00:57:15.660 I don't know if that's true or not, but my family's been here since 1870.

00:57:22.360 And I grew up with stories of my grandfather telling about his grandfather,

00:57:27.480 how they conquered malaria and typhoid and the Depression.

00:57:31.940 And I don't think they've ever witnessed anything like this.

00:57:35.200 And most of my family have left because of this.

00:57:38.000 I'm the only one who left on the farm, and most of it's been sold off.

00:57:41.580 But it's hard to live under those conditions,

00:57:45.220 especially when it's politically incorrect to do what you and I are doing right now.

00:57:49.640 We can't say that this is an illegal alien problem.

00:57:52.800 And yet every time I pick up trash and refrigerators,

00:57:56.800 which are dangerous with the doors open for kids to get into,

00:58:00.700 or car seats, the literature is all in Spanish.

00:58:05.340 And I mean bills, advertisements, newspapers.

00:58:10.480 And if on a rare occasion, somebody will have an address.

00:58:13.920 And if I call the sheriff or the police and say,

00:58:16.380 would you go to this address?

00:58:18.000 They won't do it.

00:58:20.260 And on one occasion, I took all the trash

00:58:23.420 and went over and dumped it on the guy's lawn.

00:58:26.120 And he told me it wasn't his fault because there's a stealthy, illegal trash service

00:58:33.540 that goes around to houses where illegals live and picks up all their trash 1.00

00:58:37.600 and throws it in people's orchards or vineyards.

00:58:41.060 And so it's all known to the law enforcement.

00:58:44.720 And what I get really angry is when I hear Gavin Newsom do these virtue signaling lectures,

00:58:50.700 sermonizing about how illiberal everybody is to bring it up

00:58:53.740 and how wonderful he is from all of these enclaves that he and Pelosi and Feinstein all live at,

00:59:00.400 who were the architects of the destruction of the border here in California.

00:59:04.920 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:59:06.140 And what they're saying now is that it's not just where you live,

00:59:09.480 that the cartels are expanding right now into more rural areas in America

00:59:14.500 where they know, for the most part, they're going to be left alone by law enforcement

00:59:18.560 and by others to the point where we're all afraid to talk about what's happening

00:59:22.460 because nobody wants to wind up like this poor family.

00:59:26.200 No, I don't.

00:59:27.320 I mean, it involves every little thing, though, Megan.

00:59:31.000 If you want to get a building permit like I did for a solar panel

00:59:34.100 and you get inspectors out in rural California, they're faced with a dilemma.

00:59:39.460 When they see these old farmhouses that are now enclaves of illegal activity

00:59:44.120 from people who were here illegally,

00:59:47.500 you go in there and say you're having porta-potties,

00:59:50.240 you don't have a septic system, there's 50 people living in this house,

00:59:54.040 in this ground, you've got six trailers you've pulled up.

00:59:57.780 Everything here is against code.

00:59:59.760 Your dogs are on license.

01:00:01.140 They're not vaccinated.

01:00:02.320 They could carry rabies.

01:00:03.260 They're coming from Mexico. 0.99

01:00:04.500 Or you go over to someone like me and say,

01:00:06.560 you know what, I have to do something.

01:00:08.520 So, you know, Victor, to get your solar permit,

01:00:11.260 I need to get that shed, I need to have one-quarter inch more support on that joist

01:00:19.540 so that we can – so they hyper-regulate.

01:00:23.580 This is the most regulated and under-regulated state at the same time

01:00:26.860 because it's total chaos, and the regulatory people in this very hyper-regulated state,

01:00:32.240 oh, my God, it'd be dangerous.

01:00:33.400 And so when you say to them, as I have,

01:00:35.680 why don't you just go down the road because everything is out of code,

01:00:39.900 they'll say, are you crazy?

01:00:42.100 I'm not going to risk my life.

01:00:44.320 And if I did find an infraction,

01:00:46.620 they're not going to support me because it would be racist

01:00:49.620 or it would be unfair to the poor.

01:00:52.660 So we have a whole alternate universe in California,

01:00:56.960 and it involves very million people that don't follow the law.

01:01:00.840 There's no – I can buy anything that you and I have on

01:01:04.680 or we're eating today within a five-mile radius at a cross – rural crossroads.

01:01:09.920 I can buy a shovel.

01:01:10.940 I can buy a milkshake.

01:01:12.300 I can buy jeans.

01:01:13.980 I can buy a bicycle.

01:01:16.460 It's all off the record.

01:01:17.940 There's no sales tax.

01:01:19.020 I don't know where it comes from, and people do that.

01:01:22.440 And it's just – it's like the law doesn't exist anymore.

01:01:25.780 It's like the 1870s.

01:01:27.680 Right.

01:01:28.280 And this is why you have calls by Kevin McCarthy and others to impeach Mayorkas

01:01:33.980 because he's not doing his job.

01:01:35.400 He claims the border is secure.

01:01:37.240 That's an obvious lie.

01:01:39.000 And, you know, they're going to have to do something about it.

01:01:41.380 It's reached the level that even Joe Biden went down there.

01:01:43.960 Why do you think, though – I'm curious about this, Megan.

01:01:46.600 Why do you think they do it?

01:01:48.060 Why do they want – is it the future constituents?

01:01:51.240 Are they under pressure by the Hispanic –

01:01:53.520 What's the purpose of just destroying the border?

01:01:56.340 I think it's two things.

01:01:57.180 This is based on my exposure to New York City liberals for most of my adult life.

01:02:01.720 I think there is something to the fact that they want future voters.

01:02:05.420 And they call this, you know, the great replacement theory, this racist –

01:02:07.840 there actually could be a political motivation to get more people

01:02:11.580 who they presume will be left-leaning voters into the country

01:02:13.960 to get them citizenship or at least voting rights.

01:02:17.380 And that's – we've seen that in New York, the push to get non-citizens voting.

01:02:22.460 So I do believe that there's a political motivation.

01:02:24.600 But secondly, I know enough New York City liberals that I've had this conversation with

01:02:28.120 where you get this kind of talk, Victor.

01:02:30.380 My parents came over by the Statue of Liberty.

01:02:33.440 You know, this is the country that welcomes –

01:02:35.200 give me your poor, your tired, whatever.

01:02:36.980 That's what America is based on.

01:02:38.460 You know, they think back to the 1900s when we were welcoming the Irish

01:02:42.100 and we were welcoming the Italians, we were welcoming – right?

01:02:44.380 And they're like, what – the only reason not to be like that now is racism.

01:02:48.660 That's the only reason we wouldn't be doing that.

01:02:50.580 And they don't – they really do look at the Martha's Vineyard people

01:02:54.700 and the – they enriched our lives and say, what's wrong with you?

01:02:58.940 That you would say no to these oppressed people who are just looking to support their families

01:03:02.360 and just want a better life.

01:03:04.040 And they ignore pedophiles, terrorists, people in your backyard, cartels, gangs,

01:03:10.220 the fentanyl everywhere that is killing their kids too,

01:03:14.380 but they don't – they have no interest in figuring out what the supply is,

01:03:18.200 what the supply source is, because they would lead them to a very uncomfortable place.

01:03:20.640 And that lack of interest is – that lack of interest is predicated on the assumption

01:03:25.340 that they either have the money or the influence or the wherewithal,

01:03:28.360 that they're never going to be subject to the consequences of their ideology,

01:03:31.760 that their kids will go to a safe place or they will never be hit by a hit-and-run driver,

01:03:36.520 which happens almost at 40% or 50% of all accidents out here

01:03:40.640 where the driver just takes off after he hits you.

01:03:43.600 I've had that happen before.

01:03:45.180 I've had eight people run off the road and destroy orchards and vineyards

01:03:49.080 and just left, left the car there.

01:03:51.700 And when every time I've taken a tractor and tried to pull it and sell it for junk,

01:03:55.260 the highway patrol suddenly appears and says, we'll arrest you if you do that.

01:03:59.060 We have to impound that.

01:04:00.640 And they give it back to the owner.

01:04:02.540 This has got to be –

01:04:03.660 Yes, I think that's – it's got to stop because it's –

01:04:08.740 every country is not sovereign if it doesn't have borders historically.

01:04:12.440 Yeah.

01:04:12.940 That's one of the reasons Rome just imploded.

01:04:15.620 That is why it's such a smart strategy to move some of these immigrants 1.00

01:04:19.980 to places like these sanctuary cities or sanctuary states

01:04:22.500 and give these people a dose of their own medicine just so they can see.

01:04:26.580 I think it's working.

01:04:27.120 I'm sure most of these people that are moving are law-abiding immigrants,

01:04:31.020 illegal immigrants for the most part.

01:04:32.140 Like, they're not going to turn into a terrorist is what I'm trying to say.

01:04:34.840 I'm sure many of them are not child molesters.

01:04:37.040 However, just the influx to the school system, to the town,

01:04:40.440 has been absolutely overwhelming for places even as big as New York City.

01:04:44.100 So to me, it's a good strategy.

01:04:45.440 Otherwise, people up north, like, you know, up here in Connecticut,

01:04:48.860 they don't care, Victor.

01:04:49.840 They're like, this is Victor's problem.

01:04:51.440 We're not.

01:04:51.740 We're going to feel good about ourselves.

01:04:54.180 I know.

01:04:54.760 You get the most adamant critics here are people who are Mexican-American,

01:04:59.460 and they will say the following.

01:05:00.660 That's 90% of the town that I live in.

01:05:02.440 They will say, my grandmother needs dialysis.

01:05:05.320 Now I can't get her in because there's a seven-hour wait because there's hundreds of people coming in. 1.00

01:05:11.560 Or my son wants to have an AP.

01:05:14.640 He's having AP.

01:05:15.560 They might have to get rid of AP because they have to have English immersion 1.00

01:05:18.540 or bilingual education for all these people.

01:05:21.360 Or these young people that come in from Central America in gangs, 1.00

01:05:27.140 they make fun of third-generation Mexican-American kids and say they're gringos

01:05:32.060 because they don't speak Spanish and they attack them.

01:05:35.180 Or whatever.

01:05:36.040 Or my daughter got hit out on a rural avenue and the driver left and she bled to death.

01:05:41.420 So you hear that all the time.

01:05:43.300 And because these people are not influential or rich, nobody cares.

01:05:50.340 And that's what's striking.

01:05:53.540 And instead, what we have is Gavin Newsom bragging about how you have the strictest gun control laws

01:06:01.420 in the nation, right?

01:06:03.480 So good luck trying to arm yourself against these folks.

01:06:06.780 And at the same time, spending time on things like reparations for slavery 160 years ago

01:06:13.880 for people who were probably not descended from slaves at all,

01:06:16.740 and certainly not in California where there was no slavery.

01:06:18.600 That's where he's devoting his energies.

01:06:20.940 Yeah, he does.

01:06:21.500 He has to because he has no record.

01:06:23.280 He has the highest tax basket in the United States.

01:06:26.360 He's got the most poor people, the highest poverty rate.

01:06:29.420 It's a complete disaster.

01:06:30.940 The infrastructure, the schools.

01:06:32.340 And he wants to run for president.

01:06:35.980 And everybody knows he's the antithesis of DeSantis' record in Florida.

01:06:40.900 And so what he does is he just gloms on to the latest news story.

01:06:46.160 We're in a very wet year.

01:06:47.740 He let out 12 million acre feet.

01:06:49.620 So because he didn't want to store it, because he doesn't want to give it to agriculture,

01:06:52.880 for which it was intended, went out to the ocean.

01:06:55.860 And what did he say?

01:06:57.100 Well, this is a sign of climate change.

01:06:58.760 He was all ready to demagogue the shooting as if it was Trump, as other people did.

01:07:03.840 And then he found out that it was Asians shooting Asians. 0.94

01:07:06.880 And then he sort of backed off.

01:07:08.600 But then he used that.

01:07:09.880 When during COVID, he said, this is a chance for progressive capitalism.

01:07:14.100 When we had illegal immigration during COVID, he said, we're going to give 500 million.

01:07:18.940 He's 25 billion in the hole.

01:07:21.040 And 1% of the population here pay 50% of the income tax.

01:07:25.040 And 300,000 of them are leaving every year.

01:07:27.480 So he knows that this is going to be a permanent deficit.

01:07:31.640 And so he can't talk about his record.

01:07:33.900 Gas is the highest in the country, except for Hawaii.

01:07:36.780 Electricity is the highest in the country.

01:07:39.240 And so it's a medieval society that we've created.

01:07:42.080 It's a bunch of wealthy people along the coast, specifically in Silicon Valley.

01:07:46.120 And then it's poor immigrants. 1.00

01:07:48.940 And then the middle class is leaving.

01:07:51.540 And the Reagan, Pete Wilson voters, they're gone.

01:07:54.520 I know you say your family's been there since the 1800s.

01:07:57.400 You have the farm.

01:07:58.200 You have your life.

01:07:58.880 You have your friends.

01:07:59.620 You have everything.

01:08:01.060 Do you ever think, even you, Victor, at this point, about leaving?

01:08:04.440 All the time.

01:08:05.680 All the time.

01:08:06.580 And it's very hard.

01:08:08.820 Because once a week, see, I drive into another world at Stanford in Palo Alto, where I work,

01:08:13.640 180 miles away.

01:08:14.740 And I have an apartment there.

01:08:16.260 And then you have to deal with all this.

01:08:18.680 And then you hear that from the Stanford faculty, what you and I were talking about.

01:08:22.620 You're a racist.

01:08:23.880 You wrote Mexifornia.

01:08:25.340 How dare you?

01:08:27.420 Linda is the best housekeeper I ever had. 0.73

01:08:29.820 Juan cuts my lawn in a perfect fashion.

01:08:32.960 Her Linda cooks for my grandmother. 0.72

01:08:35.340 How dare you say this?

01:08:37.100 And then when you look at these people, they're all living in Winnebago's long El Camino Real

01:08:42.080 because they can't afford it.

01:08:43.640 And they're just a service class to these wealthy people.

01:08:47.280 So all, you know, it's ironic.

01:08:49.540 The people who created all these problems are this bi-coastal, largely white, upper, upper class 0.97

01:08:55.240 professional elite.

01:08:56.220 And they did it on the premise that they were very privileged.

01:08:59.480 And they thought they were morally superior to everybody.

01:09:01.920 But of course, it would never happen to them.

01:09:04.780 And that's what DeSantis and the other governors really understood, Abbott, that if you gave

01:09:09.860 them a tiny dose, they would go ballistic because they're basically exclusionary and they have

01:09:17.160 apartheid existences.

01:09:18.380 They don't want to live around people unlike themselves.

01:09:21.340 They're very, I don't know if it's a projection or what, but I've had people come from the coastal

01:09:26.680 areas, very wealthy to come out to our farm and visit.

01:09:30.420 And they look around or they drive here and they start to, they get very uneasy.

01:09:35.500 And they say things like, why would you live here?

01:09:37.740 These are very left-wing people.

01:09:40.120 And I say, well, it's diversity.

01:09:41.820 Why not?

01:09:43.200 But it's, it's, I think it's the most crucial issue right now in the United States.

01:09:48.660 And that's why I think you and I brought it up during the Ukraine, because we're fighting

01:09:53.260 a foreign war to, to, to ensure sovereign borders when we can't ensure our own people

01:09:59.000 their sovereignty.

01:09:59.640 We, we can, but we won't, we refuse.

01:10:03.200 There's not even an attempt.

01:10:04.200 There's not even a, again, a fig leaf at an attempt.

01:10:08.100 Victor Davis Hanson, this is a great exchange.

01:10:11.220 I'm really glad you were here today.

01:10:12.580 A lot of important subjects and you're just the man to tackle them.

01:10:15.440 Thank you for being here.

01:10:17.000 Thank you for having me, Megan.

01:10:18.640 Wow.

01:10:19.060 That was educational, wasn't it?

01:10:20.800 He's so interesting.

01:10:21.760 He's just so articulate and he knows so much.

01:10:23.800 He's a gift.

01:10:25.080 Love talking to VDH.

01:10:26.260 Up next, another big guest, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is here.

01:10:30.900 Boy, is he making some headlines.

01:10:32.520 We'll talk about some of them.

01:10:35.760 My next guest served four years in the Trump administration, first as CIA director, then

01:10:41.500 as America's top diplomat.

01:10:43.960 On the job, he met with some of America's fiercest critics and enemies, topics he discusses in

01:10:49.920 great detail in his new book, Never Give an Inch, Fighting for the America I Love.

01:10:56.260 Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

01:10:58.600 Welcome to the show.

01:10:59.300 How are you doing, sir?

01:11:00.520 Very good, Megan.

01:11:01.400 Thanks for having me on today.

01:11:02.260 It's great to be back with you.

01:11:03.820 My pleasure.

01:11:04.620 Never Give an Inch.

01:11:05.460 You could have called it Never Give and then Expletive because you go there.

01:11:11.120 You go to the places, the dark places.

01:11:15.200 So first of all, let me ask you what you think the general response to your book has been.

01:11:19.540 It seems to me the mainstream press hates it.

01:11:22.520 Yeah, that's fair.

01:11:23.700 The mainstream press hates it.

01:11:25.020 And my friends and family who've read it said it sounds like me.

01:11:28.240 So that's good.

01:11:29.040 They said, Mike, that's your voice.

01:11:30.120 I can hear you saying that.

01:11:32.040 And the other reaction has been I've gotten lots of comments that say thank you.

01:11:36.120 Thanks for defending the things that matter most to America.

01:11:40.080 I was listening to a little bit with Victor Davis Hanson.

01:11:42.980 We secured our southern border.

01:11:45.140 We knew how to protect the United States from the folks who wanted to destroy our way of life.

01:11:49.340 We were determined to achieve it.

01:11:51.260 And on the things that really mattered, we never did give an inch.

01:11:54.160 We fought hard for it, Megan.

01:11:56.880 There'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.

01:12:05.360 Can you tell us that story?

01:12:07.460 Oh, sure.

01:12:10.160 Chief 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.

01:12:19.500 She 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.

01:12:32.740 He told me that.

01:12:33.480 He apologized to me.

01:12:35.440 He 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.

01:12:41.640 And so he said, Mike, I didn't get it done.

01:12:43.560 That's how that story came to my attention.

01:12:45.620 I wrote it, Megan, actually, for a different reason.

01:12:47.340 I wrote about that story because in the Trump administration, we had lots of turnover.

01:12:52.000 We had lots of people who not only got fired, but a lot of people who gave up and quit.

01:12:55.860 They were trying to protect their reputation.

01:12:58.560 They had done their part.

01:12:59.480 They checked the block.

01:13:00.640 And I had no time for those people.

01:13:02.360 There was too much to do.

01:13:04.220 You can talk about 25th Amendment and the like.

01:13:06.620 I never for a moment, never for a moment thought about leaving when I had the incredible privilege to serve.

01:13:11.660 We only got a handful of days to do it.

01:13:13.720 And it took every single minute we had to try and get it right.

01:13:18.340 I'm going to play Nikki Haley's response in a second, but you've also managed to upset John Bolton.

01:13:22.860 I think that one was by design.

01:13:25.360 You're upset, what, that he disclosed classified information according to you in his book?

01:13:29.360 Yeah.

01:13:29.900 Think about the people who weren't working on the team, Megan.

01:13:32.520 They were supposed to be part of the team.

01:13:34.040 He leads the administration and writes a book talking about intimate details about what happened in the White House while we're still in office.

01:13:40.680 So imagine my next trip abroad where the foreign leader says, I could be a friend or an adversary, I suppose, for that matter.

01:13:48.420 Hey, you've got a national security advisor that just wrote a book about what you and President Trump are doing.

01:13:53.200 You think they're going to tell me something secret, dark, troubling, quiet, something they don't want shared?

01:13:58.380 No, it is indecent to leave an administration and write a book about it while the president is still directing the nation.

01:14:06.000 Did you get along with him when you were both in office and serving Trump, the administration?

01:14:10.580 Largely did.

01:14:11.440 He and I come from the same worldview in terms of keeping America safe.

01:14:14.860 I've known John before he came in some.

01:14:17.860 I was happy to have him on the team fighting for America.

01:14:21.080 And then somehow he just he couldn't he couldn't get it right.

01:14:25.180 He worked for President Trump, but he never really understood that.

01:14:27.800 And it angered him when he when he left.

01:14:29.940 He threw a hissy fit and wrote a book.

01:14:31.760 Hmm.

01:14:32.680 The he's responded and Nikki Haley's responded to these claims we've just discussed.

01:14:37.660 And here is a soundbite showing both of those a bit.

01:14:40.180 My book went through a four month long pre-publication review process precisely to make sure there was no classified information in the book.

01:14:50.780 This is entirely consistent with Trump behavior trying to suppress other books.

01:14:55.020 And that's what happened here.

01:14:56.460 And I think Pompeo knows or should have known about it.

01:14:59.920 If he didn't know about it, it's incompetence in writing the book for not checking out the facts before he put it down on paper.

01:15:07.240 And if he did know about it, that's malicious and well beyond reckless to say things like that.

01:15:12.860 Were you trying to get Mike Pence off of that ticket?

01:15:15.720 No.

01:15:16.320 And, you know, Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true.

01:15:20.820 I never had a conversation with Jared Ivanka or the president about the vice presidentship.

01:15:26.840 And, 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.

01:15:32.200 I 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.

01:15:42.240 It's sad.

01:15:43.060 And your book is full of lies and gossip in particular on that claim.

01:15:46.020 How do you respond?

01:15:47.800 Everything I wrote, I stand by.

01:15:50.500 Why would she lie?

01:15:52.880 I can't account for it.

01:15:55.740 I don't.

01:15:56.740 She gets to say what she wants.

01:15:58.820 For me, Megan, this isn't personal.

01:16:00.380 This isn't remotely about me.

01:16:02.200 It's not about selling books.

01:16:03.680 It's not about Ambassador Haley or Ambassador Bolton.

01:16:06.400 This is about America.

01:16:07.640 I 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.

01:16:18.480 They didn't want to be around Donald Trump.

01:16:19.800 Let's be honest about it.

01:16:21.640 You'd have people call you, Megan, and say, you know, everything he touches just turns to ash.

01:16:25.620 Get away, Mike. 0.92

01:16:26.500 You have your reputation.

01:16:28.240 And a lot of folks took that bait.

01:16:29.920 They took this.

01:16:30.600 I didn't.

01:16:31.200 I didn't do it for a second.

01:16:32.360 I knew that America mattered too much.

01:16:33.840 And 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.

01:16:44.840 So what's your level of confidence on the Nikki Haley conversation?

01:16:47.280 Because she says Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true.

01:16:50.280 And you say John Kelly is the one who told you it happened.

01:16:53.500 I know two things for sure.

01:16:55.280 John Kelly told me that happened.

01:16:56.940 Obviously, I wasn't in the room.

01:16:58.060 John Kelly told me it happened.

01:17:00.220 I knew him to be someone who told the truth.

01:17:02.500 And second, Kellyanne Conway has confirmed the story.

01:17:06.000 She thinks it's true as well.

01:17:07.420 You can ask her why she believes that.

01:17:09.860 All right.

01:17:09.980 How about John Bolton?

01:17:10.880 Because I've heard you suggest that, well, in the book, he should be in jail for spilling classified information and accusing him of treason.

01:17:18.920 You heard his response that he didn't disclose any classified information, that there was a long pre-publication review.

01:17:25.040 That was point number one.

01:17:25.920 Yeah, there was a district judge that had a different view of the information in his book.

01:17:32.460 It was the Trump administration tried to stop it.

01:17:35.660 He ran afoul of that by publishing the book.

01:17:38.300 And the judge basically says, well, there's nothing I can do.

01:17:40.360 It's already out there.

01:17:41.380 Now, 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.

01:17:53.340 That's that's where it's done.

01:17:56.500 And Nikki Haley, we expect, is probably going to throw her hat in, though it's uncertain.

01:18:01.220 You as well are always mentioned and polled as a potential contender.

01:18:05.580 So is all of this just 2024 presidential politics we're watching?

01:18:11.660 Oh, God.

01:18:13.520 This isn't this isn't this isn't about personalities.

01:18:16.340 This is about who's ready to fight, who's ready to actually deliver, who not only has been in that, who's ready to go do it.

01:18:23.680 I wrote this book months and months ago, long before Ambassador Bolton made his announcement on whatever show you said he made it on.

01:18:30.920 I had no idea he was thinking about running for president.

01:18:32.700 Seems anyway, surprised.

01:18:35.460 Suffice it to say, this isn't remotely about what I'll choose to do in 2024 or those candidates.

01:18:40.220 This is about presenting a case to the American people for how I work to see a director and secretary of state.

01:18:45.920 And there's some fun stories.

01:18:47.100 There's some great stories.

01:18:48.600 The media has picked out a handful of things to try and create catfights. 0.66

01:18:51.640 It's the worst of Washington.

01:18:53.200 But 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.

01:19:00.760 Now, 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.

01:19:10.860 You think you could beat him?

01:19:13.400 Only the American people will get to sort that out.

01:19:18.980 OK, so you're not saying no.

01:19:21.540 And have you made a decision on whether you're likely to throw your hat in that ring?

01:19:25.160 I haven't made the decision and will only run if I believe two things.

01:19:29.400 One, that there's a chance that I can beat and beat everybody who decides to get in the race.

01:19:33.440 That is, I can ultimately be successful.

01:19:35.540 And second, I believe that if the American people gave me that mandate, that I could actually deliver the outcomes for them.

01:19:41.780 It's not enough to win elections.

01:19:43.140 That's important.

01:19:43.680 You've got to win for it to matter.

01:19:45.260 But in the end, what really matters is at the end of eight years, did you get it done?

01:19:50.040 Did you actually achieve the things you promised the American people you would?

01:19:53.240 If you think you can do those two things, you have a duty to get in.

01:19:57.220 You mentioned your time as a CIA chief.

01:20:00.060 And that's, you know, that's sort of in the news these days because of all this classified information, right?

01:20:05.220 Like I'm sure you had a security clearance and saw a lot of things that the rest of us are not allowed to see.

01:20:10.580 So first of all, have you gone back and checked all your boxes to make sure you don't have any hanging out in your garage?

01:20:16.620 I don't have a Corvette.

01:20:17.920 So I think it's unlikely I parked any there.

01:20:20.880 More seriously, I've done a pretty good review of everything I have.

01:20:26.040 I think we've got everything in the right place.

01:20:28.820 Two other thoughts about that, Megan.

01:20:30.860 I did.

01:20:31.300 I handled tens of thousands of classified documents.

01:20:33.300 I had a SCIF in my home, both as CI director and secretary of state.

01:20:36.960 Just explain what that is.

01:20:38.660 A secure facility.

01:20:40.220 A contained facility where the documents, when they come in the house, that's where they go.

01:20:44.920 Inside of that room, there is a safe.

01:20:46.700 When you leave that room, you put the documents back in the safe, spin the safe, leave the room, spin the door on the office as well.

01:20:54.740 That's the secure comp, but that's the process.

01:20:57.140 I was pretty diligent about it.

01:20:59.000 Is it possible I got it wrong at some point in time?

01:21:01.260 I suppose.

01:21:03.060 Two other thoughts.

01:21:03.800 If someone says, boy, Mike, when you were on the House Intelligence Committee, you did X and you did Y.

01:21:09.680 If I did, the first thing I'll do is make sure we get it back in the box as quickly as we can.

01:21:13.380 And second, I'll own it.

01:21:14.480 I won't blame staff.

01:21:15.500 I won't blame somebody else.

01:21:17.100 And unlike President Biden, I would regret having done that, having failed to protect that information.

01:21:22.400 I handled lots of it, and we kept it secret for a reason, and we have every obligation to try and get it right.

01:21:28.540 How does a senator get a classified document in his home?

01:21:34.820 That one's very puzzling to me, Megan.

01:21:36.860 I served on the House Intelligence Committee, and House members don't have skiffs in their home.

01:21:42.140 When you read classified material as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, it is in the basement of the Capitol in that secure environment.

01:21:49.600 You walk into a room.

01:21:50.840 The documents are there on the table.

01:21:52.540 You read them.

01:21:53.320 When you leave the room, the documents are there on the table.

01:21:55.580 You leave them.

01:21:56.220 It confounds me how someone in the legislative branch would have gotten documents to the Penn-Biden Center or to their home somewhere.

01:22:04.480 I don't know.

01:22:06.280 At 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?

01:22:16.340 Oh, you know, I don't want to predict what they'll do.

01:22:19.700 They've behaved politically in raiding their home.

01:22:21.820 I was on the Benghazi Committee, Megan.

01:22:23.300 You'll remember those days.

01:22:24.500 I think it's where I first met you.

01:22:27.260 We found classified information on Hillary Clinton's server in New York, in Chappaqua.

01:22:32.060 They didn't raid their home.

01:22:33.520 We got the information back.

01:22:35.220 So 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.

01:22:44.120 That would be the right thing to do.

01:22:45.520 Realistically, realistically, what will Merrick Garland do?

01:22:48.480 I don't know what what I don't know what the attorney general will do.

01:22:52.200 He's behaved politically in too many cases.

01:22:54.500 I hope that doesn't happen here.

01:22:55.640 I don't know.

01:22:57.580 I feel like the political considerations weigh against doing this.

01:23:00.860 They do.

01:23:01.340 I realize there may be a partisan goal of getting Trump.

01:23:04.220 But 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?

01:23:13.120 But Trump's the only one who gets it.

01:23:14.640 They're not going to get the nuance of, oh, but there was a signed declaration saying we've given it.

01:23:18.540 You know, that's my take on it.

01:23:20.380 Yeah, I think that's probably right.

01:23:21.940 I think the fact that now this is broadened and deepened probably makes it less likely that he's prosecuted.

01:23:27.200 But, Megan, I'll say one other thing.

01:23:29.380 I was a young soldier.

01:23:31.160 You granted four decades ago.

01:23:33.420 I handled classified information then, too, as a lieutenant in the United States Army.

01:23:37.560 I watched other folks in my unit prosecuted for mishandling of information.

01:23:42.060 We 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.

01:23:53.700 Fair, equitable, even.

01:23:55.960 That should be the rule.

01:23:58.160 Let 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.

01:24:06.360 And you have an interesting anecdote in the book about Trump and immigration.

01:24:09.700 Let me read from it in part.

01:24:12.060 You write, between the border and trade issues, we talked about Mexico almost daily.

01:24:16.920 Early 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.

01:24:23.900 Mike, he mused, how would we do it if we went to war with Mexico?

01:24:27.680 Sir, I quipped, they'd come in second.

01:24:31.640 This is a great line.

01:24:32.660 But talk a little bit about Trump's thoughts on Mexico and his understanding of the southern border.

01:24:39.820 Yeah, he knew, as do I, that without sovereignty, nations are weak.

01:24:46.240 And without sovereignty, you risk your republic.

01:24:48.960 And when you have an open border, dangerous things happen.

01:24:51.040 Not only the people which we're so focused on rightly, but drugs, crime.

01:24:55.380 We've now seen a couple hundred folks on the terror watch list come across the border these last two years.

01:25:00.120 And so he understood the importance of that.

01:25:02.000 He campaigned on, you remember, right?

01:25:03.860 Build the wall.

01:25:04.340 He tweeted it dozens of times.

01:25:06.880 And so the whole administration was focused on it.

01:25:09.420 As a CIA director, I was down there as Secretary of State.

01:25:12.420 I was probably in Mexico more than any other Secretary of State.

01:25:15.620 And in the end, it took us a couple of years.

01:25:17.620 We finally got it right, Megan.

01:25:18.960 We created what became Remain in Mexico. 0.91

01:25:21.540 I went down to Mexico with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and made clear to the Mexican government

01:25:27.940 they were going to let us return people who had claimed asylum in the United States back to Mexico.

01:25:33.800 And it did the trick.

01:25:35.340 The caravan stopped.

01:25:36.340 The huge flows of people stopped.

01:25:38.400 We secured our border.

01:25:39.580 It is possible to do.

01:25:40.660 I hear Vice President Harris say, we've got to go to root causes.

01:25:43.440 She's just, that's just nutty. 1.00

01:25:44.880 You don't need to go to root causes.

01:25:46.480 We know how to secure our southern border.

01:25:48.020 We have to do it.

01:25:49.380 Why do you think, Victor was asking me why I think they're not enforcing the southern border at all in this administration.

01:25:54.640 Victor saying we don't have one anymore.

01:25:56.800 What do you think is the reason that they refuse to do anything about it?

01:26:01.580 I think there's just different motivations.

01:26:04.220 I think in the progressive left, they view America as evil and not the greatest nation in the history of civilization the way that I do.

01:26:12.320 And so if we reject someone here, we're contributing to that racist history of our country.

01:26:17.260 I think in some of their minds, there's that we have to be decent.

01:26:20.620 We have to be nice.

01:26:21.260 And that means opening our border to anyone who wants to come here. 1.00

01:26:25.060 They're simply wrong about that.

01:26:26.520 Second, I think there's some who think, gosh, it would be just great if we have these folks here.

01:26:32.760 We need them for labor. 1.00

01:26:33.620 So I think there is a commercial aspect to this as well.

01:26:36.620 And 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.

01:26:44.680 All 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.

01:27:05.120 So is it true he told you to lay off your criticisms of the Chinese?

01:27:08.460 Yes, he told me to shut the hell up.

01:27:11.220 There was a phone call between him and Xi Jinping.

01:27:15.960 I was on the call.

01:27:16.940 I assume the Chinese foreign minister was on the phone call, too.

01:27:20.860 And Xi Jinping just railed on me.

01:27:23.840 I am full-throated in my view that the Chinese Communist Party is the singular threat to the United States of America. 0.99

01:27:29.900 Just like we took down the Soviet Union, we're going to have to defeat the Chinese Communist Party as well.

01:27:35.120 And we were at this critical moment when we had the Wuhan virus spreading across America, and we needed stuff out of China. 0.98

01:27:42.800 Think masks, think gloves, think ventilators, think all of that kind of protective gear.

01:27:47.720 And 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.

01:27:54.760 And so it was late at night, Washington time, if I remember right.

01:27:58.560 And President Trump called me back afterwards and said, man, that guy effing hates you.

01:28:03.360 And from what Xi Jinping has said, I think that is a fair summary of his views of me.

01:28:10.540 They've now sanctioned me, confirming just exactly that.

01:28:13.320 And the president basically said, hey, we've got to get this stuff in.

01:28:16.240 You need to be quiet for a while.

01:28:17.460 And if you look at the record, I actually did that.

01:28:20.340 And then were you loud again?

01:28:22.320 Yes.

01:28:22.800 And I am today as well.

01:28:24.620 Do you think it was the right call by Trump just to have you put a muzzle on you for time being so we could get what we needed?

01:28:29.400 I think probably was.

01:28:32.100 I think we should have taken even stronger actions to get that stuff out.

01:28:36.760 It was stuff we bought, stuff we purchased.

01:28:38.660 Most of it was coming from companies that were American companies operating inside of China.

01:28:43.560 The 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.

01:28:50.020 But in that moment, it may well have been the right decision.

01:28:53.380 Trigger, trigger the talk about masks and PPE equipment.

01:28:56.480 Let's move on from that.

01:28:57.860 Let's let's take out.

01:28:58.580 Let's mosey on over to North Korea.

01:29:00.020 Sorry, didn't trigger anyone.

01:29:01.780 Sorry, you've been around the world in this job.

01:29:04.780 It's actually that's part of the fun of the book.

01:29:07.100 North Korea.

01:29:08.440 So, you know, in your job, you have to deal with friends and foes alike.

01:29:11.280 And the visit by Trump over there, you know, made headlines around the world.

01:29:17.380 What was your take on whether that was worth it and Trump's approach to North Korea?

01:29:22.480 Absolutely worth it.

01:29:23.760 I was fully supportive of our engagement policy and indeed having the summits.

01:29:27.300 I thought it made enormous sense.

01:29:29.000 For 25, 30 years, we tried everything else.

01:29:32.060 None of that had worked.

01:29:33.480 And this was worth doing.

01:29:35.620 I was sent on the very first mission over there and Easter weekend of 2018.

01:29:39.680 It was really amazing.

01:29:42.380 Three Americans were held hostage.

01:29:43.960 We got them out.

01:29:45.040 By the way, we got them out without paying a time.

01:29:46.700 No pallets of cash.

01:29:47.680 We didn't apologize for America.

01:29:49.760 We didn't trade Victor Booth.

01:29:51.160 We didn't do any of that.

01:29:51.840 We just said we want our guys home and we got them back.

01:29:55.300 The best of American power.

01:29:57.440 In the end, Megan, we weren't successful at our grand objective.

01:30:00.460 Our grand objective was to get Chairman Kim to give up his full weapons of mass destruction

01:30:05.040 program.

01:30:05.580 So we didn't achieve that.

01:30:07.180 But during our time after that first summit, not a single long range missile test, not

01:30:11.680 a single nuclear test.

01:30:13.060 We got the hostages.

01:30:14.000 We got the remains of some four dozen Americans returned to their families.

01:30:18.080 So the project was worthy and we had a real opportunity.

01:30:21.360 In the end, we didn't pull it off.

01:30:24.500 I know you think you were the top diplomat negotiating that relationship, but really, we

01:30:28.180 all know it was Dennis Rodman.

01:30:29.200 So if you're an honest man, I had him on my show at NBC after he came back, he gave

01:30:35.800 me a basketball of Kim Jong-il, Trump and Dennis Rodman.

01:30:43.460 Can you imagine what I could sell that for right now, Mike?

01:30:46.160 Can you imagine the dollar value of that thing?

01:30:48.520 There are two great Dennis Rodman stories in the book, too.

01:30:51.060 I hope folks will go read them.

01:30:52.180 He was there an awful lot.

01:30:54.260 He's the Henry Kissinger of our time.

01:30:55.680 All right, let's talk about Jamal Khashoggi, because you've made some comments about him,

01:31:02.800 a journalist writing for The Washington Post who was murdered by the Saudi regime.

01:31:07.320 And you called him an activist and were critical of him, questioning his journalism credentials

01:31:14.720 and lambasting what you call the media's sympathetic coverage of his brutal murder in Saudi Arabia.

01:31:20.040 The Washington Post has some thoughts for you on that.

01:31:25.200 Last night, they came out and called this a revolting embrace of MBS and say that you coddled

01:31:33.920 the person who sent the Khashoggi hit squad.

01:31:37.020 They find it absolutely reprehensible that you would take a shot at Khashoggi in any way,

01:31:41.920 never mind criticize the media coverage of that brutal murder.

01:31:44.980 What's your response?

01:31:45.700 Yeah, the left media lost their mind on this thing.

01:31:49.840 Let's go to first principles.

01:31:51.680 My task was to defend the American people and our security and our prosperity.

01:31:57.080 The Saudis sent a team to kill Jamal Khashoggi.

01:32:00.240 That is bad.

01:32:01.240 Sign me up.

01:32:01.820 That is murder.

01:32:02.440 It's always bad.

01:32:03.720 I personally sanctioned 13 Saudi officials for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

01:32:08.280 I signed the documents myself.

01:32:09.860 We took it incredibly seriously.

01:32:12.040 But what we weren't going to do was put the American people at risk because of this.

01:32:16.020 We weren't going to walk away from the relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

01:32:20.040 Important commercial partners, important security partners.

01:32:23.140 We have soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines stationed there.

01:32:26.180 We weren't going to risk that relationship because of it.

01:32:29.640 We wanted to keep America safe.

01:32:31.060 And it was my judgment.

01:32:32.040 I recommended to the president.

01:32:33.260 He agreed with me that we were going to both hold the Saudis accountable for what they did 1.00

01:32:37.780 and also maintain the relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

01:32:41.280 It turned out to be incredibly important.

01:32:42.900 So, Megan, you'll remember when COVID breaks out, oil prices go to minus 30.

01:32:48.080 Minus 30.

01:32:49.220 We had to deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to make sure that they reduced their output

01:32:53.200 so that we wouldn't destroy the American energy industry.

01:32:56.660 Flip to the other side.

01:32:57.760 President Biden, a couple of years later, says the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a pariah state.

01:33:02.940 And we get exactly what you'd expect.

01:33:05.200 We get an American economy that is about to be destroyed by them, while President Biden

01:33:10.020 then has to go and beg for more oil from that place.

01:33:13.120 We understood the things that mattered.

01:33:15.360 We were prepared to defend them.

01:33:16.680 I was totally prepared to take abuse from the Washington Post for having done so.

01:33:21.340 And I regret only this.

01:33:23.640 The Washington Post ran a full-on campaign.

01:33:26.380 They ran full-page ads about Jamal Khashoggi.

01:33:29.020 I wish they'd have done that about the Iranians when they held Americans. 1.00

01:33:32.140 I wish they'd done that about the 13 Americans who were killed in Afghanistan.

01:33:36.480 They completely misunderstood how we deal with friends, partners, allies who do outrageous

01:33:43.080 things like murder someone like Jamal Khashoggi and still protect America.

01:33:46.960 It is possible to do both.

01:33:48.680 Are their ethics situational?

01:33:52.240 I can't.

01:33:53.220 They'll have to account for what they did.

01:33:54.840 I am fully confident that we got this one exactly right.

01:33:57.600 They go on to say that your case you're making, that the Middle East is a tough neighborhood,

01:34:04.640 is lame and it's ignorant, and that you never really crack down on Saudi Arabia.

01:34:09.140 In fact, that you refuse to impose serious penalties against them.

01:34:12.680 I assume you dispute that.

01:34:14.900 But do you, in retrospect, wish we had gone a little harder on them so that we could adhere

01:34:20.400 to the deterrence principle?

01:34:22.140 Well, no, look, remember, we're not trying to deter Saudi Arabia.

01:34:27.020 They don't have rockets and missiles fired at Israel.

01:34:29.540 Well, wait, we don't want them to kill any American journalists, however.

01:34:32.600 No, we don't want them to kill anyone.

01:34:35.300 No, no American, no non-American. 0.79

01:34:37.120 No, that's exactly right.

01:34:38.580 No, I think we got it right.

01:34:40.480 The people that we had evidence that we could demonstrate were connected to that.

01:34:44.740 We sanctioned them all.

01:34:46.180 Is there anything in this book about our dueling Easter bunny cakes?

01:34:51.760 You mentioned Easter.

01:34:52.840 Anything in there at all?

01:34:54.440 You know, I should have put it in there.

01:34:56.420 It didn't quite make it.

01:34:57.900 It's on.

01:34:58.940 Easter's coming.

01:35:00.340 It's back on.

01:35:01.180 Game on, Megan.

01:35:02.380 All right.

01:35:02.660 People got to go back and look at my first interview of Secretary Pompeo to see what we

01:35:06.380 are talking about.

01:35:07.000 It's called Never Give an Inch.

01:35:09.320 Fascinating read.

01:35:10.100 If you're not lured into it already, the Washington Post calls it, says, hatred animates this book.

01:35:16.020 It's got more venom than a quiver of cobras, which I think will make people want to read

01:35:19.300 it.

01:35:19.680 Maybe they were doing you a solid, Mike.

01:35:21.720 Thank you for being here.

01:35:23.280 Thanks, Megan.

01:35:24.000 So long.

01:35:24.900 Good luck with it.

01:35:25.540 It's available right now.

01:35:29.300 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

01:35:31.160 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - January 25, 2023

Kavanaugh Character Assassination, and America's Place in the World, with Victor Davis Hanson and Mike Pompeo ｜ Ep. 479

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