Cocaine has been found in the White House, but no one knows who it is, and no fingerprints or DNA have been found. Who did it? And why is the Secret Service unwilling to continue the investigation? Guest: cocaine expert Michael Knowles.
00:00:20.800With a reporter for The Federalist and top attorney who has been covering this story extensively.
00:00:26.240But we begin today with Cocaine White House.
00:00:28.320There is news. This morning, the Secret Service held a briefing for Congress and declared they didn't find anyone and they won't be finding anyone because they're giving up.
00:00:39.260They're giving up. There's no suspects, nor do they care to continue investigating.
00:00:43.940The Secret Service narrowed the list of possible suspects to 500 people, they said, and then declared that no DNA nor any fingerprints could be found on the bag containing the cocaine.
00:00:58.320So case closed. So convenient. Here with me now, cocaine expert Michael Knowles.
00:01:04.260No, he's not. He's not. But he is host of The Michael Knowles Show on The Daily Wire.
00:01:08.580Michael, great to see you. Look, I don't.
00:01:11.840It's probably not Hunter Biden's, but the whole thing has me thinking it's good to be a Biden.
00:01:18.440It's really good to be a Hunter Biden, a Joe Biden.
00:01:21.080You have everyone running interference for you or just a Democrat.
00:01:24.880You know, it's great to be a Supreme Court leaker and have the Supreme Court marshal cover up for you and probably chief justice because they didn't look at that one either.
00:01:35.200I just. Oh, did this just in Gail from the U.S. Supreme Court marshal's office is taking over the cocaine White House investigation.
00:01:41.400We'll get exactly the same result. You know, they don't they don't go after Hunter on his most severe tax evasion for all his Burisma payments he got when Joe was VP.
00:01:51.480They don't go after Hunter on his drug crimes, even though his dad was the biggest proponent of going after everyone on drug crimes during his years as a legislator.
00:02:00.840And if cocaine shows up in the Biden White House as opposed to like a Trump White House, they don't really have a lot of interest in it.
00:02:08.140Who are they trying to kid that? I firmly believe if they really wanted to get to the bottom of this, they would have.
00:02:13.840What do you make of it? Well, they could just think of the flawed methodology that they're pursuing in the investigation.
00:02:19.020If you want to find out who's coke it is, you don't look at the fingerprints, you look at the nostril prints.
00:02:23.940And something tells me if they took the nostril prints of the first son, who knows?
00:02:28.360So maybe they would find something interesting. This is why I think the evacuation of the White House was so brief.
00:02:34.780You know, when they found the white powder, they had to tell everyone in the West Wing to get out very quickly.
00:02:40.240But then soon enough, they allowed people to get back in when they remembered that Hunter Biden does not snort anthrax.
00:02:46.720So it's an episode that will will simply fall away to history.
00:02:51.840No one will do anything about it. And as, as funny as it is that this narcotic that the first son has a predilection for is turning up in the White House.
00:03:01.320The far more serious crimes, of course, are peddling his father's influence, cheating on his taxes.
00:03:07.580Forget about even the other sex and drug crimes.
00:03:10.060Just the major aspects of public corruption that Hunter Biden is is getting off without even the slightest consequences for.
00:03:18.480Yeah, it's just again, I don't know whose cocaine it is any more than anybody else does.
00:03:23.500But this is the first time in recent history that I can think of where we had a known coke addict in the White House on a regular basis.
00:03:31.760And suddenly coke shows up in the White House and then there's an inability to find out who did it and an unwillingness to continue the investigation.
00:03:39.080So all those things are very convenient facts.
00:03:42.000Congressman Tim Burchett, Republican from Tennessee, was at the classified briefing today or the they had it in the skiff.
00:03:49.920And this is his reaction having walked out of it.
00:03:53.120I just left the most ridiculous meeting of all time with the Secret Service, all the cocaine that was found in the in the White House.
00:04:03.200So it turns out they don't know who did it.
00:04:06.520The investigation is going to be over the end of the week and they're not going to find out who did it.
00:04:34.600What's the Secret Service going to do?
00:04:36.820Ultimately, they're all answering to the big guy, the big guy who gets 10%.
00:04:40.560And it's quite clear that if the Biden DOJ is going to attack Biden's political enemies,
00:04:46.500and if the Biden DOJ is going to let the president and his family off the hook for not only suspected crimes of very high public corruption,
00:04:56.620but crimes we've caught in some cases in text messages, in emails, on video, on terabytes worth of of images,
00:05:04.920then, of course, they're going to let the guy get away with a dime bag of Coke.
00:05:07.980You know, I have to say, if there actually were a desire to get to the bottom of this,
00:05:12.920I mean, let's say it's an alternate scenario in which it's a piece of a bomb that they found in the cubby.
00:05:19.340You don't think the Secret Service would be able to find the guy.
00:05:22.360You don't think the Secret Service would be interviewing those 500 witnesses because they know who all of them are.
00:05:26.860As the congressman was pointing out, you know exactly who goes into the White House and when over that limited period of time.
00:06:31.420There are always people watching your every move.
00:06:33.880And as you say, Megan, there is a record of every single person who is every single place in that area.
00:06:39.640So these are, with the exception of a handful of very specific guests, there are influential, very powerful people who are walking around here.
00:06:50.820And so if a cabinet secretary, if a member of the senior staff, if a member of the NSC is a Cokehead, that actually does have implications for public policy beyond some tabloid journalism about people doing drugs in places they shouldn't be doing them.
00:07:05.820It's worse than Hunter Biden. It's way worse if somebody who's actually making policy and advising the president on policy is on serious drugs.
00:07:15.160So they don't care, just like they didn't care.
00:07:17.560The fix was in from the beginning on that Supreme Court leaker.
00:07:19.860And these two things have direct parallels, because in that case, too, they said we didn't find her or him and we're done and we're not going to investigate any further.
00:07:30.340We're not going to kick it to the FBI in the Supreme Court case here.
00:07:33.680I suppose we're supposed to just say the Secret Service couldn't get to it.
00:08:00.240I think those two examples is the political circumstance that would force the powers that be to be forthright.
00:08:06.820When it comes to the Supreme Court, nobody's really got control over the Supreme Court.
00:08:11.400So if the chief justice doesn't want to release the results of the investigation, if he doesn't want to hold the leaker to account, that's his prerogative.
00:08:18.020And none of us are going to bring to bear any political pressure to stop it.
00:08:22.400The Biden White House knows that we're not going to press hard enough when it comes to the cocaine found in the White House.
00:08:27.240We're mostly just going to sort of snicker at it and make Hunter Biden jokes.
00:08:30.300And with all of the other scandals before the Biden administration, they know that Republican firepower is going to be elsewhere.
00:08:38.020And so they're going to take this one as a freebie.
00:08:40.680And Republicans are going to try to focus more of our attention on, I don't know, the border crisis or the impending World War III or the apparent selling of state influence by the Biden family.
00:08:53.440And we're going to try to focus there. And so this issue is just a matter of political circumstance.
00:08:59.060It's not going to have enough pressure to make them do anything.
00:09:03.060You've got Hunter Biden getting a complete pass on his most severe crimes.
00:09:09.300They intentionally, I believe, let the statute of limitations run on the most severe crimes before charging him with these minor violations and cutting a sweetheart plea deal for him.
00:09:19.380And then you've got a totally unwillingness to investigate the most severe allegations of potential bribery when Joe Biden was the sitting vice president, suggesting that he took millions from Burisma, this energy company that his son did as well, in exchange for him getting, among other things, this chief prosecutor fired in Ukraine who was looking into Burisma.
00:09:41.180They don't want to investigate this, Michael. They're not interested in that.
00:09:45.260It's another area in which those in charge just sort of shrug their shoulders and say, you know, I'm sure it's just these mean Republicans.
00:09:52.400And meantime, then flash forward to today and you've got an FBI trusted confidential informant in this form, 1023 form that suggested this this current occupant of the White House has been on the take for a while, has subjected himself to bribes.
00:10:10.580And the FBI initially told Congress when they asked for the document, it didn't exist and then stonewalled them for weeks when they said, we know it exists, hand it over.
00:10:19.720Then when they had to admit finally that it existed, wouldn't let them take a look at it.
00:10:23.380Then only when threatened with contempt to Christopher A finally buckle and provide the document.
00:10:29.000And that's when you had middle road congresswomen like Nancy Mace coming out and saying, I just saw documents that that suggests Joe Biden committed bribery, was on the receiving end of a bribe.
00:10:38.460I mean, that that's why I say it's good to be a Biden.
00:11:19.520Obviously, it was plain old regular corruption, maybe more pronounced by the Biden family than you see in in other political dynasties, especially on the left.
00:11:29.520But it this is the the ordinary story of states.
00:11:33.980This is the is this ordinary run of the mill political corruption that happens to be taking place at the highest level in the most powerful country in the history of the world.
00:11:42.480And and the saddest part about all of it is is not how shocking this sort of thing is.
00:12:02.140And we know that that sort of thing happens.
00:12:03.800We know that Hunter Biden has no expertise in Ukrainian energy, in energy of any kind, in anything of any kind for that matter.
00:12:10.200And we know that he was he was getting payouts hand over fist from Burisma.
00:12:14.200And we saw his father on video say he was firing the prosecutor who was looking into Burisma and withholding potentially a billion dollars of American aid.
00:12:24.080And we say, well, I guess that's the way that our government works now.
00:12:28.420And and our lack of indignation, frankly, is is the most damning aspect.
00:12:32.560None of these people running cover, at least in the press for Joe Biden, is pausing to ask themselves whether they have it wrong on him, whether this actually is not some sweet, avuncular guy, Uncle Joe.
00:12:47.620No, but really somebody who's been out for years to lie to the public, whether it's his plagiarism or his boldface lies about his own policy and his history or just to manipulate the public such that he can line his own pockets or those of his son or those of his brother.
00:13:04.620I mean, why is Jim Biden getting a pass?
00:13:06.600Why is the brother involved in everything so absurd?
00:13:09.080Like what? Why weren't people jumping up and down when they learned that a hundred Biden and Jim Biden got completely rich every year of the vice presidency for Joe Biden and thereafter and continue to enrich themselves?
00:13:20.000When I saw Hunter Biden was balking at paying 20 grand a month for his love child with the former stripper down in Arkansas, my first question was, how's he still making the kind of money where he could pay anybody 20 grand a month?
00:13:31.300Of course, he went in there to say he couldn't afford it.
00:13:48.940I can't believe you're such a Philistine.
00:13:50.860You're so deeply uncultured that you're not familiar with Hunter Biden's beautiful dot art doodle doodle paintings that are netting him half a million dollars each.
00:14:04.780We can sip red wine and listen to classical music and enjoy the beautiful artwork of Hunter Biden, which is the nearest thing to a hard skill the man has.
00:14:15.240And it's the sort of thing that my two and a half year old son could do right now.
00:14:19.020So obviously, to your point, it's a total grift and it's a grift from from the whole family.
00:14:24.080And I think you're right also that, you know, beneath the old happy Uncle Joe exterior, there's a really nasty person down there.
00:14:33.300And those of us who've been paying attention to Joe Biden and to politics for a while have seen this come out.
00:14:37.860The willingness to lie as though he couldn't even discern the difference between lies and truth, the willingness to say really nasty lies about his political opponents.
00:14:49.380Mitt Romney wants to put black people in chains.
00:14:51.180He even told on a more personal level, nasty lies about the man who was involved in that tragic car accident with his with Joe Biden's wife and very pointed and decided lies after that man had died, lying about him being inebriated, lying about all sorts of things in the man's life that were clearly intentional.
00:15:12.880And now on that personal aspect, you see this most clearly in Joe Biden's refusal to acknowledge one of his grandchildren.
00:15:21.520And I'm I'm pointing this out and because I think it's my least favorite thing about the guy.
00:15:28.480He he's an ordinary run of the mill blow in the wind, empty suit politician.
00:16:10.720But what about her grandpa, who's supposed to be this virtuous guy that everyone's supposed to like, who has this position of prestige and authority to be so cruel to a four year old girl?
00:16:18.860You've you've got to be a monster on the inside to do it.
00:16:22.520I know I've been saying it's it's one thing.
00:16:25.240Look, if this happens in your own private life and you've got a son who has a child out of wedlock and the son chooses not to be involved in that child's life.
00:16:33.360And it's all a matter of private citizens making private decisions that, you know, relationships are not going to be anything other than toxic.
00:16:40.680That's one thing. This is something very different where this girl knows she knows Joe Biden is her grandfather.
00:16:47.740She knows that she's the granddaughter of the sitting president of the United States.
00:16:51.880And while she's only four, that's probably not as meaningful to her yet.
00:16:55.720She's about to get a little older to where it's going to get more meaningful and is going to get more meaningful to her classmates.
00:17:00.800And she's in for a world of teasing and pain, as Maureen Dowd and her sister pointed out in that New York Times column.
00:17:08.140So it is cruel. And Joe Biden has no excuse for this.
00:17:11.820His whole persona is about being, as I said, the avuncular guy and the family man and family's most important.
00:17:18.700Well, let's see it. And instead of instead of him owning up to any piece of this or Hunter Biden and then the press really holding him to account.
00:17:27.020Credit to the New York Times for those pieces. Notwithstanding, here's the messaging you get from, let's say, the view.
00:17:34.500All right. The view took up. They've been kicking around the issue of him being a grandfather for the seventh time.
00:17:41.000But but here's they were talking about this piece that ran in Axios about Joe Biden's temper, which you just mentioned, and how nasty he is after promising that if you were disrespectful to staff on in his White House, you'd be fired immediately.
00:17:53.380Turns out he's running around. I mean, I'm a swearer, Michael, as you know, so that's one thing.
00:18:00.200But there's a big difference between saying like, where the F is it and saying you're a fucking loser.
00:18:07.340You know, you're a fucking idiot. I'm sorry. But like that's a there's a big difference between that.
00:18:11.160Just ask anybody who's been on the receiving end. And he's doing the latter repeatedly to staff to the point where they don't want to go talk to the guy one on one.
00:18:18.780And here is the view. I guess I need to set it up. I'm not sure how we cut it, but they were picking up in a comment made by Kennedy over on Fox News.
00:18:28.140Kennedy is a jokester. You know, she she's like a comedian.
00:18:31.100And she was joking that Joe Biden's angry temper and swears made her feel attracted to him.
00:18:39.140Trust me, that's not how Kennedy feels. And what did you say? It's in there.
00:18:43.800OK, so there here's a little bit of that and the view then reacting to it. And then listen to where Joe Joy Behar takes it.
00:18:51.800Kind of turned me on when I heard that the president gets angry and volatile and not alive.
00:18:55.740I think it was just someone being angry make you turned on by Biden's anger. I am, too. I like it.
00:19:03.240You like it. I do. Well, you have said that before. I like that. I mean, he's such a mild man. It's sweet guy.
00:19:08.240But, you know, he's not. We've heard. Listen, he has dropped more F-bombs than I have.
00:19:12.860Uncle Joe over the years. Uncle Joe has done that.
00:19:16.360I mean, over the years, we've heard him off mic say stuff. I mean, he is a he's a regular guy.
00:19:21.500I don't want two men, white men shouting at each other for the next year and a half until the.
00:19:26.120He doesn't shout. He doesn't. He has not shouted.
00:19:28.760It's all in there. Sweet. You know, Uncle Joe does do that. He's just a regular guy.
00:19:37.320So taking it away from the abusive staff and just putting it on the swearing, which, as I pointed out at the top, these are two different things.
00:19:44.340But just running excuses for him from start to finish and then finishing with the piece de resistance.
00:19:49.960He's a white guy. I don't want to look at that's the Republican on the panel.
00:19:53.140She doesn't want to look at the white guy running.
00:19:55.380And if you go on, they talk about how Joy Behar's belief that Joe Biden gets away with talking like this because of the white male patriarchy.
00:20:05.420That's the most conservative opinion you're going to get on The View, no doubt.
00:20:09.320And they're going to run the story on Biden yelling just like all of the networks are running it because Axios reported on it.
00:20:16.380And my take is a little different than other people's here in that I don't think this was just a damaging leak for the Biden campaign to Axios that now we're all seriously debating.
00:20:28.500I think this was a strategic leak by the Biden campaign because while in a way it doesn't make him look great, makes him look a little nastier than we might have thought.
00:20:38.080But at a deeper level, it makes people kind of like him when Joy Behar and Kennedy jokingly say, oh, it kind of turns me on.
00:20:48.680I think that was the point of the leak because while this is somewhat damaging, the point of this kind of a leak is to counteract the more damaging narrative, which is that Joe Biden's a vegetable.
00:20:58.440So how do you counter the narrative that we all see with our own eyes, which is that Joe Biden doesn't know what end is up.
00:21:04.560He kind of walks around like a zombie.
00:21:06.060Well, the way you counter that is you say, no, this guy, he's really vigorous.
00:21:10.120He's yelling all the time and he's saying, gee, dee it, I want to know the answers to this.
00:21:17.160And how do you not know this effing answer to this question?
00:21:19.700And so beneath even that, those examples that you see in Axios is the premise that Joe Biden, he knows the real answers to these questions.
00:21:28.240He knows the details better than his staff members.
00:21:30.440And he expects higher standards so that they can keep up with him.
00:21:41.700I mean, it is curious that these pieces are starting to appear for the first time now.
00:21:46.960You know, there's a belief by some that it's an effort by some in the press to get rid of him, pressured by Democrats, realizing he can't do it.
00:21:54.400You know, he's not going to be able to win or sustain his potential second term.
00:22:22.300A lawyer by profession, Hunter Biden now devotes his energies to the creative arts, bringing innumerable experiences to bear.
00:22:29.580The results are powerful and impactful paintings, ranging from photogenic to mixed media to the abstract.
00:22:35.940His chosen substrates are canvas, Yupo paper, wood, and metal, on which he affixes oil, acrylic, ink, along with the written word, all of which creates a unique experience that has become his signature.
00:22:54.040I assumed his chosen medium were etch-a-sketch or the back of a bar napkin or something like that.
00:22:59.720But I guess he's, he's moved up to canvas.
00:23:02.760The most offensive part of that entire line, beyond the silly jargon and that awful word impactful, it's one of the worst words in the English line.
00:23:14.220But, but the most offensive part of the description was a lawyer by profession.
00:23:19.840Hunter Biden is not a lawyer by profession.
00:23:21.700He's a rich kid from a famous family who went to Yale Law School and, to my knowledge, has never actually practiced law in his entire life.
00:23:31.220He's broken the law for his entire life and his actual profession is being a career criminal.
00:23:36.740But I guess they didn't want that on the museum poster.
00:23:39.580If you or I or any of our listeners and viewers right now did half of the things that Hunter Biden has been accused of, we would be sitting in a jail cell.
00:23:52.200The fact that this guy over and over and over again flouts the law and gets away with it is on us.
00:23:59.940You know, it's on us because we're supporting the system that allows it.
00:24:03.520You know, this is one of the things they were trying to get to at yesterday with Christopher Wray, which was basically a waste of time when he testified before Congress.
00:24:12.460And the GOP did not coordinate well enough on like, this is going to be the line of question and we're going to be on it like a dog with a bone, you know, trying to get answers on like, go ahead, define disinformation.
00:24:44.640We could put Hunter and Joe back in the White House a second time without any of this going anywhere.
00:24:50.240So let me ask you, let me shift gears on that, on the FBI hearing yesterday.
00:24:53.860Did you watch any of the attempted cross-examination or attempted defense by the Dems of the FBI director?
00:25:00.020I watched as little of it as I possibly could have.
00:25:03.940I did catch this one great moment where a member of Congress got Ray unwittingly to kind of admit that Joe Biden might be under investigation in Delaware.
00:25:15.620But then Ray very quickly walked it back and then stonewalled, as he and the DOJ have so long done.
00:25:23.600They say, we can't comment on any of the active investigations.
00:25:27.060It's the policy never to talk about who's a Fed or what our tactics are or what we're going after or who we're going to hold accountable.
00:25:33.200So I thought, you know, I've got better things that I can do with my day.
00:25:39.140I can do literally anything will be more edifying than hearing this man stonewall the Congress.
00:25:44.660This this soundbite is the one I was kind of referring to about the parents and the school board meetings, which was just so annoying to me because of all the overreaches by the DOJ.
00:25:54.500And look, the prosecution of Donald Trump is number one.
00:25:58.620Obviously, this is the one that resonated on a personal level for so many parents across the country who had never been to a school board meeting in their lives that most of them couldn't tell you when they are held or who's on the board.
00:26:11.360But the overreaches during covid made them show up and the weird sexualization of the classrooms made them show up and the indoctrination in the weird gender ideology made them show up.
00:26:23.060And then they got threatened as domestic terrorists.
00:26:25.540So take a look at that coming up yesterday in SOT1.
00:26:29.600Do you would you do you believe that the attorney general should apologize to parents who are the subject of that memo?
00:26:35.900Will you apologize for the FBI's own role?
00:26:38.820I think the FBI conducted itself the way it should here, which is that we've considered to continue to follow our longstanding rules and have not changed anything in response to that memo.
00:26:59.160Is this an appropriate law enforcement matter?
00:27:01.800Are you aware that this recommendation that parents be investigated as domestic terrorists was based on news articles called from left leaning sites that misrepresented facts?
00:27:10.980And even the facts that they did offer were about parents speaking beyond the allotted time.
00:27:16.720Would you allow the FBI to be used for such a purpose?
00:27:19.440Can you assure the American public you would never have executed these directives and so on?
00:27:23.820Right. Like there was a way of getting some meat on the bones of this cross examination.
00:27:30.640Yeah, I think there is a little bit of throwing up hands in the air going on here.
00:27:35.680I don't want to make excuses for members of Congress who maybe should have done more preparation because that's that's true of a lot of politicians.
00:27:43.280But I think part of it is they're just looking at this and they're thinking, OK, this is not going to be the most politically advantageous for me to pursue of all the things that we can dig into and look at.
00:27:55.460The issue of the government going after parents, it's it's egregious.
00:28:00.060It motivated voters in Virginia, motivated voters in Florida.
00:28:03.700It's it's motivated voters all around the country.
00:28:06.180But I just think a lot of people are really sick looking at Congress and even when the members of Congress get some really good zingers in there, nothing happens.
00:28:15.720You know, people are just so frustrated that, OK, we got our soundbite.
00:28:20.820We made so and so look foolish, whether it's Christopher Wray or Dr.
00:28:25.060Fauci or any of these cartoonish villains in our government.
00:28:28.880But then there are never any actual consequences for it.
00:28:32.660So, OK, I'm going to look away from Washington, D.C.
00:28:35.440I think that's a lot a lot of why you've seen people start to show up to those school board meetings and start to look more at state level and local level politics is because they think, OK, nothing is going to happen at the federal level.
00:28:46.160So might as well try to do something myself.
00:28:48.480If you want Christopher Wray fired, if you want Dr.
00:28:51.400Fauci fired, I realize Fauci's now moved on.
00:29:05.860There's a lot to discuss as number one, people are calling for a complete reset of the DeSantis campaign.
00:29:11.320And number two, there are growing reports that the Murdoch empire has turned on DeSantis and may be looking at someone else, someone pretty interesting, someone who's not in this race.
00:29:22.460That's what we will begin right after this quick break when Michael Knowles rejoins us.
00:29:27.640Michael, there's more and more buzz about how DeSantis needs a reset.
00:29:37.700And right now, there's a piece out today in Rolling Stone.
00:29:42.280Actually, it hit two days ago, but the headline is Murdoch's start to sour on DeSantis.
00:29:49.480Now, that sounds like somebody's got an axe to grind, but there's enough in here that sounds true that I'm sure a piece of it is.
00:29:56.460They say they've spoken with a bunch of different sources and that Rupert is understandably worried that we may end up being stuck with Trump, quoting here,
00:30:05.860and that he's increasingly displeased with DeSantis and his campaigns, perceived stumbles, lackluster polling and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump.
00:30:15.620That Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis' nonstop cultural grievance strategy and that, hold on, reading, that the Murdoch, says one source, a Fox insider, are transactional and, quote, can smell a loser a mile away.
00:30:34.280That they feel he, DeSantis, seems too awkward in his public presentation and his attempts to connect with the American voter, that they're noting his failures to chip away at Trump's stubborn dominance.
00:30:46.420And then they cite examples in News Corp's many media properties, whether it's The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post or Fox News, which are giving DeSantis a harder time.
00:30:55.760Rolling Stone reporting these are not by accident.
00:30:58.560And it's for whatever it's worth, I used to see pieces like this all the time about the Murdochs and Fox News when I worked at Fox News.
00:31:05.300When I was at the top of Fox News, I was, you know, in the 9 p.m. time slot and never once had anybody said anything to me along the lines of what was being reported as the Murdoch's manipulation or their change in mind or their chosen kit.
00:31:17.720Never. So I tend to think this kind of thing is bullshit, but the thought that DeSantis needs a reset to to do something about these poll numbers, it goes well beyond this Rolling Stone piece.
00:31:29.400And the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
00:31:32.200It doesn't need to be that Rupert is sitting up there, you know, and he gives the declaration and then everybody follows suit.
00:31:38.460You can just see that the coverage of DeSantis has become more negative.
00:31:43.460And the reason for that is his campaign certainly does need a hard reset.
00:31:52.200I am friends with a lot of people around his campaign.
00:31:54.840I think he's a terrific governor, but this campaign right now is on the track to lose and it won't even be close if things keep up the way that they are.
00:32:03.740And the reason for that is the DeSantis campaign to date has been that he is Donald Trump, but better.
00:32:10.560He's Donald Trump, but more disciplined.
00:32:13.300He's Donald Trump without the baggage.
00:32:15.040He's Donald Trump and he can wield the levers of power a little bit better.
00:32:18.120He's Donald Trump, but he's a little bit more polished.
00:32:21.520There are a lot of people who make a cold calculation and say, well, that sounds great because I kind of like Trump, but I don't want the negative.
00:33:58.960Well, if trends continue, Trump is going to move from what was a 25-point lead to a 30-point lead to now he's over a 30-point lead.
00:34:07.540And the other candidates in the race, many of whom say they're in the race to take on Donald Trump.
00:34:13.320You know, Chris Christie entered the race.
00:34:14.420He said, I'm in the race to beat up Donald Trump.
00:34:16.780Well, practically, that's not what they're doing.
00:34:18.660All of the other candidates in the race are ultimately going to train their serious fire on Ron DeSantis.
00:34:24.620And they're going to do that because they've got to take out the number two guy if they want to have a shot at the king,
00:34:29.180because they know if you take a shot at the king, you best not miss.
00:34:32.360And so the circumstances of politics right now are such that if something fundamental doesn't shift in the DeSantis campaign, it's Trump's.
00:34:41.040Hmm. The latest poll, this is from YouGov, from July 8th through 11th, shows Trump at 48, DeSantis at 22, a 26-point lead.
00:34:52.020They've all been around there, between 26 and 40-point leads for Donald Trump.
00:34:56.580But this same poll, just by way of comparison, five months ago in February, February 4th through February 7th,
00:35:03.000had Trump up over DeSantis only by 10 points, only by 10.
00:35:07.540So it's not going in the right direction. And that's with Donald Trump having been indicted twice.
00:35:14.160So it's like, you know, on paper, some might have thought that could hurt him.
00:35:18.460I am on record as having said he should be praying that they do indict him, not for legal reasons, but for political reasons.
00:35:24.840And he's shown absolutely no signs of weakness since Donald Trump.
00:35:29.400But the reports out now are not that these questioning DeSantis donors are resigning to the fact that it's Trump's.
00:35:41.220Instead, they're trying to kick the tires on some other candidates.
00:35:44.540And there's a report of Politico today that says top donors are now souring on DeSantis and looking at Tim Scott.
00:35:51.460But they cite by name they have they suggest it's well beyond this guy, but they cite by name Ronald Lauder of Estee Lauder,
00:35:58.600saying that he recently went down to South Carolina and met with Tim Scott and that his that they write donors.
00:36:04.960Faith in DeSantis has been shaken by early campaign misstops.
00:36:08.820And now I would love to know what you think of this.
00:36:11.780Again, this is Politico shaken by early campaign missteps and hardline positions on abortion, transgender rights and other culture war issues.
00:36:23.260And when I see that, to me, it suggests that this is the leftist writer trying to throw in his objections to DeSantis on to the Republican donors objection to the guy.
00:36:36.040Maybe they think he focuses on it too much or to the exclusion of, you know, kitchen table issues that that could be.
00:36:42.880But is there really a bunch of top Republican donors who want to see DeSantis?
00:36:47.920They loved him before, but now they're upset with his culture warrior status.
00:37:10.020I mean, every single piece of evidence that we could possibly have shows that running against transgender ideology, especially when it comes to children, is a major winning issue for Republicans.
00:37:21.500So maybe the leftist writer has an ax to grind.
00:37:23.280And who knows, though, maybe the GOP establishment really does want to veer away, at least from some of the other social issues, so-called, such as abortion or education or any of the rest of them.
00:37:36.280This has always been the biggest challenge for Ron DeSantis.
00:37:39.480And it was, I should imagine, the most difficult calculation to make when he was entering the race, which is that DeSantis is in a unique position in that he is a Trump-like candidate, but Trump is in the race.
00:37:52.960So he is necessarily filling the anti-Trump lane.
00:37:56.440And that means the people who are attracted to Ron DeSantis are attracted from opposite positions.
00:38:02.540You've got some people, not enough apparently, who really like Trump, who might move over to DeSantis.
00:38:08.160And you've got a lot of people who have hated Trump since day one, and they find the guy completely noxious.
00:38:12.800And they've moved over to DeSantis because DeSantis is their last hope.
00:38:16.200But DeSantis, in order to have a political identity at all and to keep doing what's been so successful, has to be kind of like Trump.
00:38:22.240And so he's being pulled in totally opposite directions.
00:38:24.960And now the liberal media and perhaps the donor class are looking at some of the other candidates who are polling at 2% and 3%.
00:38:33.780I like a lot of those other candidates personally, but I think people need to buy a wristwatch in the GOP donor class and in the pundit class because a lot of these people have no idea what time it is.
00:38:46.540And the time for aw shucks conciliatory kind of 2008 style rhetoric, that is gone, man.
00:39:18.240And so that's why you're not only seeing the big chasm between Trump's poll numbers and the rest of the field, but it's why you're seeing it begin to move apart.
00:39:26.620As the biggest opponent to Trump, the most serious rival, is now being pulled in opposite directions, you're seeing them in that field pull apart.
00:39:34.980And it's Trump and all the rest of them.
00:39:37.340And this is why, because the momentum is on his side, this is why the Trump campaign is signaled.
00:39:41.520It's not even really that interested in engaging in the primary debates.
00:40:11.960Do you think his desire to see himself in the news, which has been lifelong for him, will trump his political calculations that he has much to lose from showing up there and absolutely nothing to gain?
00:40:26.820If the debate were being held tomorrow, Trump would not show up.
00:40:29.820And I know this for a fact because there is a candidate forum in Des Moines tomorrow and Trump is the only candidate who's not showing up and and he shouldn't show up.
00:40:37.320I feel in some ways some of the fans of the other candidates are shooting the messenger here when they are criticizing me for pointing out that Trump has no incentive to debate.
00:40:48.740But while I love most, if not all of the candidates who are running, I think I might be the last conservative pundit in America who is not actively working for one of the presidential campaigns.
00:41:00.880And so I'm just trying to call it like I see it and look at the political circumstances here.
00:41:05.200There is absolutely nothing to be gained by showing up to this debate if you're Donald Trump.
00:41:34.120And so one answer that people will give as to why Trump should debate is they'll say, well, he's not the incumbent.
00:41:41.120Sure, Joe Biden's not going to debate, even though he has challengers.
00:41:44.600But that's because he's the incumbent and the incumbent traditionally doesn't debate.
00:41:49.100Sure, all well enough, except what people are missing is that Donald Trump is the first one term president to run for a rematch since 1892, since Grover Cleveland.
00:42:01.200And so while he's not the incumbent, for most intents and purposes, Donald Trump is the incumbent, especially when you see those poll numbers.
00:42:09.92032.4 points up in the RealClearPoliticsAverage, 45 points up on the Harvard-Harris poll.
00:42:15.620For all intents and purposes, the voters have signaled that they are going to treat Trump as an incumbent.
00:42:20.800And so if the other candidates want him to debate, they've got to create the political circumstances according to which he will feel impelled to debate.
00:42:28.280And right now, the numbers and the numbers as reflective of the people, the constituents, and the bizarre historical circumstance that this guy is an American original or just about.
00:42:39.600And the only precedent we can see for this is Grover Cleveland.
00:42:41.980All of that is coming together to give this guy the nomination without without an ordinary fight.
00:42:48.900It's not going to be an ordinary primary because Trump is not in an ordinary position.
00:43:05.580I mean, I've sat out there on the on the opposite end of the guy, you know, 12 feet away, watching him do his thing and wondered, oh, how will this play?
00:43:33.680So he's got, you know, if he shows there's some danger to the other candidates, because while he doesn't necessarily need it to boost his own numbers, everybody talks about how Chris Christie is going to take down Trump.
00:43:45.400That's not going to happen, but he could take down Chris Christie.
00:43:48.100I mean, Trump has the ability to absolutely stab you in the heart rhetorically on the debate stage and you never fight again.
00:43:54.940So I could see some reasons for him to do it as well.
00:43:58.380That's true, though, Megan, I think I'm the biggest promoter of the thesis that there could be a mild Chris Christie renaissance.
00:44:06.520I call it the Chris-a-sance or croissants for short.
00:44:09.220And I'm increasingly dim on that view.
00:44:11.900But people forget he was a popular two-term governor.
00:44:47.140But the flip side to that is if Trump doesn't show up, I suspect viewership is going to be relatively low.
00:44:51.980We'll be able to test this theory tomorrow in Des Moines when the candidates show up for this forum, which is not exactly a debate, but it'll be similar enough that we can get some sense of this.
00:45:01.860So then what's going to happen on a debate stage if Trump doesn't show up?
00:45:04.880Well, what's going to happen is they're all going to make their comments about how terrible Trump is.
00:45:07.880But it's not really going to hit because the guy's not in the room.
00:45:10.780And then most likely what will happen is they'll turn their fire on the leader of the non-Trump part of the field, and that's DeSantis.
00:45:19.220And if the rest of the field turns their fire on DeSantis, that's only going to benefit Trump.
00:45:23.780So I just think if you're on the Trump campaign now doing this calculation, I think you see potentially something to lose by showing up.
00:45:30.740But you potentially also have something to gain, because if that whole field turns on DeSantis, they could knock his numbers down even further.
00:46:08.780And number two is the other candidate that the Murdochs are reportedly hoping jumps in is Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, who I know was the great hope of people very high up in Republican politics.
00:46:22.920But I think from what I hear, the guy has decided not this time, maybe next.
00:46:29.700And so, you know, I don't know that the fleece is going to make an appearance in 2024, though I understand why he's appealing.
00:46:35.220But to your point, he can get those Republican women in the suburbs.
00:46:38.560I don't know if they'll see him as the fighter who's got to stand up to the people who want to chop off children's body parts and, you know, arrest parents as domestic terrorists.
00:47:04.100And if you like your news in the form of an audio podcast, go ahead and follow and download us wherever you get your podcast for free.
00:47:10.600There was just a big write up about us calling us the pod gods, talking about our astonishing 41 percent growth in just one quarter.
00:47:18.800We were already one of the top shows in podcasting.
00:47:21.380So thank you to all of you for making that possible.
00:47:26.880So, Michael, in case you're feeling sad about your options out there, in case you're worried about the fact that Joe Biden on the very first engagement of his overseas trip didn't show at the big dinner with all of the diplomats because he was tired.
00:48:30.140And part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine.
00:48:37.820And we can predict then if we think about what machine, what information is going in, what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made through that process.
00:48:51.200OK, my dog, Strudwick knows all of that, that we needed the vice president of the United States to explain that.
00:49:00.220And the way she does it, like she's really offering a particularly helpful insight to us, Michael.
00:50:45.840Did you ever see, Megan, the scene in The Simpsons where Bart is giving a report on Libya and he sort of just rambles from unrelated topic to unrelated topic.
00:50:59.740And then he says, in conclusion, Libya is a land of contradictions.
00:51:02.900That was more intelligent and educational than whatever Kamala Harris just said.
00:51:13.100Politicians, taken out of context especially, often will make really dumb sounding remarks.
00:51:19.060They did this to George Bush for eight years.
00:51:22.200George Bush, however, is a smart man who has read lots of books and is curious.
00:51:28.080And is actually not a half bad painter, certainly a lot better than Hunter Biden.
00:51:31.480So there's obviously something going on in his mind that he sometimes fails to communicate with his words.
00:51:36.840In the case of Kamala Harris, I don't, I have not seen any evidence that a similar situation would be taking place here.
00:51:46.420I would not, I have not seen any similar evidence that there is a real chasm between how she sounds and what's really going on in her mind.
00:51:53.780And this is a big problem because Kamala Harris is exemplary of a political apparatus that no longer really functions, of an executive branch with an elected component that doesn't really matter that much to the functioning of government.
00:52:11.460Of a leadership class that doesn't really seem to know anything.
00:52:14.140Of an educational apparatus that has had standards crumble where people graduate sometimes with master's degrees and they probably shouldn't have been let out of the seventh grade.
00:52:24.720And we think that we can just get away with that forever.
00:52:27.860That we can continue to lower standards and we can continue to elect people who don't know anything about anything.
00:52:32.140And you can't, at a certain point, a country will cease to flourish if the people who are running that country don't have any practical skills or knowledge or about anything at all.
00:52:44.380Forget about even learning the liberal arts and understanding what a flourishing life is and how to make sense of our freedom.
00:52:49.200These are people who probably don't know how to make the toaster work.
00:52:51.920And so there is a basic level of competence that we require in our government in order to function.
00:52:57.880And when you don't have that competence, things break down as we're seeing all around us.
00:53:38.440Like why she's speaking to us as though we were are in the first grade.
00:53:43.060I suppose what bothers me even more is let's say that her IQ is not as high as perhaps it ought to be in that position.
00:53:51.860Well, look, there are plenty of people who are a lot smarter than I am.
00:53:54.780I'm sure there are a lot of people with a much higher IQ than I have.
00:53:57.460But if I were the vice president of the United States, if I were giving a speech, I at the very least would make sure that my speech writer wrote me a good speech.
00:54:08.500I would at least make sure that, you know, it's not like this woman is on her own.
00:54:12.740She's got the executive branch of the United States behind her.
00:54:27.320Why doesn't she at least pay somebody to do the work for her so that she doesn't in her role as a representative of our country and our people continue to embarrass the people of the United States?
00:54:39.280I know it says something about her and none of it is good.
00:54:42.540And yet they want us to believe that Ron DeSantis is focused on culture war issues is a nonstarter for him in terms of getting in the White House.
00:54:49.640But this woman is our sitting vice president.
00:54:52.540You get the ladies of the view saying they don't want another race between two white men out there pushing the patriarchy.
00:54:58.580Well, if this is the alternative, I think most of us would choose the patriarchy.
00:55:01.220Speaking of woke cultural issues, there's a lot to go over.
00:55:06.360I promised this to the audience yesterday, so I will begin this part of our discussion with what happened on CNN.
00:55:12.440So CNN was doing a story on Dylan Mulvaney, and there's a correspondent by the name of Ryan Young, who you can tell from the clip, did not even realize he was barreling face first into one of the hot button issues of the culture war.
00:55:28.220But he did. Here is his original sin. Watch.
00:55:33.760One bar was telling us basically they're not going to serve it because they don't like the way Dylan Mulvaney was treated after this whole controversy started.
00:55:42.300He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with with Bud Light.
00:55:48.500They didn't like how Bud Light didn't stand by him after all this.
00:55:51.800Just don't. He used him. He used Dylan's actual pronouns instead of the preferred pronouns.
00:56:00.260And you can see the guy. You could see he has no idea he's doing anything wrong.
00:56:04.240You know, he's probably not immersed in the culture wars.
00:56:07.480I don't know what his normal beat is, but it took 24 hours, not even for CNN to then do this.
00:56:13.980Yesterday in a segment about transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who was featured in Bud Light's recent campaign, she was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronoun.
00:56:26.840And CNN aims to honor individuals ways of identifying themselves.
00:56:34.520Really? What are they going to do when the like Z pronoun takes over?
00:56:38.660Because that's getting bigger. Zay, Zay, Zay is upset about the backlash over Bud Light.
00:56:44.540CNN is not going to do that. Like there's only so far you can take it.
00:56:47.640And I'll say this to you, Michael, as you know, I only recently came to switching on the pronouns to rejecting the preferred pronouns.
00:56:54.700And once you switch back to actual, you know, biological pronouns, it's jarring to hear it said the other way.
00:57:01.180Right. It's like, yeah, when I hear her say she I'm like, what?
00:57:04.860Who is she referring to? It's it's amazing what you allow yourself to just slip.
00:57:08.660Back into reality. How jarring the pretend world sounds to you.
00:57:14.480Well, this is why the left focuses so much on language.
00:57:18.180I wrote a whole book on this called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
00:57:21.220I sometimes fall into these errors, too, because if you in any way use the language of people who are trying to deceive you, you will deceive yourself.
00:57:31.480Language is what constitutes so much of our consciousness.
00:57:34.160What was so wonderful about this, though, is that it happened on CNN rather than on a right wing network, because when when you and I refer to men as men, not as women, if they pretend to be women.
00:57:47.360We're doing so intentionally where we're disciplining our intellect and we're making a point about reality and speaking the truth as far as we see it.
00:57:55.420That's not what this guy was doing. This guy is just a normal guy.
00:57:59.480He's a news presenter who just reports on the news.
00:58:02.780And so you can tell he's on a liberal network.
00:58:04.980He seems like a kind of a liberal guy in the way that he's talking about transgenderism.
00:58:08.680And so I don't think he meant to give any offense or transgress any of these ever changing rules.
00:58:13.640He just being normal knows that Dylan Mulvaney is a man.
00:58:19.060And so he he perceived reality as it is and spoke in accordance with reality.
00:58:26.020And that's the biggest sin you can commit these days.
00:58:28.740And then the reaction from CNN, he was out of a movie.
00:58:32.860It wasn't out of a horror movie. It was out of a parody. It was out of a comedy movie.
00:58:35.660We are very, very sorry. We we've committed an egregious sin.
00:58:39.980Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, you know, flogging themselves on air.
00:58:45.440But the reason that CNN fell into this era in the first place is because everybody, Megan, everybody, statistically, at least 87 percent, maybe 100 percent of people know that the transgender stuff is totally bogus and that they they know that the men are men.
00:59:02.660If it's creeping out into CNN, I promise you it's everywhere.
00:59:06.740Yeah, it's really true. But in another interesting thing happening in that clip, the pair of them was the hierarchy of identities, because in a normal world, if you had a white woman coming on to apologize for a black male anchor and his misuse of the proper terms, she'd get killed for whitesplaining.
00:59:25.920Right. She she'd be called a Karen, like either he'll apologize or he won't.
00:59:30.680But don't you try to fix it, white lady, part of the problem.
00:59:33.920But because it was an offense to the trans community, all the rules are out the window.
00:59:39.180They're at the top of the hierarchy right now.
00:59:41.140That is so true. What an insightful point.
00:59:45.760The only way that she could really dot her T's and cross her I's here is if we were to find out if she released a genealogy report that it turned out she was one 2048th, you know, Nigerian or something like that.
00:59:59.160And then she could also claim to be a member of that aggrieved minority.
01:00:02.900But as it stands right now, you're right, Megan, this is this is open to debate.
01:00:07.380Yeah. Otherwise, she goes from Kate Bolden to Karen, Karen Bolden, whatever her name is.
01:00:12.280Let's stay on this because the latest reports on Bud Light.
01:00:23.480Bud Light sales from The New York Post plunged 28.5 percent for the week end of July 1.
01:00:29.200Worse than the twenty seven point nine decline they suffered the previous week, which is already at record lows.
01:00:36.320Their sales, reports The Post, appears appear now to have infected Bud Light's sister brands within, as you call them, transheiser bush.
01:00:46.240This is my favorite thing I've heard in the past two months, according to Bump Williams, whose consulting firm crunched the latest numbers from Nielsen.
01:00:54.700Sales of Michelob Ultra are down by four point three percent sales of Bush Light are down by eight point five percent.
01:01:02.940Meanwhile, Modelo Especial, the number two beer brand in the U.S., saw its sales jump eleven point four percent during the same week.
01:01:09.520So it's not about people just aren't drinking the beer.
01:01:11.320People are still mad at Anheuser and Bud Light in particular.
01:01:16.840And adding to that, you've got the the ex Anheuser-Busch executive who by name goes on the record and speaks out about this, saying he is shocked by how much money the company has lost in the wake of this partnership.
01:01:30.940His name is Anson Fredericks. He worked for the beer maker for nearly 11 years, was its president of operations till last April and told Fox Business.
01:01:38.260He's even more shocked, though, about the lack of clear response by CEO Brendan Whitworth, who's had three chances now to speak out and try to fix it and has failed.
01:01:48.100He said he should have come out and said, of course, this is a mistake.
01:01:51.040We would not do this again because we've lost billions of dollars in market cap.
01:01:54.860Our brands are down almost 30 percent and all of a sudden we're putting a lot of our suppliers at risk.
01:02:00.260But that CEO cannot get it right, Michael.
01:02:03.820So what do you make of the latest terrible news for Bud Light and Anheuser?
01:02:07.020Well, the reason that Transheiser Bush's CEO can't do the simple thing and apologize is because he's being pulled by his investors who have signed on to things like the ESG movement and GARM,
01:02:19.100which is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is just another one of these multinational liberal blobs that says that corporations are going to toe the leftist line or they don't get to advertise on the big tech platforms.
01:02:31.380And so even when the consumers are saying we hate your product, we're not going to buy it anymore, this boycott's here to stay.
01:02:37.720Even if the CEO were inclined to apologize, he just thinks the greater risk to him is from irritating the investors and the political establishment than it is from irritating the customers.
01:02:49.160We are no longer operating in the kind of free market system in which the customer is always right.
01:03:25.280And what this speaks to, by the way, is a much deeper and broader change in politics.
01:03:31.160For most of my lifetime and certainly since the end of the Cold War, I would say until about six, seven years ago, the defining term for the right in America would be liberty or choice or freedom, something like that.
01:03:48.600That's what motivated all of the conservative movement, the intellectual aspect of the conservative movement, and the Republican Party.
01:03:54.960That has shifted with the rise of populism and I think with the advance toward absurdity of leftism to the point that now the key term is no longer choice or freedom or something like that.
01:04:32.420In a culture that has become so absurd in which we can't agree on the basic facts of life, where we can't communicate with one another, as a result, we don't even know the right pronouns to use, even on CNN.
01:04:41.520That kind of culture needs to be ballasted with something it can hold on to, objective truth that we can all agree upon without which self-government is not possible.
01:04:51.400So you see this reflected at the constituent level.
01:04:57.260That's why more populist, right-wing voices, guys like Tucker Carlson and others who take a firm line on these kinds of issues, are so popular.
01:05:07.420You see it on the intellectual side with the rise of something like the post-liberal movement.
01:05:14.060A less libertarian kind of right-wing.
01:05:16.520The whole political establishment is moving into that direction.
01:05:20.440And the corporations had better keep up if they don't want to irritate all of their customers, because you can have all the ESG asset manager money in the world.
01:05:28.800But if you don't have people to buy your product, your company is not going to last very long.
01:05:41.320So the pressures on the other side are mostly from these ESG types.
01:05:44.280But you've also got the actual individuals like Dylan Mulvaney, who first released a video a week ago saying for a company to not stand by a trans influencer once they partnered with them is even worse than to have not partnered to begin with.
01:06:00.740It was interesting because for the first time we learned that it was an official relationship.
01:06:04.800It was not just a random can of beer that that appeared in her in Dylan's mail.
01:06:50.800It's a little sad that I had to leave my country to feel safe, but that will get better eventually.
01:06:55.240Still haven't been kissed yet, but I'm holding out hope.
01:06:58.020Has me feeling like I'm my own best friend again.
01:07:00.820And that is the best feeling in the world.
01:07:02.540Can I tell you, this is like, this is one of the things about this guy.
01:07:08.360He has this sort of love ya persona that people are lured in by, you know, like, oh, he's he's only full of kindness.
01:07:17.820He's only trying to spread love and ask for acceptance.
01:07:21.020And yet so many of us have such a strong, visceral reaction to this guy because we recognize what he's actually spreading and selling is very dangerous.
01:07:33.660You know, his idea of girlhood and womanhood offends me to the core.
01:07:39.620It's not that I'm not rooting for this human being to find wellness in his life.
01:07:45.260It's that I completely object to what he's done to my sex, to his imagery of my sex, of what it means to be a woman, which is a fundamental, beautiful thing that half the population shares.
01:07:57.420And the other half doesn't and won't, no matter how hard they try.
01:08:01.520This is the key, the danger of it all.
01:08:04.960And it's why we can mock some of these insane behaviors and campaigns.
01:08:10.260But we also feel a great deal of pity for it.
01:08:12.880But the fact remains that if you embrace a transgender identity, you've got a 41 percent chance of trying to kill yourself.
01:08:20.740And a large number of those people will succeed in killing themselves.
01:08:58.360It's all, you know, look, there is, you're right.
01:09:00.760So I don't want to totally discount the chemicals in the water.
01:09:03.560But there's obviously something going on here.
01:09:06.160And what the advocates of this transgender movement are saying is, well, the reason that anxiety and depression and suicidality are associated with transgenderism is because it's not culturally accepted.
01:09:18.340So if we normalize it and encourage more people to engage in it, then those rates are going to go down.
01:14:44.840We're going to be right back with the very latest on the investigations into Hunter Biden.
01:14:49.000I know it's confusing, but here on this show, we've made a commitment to you to try to keep it very simple.
01:14:53.120Not Kamala Harris level simple, but at your education level simple.
01:14:58.600And we're going to do just that in two minutes.
01:15:01.100The media playing a bit of catch up on allegations about the Biden family's business dealings.
01:15:11.300We brought these to you last Thursday, followed up again on Friday.
01:15:16.060Now, finally, we're seeing some coverage of this issue in the mainstream press.
01:15:21.040It would appear many of these so-called journalists, however, are much more concerned about the alleged wrongdoing by the man making the accusations against the Bidens than they are with any of the substance of what he is alleging.
01:15:39.300The New York Post broke the reporting.
01:15:40.980They broke the videotape of this guy who is a dual citizen, American and Israeli making allegations.
01:15:46.380And he has been for years about the Biden family.
01:15:50.320Well, now he's been charged, which he admitted he'd been charged in his whistleblower or whatever you want to call it video.
01:15:57.860And only once the indictment was unsealed at Gal Luft's request did the media decide this is an OK story to cover because they could use the allegations to discredit him.
01:16:08.720Without taking any sort of an honest look at whether what he is saying could potentially be true.
01:16:14.820Doesn't mean it is true, but why wouldn't we at least be looking into it at this stage of the game?
01:16:21.300Margot Cleveland is senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, who has been covering all these stories about the Biden family allegations very closely.
01:16:35.400And the audience should know you're a legit lawyer.
01:16:37.560I mean, you've been you've been practicing law for many, many years.
01:16:39.920We're with a federal clerk as a federal clerk for a law judge for many, many years, a judge.
01:16:45.640So, you know what you're talking about?
01:16:46.900You're not just a pundit when it comes to legal issues.
01:16:50.020Let's start with this Gal Luft and then we'll talk about just to keep it simple for the audience.
01:16:54.060There's many aspects to the Hunter, Joe, Jim Biden alleged corruption.
01:16:59.160But the ones we're going to talk about today involve this guy, Gal Luft, who I mentioned a moment ago.
01:17:04.140And then we'll talk about the U.S. attorney in Delaware who gave Hunter the sweetheart deal.
01:17:09.400And many of us are asking what happened to all the serious charges, because that conflict about whether this U.S. attorney in Delaware has told us the full truth or is doing some sort of a cover up for Merrick Garland, et cetera, remains at issue.
01:17:23.500Gal Luft comes out and says, I know Hunter Biden.
01:17:26.420And I've known the Bidens for a long time and I had some I had a think tank that was very well respected by many people in Washington.
01:17:32.620I had the CIA director, former guy James Woolsey, in partnership with me on this think tank.
01:17:37.280I was cited in MSNBC and NBC and all these other mainstream news outlets for years, thanks to my knowledge of China policy and so on.
01:17:44.480Well, he says in March of 2019 under President Trump, I called the FBI and said, I need to meet with you about the Bidens.
01:17:56.180I'm very tight with this Chinese energy company, which is very tight with the Communist Party over in China.
01:18:02.800And I happen to know, thanks to my ties to this CEFC, that the Bidens are up to no good.
01:18:08.740The Bidens are taking money from these guys and including while Joe Biden was the sitting vice president, this was happening.
01:18:15.700So I've got things I want to tell you.
01:18:17.320So the FBI goes over, they meet with him along with two U.S. attorneys.
01:18:21.400And he, according to him, tells them the whole thing.
01:18:24.860He does not believe there's any follow up.
01:18:26.520And then a year later, October of 2020, he dispatches his lawyer stateside to have another meeting with the U.S. attorney who basically tells him, look, we're a month away from the election and pursuant to DOJ policy.
01:18:39.240We don't investigate the family or the candidate who's about to be on the ballot.
01:18:43.440And the next thing Gal Luft knows, it's February of 21, I guess.
01:18:48.540Or no, it was actually a year later, February of 22.
01:18:50.520And he gets arrested and they accuse him of weapons sales, of not registering as a foreign agent and of lying to the FBI.
01:19:01.080Then he comes out with his whistleblower video just last week and says, this is all part of trying to smear me.
01:19:23.840But what's interesting to me, Margo, is the absolute disinterest in the story until at Gal Luft's request, the indictment against him, which happened months ago, was unsealed.
01:19:33.640And now finally, the media has a way of hitting him severely to talk about these allegations.
01:19:41.800Well, this, again, is part and parcel of what has been going on with both the media and the FBI and DOJ.
01:19:50.120So as you mentioned, this goes back to March of 2019.
01:19:55.040And the assistant U.S. attorneys who talked with him were the ones who were prosecuting the other folks involved in the Chinese business maneuvering.
01:20:05.960And you might remember that they are the ones who said, we don't want the Biden name mentioned in the indictment.
01:20:54.760So the fact that he might have been in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, that doesn't say anything other than, hey, if he knows the Chinese Communist Party and was in bed with them, so was Hunter Biden.
01:21:21.340But they also have charged him with violating FARA, F-A-R-A, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires if you're working in the United States on behalf of a foreign government that you disclose it.
01:21:33.180So we know exactly who we're dealing with.
01:21:36.400But he raised in his video, Gal Luft did, if I did that, then Hunter Biden did that in spades and potentially other members of the Biden family.
01:22:02.640But then again, how is Hunter Biden not getting prosecuted for gun, the default statement to get the gun when everyone else is?
01:22:10.840So again, this is part and parcel of the collaboration between the media, the DOJ and the FBI to protect the Biden family.
01:22:20.560And whether Gal Luft is a arms dealer and a bad guy or not, you still need to follow up on this information.
01:22:30.800And that's where March of 2019, they should have been following up.
01:22:36.980You've got to tie this all into also what Senator Grassley has said, that the FBI purposefully buried information.
01:22:45.720We had FBI headquarters Brian Otten, who the whistleblower claimed opened up an assessment so that the FBI could falsely label things disinformation.
01:22:56.740We also just to just to just to just to add to that, just so the audience can follow this guy, Brian Otten, is an anti-Trump guy inside the FBI who's been maneuvering things inside the FBI against Trump and to protect Biden for a long, long time.
01:23:10.420And there are real questions being asked now, including of Christopher Wray.
01:23:18.860And Megan, I'm so glad that you mentioned that, because yesterday when those questions were posed to Wray, there was a really good point that I hadn't thought of.
01:23:27.340After Otten was already in internal investigation for what he did in Crossfire Hurricane, he was somehow still involved in and started doing this assessment that came to the information.
01:23:41.280I'm sorry, how can you possibly do that, that you have the person that's under investigation for politicizing in Crossfire Hurricane now involved in this situation?
01:23:52.700So, again, this just this has so many webs and so many legs to it.
01:24:25.340But we have the biggest bombshell here, which is Burisma's owner told a confidential human source with years of credible experience working with our government under the Obama administration that Burisma paid five million to Joe and five million to Hunter.
01:25:26.860I do want to get to that piece of it in one second.
01:25:29.360But before we leave gal loft, we take a take a trip back to China for one more second.
01:25:33.920Um, Jake Sullivan was asked of the NSA was asked about about gal loft and his extraordinary allegations that just this week and listen to how he handled it.
01:25:49.520U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York died in a man named gal loft for violating the 40 Agents Registration Act by working without registration from a company called CESC China Energy.
01:25:59.700Uh, the president's son and brother were at the same firm without registration.
01:26:04.260What's the White House's take on the potential of their liability, uh, far liability for the first family of the president here?
01:26:12.180I've not seen that and can't comment on it.
01:27:07.600And now we're going to have a new hearing with them, thanks to James Comer, which will be good.
01:27:10.780Um, and they've alleged that there's a reason David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, did not bring really meaty charges against Hunter and let the statute of limitations expire on some of the worst claims that could have been brought against Hunter.
01:27:28.700That is Merrick Garland and another deputy working on the case at every turn, tipped off Hunter Biden about investigations or interviews that were going to happen, shut down any mention of Joe Biden or an actual look into whether Joe Biden had a connection to this.
01:27:47.120And basically protected the president and his son from start to finish.
01:27:51.320And that whistleblower says David Weiss, the U.S. attorney, admitted to the IRS whistleblowers and other FBI agents at a meeting that he didn't have full authority and that he had been turned down by U.S. attorneys in California and D.C. on bringing charges.
01:28:07.060Now, Weiss is coming out kind of siding with Merrick Garland saying that's not true.
01:28:12.880The whistleblower doesn't know what he's talking about.
01:28:14.780They don't know what they're talking about.
01:28:16.540But there is a memo that the whistleblower Shapley wrote that we've seen now dated October 7th, 2022, that he sent to his boss and the boss signs off on it saying, thanks, you covered it all.
01:28:28.700Doesn't say you misstated everything, Gary Shapley.
01:28:31.280And in that memo, he says the whistleblower now Shapley, among other things, quote, Weiss, David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, stated that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.
01:28:42.960And it goes on to say he told us DOJ denied his request for special counsel authority and told him to instead, quote, follow the process.
01:28:52.660Now, Weiss is trying to weasel out of all of this by saying, I never I never asked to be special counsel.
01:28:57.980I was told I would be labeled special attorney, which is a slightly different thing.
01:29:03.980If I needed that authority, it'd be granted to me and and suggest it may still be granted to me like it's all wide open.
01:29:10.820Well, you've you've let the statute of limitations run you.
01:29:14.220The New York Times confirmed you were turned down by the California U.S.
01:29:30.380So the big question I have is, did Weiss lie to his agents when he said that he is not in control of it?
01:29:40.620Or did he lie then to Congress when he said, I've always been told I have this kind of authority to do it?
01:29:48.460And with Weiss, who, again, is the Delaware U.S.
01:29:51.300attorney, he's the holdover from Trump, which the left is trying to portray as, oh, see, he he's in control of this.
01:29:59.200He's trying to change the story every chance he gets.
01:30:02.700He has never come out, though, and contradicted what the whistleblowers have said, which was during this meeting.
01:30:10.060And not only did he say he's not in charge, but he said that he tried to get the authority to bring the charges and he was denied it.
01:30:17.620And as you noted, the next day or actually it was that evening, he sent a confirmation email summarizing it, which another individual in the meeting confirmed happened.
01:30:27.860But for the attorney general, he has a bigger problem because he said under oath to Chuck Prasley, who was very specific in the questioning, attorney general Garland said he has the authority.
01:30:43.440Not I will give him the authority, but he has the authority.
01:30:47.520So we have Weiss trying to give cover to Garland.
01:30:55.920It doesn't make sense at all, because now you've got OK, there's a piece at MSNBC where a former Michigan U.S. attorney is trying to explain this all like it all comes down to the whistleblowers misunderstanding of special counsel versus special attorney.
01:31:10.600And the two men were just talking past each other.
01:31:12.440Well, that doesn't make sense because a whistleblower did not put it in those terms.
01:31:15.340The whistleblower Shapley's memo says Weiss stated he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.
01:31:23.000He wasn't hung up on the terms exactly.
01:32:20.480What how did you satisfy yourself before the statute of limitations ran that these crimes would be prosecuted, that you clearly believe should be prosecuted if you went to California and D.C.
01:32:29.960Why did you not then proceed on your own if you had the authority?
01:32:35.200And if you didn't have your the authority, did you or did you not ask to be appointed as either special counsel or special attorney, however you want to put it?
01:32:46.280They are as well as what did you tell your staff?
01:32:51.560But this whole distinction between special counsel and special attorney is not just ridiculous.
01:32:57.120It actually makes Weiss look worse because if he could have been appointed a special attorney, which, as you noted, has bigger authority, he didn't have to go to Garland.
01:33:08.040Why did he not have that authority immediately to make sure that there was no political playing going on?
01:33:14.900And as you noted, what he says, what Weiss said in that meeting makes no sense for the distinction between the two.
01:33:24.620He didn't say, well, I didn't ask for special counsel.
01:33:28.040He said I didn't have the authority and they would not charge it.
01:33:31.980That is consistent with whether it is special counsel or special attorney.
01:34:17.820And then you've got these IRS guys who are supposed to investigate financial misdeeds by Hunter Biden that may relate to all of this.
01:34:24.980You know, falsities in his tax reporting on all of these incomes and this guy inside the FBI who may have been running cover from start to finish.
01:34:36.520I want to tell you all we're off tomorrow, but I would love for you to check out MeganKelley.com for all of your Megan Kelly show info, your needs.