Verdict with Ted Cruz - March 01, 2023


Justice Corrupted： FBI STILL Refuses to Take Accountability for Politicization


Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

153.69452

Word count

6,991

Sentence count

494

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

19

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Ted Cruz responds to FBI Director Chris Wray's interview with Fox News' Brett Baier on whether or not the FBI had infiltrated the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and if so, who were they?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.300 Welcome.
00:00:05.020 It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:00:08.240 Senator, it was a lot of headlines that kind of came out of nowhere from the FBI director,
00:00:15.100 Ray, and he had a lot to say in the sit-down interview with Brett Baier over at Fox News.
00:00:19.940 And I want to get your reaction first off to the FBI director's inability to answer
00:00:26.020 a very straightforward question about January the 6th and possible FBI informants.
00:00:33.080 Here is what he was asked and his lack of response.
00:00:36.560 Real confidence in that.
00:00:37.480 And the other Twitter question we get a lot is,
00:00:40.640 did the FBI have undercover agents or paid informants or assets among the mob
00:00:45.600 that stormed the Capitol on January 6th?
00:00:47.640 Well, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Brett, I can't really appropriately talk about
00:00:51.720 when, where, and how we use confidential informants.
00:00:55.080 Is it classified?
00:00:57.040 Well, we have information that is, about any number of topics, that is law enforcement sensitive.
00:01:03.400 But you should not read into my inability to answer a question because of my obligations
00:01:11.620 as that is a clue or a hint in any way about how accurate your reader's tweet is.
00:01:19.660 I mean, Senator, that's not a very good answer for a lot of Americans that want answers.
00:01:25.540 We are getting a lot of the footage that's going to come out of January 6th.
00:01:28.780 Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has talked about being transparent.
00:01:31.920 He believes it was politicized January 6th.
00:01:34.000 The January 6th committee was politicized.
00:01:36.140 Are you satisfied with Director Wray's response?
00:01:39.780 Absolutely not. 0.99
00:01:41.100 That was a ridiculous answer. 0.96
00:01:43.400 And listen, there is a fundamental problem at the FBI and at the Department of Justice. 0.91
00:01:50.600 It's something that we've talked about a lot on this podcast, which is that DOJ and the
00:01:55.460 FBI have been profoundly politicized.
00:01:58.060 The last book I wrote, Justice Corrupted, How the Left Has Weaponized the Legal System.
00:02:03.200 And by the way, I would encourage folks, go buy that book.
00:02:05.400 I detail how first Barack Obama and now Joe Biden have turned DOJ and the FBI into partisan
00:02:15.660 tools they use to attack their enemies.
00:02:18.580 On January 6th in particular, there are enormous questions about the responsibility, the culpability
00:02:27.420 of the FBI and the DOJ.
00:02:29.540 What did they know?
00:02:31.180 What was their involvement?
00:02:32.380 And listen, let me say something about Chris Wray.
00:02:35.400 So I've known Chris Wray a long, long time.
00:02:39.660 When I came out of law school, I graduated law school in 1995.
00:02:44.160 And the first judge I clerked for was a judge named J. Michael Ludig.
00:02:48.940 He was at the time the top conservative federal appellate judge of the country.
00:02:55.260 Judge Ludig and I were very, very close.
00:02:57.260 He was like a second father to me.
00:03:00.140 Judge Ludig was a very young judge.
00:03:01.980 He was 41 years old.
00:03:03.080 He had been on the federal court of appeals for five years.
00:03:06.940 He was appointed by George Herbert Walker Bush at age 36.
00:03:11.160 So he was the youngest federal appellate judge in the country.
00:03:14.520 Judge Ludig had been Antonin Scalia's very first law clerk the first year Antonin Scalia
00:03:21.640 was on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:03:24.060 And so Judge Ludig was someone who was just, he was an incredible judge.
00:03:30.680 He taught me, he was really the first person after law school to teach me how to be a lawyer.
00:03:36.800 So I knew Chris Wray because Chris clerked for Judge Ludig, I think it was three years
00:03:43.220 before I did.
00:03:44.320 So I was the fifth year Judge Ludig was on the court.
00:03:46.760 I believe Chris was the second year Judge Ludig was on the court.
00:03:50.520 And I've known Chris a long time.
00:03:53.280 Chris is a good guy.
00:03:54.700 He's a very smart lawyer.
00:03:56.140 He's a very decent man.
00:03:57.680 He loves America.
00:03:59.900 Chris is not a left-wing activist.
00:04:04.180 But I will tell you, I've been incredibly disappointed with the job Chris Wray has done as the head
00:04:13.320 of the FBI.
00:04:14.520 And the reason, and I've had this conversation with Chris directly more than once, the reason
00:04:21.400 is Chris is fundamentally, he's a company man.
00:04:24.380 He's someone who believes his job is defend the FBI.
00:04:29.500 That his responsibility, he's someone who has been at DOJ a long, long time.
00:04:36.680 He was the head of the criminal division under George Herbert Walker Bush.
00:04:40.380 He was someone who was a prosecutor for a long time.
00:04:43.720 And he believes, his responsibility is, whatever the career lawyers the FBI has done, he needs
00:04:51.320 to circle the wagons and defend them.
00:04:53.320 And I have had energetic and even screaming conversations with Chris, where I've said,
00:05:02.000 listen, you are not helping the FBI when you are defending Democrat partisans who have corrupted
00:05:13.060 the FBI, who have turned it into a weapon to advance the political interests of partisan
00:05:20.900 Democrats.
00:05:21.480 It doesn't help the institutions.
00:05:24.140 It weakens the institution.
00:05:26.800 And on this question, listen, it is a matter of enormous public import to know whether the
00:05:38.040 FBI had informants in the January 6 riots and what role they played.
00:05:44.260 And as a matter of accountability, the public interest is massive.
00:05:50.600 Now, Chris doesn't want to answer that.
00:05:52.960 The FBI doesn't want to answer that because the obvious inference from their refusal to
00:05:58.980 answer that is yes, they had FBI informants that participated in the riots.
00:06:04.640 And the question that arises from that, and this is something I talk about at length in the book,
00:06:09.720 Justice Corrupted, is the extent to which FBI agents or FBI confidential informants incited
00:06:19.640 the behavior.
00:06:20.260 So one of the things I talk about in the book is the plot in Michigan to kidnap and murder
00:06:27.720 the governor of Michigan, Democrat Gretchen Whitworth.
00:06:32.080 Now, that broke shortly before the 2020 election. 0.97
00:06:35.060 And it was the sort of story that was really fabulously beneficial for Democrats because Democrats message was those crazy right wing Republicans and especially those Trump Republicans are a bunch of violent insurrectionist terrorists. 0.98
00:06:53.660 They're terrible and we need to stop them. 0.99
00:06:57.600 And so and it was a national story.
00:07:00.180 I mean, they played it up.
00:07:01.220 I remember it being used by Democrats all over the country center that were like, this is something to seize on to basically attack Donald Trump on the national election.
00:07:12.520 But also to say, you don't want Trump Republicans in the House and the Senate and the school board, city council, if they up and down the ticket.
00:07:22.180 Yeah, they want to they want to murder you and they want to take out our politicians.
00:07:25.500 And look, it was designed also for reasonable people that that like, you know, reasonable people don't want to advocate violent acts of murder and terror.
00:07:36.020 And so the media and the Democrats were trying to say, if you support Trump and the Republicans, you're in support of violent acts of terror and mayhem. 0.97
00:07:46.240 And with the Gretchen Whitworth story, when it broke, you're like, holy crap, they want to kidnap and murder a governor. 0.99
00:07:52.700 That really sounds bad. 0.89
00:07:54.720 Now, when DOJ went to trial, what happened is that initially when they went to trial, every single one of the defendants was either acquitted or had a hung jury.
00:08:06.300 They couldn't convict anyone.
00:08:07.540 And the principal defense at the trial was that the FBI engaged in entrapment, that it essentially the FBI had placed informants among these right wing extremist groups.
00:08:23.000 But the argument of defense counsel was these extremist groups were not particularly violent until the FBI informants kept saying, hey, isn't it a great idea to go kidnap and murder the governor?
00:08:34.200 And they're like, oh, I'm not sure it is like, no, no, no.
00:08:36.540 This is a good idea.
00:08:37.520 This is a good idea.
00:08:38.400 And the law is that you can be prosecuted if you plan or commit an act of violence, but the government can't entice you into it.
00:08:47.960 It can't be their idea.
00:08:50.280 They can't be the cause that causes you to go along with the corrupt plan.
00:08:55.980 And at the trial in front of the juries, I mean, the Justice Department had a massive black eye because the defendants prevailed.
00:09:05.300 And by the way, the special agent in charge of the Detroit office of the FBI, who had this massive debacle of the prosecutions going south on him because his agents had engaged in misconduct and incitement, got promoted, got sent to D.C.
00:09:26.820 And got put in charge of the January 6th prosecutions.
00:09:31.960 You literally can't make this up.
00:09:33.280 They took the guy who had this enormous black eye.
00:09:40.000 Yeah.
00:09:40.220 And they said, you're the right guy to engage in political prosecutions.
00:09:44.520 And here's what Chris Wray should say.
00:09:46.920 And listen, I hope, as I said, Chris is a friend.
00:09:50.000 I hope Chris is listening to this podcast.
00:09:51.980 I doubt he is.
00:09:53.300 But I hope he is.
00:09:55.300 Here's what Chris ought to do.
00:09:57.680 Chris ought to say publicly, ordinarily, the FBI does not reveal confidential informants.
00:10:05.500 And there are strong law enforcement reasons to do that.
00:10:07.660 When we get some guy who goes undercover into a drug cartel, you want to keep that guy confidential.
00:10:15.620 You don't want to out them.
00:10:16.540 So in the ordinary course of affairs, we protect those sources.
00:10:20.760 That being said, the public interest in knowing what happened on January 6th, what led to the riots, what led to the acts of violence,
00:10:29.500 that public interest is so significant that we at the FBI are going to tell you how many agents did we have in that riot?
00:10:39.420 How many confidential informants did we have in that riot?
00:10:43.680 How many people were based on the payroll?
00:10:45.620 Yes.
00:10:46.040 And what were their roles in inciting the violent conduct?
00:10:50.220 That is a matter of enormous public interest.
00:10:53.740 And Chris Ray, in his answer there, and consistently, he refuses to answer that question,
00:10:59.980 and I think he's doing a disservice to the American people by protecting the bureaucrats at the FBI rather than accepting public accountability.
00:11:10.260 Yeah, there's a name that's become very famous, and it is a name from January 6th, Ray Epps.
00:11:17.400 And I want to play something that you said about Ray Epps when you were talking to the FBI because it became such a—
00:11:23.640 He was a senior official at the FBI that I was questioning about this.
00:11:26.980 Yeah, and Ray Epps is a guy and a name that everybody remembers from January 6th.
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00:12:22.820 I want to play, Senator, for everybody listening, and this was you questioning, as you mentioned a moment ago,
00:12:28.880 a top person at the FBI about Ray Epps and really about his disappearance from the public
00:12:36.560 after he was so public on January the 6th.
00:12:39.880 Take a listen.
00:12:41.180 Ms. Sadburn, who is Ray Epps?
00:12:43.560 I'm aware of the individual, sir.
00:12:45.580 I don't have the specific background to him.
00:12:48.400 Well, there are a lot of people who are understandably very concerned about Mr. Epps.
00:12:53.260 On the night of January 5th, 2021, Epps wandered around the crowd that had gathered,
00:12:59.880 and there's video out there of him chanting,
00:13:01.680 Tomorrow, we need to get into the Capitol, into the Capitol.
00:13:06.360 This was strange behavior.
00:13:07.920 So strange that the crowd began chanting, Fed, Fed, Fed, Fed, Fed, Fed.
00:13:14.560 Ms. Sadburn, was Ray Epps a Fed?
00:13:16.160 Sir, I cannot answer that question.
00:13:19.980 The next day, the next day, on January 6th, Mr. Epps is seen whispering to a person, and five seconds later,
00:13:28.280 five seconds after he's whispering to a person, that same person begins to forcibly tear down the barricades.
00:13:34.220 Did Mr. Epps urge them to tear down the barricades?
00:13:39.940 Sir, similar to the other answers, I cannot answer that.
00:13:44.160 Shortly thereafter, the FBI put out a public post listing,
00:13:48.400 seeking information on individuals connected with violent crimes on January 6th.
00:13:53.180 Among those individuals, in the bottom there, is Mr. Epps.
00:13:56.380 The FBI publicly asked for information, identifying, offering cash rewards for information leading to the arrest.
00:14:06.520 This was posted, and then, sometime later, magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting.
00:14:14.720 According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything.
00:14:17.920 No one's explained why a person videoed urging people to go to the Capitol,
00:14:23.740 a person whose conduct was so suspect, the crowd believed he was a Fed,
00:14:28.940 would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.
00:14:34.200 Ms. Sanborn, a lot of Americans are concerned that the federal government deliberately encouraged illegal and violent conduct on January 6th.
00:14:44.660 My question to you, and this is not an ordinary law enforcement question, this is a question of public accountability.
00:14:50.280 Did federal agents or those in service of federal agent actively encourage violent and criminal conduct on January 6th?
00:15:00.060 Not to my knowledge, sir.
00:15:01.760 I mean, Senator, this seems to be the new playbook of anybody in government that doesn't want to answer a question.
00:15:08.240 They just say, it's classified or it's an ongoing investigation.
00:15:12.160 This is exactly what Ray just did in the simple question he was asked about in four minutes on January the 6th.
00:15:17.280 So, Chris, Ray, and the FBI should answer these questions.
00:15:21.880 We need to have accountability.
00:15:23.820 We need to know, listen, with Ray Epps, I don't know the man.
00:15:26.880 I never met him.
00:15:27.600 I don't know his background.
00:15:29.220 But I will say, you watch that video, as I have, as many people have,
00:15:33.880 of him urging the crowd on January 5th, let's go into the Capitol.
00:15:38.980 And the crowd turns on him.
00:15:40.900 They begin chanting, fed, fed, fed.
00:15:45.500 That's weird.
00:15:47.420 Ben, I've never seen anything like that.
00:15:49.460 When the crowd is like, wait a second, why is this guy trying to urge us to commit a criminal act?
00:15:59.300 Maybe he's a private individual with no connection to the FBI.
00:16:04.580 If that's the case, it raises the question, why wasn't he charged?
00:16:08.820 I mean, we have video of him urging people to enter the Capitol.
00:16:12.360 They've charged lots of people to enter the Capitol.
00:16:15.040 But if he was on the payroll of the FBI, then you had the federal government, you had law enforcement encouraging criminal and violent acts.
00:16:26.080 That's a very different scenario.
00:16:27.880 And to date, the FBI refuses to answer.
00:16:35.020 How many FBI agents were there on January 6th?
00:16:37.760 One?
00:16:38.620 Ten?
00:16:39.320 A hundred?
00:16:39.940 A thousand?
00:16:40.600 I have no idea.
00:16:42.320 And by the way, a lot of people figure, okay, you're a senator, you're on the Judiciary Committee.
00:16:46.520 The Judiciary Committee has oversight authority of the FBI.
00:16:50.640 You know this.
00:16:51.380 They briefed you on it.
00:16:52.420 Nope. 0.93
00:16:52.620 They haven't told us a damn thing. 0.62
00:16:55.240 What I know is what Chris Wray has said in public, because when he testifies, and by the way, today, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, is testifying in front of us.
00:17:04.340 He's going to stonewall, because Merrick Garland has been the most political attorney general we've ever had.
00:17:09.800 And Chris Wray, it's not that he's a partisan leftist.
00:17:15.960 It's that he believes his job is defend the senior bureaucrats of the FBI.
00:17:22.800 And I've got to tell you, one of the amazing things that's happened over the last couple of years,
00:17:26.200 I regularly get FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who come to me, who contact my office, and they say, we love the Department of Justice.
00:17:38.940 We love the FBI.
00:17:40.060 We believe in the law enforcement mission.
00:17:42.240 And we are incredibly unhappy at the politicization of our senior leadership.
00:17:49.280 It is, I revere the Department of Justice and the FBI.
00:17:53.120 They're incredibly, so I will tell you, on the right, there are a bunch of people who say, let's abolish the FBI.
00:17:59.400 Now, I don't think that's a good idea.
00:18:01.620 The FBI does a lot of really important things.
00:18:04.340 They fight child kidnappers.
00:18:06.360 They fight drug dealers.
00:18:07.500 They fight human traffickers.
00:18:09.680 They fight mobsters.
00:18:11.480 I am very grateful for the law enforcement mission of the FBI.
00:18:17.600 What I think we need to do is clean house at the FBI and get rid of the hardcore partisan Democrats who burrowed into the senior positions at the FBI and who've corrupted the FBI.
00:18:30.440 And my biggest concern with Chris Wray is he's unwilling to do that.
00:18:35.320 He's unwilling to take that on.
00:18:37.020 And it is, he ought to engage in radical transparency.
00:18:43.820 And I'll point to two examples Chris Wray ought to follow.
00:18:46.580 Number one, Elon Musk when he bought Twitter, where he publicly made, he exposed the internal emails of the corruption at Twitter.
00:18:57.280 That broke the big tech oligopoly on political discussion.
00:19:07.560 Secondly, and second, you look at the job John Ratcliffe did at the DNI as the director of national intelligence.
00:19:18.160 So John Ratcliffe was appointed by Donald Trump.
00:19:20.460 It was just a temporary interim appointment.
00:19:23.440 I think he was there like six weeks.
00:19:24.840 It wasn't very long.
00:19:25.580 But John, who's a Texan, he's a friend, did an incredible job because he opened up and made public many of the abuses of the DNI and the intelligence community, how they'd been politicized.
00:19:39.920 And in six weeks, he made a massive impact.
00:19:44.020 My advice to Chris Wray, follow the example of Elon Musk and follow the example of John Ratcliffe.
00:19:50.800 Prioritize the long-term integrity of the FBI over your short-term personal loyalty to the hardcore Democrat partisans in the senior career positions of the FBI.
00:20:06.080 If you want to save the institution, act boldly to save and strengthen and preserve the FBI.
00:20:15.920 You know, it's interesting that you mention that because one of the questions that Ray was asked by Brett Baer was about social media companies censoring things when it came to the FBI having basically conversations with them on the regular, sometimes daily in the run-up to the election.
00:20:35.340 I want to play that for you next.
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00:22:26.960 Senator, I want to play this for everybody.
00:22:29.320 And this is Chris Ray being asked about the social media companies and how much pressure were they putting on these social media companies to silence and censor stories.
00:22:38.700 Listen to this.
00:22:39.800 Well, let's start with the laptop.
00:22:41.060 The FBI has had access to this laptop for more than three years.
00:22:44.280 Why is this investigation on the Hunter Biden laptops taking so long?
00:22:48.680 Well, the investigation is being led, as you may know, by a U.S. attorney appointed in the last administration out of Delaware.
00:22:56.540 And the FBI is actively supporting and working with that U.S. attorney on that investigation.
00:23:02.040 But the whistleblowers are telling these lawmakers that there was an internal effort to shut down the investigation from the beginning.
00:23:08.640 Have you found that?
00:23:09.740 I have not found anything like that.
00:23:11.420 All right.
00:23:12.640 So let's talk about the FBI and what you told Big Tech or some agents did about the authenticity and providence of Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:23:22.840 What about that from an FBI perspective?
00:23:25.180 The FBI does not, is not in the business of functioning as the truth police.
00:23:29.620 Understood.
00:23:29.960 We don't tell social media companies to censor anything.
00:23:33.460 Well, the Twitter file suggests something different.
00:23:35.840 I mean, there was an FBI request numerous times, Taibbi puts it out, FBI San Francisco requests to ban certain accounts.
00:23:45.040 Twitter personnel in this case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts that the FBI wanted to ban or suspend.
00:23:53.600 Is it appropriate to flag social media accounts on Twitter or elsewhere due to politics or government policies when it comes to COVID?
00:24:03.280 Is it appropriate in any way?
00:24:06.660 You're saying it doesn't happen, but there's evidence that it had.
00:24:09.620 We don't tell social media companies to ban accounts.
00:24:14.120 But you suggest.
00:24:15.080 Well, what we do is tell social media companies about information that we have about foreign disinformation campaigns by foreign actors, by foreign intelligence services.
00:24:25.920 And those companies then make decisions about what, if anything, they want to do about it.
00:24:30.380 I mean, Senator, you hear what he's saying here.
00:24:33.400 And he's saying we don't tell social media companies to censor anything.
00:24:36.800 That, I'm sorry, in my opinion, is a complete lie.
00:24:39.220 The emails and the Twitter files show the complete opposite coming from the FBI.
00:24:44.300 Look, you're exactly right, Ben.
00:24:46.700 The Twitter files demonstrate that the FBI was repeatedly asking social media companies to censor stories they didn't like.
00:24:56.020 And the most striking example is the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:24:59.860 The Hunter Biden laptop, the story broke when the New York Post wrote about it in October of 2020, right before the presidential election.
00:25:08.320 And it was a story that was incredibly damaging to Joe Biden because it suggested corruption at the very highest level.
00:25:14.440 And the FBI asked Big Tech, please censor this story.
00:25:21.420 The FBI suggested to Big Tech, it was Russian disinformation. 0.98
00:25:24.960 Now, we now know that was garbage. 0.99
00:25:28.260 That was a lie. 0.99
00:25:29.340 It was not Russian disinformation.
00:25:32.200 It was, in fact, true.
00:25:34.000 The laptop is true.
00:25:35.540 It's been confirmed.
00:25:36.720 It was Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:25:38.100 By the way, it's not me confirming it.
00:25:40.600 Hunter Biden's lawyers in filings have said, it was our laptop and we're really unhappy that you took our client's laptop and made it public.
00:25:49.320 Like, they have implicitly admitted, oh, they tried to back that away when they realized, oh, crap, we shouldn't have made that admission.
00:25:55.280 But it was true and incredibly relevant to the election.
00:26:01.700 The FBI said, please block it.
00:26:03.920 And social media saluted, said not only jump, but sir, how high?
00:26:09.620 And again, Chris Wray, he thinks he's defending the FBI.
00:26:15.580 He's trying to say, OK, my job is to defend my guys.
00:26:19.500 Baloney, your job is not to do that.
00:26:22.620 The degree to which Big Tech got in bed with the FBI and actively censored the American people and had an effect of essentially rigging the election.
00:26:32.840 It had an enormous consequence on the 2020 election that this story was suppressed.
00:26:38.880 And the FBI is directly responsible.
00:26:40.880 And I don't understand why Chris Wray doesn't feel any responsibility for that.
00:26:46.540 I just think he's his entire focus is my job is protect my guys.
00:26:52.800 Even if my guys are crapping all over the FBI and destroying its integrity, I got to defend the people that are hurting the FBI.
00:26:59.860 I think that's a basic and profound misconception of the responsibility of the head of the FBI.
00:27:07.180 And you would think as a law enforcement guy, right, we're supposed to be not political, but right and wrong.
00:27:12.560 If you saw members of your organization writing these emails that are clearly politically biased, that would just piss you off, for lack of a better way of saying it.
00:27:25.020 And you would want to at least make sure that doesn't happen anymore.
00:27:28.300 And again, he's saying, no, no, no, we don't do this.
00:27:30.860 Yes, you do.
00:27:31.440 It's in writing.
00:27:33.180 Oh, look, and privately, Chris expresses concerns with these issues.
00:27:38.300 He's very good at saying, oh, I want to stay out of politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:27:43.600 By the way, I actually believe him.
00:27:46.700 I think he would like the FBI to focus on law enforcement.
00:27:50.840 I just think he doesn't have the willingness to take on the extremely partisan leftists, many of whom are now in the senior career leadership of the FBI.
00:28:05.520 And he views it as, I don't know, I don't want to speculate, but he's unwilling to take them on.
00:28:11.640 Maybe he thinks he can't survive that.
00:28:13.720 Maybe he thinks it somehow damages the FBI.
00:28:16.780 I don't want to impute motives to him.
00:28:18.680 But the fact is, he's unwilling to call them out.
00:28:23.380 He ought to hold accountable every person at the FBI that urged social media to censor the media and censor people for expressing their political views.
00:28:34.520 He ought to make public, here's every person the FBI had at January 6th, every informant we had at January 6th.
00:28:42.240 This is not a run-of-the-mill mafia case.
00:28:46.080 This is an issue of enormous national import and the American people need to know.
00:28:51.840 I think he doesn't want to do that because the FBI would be embarrassed by those facts.
00:28:57.360 And so he believes he can just stonewall and tell Congress, go jump in a lake. 0.66
00:29:02.360 We're not going to tell you.
00:29:03.280 And the American people don't deserve to know.
00:29:04.840 And I think he's wrong in that.
00:29:05.860 There's something else that came up, and I was truly shocked by the FBI director's response.
00:29:14.020 And it was a question about the drug cartels.
00:29:18.420 There was some shocking for some Americans to see.
00:29:23.200 I, unfortunately, was not shocked by some of the testimony today by the victims when it comes to fentanyl in Washington, D.C.
00:29:30.680 talking about how it's destroyed their family.
00:29:33.660 There's a couple of them that have gone viral, including one mother who lost not one, but two sons to fentanyl.
00:29:41.640 And this is one of the reasons why I think it was very clear that there was a direct question asked to Ray from Bret Baier about this war.
00:29:52.420 And it is a war.
00:29:53.960 It's a war with fentanyl.
00:29:55.480 It's a war with the cartels.
00:29:57.440 And he asked him, is it time to designate the drug cartels as terrorist organizations?
00:30:05.000 And we couldn't get a straight answer from the FBI director on that.
00:30:08.480 Listen.
00:30:10.100 On immigration, do you believe the cartels should be designated as terrorist organizations?
00:30:15.560 Well, I do believe that the cartels represent a significant threat.
00:30:20.040 And we have hundreds, the FBI has hundreds of investigations that go into cartel leadership.
00:30:26.100 And I'm interested in all appropriate legal tools that will help us go after them.
00:30:30.760 We are going after them.
00:30:32.200 Obviously, we're not responsible for the physical security at the border.
00:30:36.100 But we recognize that the threats emanating from the border are serious.
00:30:40.980 Senator, I'm going to cut him off there, because why can't he just answer that simple question with a yes?
00:30:46.300 Yes, because unfortunately, the leadership of the FBI is too concerned with politics.
00:30:51.780 The answer shouldn't be yes.
00:30:53.640 It should be hell yes.
00:30:55.180 Look, we, on a recent podcast, we walked through my cross-examination of the head of the DEA,
00:31:03.440 where I talked about the incredible harm that Mexican drug cartels carry out,
00:31:08.280 where I talked about the over 100,000 people that last year died of drug overdoses in the United States,
00:31:15.160 the vast majority from Chinese fentanyl flooding over the southern border.
00:31:20.620 Now, the head of the FBI, I've sat down and talked with her.
00:31:23.400 I think she's actually kind of pretty similar to Chris Wray.
00:31:26.960 She's a law enforcement person. 0.89
00:31:29.000 She wants to prosecute the bad guys. 0.99
00:31:30.740 Her answers were very political.
00:31:36.180 And because she's not, I think, a terribly political person, she was bad at it.
00:31:43.880 She was repeating the Democrat talking points from this administration.
00:31:47.480 So their talking point is, the drugs that are flooding into this country are coming over the legal ports of entry
00:31:53.060 and not over our unsecured southern border.
00:31:56.060 We don't have an unsecured southern border, they claim, despite the fact that five and a half million people
00:32:00.720 have crossed illegally under Joe Biden, the worst illegal immigration in the history of our nation.
00:32:05.540 That's the incredible record of the Biden administration.
00:32:09.520 She was trying to repeat the talking points of, no, no, no, no.
00:32:13.680 People don't cross illegally under the southern border.
00:32:16.700 If they do, they certainly don't carry drugs.
00:32:18.400 The facts are the contrary.
00:32:20.400 I asked her a very simple question.
00:32:22.320 Is the fact that these drug cartels have made tens of billions of dollars because of our open southern border
00:32:35.180 is the fact that the single best thing that ever happened to the Mexican drug cartels with Joe Biden becoming president
00:32:42.420 because they made massive amounts of money.
00:32:45.960 Is it a good thing that these vicious criminal drug cartels have made tens of billions of dollars?
00:32:54.540 Now, look, for any cop and for any honest law enforcement person, for anyone running the DEA,
00:33:02.240 the answer ought to be hell yes.
00:33:04.160 Like just like Chris Ray. 0.91
00:33:05.680 Should we designate the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists? 0.99
00:33:08.740 Hell yes. 0.99
00:33:09.780 They are engaged in murder and torture and horrific acts of violence. 0.99
00:33:13.520 They are terrorist organizations.
00:33:14.860 But much like the head of the DEA that we played that cross-examination, I think, last week,
00:33:22.500 he doesn't want to say that because he gets that the political taskmasters in the White House don't like that answer.
00:33:31.360 So he just dodges.
00:33:33.280 And I just wish that, and by the way, eventually the head of the DEA, after I asked her, I think, four times,
00:33:41.560 finally and reluctantly said, yeah, it's a terrible thing.
00:33:46.140 Like vicious drug cartels, they make roughly half their money from drug trafficking,
00:33:50.420 roughly half their money from human trafficking.
00:33:52.420 It is a terrible thing that Joe Biden has given the tens of billions of dollars.
00:33:56.380 No kidding.
00:33:58.140 Why didn't you say that the first four times you asked?
00:34:01.000 I asked you.
00:34:01.700 Because she was trying to follow the partisan talking points.
00:34:06.440 I think that's sadly what Chris Wray is doing there, too.
00:34:09.480 Yeah, no doubt about it.
00:34:10.820 I want to ask you lastly about one other thing that Chris Wray said, and that dealt with Wuhan.
00:34:15.460 Wuhan, the FBI is one of two parts of the government now, the Department of Energy,
00:34:21.600 and the FBI are saying they believe the most likely cause of COVID-19
00:34:27.440 is actually that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:34:31.560 that it came from a lab, that it didn't come from animals,
00:34:34.100 it didn't come from a wet market, it didn't come from all of those other lies.
00:34:37.280 And I want to play for you his response on Wuhan.
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00:36:05.620 Senator, lastly, I want to get your reaction to the FBI director.
00:36:10.540 He was asked about the lab leak question.
00:36:13.040 It was pretty simple what he had to say in response.
00:36:15.700 Here it is.
00:36:16.960 The FBI has for quite some time now assessed
00:36:20.640 that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.
00:36:27.640 Let me step back for a second.
00:36:28.960 You know, the FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc.,
00:36:37.140 who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats.
00:36:42.080 I mean, this was probably the most candid answer he had during the entire interview,
00:36:47.380 and he actually says, look, for a long time we've considered the lab leak to be the most accurate, quote, theory here.
00:36:54.160 Yeah, listen, this is the only answer in the interview that we've discussed tonight that I like and respect.
00:37:01.600 The FBI, under Joe Biden, concluded that the most likely explanation for COVID-19 was that it escaped from a Chinese government lab.
00:37:13.500 They concluded that with what they call moderate confidence.
00:37:16.940 And so in the intelligence community, when you have a conclusion in intelligence,
00:37:20.420 you have sometimes conclusions with low confidence, sometimes with moderate confidence,
00:37:25.320 confidence, sometimes with high confidence.
00:37:27.680 The FBI concluded it with moderate conferences.
00:37:30.920 This weekend, we had the bombshell report that the Biden Department of Energy came to the same conclusion.
00:37:37.480 They concluded that the most likely source for COVID-19 was a Chinese government lab.
00:37:43.240 Now, they were less certain about it than the FBI.
00:37:45.760 They said they concluded that with, quote, low confidence.
00:37:48.800 But they still thought their assessment, their best judgment was that was the most likely source.
00:37:54.920 Now, as regular listeners of this podcast know,
00:37:59.120 we have been laying out the facts on the origins of COVID-19 for three years.
00:38:06.040 Go back and listen.
00:38:07.180 I actually tweeted today.
00:38:08.200 Go listen to the podcast that we put out in March of 2020.
00:38:16.340 Look, the pandemic broke on the national scene in January and February of 2020.
00:38:20.340 So this was early.
00:38:21.640 This was right when the pandemic was starting.
00:38:24.340 And we put out a podcast in March of 2020.
00:38:27.060 We put out a second podcast in April of 2020.
00:38:29.280 So right at the outset, where we walked through the evidence that this virus originated at a Chinese government lab.
00:38:40.480 Now, at the time, the Democrat talking points and the corporate media talking points and the Chinese Communist Party talking points were all the same,
00:38:50.920 which is that it is a crazy tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theory to say that it came from a Chinese government lab.
00:38:57.480 We walked through on this podcast.
00:39:00.980 And by the way, Anthony Fauci in writing was asking Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook,
00:39:05.500 please suppress anyone making the arguments that this came from a Chinese government lab.
00:39:10.520 I got to tell you, Ben, I remain amazed how the verdict podcast did not get censored at the time,
00:39:17.500 because we were one of the very few places on planet Earth that you could hear those facts.
00:39:22.720 For whatever reason, they didn't take us on and censor us.
00:39:26.780 And three years ago, we laid out the facts.
00:39:29.700 Let me point to three data points that are really compelling.
00:39:33.260 Number one, the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
00:39:36.680 The Wuhan Institute for Virology is a Chinese government lab, and it studies viruses.
00:39:41.460 That's why it's called an Institute for Virology.
00:39:44.020 It studies not just viruses, but it focuses in particular on coronaviruses, the particular type of virus that COVID-19 is.
00:39:54.580 It doesn't just study coronaviruses.
00:39:57.240 It studies coronaviruses from bats.
00:40:01.160 And by the way, the best scientific evidence we have is that COVID-19 came from a coronavirus carried by bats.
00:40:07.780 Now, the bats that carry the coronavirus don't occur naturally around Wuhan.
00:40:15.680 How far away are they?
00:40:17.380 The closest bats are about 900 miles away in caves a long, long way away from Wuhan.
00:40:25.960 Where is the Wuhan Institute for Virology?
00:40:28.340 It is a few hundred yards away from where the wet market, where the first major outbreak of the COVID pandemic occurred.
00:40:44.900 You can literally drive a golf ball from the Wuhan Institute for Virology to the Wuhan wet market where the pandemic occurred.
00:40:56.840 I want you to think, just as a statistical matter, what are the odds that a pandemic in a coronavirus carried by bats would occur at a wet market a few hundred yards away from a government lab studying coronaviruses carried by bats?
00:41:21.840 They are, the odds are incredibly low that that is a coincidence.
00:41:29.000 That's fact number one.
00:41:30.820 Fact number two, we now know that not one, not two, but three different employees of the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
00:41:38.820 In November of 2019, so a couple of months before the pandemic erupted on the worldwide scene, November of 2019, they checked themselves into hospitals for serious health conditions.
00:41:53.640 That suggests, it doesn't prove, but it is a powerful suggestion, that those may have been among the first public outbreaks of COVID-19.
00:42:03.780 Fact number three, what did the Chinese communist government do after the pandemic erupted?
00:42:13.840 Well, we know that months before the pandemic, they had begun buying and hoarding PPE, protected personal equipment, things like masks and gloves.
00:42:23.780 They had done it in advance of the pandemic.
00:42:26.860 That suggests foreknowledge.
00:42:28.800 We also know that they directed the Wuhan Institute for Virology to destroy the samples of the coronaviruses they were studying.
00:42:40.340 That suggests guilt, as we talked about in a previous podcast.
00:42:47.140 In a court of law, in a civil case or criminal case, if an individual destroys evidence, a judge can instruct the jury, you may draw a negative inference from the destruction of evidence.
00:43:02.320 You may conclude that the destruction of evidence demonstrates a guilty mind, demonstrates that the evidence would incriminate whoever destroyed the evidence.
00:43:13.360 In this case, it was the Chinese communist government, and the obvious inference is that COVID-19 was a virus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, and it escaped and caused this pandemic. 0.85
00:43:26.460 I also think, I actually think the evidence is overwhelming of that.
00:43:29.720 By the way, the evidence was overwhelming three years ago.
00:43:33.420 What the hell took the Biden Department of Energy three years to get there?
00:43:37.680 I'm glad they got there, and I'm glad the FBI got there, but why did it take so long?
00:43:42.980 This podcast, we figured it out three damn years ago in March of 2020.
00:43:50.680 Go listen to that podcast. 0.80
00:43:52.760 We laid out the evidence then.
00:43:54.440 And by the way, I've got to say, it's one of the reasons why, listen, I would encourage folks who listen to this podcast, and we have an amazing community of verdict listeners,
00:44:03.060 share it with your friends, because you learn things here on this podcast that you will not learn watching TV news.
00:44:11.280 You will not learn reading the newspapers.
00:44:13.300 You will not learn listening to the radio.
00:44:15.560 This podcast is designed to tell you what's happening before it's news.
00:44:20.680 And I got to say, the FBI, I'm glad that Chris Wray is willing to say that, but at the same time, the corporate media and big tech, and Chris Wray is protecting and apologizing for big tech.
00:44:36.700 Big tech and the corporate media did everything they could to stigmatize, to silence, to suppress anyone laying out the evidence that this came from a Chinese government lab.
00:44:49.840 No doubt about it.
00:44:51.040 It was a very interesting interview, and even more fun to hear your response.
00:44:55.080 The FBI director, Ray, here, and it's the goal of this podcast, like you said, to give you what's happening even before it happens.
00:45:01.180 Wuhan's a great example of that.
00:45:02.980 We will see you guys with a special verdict taping we're going to be doing live from the stage at CPAC in just a couple of days, so make sure you listen to that show as well.
00:45:11.840 Don't forget, share this podcast with your family and friends.
00:45:14.500 Write us a five-star review.
00:45:15.580 It helps us reach more people that don't know about this show.
00:45:19.060 So please do that.
00:45:20.220 It helps us tremendously on the charts, and we will see you back here in a couple of days live from the stage of CPAC.
00:45:25.800 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:45:28.520 Guaranteed human.