One of the most stunning tidbits in Tulsi Gabbard's newly declassified Russiagate files is the revelation that Hillary Clinton's campaign approached Christian leaders with offers of future government benefits if they backed Hillary for president. "Shepherds for Sale" author Megan Basham explains who might be implicated in this new dimension of the scandal. Plus, Rep. Greg Steube reacts to Gabbard's revelations and weighs in on President Trump's call to cancel the August recess. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
Is your pastor for sale?
We talk with Megan Basham about how you can identify whether or not your pastor is receiving non-Christian money to peddle really bad stuff.
Greg Stubay joins the show and we have the latest on the Epstein story as well.
That's right.
Listen for the latest breaking news on all things Epstein.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
So start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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Joining us now is Representative Greg Stubay, a great American from Florida's 17th congressional district.
Representative Stubay, great to see you.
Representative Stubay, I want to get your reaction on all the Obama gate news.
It is clear that the intel agencies not only lied, but they pushed a untruth, a fabrication on the American people to derail President Trump's first term.
Your reaction, sir.
Yeah, and obviously Americans knew that this was going on, but never had this evidence.
And as Tulsi had said, irrefutable evidence.
If you read this report that has been now released, and I would imagine there's a lot more information that's going to be released, you had Obama, Clapper, Comey, Brennan all actively and intentionally using intelligence that they knew was false to create this Russia collusion narrative to go after President Trump.
This was an intentional, deliberate act to undermine President Trump and his presidency.
Completely unprecedented, this type of behavior from a president and his higher echelon of intelligence officials.
So she's referred this to the DOJ.
I know the DOJ has created some type of special group to go after and investigate this for possible crimes.
I see this as treason.
There's a lot of these individuals who lied under oath to Congress, but there's a statute of limitations for that.
So we actually are looking at what that statute of limitations is.
And I'm going to do legislation that's going to change the statute of limitations for lying to Congress moving forward.
But they're going to have to try to come up and look at a crime that they're not going to have a statute of limitation issue with to charge.
This was a conspiracy at the highest level to take down the president of the United States, and there has to be accountability for this.
So, Congressman, I'm going to express some frustration from the base here.
Why are you guys taking a recess when you guys should be having Barack Hussein Obama testify in front of the House Oversight Committee?
What is it with this recess in the middle of the summer?
A lot of the audience is really fired up about this.
Can you please explain to the audience?
Yeah, they should be.
That's a decision that Speaker Mike Johnson makes.
That is solely within his determination as to whether our calendar and when we're there, when we're not there, when we go on recess.
Typically, August is the recess time for Congress, but obviously Trump wants the Senate to stay there to get through a bunch of appointments.
We are able to get his big, beautiful bill done.
There's other work to be done, so I'm frustrated too.
I'm very frustrated that why don't we just vote on the Epstein stuff, get that done, move forward?
I mean, there are CRAs.
There are CRAs are disproving, Congress disproving rules that the Biden administration put in place that we weren't able to get to this week because of all this Epstein drama.
Why don't we just deal with that, do the thing that the American people sent us up there to do instead of leaving for, it's more than a month, it's like six weeks, five or six weeks, and during that time, nothing's getting done in Washington.
Now, thankfully, the DOJ obviously is going to move forward on all this information that Tulsi has now released, but Congress can't do any work if we're not there to do it.
Yeah, I mean, I would love to see some congressional oversight on all this RussiaGate stuff or ObamaGate.
This is precious time that I think is being wasted.
So additionally, I want to now get into the question of accountability.
You used the word treason.
What can Congress possibly do to aid this process?
Because I think the American people and our audience, especially, is growing very impatient that there's a lot of talk, but not a lot of action.
Please.
Yeah, so the things that Congress can do is bring these individuals in and depose them under oath and ask them questions based off that intelligence.
And what we can also do is bring them in.
If they're going to try to hide behind classification and say that this information is classified, we can bring them into the SCIF and do it in the SCIF.
Now, since Tulsi's released this information, the DOJ has the ability to do that.
And obviously, they have the power to be able to charge these individuals, which Congress obviously does not have.
We could do congressional referrals, but Tulsi has already done that.
But to aid in that, obviously Intel, judiciary, oversight could bring these individuals in and depose them.
It's my anticipation that the DOJ and the strike force is going to do that.
But those are certainly things that we could assist in doing, working with the administration to see if there are areas or individuals that we can bring in in an oversight capacity, put them under oath and ask them questions.
Not in a, you don't want to do a hearing and every person only have five minutes.
You want to bring them in and depose them under oath.
And those three committees that I just referenced all have subpoena power to do that.
What would you say then is some other legislative goals that you guys have for the remainder of this congressional calendar?
Because we're already getting whispers.
Oh, the midterms are coming.
We can't vote on controversial stuff.
What would you like to see legislatively be passed from now, probably to the end of the calendar year?
I've filed countless bills.
I think it's over 20.
Countless bills to enact and codify President Trump's executive orders.
I would love to get that done.
There is a large support from the base, obviously.
You know, you got the president doing these executive orders.
Why isn't Congress following through?
And I realize that on a lot of this, you're going to need 60 votes in the Senate to get it done.
But put those senators on the board on a lot of these issues.
And so their voters in the midterms will know where they stand on these issues, like men and women's sports, which we were able to get passed.
It didn't pass the Senate, but obviously we got them on the board on that.
As we walk into the appropriation season, we have to get an appropriations bill done by September, which is another frustration as to why are we leaving when only two of the 11 appropriations bills have gotten passed in the House.
We have to pass the rest of those.
There's no way in the calendar in four weeks when we get back that you're going to be able to get through nine other appropriations bills.
So the leadership is already setting us up for a CR scenario, which a lot of conservatives like myself do not support.
We want to cut spending.
We don't want to continue the same level of spending that we have had.
So we have to get through the appropriations stuff in September.
But I absolutely think that we should be focused on codifying President Trump's executive orders through Congress, at least get it passed to the House and send it to the Senate.
Congressman, my team made me aware of this bill that you have around the independent programmers tax incentive.
Personally, I'm very curious about it because it affects shows like this one on the Great Real America's Voice.
Tell us about it and what is the significance of it, especially for decentralized, dissident media?
Yeah, 85% of cable is the four major networks.
And so they push out like Newsmax got pushed out from the different networks.
These different conservative networks like yours don't have the ability to get out on these different cable networks because they're only owned by four media markets, NBC, ABC, CBS, all the fake news.
So different independent programmers are at a significant disadvantage to be able to get their shows on cable network TV because those four major cable network TVs shut them down.
So what my bill would do would give them a tax incentive to give them the ability financially to do the things they need to do to get their message out to the American people.
Now, Newsmax has done an excellent job of trying to navigate that despite the fact that a lot of these different networks haven't allowed them on their networks.
So those are the type of things that can get done if this bill gets done.
And what's fascinating is this has bipartisan support.
I'm on the Ways and Means Committee, which is in charge of taxes.
There's members on that committee that have co-sponsored this.
And so that is a real good impetus to try to get some type of bipartisan bill done.
And through the Congress, it should get 60 votes in the Senate if we have a bipartisan bill that comes out of the House.
One minute remaining, Congressman Stuby.
What can the audience do to help support this and help empower decentralized media?
Yeah, the best thing is to contact the chairman, Ways and Means, Jason Smith, and encourage him to hear this bill and get it through the process.
Encourage their specific member of Congress to co-sponsor it.
And that would help tremendously to have bipartisan, broad support across the country to support this, get it up in the committee, and get it out to the floor.
Congressman Stuby, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
And for whatever it's worth, I don't think it's time for a vacation.
The American people are not taking months-long vacations.
So I think get back to you.
Thank you so much, sir.
Thank you.
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As promised, we told you we would cover Epstein News as it was developing.
At this very moment, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is meeting with Ghelane Maxwell in a conference room in a federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.
The meeting is expected to go all day.
What exactly the meeting entails is unknown, but I could tell you, Todd Blanche, he is a bulldog.
He stood by President Trump in the midst of that Moscow show trial in the city of New York with Alvin Bragg, and he had President Trump's back there.
He could be asking informally what Maxwell knows and what could testify to.
He might simply be negotiating for her to provide more extensive sworn testimony at a later point.
There could be negotiations for some kind of clemency in return for testimony.
Right now, we don't know.
It's all guessing.
But him going down to Tallahassee shows that this administration cares about the Epstein case and may care about getting more information.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday and the New York Times reported today that back in May, Attorney General Bondi informed Trump that his name would appear in the Epstein files about Jeffrey Epstein.
That doesn't prove anything criminal, but it may explain, you know, honestly, kind of part of all the coverage around this.
Now, I'll say this, though.
We knew that Trump knew Epstein.
This is not breaking news in any way, shape, or form.
And additionally, Trump kicked Epstein out of his club for being pervy and being weird.
He literally kicked him out and didn't talk to him for 15 years.
It was this very high-profile fight where Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for hitting on underage girls at Mar-a-Lago.
I'm sure a lot of you guys did not know about that.
And so the fact that Donald Trump might on the periphery might be mentioned in some sort of fact pattern means absolutely nothing.
It means absolutely nothing.
A federal judge, and it shouldn't be surprising to anyone, we knew that they were in the same social circles dating back for 40 years in Palm Beach.
And again, did you know?
And I want you to write this and commit it to memory.
Did you know Donald Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein in a high-profile expulsion from Mar-a-Lago for being a creep?
It's very important.
And maybe that's what's in, you know, whatever documents.
Again, it's just hearsay and it's rumor.
And also, make no mistake, there might be other unverified stink bombs, little mines, little fake stuff in all the quote-unquote documents, in the plethora of stuff, the same way that the Wall Street Journal article came out against Trump that was obviously fake.
That was obviously fake.
So a federal judge in Florida blocked the release of Epstein grand jury testimony from that state, saying the court's hands are tied in that matter.
Judge Robin Rosenberg says that there are, quote, no exceptions to the grand jury secrecy due to an existing precedent by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Separately, two judges in New York have given the government a week for the government to give more specifics on what grand jury testimony they want unsealed and why they want and how.
And they've also ordered potential victims to give a chance to reply to the effort.
Late Wednesday, a House Oversight Subcommittee voted to subpoena the Department of Justice for Epstein documents.
Republicans, Nancy Mace, Scott Perry, and Brian Jack all voted with Democrats to support the subpoena.
Speaker Mike Johnson canceled the final day of House votes in order to block a coordinated Democrat push to force the release of Epstein documents prior to the recess.
And the Senate, though, is less interested.
Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Chuck Grassley, each chair committees that could go look into the Epstein case.
All three have said it's not on the agenda.
And so look, here is the big picture of it.
The Trump administration right now is taking this very seriously.
The big picture is that the press is building a narrative over the House Republican being in crisis over this.
This is in Politico Today.
Quote, the bill is coming due, House GOP braces, for Epstein crisis to intestify.
This is not a crisis by any means, but it's something that is going to continue to push forward as the administration tries to get to the bottom of this.
So I could tell you this, that taking a step back, Todd Blanche does not have to be in Tallahassee right now interviewing Ghelane Maxwell.
The DOJ does not have to be moving to try to unseal the grand jury testimony.
Unfortunately, unelected judges are getting in the way and they are blocking this.
And so we're going to keep our eyes on the story as more things develop.
Democrats are trying to use this as a way to attack Donald Trump and try to slow down the momentum of this very, very successful presidency.
Democrats would like nothing more than to try to use this as some sort of cheap political lifeline.
And so I think we need to simultaneously be committed to the truth while also not play into what the Democrats and the circus show that they're trying to do in the House of Representatives to try to undermine and debase and trying to slow down this phenomenally and historically successful presidency.
But right now, it's judges that are getting in the way of President Trump and his administration trying to get to the grand jury testimony.
The grand jury testimony is by far the best information available, the most robust information available because it was used as a prerequisite for an indictment and for criminal charges.
We don't follow the hysteria.
We follow facts here, and we're going to keep on covering this situation as more information arises.
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Okay, joining us now is Megan Basham, author of Shepherds for Sale, Daily Wire culture reporter.
Megan, great to see you.
Been praying for your health.
And so, and thank you so much for taking the time.
Your book, Shepherds for Sale, is terrific.
So, Megan, in this report that was declassified, the House Intelligence Report, on page 19, there was, quote, the Russian Federal Security Service in August had details of secret meetings with named security services.
And the Russians had the stirr on Hillary never released it, but it begs a much different question.
Are our Christian shepherds for sale?
Megan, welcome to the program.
Please walk us through it all.
Thanks for having me, Charlie.
It's always good to be here.
So, yes, that was a rather stunning little tidbit in this declassified report that we found out that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was meeting with these unnamed religious groups, and it was essentially a quid pro-quo arrangement.
If you support Hillary Clinton for president, if you throw your weight as these ministry leaders behind her, we are going to increase your financing and offer you quote unquote State Department patronage.
So at this point, we don't know who these religious organizations are.
I'm filing a FOIA to find out.
But, you know, I have some pretty strong suspicions based on all of the reporting that I've done on this subject and went into deep detail in my book, Shepherds for Sale.
And, you know, I can give you the example of the National Association of Evangelicals.
It is an extremely large and influential group.
It represents thousands, hundreds of thousands of evangelicals, millions all over the country, all over the world.
And what they did in 2016 was one of their board members, surprisingly, came out for Hillary Clinton.
And, you know, that to me kind of put my tension, my spidey senses off because I went, why would somebody from the National Association of Evangelicals suddenly start making the rounds in Politico and other major news outlets supporting Hillary Clinton?
And one of the things you can look at is that the immigration resettlement arm of the National Association of Evangelicals did indeed receive a lot of funding in the Biden administration from the federal government to resettle quote unquote refugees, asylum seekers.
So we don't know who these groups are, but we certainly know that it was surprising when a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals came out for Hillary Clinton.
And, you know, I can look at other examples of this sort of strange bedfellows happening.
There is a group called the American Values Coalition.
They are a never Trump group.
They've been extremely active.
And in 2024, they launched a faith initiative.
And its purpose, in its own terms, is to disciple.
They use that word, disciple America's pastors on politics.
They said they want to reframe evangelicals' political imagination.
Well, when you look at who sits on the board of this organization, one of them is the board chair, a man named Neil Rickner.
His company, an energy company, a wind solar kind of company, received $1.2 million from the Biden administration's Department of Defense shortly after they launched this faith initiative with their Never Trump group.
So we don't know yet, but we can look at these very strange associations and how they are coming into churches to try to not just influence church members, but to specifically influence pastors so that the pastors will influence their church members.
So I just want to brag on you, Megan.
You have done such incredible work here.
Probably the best, by far the best journalism and investigative research in how the American church is for sale and how many of our pastors and how many of our Christian nonprofits just sell their soul, literally, to secular nonprofits or to foreign donors.
And so I want to play cut 422 and I'll allow you to talk about this in a second.
So let's play cut 422 and then I'll let you explain it.
And I think it's important that we recognize that we've never had in this country, especially within the church, a moment of profound enlightenment around those issues.
And so we go all the way back to the 19th century.
The church and I have some kind of major gospel epiphany that talked about we're going to work for the interests of the restoration of the freedmen.
We never had that.
And so throughout our history, the church's voice was contra to every meaningful gain that black people were trying to pursue.
Okay, what were we listening to here, Megan, and the significance of it?
So that was an interview training session with the J29 coalition.
So that is that faith initiative of the American Values Coalition.
Now, you know, they use this sort of lingo to appeal to Christians to sound like, hey, we're just like you, we're conservative Christians too.
And, you know, when you hear American Values, you think that's me.
Well, no, this is actually a progressive group, a never Trump group.
And so that is part of its faith initiative training.
And when you look at the coaches that they're using, it's people like David French of the New York Times, who, you know, endorsed Harris over Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
It's Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, who is a confirmed never Trumper.
So it's very much a group that is on the progressive side.
It is very anti-Trump.
And so this is the group whose board chair received that $1.2 million grant from the federal government during 2024 during the Biden administration.
So we see these groups coming in.
And what they said very specifically is, we want to disciple conservative pastors.
So it wasn't like they just wanted to get to any pastors.
They've been very specific that they want to target conservative pastors.
But what you just heard there is the kind of theology that they're espousing.
It's something known as liberation theology.
And in fact, it is really just Marxism repackaged with kind of churchy language.
And so they will argue things like you just heard there, which is that we need to achieve equity by paying out reparations through affirmative action.
So they come in under the guise of being conservative Christians, but that's the kind of thing they're teaching.
It's the kind of thing that very few sound, doctrinally sound conservative pastors would ever bring into their church.
And yet they're finding ways to do this.
They're coming in with funding from the left and saying, hey, let us have access to your pastors, to your church members.
And, you know, I do want to clarify here that the Clintons have a long history of doing this.
This is actually not new, what we just learned at State Department.
Their Clinton Foundation has funneled money into evangelical front groups for decades in order to get Christians to take up something like, say, anti-human climate change policy.
So the Clinton Foundation funneled a lot of money into an evangelical front group called the Evangelical Environmental Network.
So this is not new for them.
And I wasn't surprised to see that the State Department had made this gambit to try to say, hey, we will do a quid pro call with you.
You support Hillary Clinton for president and we will start financing your ministries.
And so, Megan, I want to take a step back here.
How big of a problem is this amongst the Christian leaders?
And remind the audience what you learned during COVID of how many of these major evangelical thought leaders and major spokespeople were for sale that put themselves up for auction to the highest bidder.
Yeah, Charlie, it's been a massive problem.
And I think it's gone unnoticed for so many years.
So that when something like this little tidbit in the House Intelligence Report about these religious groups comes out, people are shocked and rightly so.
But what they need to know is it's very much not something new.
What we saw during COVID was Francis Collins, who was then head of the National Institutes of Health, using his associations with all of these high-profile evangelical leaders to try to convince Christians that you needed to do things like submit to government authority and closing your churches, that you needed to submit to getting that vaccine.
And in fact, you heard a lot of those voices even arguing against religious exemptions.
They were counseling that it is not biblical to seek religious exemptions for these vaccines.
Obviously, a lot of Christians strongly disagreed with that.
But, you know, that was kind of what I was trying to sound the alarm on in my book.
And this just confirmed it, is that this is going on all over the place.
And, you know, A big part of it is that you will have these left-wing groups.
So, you will have something like the Tithes Foundation, which is a massive funder of left-wing priorities like abortion, like the LGBTQ agenda.
Same thing with the Rockefeller Foundation.
And they funnel money into all of these sort of evangelical front groups so that you don't see their involvement.
And it's the same thing with the federal government, because we need to keep in mind that these really large foundations are also typically getting federal grants.
So it's a way for all of that money to come in and trickle down to these evangelical leaders.
And some of the most high profile have been Christianity Today has been involved with these groups.
They take money from secular foundations like the Lilly Endowment, which is the foundational arm of the Eli Lilly Pharmacy Company.
So, you know, we're talking about big pharma here.
And all of this has been going on for a really long time.
And I think that so many Christians in the pews did not realize how these ministries were trying to speak for them, but representing values that they don't agree with.
And so, you know, when my book came out, I think so many people were surprised to hear it.
And yet it's been an open secret for years.
And now we see it confirmed in the State Department report.
It is so, it is so sad that these people have a position of authority and they are using the name of God to erroneously represent theology to then make money or get their organizations to get money.
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Megan Basham is with us, Shepherds for Sale.
Megan, I want to play this piece of tape here.
This is the new mayor.
You see kind of a theme here, everybody?
There's these Somali Islamic mayors that are popping up all across the country.
There's the one obviously in Minnesota with Omar Fatah.
This one is, I don't want to get her name wrong, but she is not from Minnesota.
She's from Maine.
You know, when I think of Maine, I think of Somalian Muslims.
So I'm going to play this and I'm going to ask the question of how much of this mass migration refugee resettlement program is because of Christian groups.
Okay, her name is Deka Dalalik.
Okay, I'll work on that pronunciation.
Play cut 434.
Policies, how can the politics in Somalia can be, you know, resonate what we have here in the United States, the democracy that we have?
How can you help us be a better country and build back what we used to have back in a long time ago?
So hopefully we will be able to help our country, our former country, Somalia.
So she's talking about helping her former country.
Her name is Dika Dalalik.
Anyway, Megan, this is troubling a lot of people as we're starting to see foreign Islamic influences seep into mayor races and positions of power.
Talk about how Christian groups and nonprofits have been heavily involved in the refugee resettlement issue, please.
You've done great research on this.
Yeah, and that's a really important point.
You know, one of the people who sort of spearheaded this, we must bring in Muslims or we're not really Americans, was Russell Moore, who was then head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the policy lobbying arm of the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention.
So it represents some 43 million people across the United States.
Not a small organization.
And now, of course, he is the editor-in-chief at Christianity Today.
And he was really one of those loud voices during the first Trump administration saying that we must bring in Muslims in order to show that we're faithful Christians, which was a little confusing when the Trump administration said we are going to just put a pause on immigration.
Russell Moore said that.
He would never say that, Megan.
Russell Moore would never advocate for mass Muslim immigration.
Keep going.
Well, and even when it was very reasonable to the American people, so the Trump administration said, we're going to put a pause on allowing immigration from seven nations, seven Muslim majority nations where we know that they are hotbeds of terrorism.
Well, you know, Russell Moore, in association with the National Association of Evangelicals, again, very large group with Tim Keller and some others, said that this was un-Christian and un-American to even put that pause on.
And Russell Moore further argued for the building of mosques in the United States.
And, you know, what really happened with the Southern Baptist Convention is people got upset.
They said, look, we're Christian.
We're Baptists.
We don't want our policy arm arguing for the building of mosquitoes.
We build churches.
I mean, like, what?
Sorry, keep going.
It's just, it's such tips.
In the United States, obviously.
And I want to really drill down on this, Charlie, because you've done such great work with college students on college campuses.
And what people need to know is now Russell Moore, along with his partners, a man named Curtis Chang, who is a Democrat professor at Duke Divinity, and David French at the New York Times, they have created a program called the After Party, and it's specifically targeting Christian college campuses.
And it is targeting the members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, 185 member schools, including schools that most parents would look at and say, oh, that's a conservative Christian school that I can send my son or daughter to, schools like Wheaton, like Biola, like Baylor.
Well, they brought in this program and it's entirely left-wing funded.
It's funded by, again, the Rockefellers, the Hewletts, who take money from the federal government.
And so all of this money is fungible and it starts to move into all of these other organizations.
And then they're targeting conservative Christians to try to say, if you want to be a faithful Christian, you need to be open to these Democrat policies.
You need to be open to considering voting for these Democrat politicians who, even though they're pro-abortion, well, but they're also pro-immigration.
And so we think both of these issues are pro-life.
And so that's how they kind of try to sell it to, I would say, impressionable college students who, you know, may have not thought through these issues.
And so they hear that and they say, gosh, I don't want to be on one side.
So I have to be open to the party of abortion and to transing kids.
And so that's really what these programs do.
And they're very insidious.
And, you know, they're subtle.
So insidious.
Yes.
And they're coming on not just churches, but like I said, Christian college campuses.
So they're really coming at Bible-believing Christians every which way they can.
And in return, their refugee resettlement arms, as we saw with the USAID revelations, are receiving tens of millions of dollars to resettle refugees and asylum seekers.
Megan Basham, you're a hero.
Check out the book, Shepherds for Sale, and we're praying for your health.
Thank you.
God bless you, Megan.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
