This piece sums up why the FBI placed all of their trust in a former British spy they knew was lying to them.
Was the FBI team investigating Hillary Clinton violating information security procedures themselves?
More astonishing evidence of Russian collusion with the Democrats.
More evidence that tax cuts do not “cost the government money.”
Venezuela descends into complete chaos. Read this piece about their “Mad Max”-like roads.
Hillary hijacked the justice system. Here’s one of the people she used to do it.
Copyright CRTV. All rights reserved.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
All right, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
I'm doing okay, Dan.
It's Friday, babe.
I love the Friday show because we kind of recap what happened during the week.
There's some breaking news stories, too, and folks, a lot of anger out there.
Understandably so over this budget deal, which spends a lot of money.
You know, There's a tidal wave of red ink coming ashore, as Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, said once.
He's absolutely right.
I think he called it the red menace.
You know, Joe, Milton Friedman, we've used this quote on the show often, you know, all debts are paid either by the debtor or the creditor.
All debts are paid.
Listen to me, folks.
All debts are paid.
They're either paid by the people who lent the money and never got the money back.
They paid the debt, right?
They lend you money you never paid them back.
They just paid it.
Or by the person who takes the money, borrows the money, and then pays the debt back later.
But all debts are paid.
I don't know what people aren't getting, especially some Republicans in Congress and the Senate who passed this budget bill, about this.
These debts will be paid.
The money that we're borrowing that we don't have right now is not going to evaporate.
There's no money fairy.
It's not going to drop from the sky.
The tooth fairy is not going to arrive with it.
Money is simply a representation of value.
That value has to be created.
Meaning people are going to have to work harder to create value in the future for value that wasn't created now in an effort to borrow money.
What part of that are you missing?
Man, is this frustrating.
The way we talk about debt like it's phantom money.
Joe, you get it?
I mean, you get why people are bitter about this?
I mean, does this make sense?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, I get it.
Times are good and people, you know, all of a sudden the economy's bouncing back and people tend to think, oh, it's going to all be okay.
You know, the debt, we'll pay it off.
We'll pay it off.
When?
When are we going to pay it off?
You realize if we grew at 7%, almost triple what we're growing at now, At 7%, folks, that's practically impossible to do for any more than a few years, given the advanced stage of our economy and the political morass we live in.
In 10 years, we would have to grow at that rate and stop spending now to even cut our debt in half.
Think about it.
We would double our economy.
You know the rule of sevens, these finance people.
If we grew at 7% in 10 years, we would double our economy.
If we held spending now to the levels we're at now, which we're not doing, we're spending more every year, we could cut our debt in half in 10 years, growing at 7%, which is, by the way, I can't say this enough, highly unlikely, especially given our political situation and the Democrats' commitment to big government, not big growth.
If we didn't spend another dime as of tomorrow and just held spending constant and grew it an unlikely 7%, we would still only cut our debt in half in 10 years.
What part of this are they not getting?
Gosh, it's so frustrating, right?
I got more on this.
I've got some other great stories, and I've got some updates on, of course, the fiasco going on with the Obamagate spying scandal.
Only the biggest scandal in modern American history.
Today's show brought to you by our buddies at BrickHouse Nutrition.
You know, I'm big fans of these guys.
I spoke to Miles yesterday.
I'm like, Miles, he's the owner of the company.
He writes some handwritten notes to a lot of the customers, too, which I think is a nice touch.
I said, Miles, you got to get me more fielder greens.
I love this stuff, folks.
It's like your fruit and vegetable insurance.
Everybody knows fruits and vegetables are the key to a long, healthy, productive life, okay?
Fruits and vegetables, they have all kinds of micronutrients, macronutrients in there.
And it's really difficult to eat the variety, the rainbow of fruits and vegetables that we want to eat.
You know, you got your blues and your blueberries, you got your purples and your blackberries, you got your cranberries, you got your cherries, all that stuff.
It's really tough to get that in your diet every day because you don't have time to go back and forth to the refrigerator.
Well, these guys thought of a great way to do it.
They ground up real food, some exotic fruits and vegetables with some great micronutrients, macronutrients in there, and they ground it up into a powder called Fielder Greens, which tastes great.
I like to mix it with green tea, sometimes with a little V8.
It's absolutely terrific.
I enjoy it.
It's one of my favorite products.
My kids like it too, which is unusual because my youngest won't eat anything, especially if it involves the fruits and the vegetables.
So I put this stuff in a drink and she takes it and it's absolutely terrific.
Go give it a shot.
It's called Field of Greens today.
Folks, again, there's no serious medical professional who would deny the fact that fruits and vegetables are the key to good health, a good diet.
This is just strong, solid stuff and it tastes great.
Go give it a shot.
Field of Greens.
It's called Fielder Greens.
Give a look to their other stuff, too.
Their energy pill, Dawn to Dusk, is fantastic.
But Fielder Greens is available at BrickHouseNutrition.com slash Dan.
That's BrickHouseNutrition.com slash Dan.
Check it out today.
BrickHouseNutrition.com slash Dan.
Fielder Greens.
Tastes great.
Good for you.
Give it a shot.
Fielder Greens.
Okay, an interesting story from Luke Rosiak yesterday at the Daily Caller.
And, you know, it's funny how people are...
The broken FBI investigation into Hillary and into Trump.
I feel pretty good today, by the way, Joe.
You know, I'm a little energetic.
Yeah.
I'm taking a break from the gym today.
I'll be in for Mark Levin tonight on the radio.
So I feel not to get distracted, but I feel pretty good.
So Rosiak has this piece up about Peter Stroke, the lead investigator.
And a text he wrote that he was in the skiff.
Now, I don't want to complicate you and get lost in the wonkiness, but it's an interesting piece because, yeah, he tweets his, or excuse me, texts his love interest, Lisa Page, and one of the texts says, hey, we're up in Jim's skiff.
I'm assuming he's talking about the director.
Comey, what is a skiff and why does any of this matter to you?
And what I'm about to tell you, I don't think you're going to hear anywhere else, but it's important.
I kind of alluded to it yesterday.
A SCIF is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
It's a facility you go in, in the federal government, we had them in the Secret Service, where you walk in, you're not allowed to bring cell phones, two-way pagers, any kind of communication device, because in that facility, the communications are supposed to be reserved for that facility and that facility only.
It's where any kind of high-profile, classified conversation would happen, Joe, would happen in the SCIF, right?
I know this is redundant for a lot of you who are in the national security arena, but a lot of people don't know what that is.
Bottom line is, everybody knows, Joe, you don't bring a cell phone in the skiff.
You just don't do it.
And you definitely don't text from the skiff.
Now, to be fair, there is some dispute as to, you know, was he really in the skiff or did he walk outside and send a text?
Fine, I get that.
And the answer is, I don't know.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
Lot of people have been talking to me about stuff.
We were very concerned about obviously what happened in the FBI in this investigation and folks.
I'm telling you the next big scandal coming.
Is the communication between upper-level FBI executives involved in these cases, specifically the Hillary Clinton case, because the Hillary Clinton case involved the transfer, Joe, of classified information over unclassified systems, right?
I mean, everybody gets that, right?
That was the whole essence of the Hillary email investigation, was classified information transported over an unclassified network.
Now, I am not piling on the FBI, folks.
Please.
I love the men and women there.
I said this specifically to people I spoke with yesterday.
I mean it.
I work with them.
They are the best of the best.
The best I ever were.
I was envious in some ways in the Secret Service.
Like, gosh, these guys are really good.
And they are.
But it's clear we've had substantial mismanagement at the upper levels in the involvement in the special prosecutor case against Trump and the Hillary email investigation.
It does us no good as a free constitutional republic to ignore those things and pretend they didn't happen.
We start entering into police state territory then.
There was clearly mismanagement there.
The next big shooter drop here is going to be Communications between, from what I'm hearing, upper-level managers on unclassified platforms using classified information, transmitting it, transporting it.
Folks, this is a big deal.
This is a huge deal because it's going to... Think about it.
Joe, if you're investigating Hillary Clinton for transmitting, right, classified information over an unclass system, right?
Right.
And upper level executives may have been involved in the FBI and the similar type thing.
Is your incentive to make that case go away too?
I'm not saying that's the specific reason they did it.
I'm saying the incentive there is to not draw attention to unclassified information.
Excuse me, classified information being transported over unclassified systems because you may have been involved in the same thing.
I'm relatively confident that this is going to come out, and if an audit was requested... Joe, giving you the... If an audit was requested of some of the people involved in this case, you may find that some classified information was sent over unclassified systems as well, for a variety of reasons.
It's not good, folks.
I'll include the Luke Rosiak Daily Caller story in the show notes today, available at Bongino.com.
Please subscribe to my email list.
I'll send it to you.
Read the story, though.
He says he's in the skiff.
Does he mean he's inside or outside?
That's a critical distinction.
I mean, is him texting from the Skiff maybe one time a national catastrophe?
No.
Has it happened before?
Yes.
People tell you, oh, it's not possible.
It is.
I'm pretty sure of that.
Not that I did that myself, but I'm pretty confident it is.
There are various ways around it.
Bluetooth stuff and things like that.
Either way, it speaks to a lack of awareness of what you're doing.
You're investigating a woman for sending classified information over unclassed systems while you're violating rules of information control and classification.
It doesn't make sense.
All right, another break we had yesterday in this thing, which is absolutely astonishing.
Joe, whenever, you know, I say this all the time, whenever you want to see what the Democrats are up to, just look at what they're accusing Republicans of.
Because that's what they're doing is they're accusing Republicans of what they're doing in an attempt to distract.
It was, think about it, it was the real genius the entire time of the special counsel.
The whole idea with the Democrats of starting up the special counsel investigation, Joe, was everything they were guilty of they were going to accuse Trump of.
They were going to use the special counsel to investigate it at any time Trump fought back and said, wait, I didn't do that.
It's you guys colluding with the Russians.
What's the Democrat response?
You're just impeding the special counsel.
You're just obstruction of justice.
Folks, How does this not piss you off?
How does this really not get under your skin?
You know, like a tick.
Burrowed in, you can't get it out.
How does this not upset you?
This scheme, for all of its deceptiveness and the evil embedded in it, and it was an evil scheme the Democrats did, trying to frame Trump.
It is tactically Ingenious.
It is.
And it would only work if you had a compliant lapdog bootlicking media, which the Democrats of course have.
Bingo.
It's a genius scheme.
It's important now what the story I'm going to talk about next.
The whole essence of the Democrats' case against Trump is that they colluded with the Russians to overthrow the election.
We now know that to be nonsensical, almost to the point of hilarity.
There's no evidence.
That never happened.
There's no evidence at all.
They were accusing the entire time Trump of Russian collusion because it's been the Democrats colluding with Russia the entire time.
I have another example of it right now.
First, we had Hillary colluding with the Russians through Fusion GPS to get fake intelligence on Trump.
That happened, folks.
That actually happened.
Then we had evidence yesterday of Adam Schiff talking to some prankster about naked pictures of Trump compromise that turned out to be a prank.
But Schiff was a more than willing guy to get involved in it.
Now we have more evidence.
We have a case that broke yesterday.
Again, a story I'll have in the show notes today.
Please read it.
Of Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia.
Did you hear the story, Joe?
Yeah, I heard it.
Texting with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch about trying to set up a backdoor meeting with Christopher Steele, the spy who used the Russian intel to put into the dossier, and saying, hey, and I don't want a paper trail.
Folks, this is a genius scheme!
Now we have Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner with hard evidence of actual Russian collusion Accusing Trump of Russian collusion, they have no evidence of.
Appointing a special counsel, and whenever the Trump team, or Trump himself, points out the actual Russian collusion evidence, I just told you happened.
Hillary, Mark Warner, and Adam Schiff.
What do the Democrats do?
They go, you're just impeding the special counsel into collusion on you.
You're obstructing justice.
It's genius.
And there's dopey, dopey liberals in the media, They lap it up like a dog licking out of a bowl.
Like a dog.
I mean, it's... What was that movie, Lee?
Oh, it was, um...
Remember that, it was one of the Batman movies, the Christopher Nolan movies, where Bruce Wayne's first learned to become Batman, he goes in a restaurant to confront the mobster, and the mobster talks about killing his parents, and he says, and they begged, like a dog, like a dog, like a dog.
This is the media, like a dog.
That's it.
I mean, it's unreal how they suck this stuff up.
They are immune to evidence.
This was a beautiful scheme.
Evil, deceptive, manipulative, horrible that it happened.
Still horrible to this day, but really unbelievably tactically smart.
You're obstructing the investigation!
Into what?
Russian collusion!
What do you mean?
Amongst the Democrats?
No, with you!
But we didn't do that!
You guys did!
You're obstructing by asking!
Look, he's obstructing!
And the media never asks any questions!
It is amazing!
I got one more thing and I want to move on.
I got a lot of other stories.
Folks, by the way, I say this Sincerely, I appreciate all the feedback on the show.
And I know a lot of you really, really dig the Russia story, but I do have to get back to some other news, too.
So much going on.
And, you know, I appreciate the feedback on that.
I do read most of it.
The majority of emails has been getting a little voluminous lately as the show has exploded.
Thanks to you.
We're now the number two conservative podcast in the country.
So we appreciate that.
Thank you very much.
But there is a lot more going on.
But one more story, because it's important.
It explains some motive in the case.
Before we get to that, today's show brought to you by, listen, I'm stoked to have them on board here.
This is a new sponsor.
My daughter loves, loves, loves this product.
Quip!
This is a great product.
When it comes to your health, brushing your teeth is one of the most important parts of the day.
Quip, that's Q-U-I-P.
Q-U-I-P, Quip knows that.
They've combined dentistry and design to make a better electric toothbrush.
This is really cool, this toothbrush.
My daughter loves this thing, this toothbrush.
She loves it.
She won't give it up.
I'm going to have to go buy now my own again because she keeps taking it from me.
You know, you could change it out.
She keeps stealing the toothbrush.
I'm not even kidding.
Like, Isabel, give me back my Quip.
Quip is the new electric toothbrush that packs just the right amount of vibrations into a slimmer design at a fraction of the cost of bulkier traditional electric toothbrush.
You've seen those things.
They're enormous.
Can't even pack them in a suitcase.
It looks like a jet engine, some of these things.
And guiding pulses alert you to when to switch sides, making brushing the right amount effortless.
Sorry.
Quip also comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel anywhere, whether it's going in your gym bag or carry-on.
And because the thing that cleans your mouth should also be clean, Quip's subscription plan refreshes your brush on a dentist-recommended schedule, delivering new brush heads every three months for just $5, including free shipping worldwide.
You like that?
Quip is backed by a network of over 10,000 dental professionals, including dentists, hygienists, and dental students.
I'm telling you, this is the coolest-looking electric toothbrush you've ever seen.
It vibrates so fast, you can barely see it.
Most toothbrushes don't get named one of Time Magazine's Best Adventures of the Year, but Quip did.
Find out for yourself why.
You're going to dig this thing.
It is so unbelievably well-priced.
It's incredible.
I had a hard time when I saw the price believing it was real.
I called the company on a call, and I'm like, you sure that's the right price?
It is.
Quip, again, that's Q-U-I-P, starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com, that's getquip, Q-U-I-P.com, getquip.com, slash Dan, Getquip.com slash Dan.
Right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Dan, spelled G-E-T, get, quip, Q-U-I-P dot com slash Dan.
This thing is super cool.
You're going to love it.
You'll never use another toothbrush again.
All right.
One more final point on this.
There's been Andy McCarthy, who I have enormous respect for, and that may be an understatement, who writes at National Review, he has a piece out, because I want to be fair on this case, folks, I want to give you some alternate views on what's going on as well.
He has a piece out saying, basically, our show, yes, not calling out our show, just conservative commentators saying, hey, the show we did yesterday about, you know, Obama wants to know everything, or POTUS wants to know everything, the Peter Stroke, Lisa Page text, which I think is problematic.
And I played some audio of Barack Obama talking to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday saying that he doesn't request updates on ongoing investigations, basically.
You can listen to yesterday's show and you can hear it from Barack Obama's mouth himself.
You don't have to hear my version of it.
You can hear him say it.
McCarthy wrote in a piece, again to give you the other side, that, hey, this isn't problematic at all.
He's the commander-in-chief.
This is a counterintelligence investigation, and it's his purview to do that.
I totally get that, and Andy is absolutely right.
He is a skilled former assistant United States attorney and a really sober and smart thinker, and I want to give him a lot of credit.
But I disagree with Andy on this, and I don't think he would mind.
Andy doesn't take any of this personal, but I disagree on this.
And here's my complaint about it.
Because Barack Obama can, and I don't dispute that at all, Joe, can be briefed on something.
Do you understand?
Horse blinders here, folks.
Look straight ahead.
I am absolutely in agreement with Andy McCarthy that Barack Obama, as the commander of chief, can be briefed on whatever counterintelligence investigation he wants.
The Department of Justice and the FBI fall under Barack Obama at that time.
Point absolutely stipulated.
I don't think the question is so much, can he be briefed?
It's, should he have been briefed?
Now, to be fair again, it says, the text says, POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
We don't know what that means, but I think a reasonable person would suggest if everything Stroke and Page were doing was investigating Hillary, answering Hillary questions still, even though the investigation had been closed because they were still answering questions on it.
And releasing documents and getting ready or knee-deep in a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump team.
I think it's fair enough to say, Joe, that that's probably what Barack Obama was wanting to be briefed on.
I don't think that's a leap.
The question is, should he have been briefed on it?
It's clear to me and clear as day that there was an investigation involving Department of Justice assets working for President Obama that were targeting his political enemies and letting off lightly his political friends.
The question again isn't can he, I think it's should he have been involved.
Now, Andy may disagree and that's fine.
I don't think yesterday was in grounds, was grounds for like some reverse impeachment of Barack Obama now that he's out of office.
My simple suggestion here is I think from the start this was a setup on Donald Trump and any attachment to the White House is problematic by its very nature because I don't think this was a, I think this was an illicit operation from the start.
Does that make sense, Joe?
I don't think he should have been briefed.
No, yeah.
He should have understood the political sensitivity of the matter and at a minimum kept at arm's length from it.
That's my only point.
One more issue with this too as well.
Byron York has another excellent piece.
He's done incredible work on this at the Washington Examiner today, which again will be at the show notes at bungie.com.
Thank you for driving the traffic to our site.
We appreciate it.
It makes putting this show on a lot easier and what Joe and I are planning ahead a lot easier to do too.
So we got a lot of big things coming up.
All right.
Byron York talks about how the faith in now Christopher Steele and the attempt to resuscitate Christopher Steele's reputation in the dossier, folks, is absolutely everything.
Because without Steele's reputation, if the Democrats don't resuscitate and resurrect his reputation, you have no dossier.
Because the dossier is all Steele's word.
If Steele's reputation is shattered, which it is, the dossier is shattered.
If the dossier is shattered, which was the bulk of the information presented to the FISA court to spy on the Trump team, if that's shattered, you basically have a FISA court which spied on someone with no credible information at all.
You have a problem.
So the FBI right now and people, excuse me, the politicians on the left and the Democrats are desperate to resurrect the image of Steele and his work with the FBI.
So one of the things he talks about, Byron York, in this piece is How it's interesting in the reauthorization in January of 2017, the reauthorization to spy on Trump, that the FBI at this point knows Steele is a fraud.
They know it.
Why?
Because Steele's been talking to the press, Yahoo News and Mother Jones, Joe, while telling the FBI and others he's not talking to the press.
Right.
Folks, this makes sense.
He's lying.
By January of 2017, for the reauthorization of the spying, the FBI unquestionably knows this.
Now, they give an excuse to the court that is fascinating.
They know they can't run from the FISA court anymore on this because Steele is openly talking to the press.
The information that's appearing in Mother Jones and Yahoo News is the same information the FBI has.
There's no way it's from anybody else other than Steele, and Steele admitted to it.
In a British court filing, he admitted talking to the press.
The excuse they give for Steele, the FBI, again, because if they don't resuscitate Steele, they don't have a dossier.
If they don't have a dossier, they don't have a case.
They're like, you know, Mr. Court, folks, well, Steele just talked to the press because he was angry that the Clinton case was reopened.
Remember the Hillary email case, which was reopened when they discovered the emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop?
I can't just say the Weiner laptop.
You have to say Anthony or else it just sounds way too weird.
They said, well, he was just angry that the case was reopened and therefore that's why he went to the press.
What's the problem with that, folks?
I'm telling you this case stinks to the heavens.
The problem is he was talking to the press, as he's already acknowledged in court filings, before the Clinton email case was reopened.
Folks, the lies on top of the lies on top of the lies on top of the deceptions just continue to build and build and build and cause a legion of complications.
I'm going to wrap up this portion of the show and get into some other stuff, but I want to leave you with this thought.
Democrats, liberals, delusional never-Trumpers, police state defenders, people who think they're defending the FBI but you're not helping.
Trust me, you're not helping.
I have sources on this.
You are not helping.
The Bureau, the working men and women of the Bureau want this thing gone.
They want the truth and they want to move on.
You're not helping.
I'm begging you as a fellow American citizen, I may be your political opponent, I am not an opponent for you for the better of the country and moving forward.
We both have that interest in mind.
Let it go.
Admit the truth.
Admit what happened.
There may be legal consequences for the people involved, but stop defending this thing.
Do you understand you are delaying the inevitable?
People email me, Dan, you said the other day, I don't think people are going to get arrested.
I'm so disappointed.
Folks, the truth is I don't know what's going to happen, but I know this.
They cannot run from the truth.
The Trump team is in charge now.
The Obama team obfuscated and hid the truth on the IRS and Benghazi and all this other stuff for eight years because they controlled the mechanisms of power.
They don't anymore.
As time goes on, more Obama acolytes and deep staters are going to leave the government and the information is going to come out.
There has been a litany of bombshell reports.
It's been coming out day after day, week after week.
It's going to get overwhelming.
Just let it go.
You know, there's a There's a, in business, I've owned a couple businesses and I went to business school.
I'm like, who cares?
I'm not telling you that to impress you.
I'm just, in business school, they have this, they teach about this line that businesses will use sometimes, Joe, called, you know, let's just take a bath on this one.
In other words, if you're just going to declare a loss and the loss is substantial and you could maybe, through different accounting tactics, hide it amongst certain quarterly filings, right?
Just take a bath, release it all at once, let your stock price take a hit, and just start over.
Liberals, it's time to take a bath.
You lost.
You spied on a political opponent.
The guy you believed in, his administration, Barack Obama, and his chosen political successor, Hillary Clinton.
They got caught.
You defending it, history is not going to be kind to you.
And to the really morally compromised people in the media who are backing you up, you, who had a responsibility to tell the truth, are even more disgusting.
No, I mean it.
Absolutely disgusting.
Your one job is to tell the truth.
And you have completely, utterly failed.
History will not be kind.
Okay, I got some really good stories today, by the way, because Trump is playing, I'm absolutely convinced, six-dimensional chess now again.
I know, I know, sometimes you guys laugh when we say stuff like that, but I'm telling you, he beat the media and the Democrats again on another issue.
Wait till I tell you this one.
All right, today's show also brought to you by buddies at Man Crates.
This is the best gift around.
I get so much feedback on this.
Me and Joe love this, especially the salami bouquet.
The salami bouquet, I have a refrigerator in my garage too.
It's full of salami from the salami bouquet.
Hey, give your guy a box of chocolates for Valentine's Day.
It's boring.
Surprise him with a heart-shaped box of delicious beef jerky, the ultimate snack for Odesiak.
Our buddies at Man Crates here, they offer the best gift for guys, and they have a litany of gifts out there, and I know this is tough.
My wife never knows what to get me.
Introducing ManCrates.com, the only place to find awesome gifts guys love.
It's not a cologne sampler or some tacky mug.
ManCrates offers curated gift collections for every type of guy.
The home chef, the outdoorsman, the sports fanatic.
They got a gift for you.
Check out classics like the NFL Barware Crate and the Whiskey Appreciation Crate or fresh takes on traditional Valentine's gifts like Joe and I's personal favorite, the Salami Bouquet or the Jerky Heart.
Just give me some meat.
Yeah, baby.
Give me the flesh of dead animals.
Go to mancrates.com.
Pick the perfect gift and wait for that magic moment.
He'll fall head over heels when his gift arrives, and you, folks, this is not a joke.
You get to pry the wooden crate open with the included crowbar.
Sometimes I get a hammer, I go in my yard, and I cheat a little bit and smash the thing open.
They have thousands of five-star reviews.
And every gift comes with a complete satisfaction guarantee.
Here's where you go.
No better gift for Valentine's Day for your dude.
Go to mancrates.com slash Dan for 5% off.
They don't offer a discount anywhere else.
You can get 5% off right now at mancrates.com slash Dan.
That's mancrates.com slash Dan.
This thing is legit.
Go check out the gifts they have there.
You will not be disappointed.
Okay, moving on.
So yesterday, this story has been getting bandied about in the media about Trump proposing a military parade in D.C.
Let me give you a little bit of background.
I'm sure you've heard of it, Joe.
Trump went to France to meet with Macron and they had a military parade in France.
It's actually not that uncommon throughout the world.
And regardless of how you feel about a military parade or not, I don't think it's a bad idea at all if the military is okay with doing it.
Celebrating a military to me is something I'd be very proud to do.
But I also, again, to be fair and give you both sides, there are some people who think it sounds kind of dictatorish.
Again, I don't feel that way, but whatever, I'll give you both sides.
That's not the point.
I'm not here and I'm not going to debate to you and the rest of the portion of the show and take up your time debating the pros and cons of the military parade.
I told you how I felt.
You're free to feel however you want.
I don't think Trump really was proposing a military parade.
I don't!
Now, I'm not saying everything Trump does is four and five dimensional chess.
Sometimes I think he does things and he generally thinks, all right, that was probably a bad idea.
I'd like to take it back.
And I don't feel any need to defend it.
And I think in his own head, excuse me, neither does he.
But I really believe this was absolute bait for the liberals and the left wing media.
And like suckers, they took it again and ran with it.
What do I mean?
Yeah.
What makes you think that?
I think what he did, Joe, is he knows a military parade's not going to happen.
He sees the idea.
He knows, by the way, that he's had a lot of success.
Remember that we talked about in an episode about three, four months ago, the Trump strategy of throwing out something That is a hyperbolic, unattainable position waiting for the liberals to respond and baiting them into a response that shows as, pardon the language folks, but that makes them show their asses.
Yes, I remember that.
Remember that show and we got some feedback.
Don't say that on the show.
The problem, gosh, I don't want to lose you folks on this because some guy complained to me yesterday.
He said, you don't get to the point quick enough.
I have to set it up.
The problem with liberals, In contrast to conservatives, is liberals will not tell you what they actually stand for while conservatives will.
It's been a big complaint amongst conservative activists for a long time that we run on honest positions, not Republicans, conservatives.
I want to be crystal clear.
Right, Joe?
Yeah.
Cut taxes.
Let people control their health care, let people pick where their kids go to school, and deregulate our economy.
This is not a mystery, folks.
Any conservative running for office will run on four, and that's not it, folks.
That's just a brief synopsis of what conservatism is, and a lot of libertarians as well.
The beef we've had with liberals for a long time is they don't tell you that.
They run on all kinds of garbage and nonsense and you never understand what they really stand for.
Think about the tax cuts, for example.
What was Joe?
What was liberals like Nancy Pelosi?
What was their big beef with the tax cut?
It doesn't cut taxes for the middle class!
Joe!
I thought you hated tax cuts!
Isn't that the liberal platform?
Like, I don't know, the tax cuts, no good.
The government's the benevolent force in our lives.
Taxes pay the government.
The government will take care of us all.
Joe, am I crazy?
Is that not the liberal platform?
The whole point of this platform here was to give you a platform that people can vote on.
But if people are confused about what the platform is, like they are with liberals, then how do we get an honest group of like a voting electorate?
Does this make sense, Joe?
Yeah!
Like, the genius of what Trump does on immigration and on other things is he puts out a position he knows is probably untenable.
He's not putting it out... Now, this may generate some controversy, but I'm okay with it, and I'll take it.
Okay.
I don't, he's done this before, I'll give you an example, with the wall.
I don't think Trump really believes there's going to be a full border wall, but I don't believe that, I'm sorry.
You've said that, yeah.
I believe he ran on it through this position out there that he realizes is a bit of an exaggeration based on what's legislatively possible.
I'm sure he'd like to see it, but he probably understands it's not going to happen because of the political gridlock we have in DC.
He throws his position out there not to actually build a wall, or as he says he's going to, but to watch the Democrats respond out of Trump derangement syndrome.
No wall!
No borders!
No nothing!
Now all of a sudden people are like, wait, wait, the Democrats who've told us forever that their national security hawks don't want a border wall, they want unfettered immigration and open borders, this is crazy!
Joe, is this making sense?
That's a really good illustration, yes.
Nobody, thank you, nobody has been able to do that with the Democrats and it's why people still to this day will vote Democrat even though they share none of their values.
I know this, I ran for office, I knocked on doors, And I used to love knocking on doors in an area Joe's familiar with, Prince George's County, Maryland, which is the wealthiest, largely minority county in the country, or one of them.
It's either one or two.
It's largely black and hispanic, but they're a very wealthy people.
You have government employees, you have doctors.
There are parts of it that are struggling, but there are some very wealthy parts of it as well.
I would knock on doors running for Senate in Maryland.
I'd talk to black voters and they'd tell me, I'd know they were Democrats because you can see their voter registration.
And it'd be amazing.
You talk to them about values and what mattered to them, and I swear to you folks, they would lay out a Republican platform.
Hard work, pro-life, and I would leave scratching my head saying, how the hell are these people voting Democrat?
I've told you this story, Joe, a thousand times.
This was not one interaction, folks.
This would happen repeatedly.
The genius of Trump is that he's exposing the strategy that Democrats have used to get this very same people I'm talking about to vote Democrat.
They've confused them.
You hear Pelosi out there saying, we don't support this tax cut because it doesn't help the middle class and cut their taxes enough.
People like, yeah, the Democrats are for tax cuts.
No, they're not.
They haven't been for tax cuts since John F. Kennedy.
They're not for tax cuts.
The genius of Trump is throwing out a position, he knows it's hyperbolic, not to get it, Not to get the wall, not to get a military parade, but to get the Democrats to come out publicly and go, Wall sucks!
Open borders, babe!
Military parade?
Screw the military!
Screw them!
Screw the military!
Now, for those of you who will cut that piece out, clearly I love the military.
I adore the military and their sacrifices, but I know the hacks at Media Matters will say, Dan Bongino said screw the military.
No, that's not what he said.
I'm talking about you imbeciles.
Do you see the genius of it?
I'm absolutely convinced, Joseph, he did it again!
He didn't really want a military parade!
He had no... I absolutely believe it!
He threw it out there, and what did he watch yesterday, and what happened?
He watched the media people, people on CNN, people on MSNBC.
Joe, this is why I brought this up, by the way.
Remember who I ran against in the Senate race in Maryland?
Ben Cardin?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Nice guy, personally.
Yeah, but a liberal Democrat.
I know.
Yeah, of course you do.
Ben Cardin introduced a bill yesterday to ban military parades and the expenditure of U.S.
money on a military parade.
Ben, seriously, I ran against you.
You're a nice guy.
We were always friendly.
But seriously, do you realize you just showed your ass?
I mean, do you realize he just played you for a fool?
You really want the headline, Ben Cardin bans military parades.
I mean, that's...
This is... I'm telling you this was not an accident.
I'm telling you.
This was another effort like the wall to say something, not to get it done the way he's saying it, but to get the Democrats to do what they haven't done for voters in a long time, which is show the voters who they really are.
Talk about burying it.
How do you think this... Right?
How do you... We're stepping in it knee-deep, brother.
How do you think the Democrats How do you think for years they've gotten those voters, who I told you I knocked on the doors, to vote for people who don't share their values at all?
Because they've never shown you what their values are.
What Trump has done by aggravating them so much and instilling a sense of deep Trump derangement syndrome... Joe, this is important.
I'm gonna leave it here.
Okay.
Where they react emotionally, and they don't act strategically.
The genius of Trump has been in showing working class Democrats and middle class Americans the insanity of what the Democrat Party's become today.
Give us your money, give us your kids, give us your healthcare, and basically, ah, military parade!
Screw them, let's ban military parades!
It is a genius move, and I tweeted it this morning.
Regardless of your feelings about it, I'm convinced he beat them again.
And these suckers fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Just amazing.
Oh, man.
I saw this story.
I'm like, we've got to cover this today.
All right.
Another interesting story I've been holding all week because, again, it shows you just the hypocrisy of the far left wing of the Democrat Party, and that's really hijacked the party as we know it now.
You know, I wake up every morning and my goal is to get across to you that although Republicans may not be the answer anymore, and I think after this budget bill that's pretty clear, conservatism is and will always be the answer.
And liberalism is a fraud.
They're liars.
And as I kind of alluded to in the last segment we did, I'm proud to be a conservative because what I believe, I don't waver on.
I believe what I believe because I believe it's right.
Liberals, I would argue, you strongly believe in power.
And they believe in ends that justifies the means, meaning the means to get there can change.
There's no principled way to do things.
There's only a way to acquire power.
I saw a story, and I saw this like two weeks ago.
I've just been so enmeshed in this Obamagate spying scandal.
I haven't been able to get to it.
That's really fascinating.
It exposes liberals for who they are, Joe.
So here's the long and short of it.
California, the liberal state of California, is in the process of suing petrochemical companies, you know, oil and gas companies, for climate change.
And the basis of the lawsuit is, you're going to destroy our cities, there's going to be flooding, it's going to be chaos, everything's going to, we're all going to die.
So they're suing the petrochemical companies, oil and gas companies, because we're all going to die and they're going to have to pay for it.
You may say, well, what's interesting about that story?
Nothing!
That's what the Democrats do.
They sue oil and gas companies, you know.
Keep in mind, the very same Democrats, by the way, who fly around the world and charter jets, who, you know, drive around in 67-car motorcades.
I mean, these very same Democrats.
You got that?
Thousands of Americans would die.
Well, what's going to happen if oil companies, Bernie, continue to sell oil and gas?
Thousands of Americans would die.
What's going to happen in California if we allow gas stations to exist?
Thousands of Americans would die.
What's going to happen if we don't sue these oil and gas companies and allow those evil capitalists to make money?
Thousands of Americans would die.
Bernie, what's going to happen, finally, if Democrats don't take charge and wipe clean the stain of petrochemicals from America as we know it?
Thousands of Americans would die.
Of course thousands of Americans will die, that's what they believe.
Now, again, that story in and of itself is totally unsurprising and completely uninteresting.
What's fascinating and showing you that the liberals don't believe what they believe is California, the state of California, they sell and localities and states and local entities will sell municipal bonds, muni bonds, Joe.
In other words, you know, wherever you may live, whatever it may be, east to an official Ohio, they'll sell a municipal bond at the local entity.
And those municipal bonds are typically tax-free in some respect.
And what they do is they allow people to lend money to government to engage in projects and municipal bond projects, whatever they may be.
What's absolutely fascinating is all the claims they made in the lawsuit against these oil companies show, you know, thousands of people will die, the cities are going to flood, it's all going to fall apart.
If they actually believe those claims, Joe, this is the coolest story ever.
Don't you think?
They may want to put that in their bond sales so that people who are buying bonds, in other words, investing in these construction projects in these same cities, would want to know that thousands of people are going to die and a place is going to fall apart because climate change is going to happen tomorrow?
Yeah, I'd want to know.
You'd want to know, right Joe?
You're lending the city of San Francisco $100,000 of your money to build a project on land in a lawsuit you're saying isn't going to exist because thousands of people are going to die and the land is going to flood and climate change is going to overrun it.
But Joe, what do you think is conveniently missing from the municipal bond prospectus type thing, and the information in the bond prospectus, that exact piece of information?
So when you want to sue oil and gas companies, San Francisco is going to float away.
And the oil and gas companies should pay for it, right?
But when you need to sell bonds to get money from people and you don't want to pay a high risk premium, in other words, Joe, you want to downplay the risk because you don't want to pay a lot of interest, right?
If I'm selling a bond on land that's going to float away in 10 years, the people buying that bond are going to be like, well, man, I want a lot of interest on that bond because I'm not going to give you that money.
Land's not going to be there.
But that's not what they say.
When they sell municipal bonds, they say, oh, no, no, no, we're okay.
It's all good.
We're fine.
Folks, I mean, is this not, I saw the story in the Wall Street Journal.
I can't put it in this because it's a subscription only piece, but I'm summing up to you what the piece says.
And now there are people out there that are going to sue who are saying, hey, we bought these bonds.
You're telling the oil company, San Francisco is going to, you know, going to float away and thousands of people are going to die.
But then in our bond sale, will we let you money?
You're saying, no, no, it's all good, fellas.
Because they don't believe it.
Because it's fake.
They're making it up.
I told you they don't have the very same principles we do.
They will have whatever principles gets them to that ends.
And that ends to them is government control and taking your money.
It's really disgusting, folks.
All right, one more story here I wanted to talk about today.
So a great report at the Daily Wire about a topic that's sensitive to my heart and has been for a very long time about the liberal nonsensical theory that... it's going to tie into another story so I shouldn't say one more but...
Daily Wire is a story about tax cuts.
One of my big beefs, folks, if you're a regular listener to the show, you know this, is this nonsensical liberal theory that is, in fact, not true and is not based in fact at all, that government tax cuts are going to cause revenue dips.
In other words, they're going to, quote, cost the government money, which in and of itself is nonsense.
We all know that, right?
Tax cuts don't cost the government anything.
The government doesn't produce anything.
The government simply takes value from you.
The government doesn't produce anything.
No.
The government is not a business.
It doesn't recombine different pieces of value into an economic service or good of higher value.
The government simply takes money from you, okay?
When the government doesn't take money from you in the form of a tax cut, it doesn't cost them anything.
It's like a guy walking down the street who refuses to rob you.
That doesn't cost him money, okay?
It's your money.
Control over the money matters.
It's your money, you earned it, you created the value.
The government doesn't create value.
This is important, because one of the central themes of liberalism for a long time would be, oh, tax cuts cost the government money, the government is a positive philanthropic force in our lives, Joe, and therefore, if we cost the government money, we are not doing the public good, right?
Because the government's a force for good, so we can't cost the government money.
Does that make sense?
Summed up in an interesting little nutshell, government, good thing.
This is liberals.
Yeah, makes sense to a liberal, yeah.
Right, right.
Government needs money, therefore give the government money to do good things.
So their credo here is that if we cut taxes and we cost the government money, good things won't happen.
I have debated to you strongly over time that based on the historical evidence from nearly every significant tax cut in American history, there is no evidence that tax cuts, quote, cost the government money.
None.
You can make all the arguments you want, folks.
You will never make 2 plus 2 equals 7.
Just look at the tax tables.
I include them in the show notes often.
The Reagan tax cut.
The George W. Bush tax cut.
The Calvin Coolidge tax cut, the John F. Kennedy tax cut, the Bill Clinton capital gains tax cut.
Yes, I said that right.
Listen to me, and listen good, because you will never be able to prove me wrong.
None of those tax cuts cost the government revenue.
Government revenue went up.
You can dance with the numbers all you want.
Is a percentage GDP?
It doesn't matter.
The hard fact is whether you inflation adjust or not, government revenue did not go down after the tax cuts.
After any of those.
Matter of fact, one of the largest four-year spikes we had in tax revenue in American history was after the George W. Bush tax cuts.
Look up the article by Dwyer in the Washington Times about the Bush tax cuts.
Just Google that and you'll see what I'm telling you.
Tax revenue went up.
That's a fact.
I'm not going to debate it with the liberals.
They email me all of this stuff.
And they still, it's funny when they email me, Joe, they never actually refute what I'm telling them.
They'll send me fancy numbers.
Well, it would have went up more as a percent, but it didn't.
But you're telling me tax revenue did not go down after taxes.
Yes, but it would have went up more.
How do you know that?
Oh, I don't, but I'm guessing.
Okay, thanks.
I'm not guessing.
I'm telling you as a fact that this happened.
Tax revenue went up after those tax cuts.
Why am I bringing this up today?
Because the Trump tax cut just took effect, and what were we told by the liberals, Joe?
We were told, oh my gosh, this is crazy.
Tax revenue is going to go down.
The government does good things with your tax money.
We're all going to die again.
Well, Daily Wire is a piece that tax revenue in the first quarter after the tax cut, compared to last year, Went up!
By 18 billion dollars.
How did that happen?
Come again?
We were just told tax revenue was going... Now, folks, to be clear, we were told by the liberals tax revenue would go down.
We just had a tax cut the first quarter after the tax cut as compared to tax revenue from last year's $18 billion higher.
I absolutely get even the Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians listening will probably say, well, Dan, you know, just to affect the tax cut, we can't attribute that to the tax cut.
Yes, you are right.
100%.
I'm not attributing anything to the tax cut.
I'm simply telling you exactly what I'm telling you about the Reagan tax cuts, the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Kennedy tax cuts, the Coolidge tax cuts, and the Clinton tax cut.
That the point liberals are making Tax cuts equals loss of tax revenue to the government.
That point is categorically false.
That's all I'm saying.
I am not making any causal inference at all.
I'm simply saying what the liberals are telling you is absolutely false.
Easily proven false.
Just look at the numbers.
We cut taxes.
Tax revenue is going to go down.
It's gone up.
It's gone up by 18 billion compared to the last quarter.
What are you saying, Dan?
The tax cuts, how would they, they just were instituted.
I'm not saying any of that.
I don't need to.
I don't need to make a separate point, Joseph.
I just need to make the point that what you're saying is categorically false.
You've said tax revenue goes down when the government cuts taxes.
You cannot prove that.
You can't prove it under Reagan.
You can't prove it under Bush.
It didn't happen.
And it didn't happen now.
You're just making it up.
I'll include this piece.
It's in the Daily Wire today that the site Ben Shapiro is associated with.
It's a really good piece.
It'll be in the show notes.
Please read it.
Keep it up on your phone or print it and highlight the section and ask your liberal friends to show you again where tax revenue went down.
Now, fairly enough, some of you have emailed me and said, well, you do owe us some form of an explanation, Joe, just because you're saying it's not causal.
Why does tax revenue not go down?
Folks, it's quite simple when you think about it.
I don't need to be long-winded about it.
I told you I opened up this segment intentionally this way.
I said to you, the government doesn't create value.
The government takes value from others.
The government doesn't take a piece of glass and a rare earth mineral and a production machine and create an iPhone.
Those things in and of themselves are only worth a certain amount.
The glass, the plastic, right, Joe?
The rare earth minerals that are in an iPhone.
They're only worth, say, all combined separately, they're worth about, I don't know, $300, $400.
The iPhone, though, especially the X, sells for like $1,000 now.
What is that $700?
though, especially the X sells for like a thousand dollars now.
What is that $700?
The $700 in revenue and profit and proceeds, whatever you'd like to call it,
is the financial reward, Joe, for combining the glass, the rare earth minerals and the plastic in a way nobody
done before.
Or else there wouldn't have been an iPhone X!
Then someone else would have made it!
It would have been the JoePhone X!
But there isn't a Joe Phonex, because Joe, for as smart as Joe is, could not figure out how to make the Joe Phonex with the same components.
Right, Joe?
You didn't figure it out first?
I'm not crazy, right?
No, no.
I thought about it, but I was too late.
But you didn't do it.
I thought about it too.
It'd be nice to have a Dan Phonex, but it didn't happen.
So iPhone, well Apple in this case, to be precise, is rewarded for folks, remember this term, adding value.
This is what liberals don't understand.
They took disparate components, not worth a thousand dollars, they combine them in a new way into a product that does special things.
That they can now charge more than some component of their parts for, and that more, Joseph, is the financial incentive to produce a product no one's seen before that people want.
The iPhone X. That's how this works.
Now, how does this relate to tax revenue?
Because the way you produce added value, proceeds, profit, revenue, Is by investing in research and technology and capital that figures out ways to recombine these things.
Somebody at Apple was paid a lot of money to take a bunch of rare earth minerals, glass and plastic, and figure out a way to do something new.
When you do that, you create more value.
When you create more value, you create more products.
When you create more products that are of value, you create a growing economy.
When you create a growing economy, and the government takes a percentage of that growing economy, the government's percentage of that growing economy, even if it stays the same, results in more money, because the economy's growing!
The pizza's getting bigger!
If you have a pizza, you cut it into eight slices.
And the diameter of the pizza is a foot long.
And then the pizza grows to three times the size, right?
And it's probably not appropriate area calculations, but the diameter of the pizza is now three feet long, but you're still cutting it into eight slices.
That's a big damn piece of pizza.
That's a big slice.
That's a big slice, brother.
This is why government revenue likely goes up When you stick more money into the private economy, it is more free... I hate when I say that.
Free market economy.
It's not private.
When you stick more money into the free market economy by cutting taxes and you allow entrepreneurs to invest in new ways to put glass, rare earth minerals, and plastic together into new iPhones and things like that, you create added value, more value.
The government doesn't do that!
The free market does that.
That grows the economy so that the government can leech off it.
A little harsh, right?
This is what's upsetting about this.
Now, I want to wrap with this.
This is kind of related to that.
So does that make sense, Joe?
Why tax cuts would lead to increased tax revenue?
Yeah, I mean, we've said it a number of times.
I mean, like 10,000 times.
It's not complicated, but liberals still don't seem to get it.
I bring this up because I did read a story in the Wall Street Journal today about Oxfam, which has turned into a far-left organization.
It started for a really good cause, but Oxfam just put out this report.
The report's titled Reward work, not wealth.
And their suggestion in there is something I've warned you about for a long time.
Their suggestion is to create a global tax entity that can create a global tax structure.
So basically what Oxfam wants is to tax the hell out of successful entrepreneurs.
The exact opposite of what I'm telling you actually creates wealth and prosperity.
But folks, this is not an accident.
I've warned you before about this.
Liberals hate the idea of subsidiarity, local control.
They hate it.
Why do they hate it?
Because if entities can tax at the local level, and it's not a global tax body, people can escape.
You don't like the high taxes in New York or Maryland?
Do what I did.
Move to Florida.
There's no state income tax.
Liberals hate that.
So do the liberals at Oxfam.
The liberals want a global tax body because they want no... I don't say it in a frightening, kind of apocalyptic way.
I'm telling you that this is their strategy.
Their strategy is to institute some form of global taxation so there's no way you can run away from the high taxation and guaranteed poverty that accompanies it.
But they're doing it.
In the name of reducing inequality, which ironically will reduce inequality because it'll make everybody poor.
Absolutely guaranteed.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I really appreciate it.
Please go to Bongino.com, subscribe to my email list there, and you're always welcome to email me.
The email's on the website.
Give me your feedback on the show.
I really appreciate it.
I'll see you all next week.
You just heard the Dan Bongino Show.
Get more of Dan online anytime at conservativereview.com.
