In this episode I address the latest radical Democrat proposal to take away your healthcare plan. I also address the scandalous cover up of this key piece of paperwork by deep state actors. Finally, I explode the myth that tax cuts are causing our deficit problems.
News Picks:
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This Democrat candidate for president vows to eliminate your job’s insurance plan.
Clueless Washington Post reporter calls Trump supporter “rubes.”
Our debt problem is approaching catastrophic levels.
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Border Patrol wives issue a scathing letter to Nancy Pelosi.
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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?
Hey, man.
Doing okay.
No, you're not.
What are you, fussy today?
Yeah, I'm doing great.
You grumpy like my seven-year-old?
I didn't get my bottle this morning.
You sound a little off-kilted today.
I can tell.
Producers are usually like, yeah man!
Get me off this damn show tonight.
Are we done with this thing yet?
Oh, I'm not used to hearing you like that, man.
We've been working hard, though.
Poor guy's probably not getting a lot of sleep.
Nah, we're doing good.
We're all working hard.
Yeah, yeah, we are.
We're trying to get this video thing up for you real soon, folks.
We just want to make it perfect, as always.
Audio content, Joe does a great job keeping it sharp, and we don't want to disappoint you with anything else.
All right, I got a lot to get to today, including some just really Frictional, I think.
Frictional?
I don't know the best way to say it.
Explosive, astonishing, troubling, disturbing comments by Democrat candidates for president, notably Kamala Harris, about healthcare.
I'm going to play her comments, by the way.
I'll give commentary on her comments, but we didn't edit it.
I'm going to give you her comments about basically taking away your healthcare now.
You know, all of our Remember Joe, we were all called conspiracy theorists when we indicated that Obamacare was just a Trojan horse to make their way into the free market healthcare system to take that away and take away your free market healthcare and give it over to the government.
Now they're just openly admitting it.
I want to get to that.
I also want to get to Nunes.
Nunes said something just incredible on Maria Bartiromo's show this weekend that I I chatted about a bit on yesterday's show, but I want to go into a little more detail, and I want to talk about something else in Venezuela, some really important takeaways from you.
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All right.
Let's get to it.
Kamala Harris was interviewing with Jake Tapper from CNN and the Democrats are no longer hiding their far left radical lurch, Joe.
They are no longer hiding their desire to take over the means of production in the economy, including the healthcare system, which is a, has a massive footprint on our economy, creates jobs, creates employment and leads to, you know, health outcomes, hopefully good health outcomes for people who utilize it.
We, we were, People like me and Joe who did shows on this three and four years ago on my podcast warned you that Obamacare was an entry vehicle into getting the government in control of the healthcare system.
Now, Joe, we did shows on this.
Remember this.
We said Obamacare is the Trojan horse.
Now, all the leftists, Joe, remember when they told us, you're a conspiracy theorist, Obamacare's not designed, remember this, to destroy free market healthcare?
You're all crazy!
Nuts!
Yeah.
Queue up that cut.
Kamala Harris, now announced presidential candidate for 2020 on the Democrat side against Donald Trump, talking exactly about what we were called conspiracy theorists for warning you about three, four, and five years ago.
Play that cut.
You support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders.
You're also a co-sponsor onto it.
I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance.
So for people out there who like their insurance, they don't get to keep it?
Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care.
And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.
Who of us has not had that situation where you got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this.
Let's eliminate all of that.
Let's move on.
Did you hear that, folks?
Folks, did you hear that?
There's a couple of takeaways from that.
I want you to tattoo on your skull and your brain so you understand where the radical far-left is going in this 2020 election against Donald Trump.
One of the first things she says, which I find tragically comical because she's either one of two things, grossly ignorant on how healthcare economics works, or she's lying to you.
She says, You know, we're going to make sure everybody has health insurance.
And she makes the cardinal sin of far-left radical liberals when they talk about health care.
She confuses intentionally, I believe, because Kamala Harris is not stupid.
Don't make any mistakes here.
This is not an ignorant woman.
She's very bright.
She knows exactly what she's doing.
She confuses Joe.
Insurance, health insurance versus access.
She says, I'm sorry, she says, we want to guarantee access for everyone.
No, you don't want to guarantee access.
Stop making that up.
You want to guarantee insurance, which Joe, anybody can do.
The government can say, hey, everybody gets an insurance plan.
It's called government insurance.
It's called Joey Bag of Donuts insurance plan.
Well, can you use the insurance?
But no, you can't use it anywhere.
Nobody's actually going to accept it.
Oh, that's your answer?
So what she does is she talks about guaranteeing access for everyone, but what she really means is guaranteeing insurance.
But guaranteeing insurance via the government that can't be used because doctors are going to stop working, hospitals are going to stop working, and care will be rationed, which I'll get to in a minute, is not in fact access.
Joe, please tell me this makes sense.
You are always the audience on Budsman.
Insurance isn't access.
Stop confusing the two.
No, no.
Okay, we're good.
Yeah.
It is not access.
Tons of people have government-run insurance programs, whether it's SCHIP, Medicare, or Medicaid, that cannot get to a doctor in a reasonable time because they've stopped accepting Medicaid patients.
Access is not insurance.
Whenever a democrat says you're going to guarantee access, how are you going to do that?
If a doctor's office, if it takes $10,000 to open the door every morning to pay your staff, to pay for the electric used in the sonogram machines, The x-ray machines, whatever it may be, to pay the insurance bill.
And the government says, we're only going to pay you $9,000 a day.
And the doctor's office has to shut down because the simple economics of it indicate he would lose or she would lose $1,000 every day they open their door.
The doctor shuts down.
That is not access.
You can't guarantee access.
Joe, what are they going to do?
Pull the doctor out of there in handcuffs and say, you will serve these people no matter what.
What are you gonna do?
You can't guarantee access.
That is an absurd, outrageous statement that relies exclusively on economic ignorance.
There's no way you can do that.
You can't guarantee access.
And guaranteeing insurance means nothing if the insurance doesn't guarantee access.
Folks, please tell me you understand the difference here.
Anybody of using government power can say, you all have government health insurance.
If the insurance doesn't guarantee access to actual health care, it is self-defeating.
What's the point?
She's intentionally confusing the two things.
Secondly, I said I'd get to the rationing versus the pricing thing, and this is important.
Folks, I've indicated and talked about this and tried to push people and prod people in the right direction so they understand how to talk to their liberal friends about health care.
Again, I think that's largely useless at times for the liberal, but sometimes there's a third party listening that you can convince.
You know, liberals aren't interested in facts and data, but when you debate them, sometimes there's a third party listening and you can convince them.
So it's worth your time to engage, right?
But liberals don't understand or pretend to not understand the difference between insurance and access.
Insurance doesn't guarantee access.
Access guarantees access, and the only way to guarantee access is to engage in indentured servitude, where you force doctors against their will to work against their will, which is not possible in a constitutional republic.
Now, you may say, I said before, care will be rationed in a government system.
We know this because it's already rationed in single-payer systems.
Look at the United Kingdom, where 5% of doctors, and a survey was conducted a few years ago, admitted, these are only the ones that admitted, Joe, 5% of doctors in the United Kingdom admitted to knowing patients that had died on a waiting list.
I've read to you statistics.
10 and 20 week waiting lists.
Sometimes more for seeing a specialist in these social medicine single payer systems where the government runs it.
Now.
I've explained a couple times the why, but it's important to reiterate it now.
Why?
Why, when government controls medicine, is it rationed by time?
Rationed by time, meaning a waiting list.
It is handed out to people based on time.
You go first, you go second, you go third, you go fourth, you go ten weeks later, you go twenty weeks later.
Why is that?
Because, ladies and gentlemen, there are only two ways to allocate resources.
Anywhere!
In the known civilized human race, there's only two ways to do it.
Whether it's oil, whether it's food, whether it's a doctor's time, these are scarce resources.
Food is not unlimited.
A doctor's time is not unlimited.
Gold, rare earth minerals, they are not unlimited.
So the way free people allocate resources is by price.
They allow people to bid on it.
That's what you do when you go to eBay or even when you go to a store.
Right.
You may say, I'm not bidding on things in the store.
You are!
You're bidding on them every day.
You walk into Macy's or whatever, Sears, before they went going out of business, I think they were going out of business, whatever, the local Walmart, you see a product.
Ah, that bread, $3.
I don't like that.
That's too expensive.
I'm going to go with this other bread instead.
You're already bidding on the price.
You do it every day!
When the price gets too high, you don't buy it!
When the price gets too high, if you don't buy it, the producer of that product has to either lower the price to get more consumers to buy their product, or, what happens, Joe, if a lot of people, despite the high price, buy it anyway, like the initial investment into flat-screen televisions 10 years ago, and HD technology, what do other producers say?
Wow, people must really like this, Joe!
Their demand is inelastic here.
They're spending four and five thousand dollars.
There's a heavy markup on here.
So what happens, Joe?
Other producers come in and make the product cheaper so they can get a cut of that revenue too.
Listen, I don't want to beat you to death with grade school economics, but the fact that we're having common sense arguments about economics that could be taught in first grade is deeply troubling to me.
That's how we handle, in a free society, the allocation of resources.
By price.
Who fills in the gaps?
Social services and people who will fill in the gaps when people who are really poor can't afford the price.
Children, other things like that.
That's always been the way it worked.
Joe, if you don't price products and services, what's the only other way to get those products and services out there?
Rationum!
To rationum!
If a doctor's services were, hey, they're free for everybody!
Government insurance!
Everybody gets to go to the doctor all the time!
Then what happens?
Everybody's gonna go at the same time!
People are gonna go, you know, I've been thinking about some plastic surgery for this lump on my arm and it's not, it's a fat, I say that because I got a, did you see that show?
I got this fatty tumor on my arm.
That looks like a potato!
Yeah, I've got this, I know.
It's not cancerous or anything.
But I don't take care of it because I don't feel like paying rent.
It's not dangerous, folks, at all.
I'm not dying, don't worry.
But it doesn't hurt, and the only reason I don't do anything about it is because I just don't do anything about it.
I don't want to pay right now, and it's not bothering me.
But if the government comes out tomorrow and says, health care is free!
No prices!
What happens, Joe?
I call the doctor's office tomorrow.
Hey, I demand you remove this lipoma from my forearm.
I demand it right now.
The government said this is free.
And then everybody else with a non-serious medical condition that didn't need the services does it too.
So what happens, Joe?
Because there's no price, what happens?
The doctor has to ration his time because it's a scarce resource.
And what does he say, Joe?
Okay, you can get on a waiting list.
And then what happens?
The connected people get to the front of the waiting list because they know government bureaucrats or they have money.
That's the irony of rationed single-payer government-run healthcare.
That it actually benefits the connected few who have the money, the influence, and the government connections to get around the waiting list while still not paying.
It's like rationing by attrition.
Yes!
Yes, exactly!
It's sad, but people wind up dying off on these waiting lists.
It's a tragic outcome of the rationing of scarce government resources.
Kamala Harris knows this.
Now, the reason I set this up in this order, that insurance isn't access.
Access is access.
And insurance doesn't guarantee access, and if it doesn't, it's useless because it's not actually insuring anything.
Second, you can only ration or price healthcare services.
Kamala Harris knows this.
Now third, I bring it up because if you go back and rewind and you listen to that again, look at the reason, Joe, she uses to advocate for a government takeover now of your insurance.
You.
You listening on your headphones, running in your kitchen, in your car.
You working out in the gym listening to my show right now.
Understand that this Democratic Senator running for President, who got 20,000 people at a rally in Oakland, California, that's a big crowd, folks.
That's a huge crowd.
Do not short sell these people.
Including Kamala Harris.
She is a legitimate candidate here.
Is advocating for taking your insurance plan.
Make no mistake what she's saying.
They're not doing the Obama dance around the topic anymore.
They are now openly advocating for wiping out your insurance plan.
If the government is not paying for it now, you get it through your job or elsewhere in the individual market.
Your insurance plan is under absolute threat right now.
Their words, not mine.
It's not a conspiracy theory when it actually happens.
Now notice what she says.
Didn't lose my place there.
She says, you know all this stuff now where you have to wait for approval for the insurance company and you have to wait to get to see the doctor and all that stuff?
Let's just get rid of all that.
Folks!
Do you understand the irony of this?
The incredibly thick... I know, you gotta see the... Even Joe, who woke up salty this morning, even now he's back to Joe, regular Joe.
He's got this bewildered, befuddled look on his face.
The whole reasoning behind eliminating the price system...
Is because you don't want to generate waiting lists when eliminating the price system will do nothing but actually create waiting lists.
Folks, that's why I set this conversation up in a very specific order to walk you through this so you understand basic economics of healthcare services and delivery.
Those services, the doctor's time is scarce.
You can price it or you can ration it.
So Kamala Harris ironically saying these insurance companies and they're uh you know you're gonna have to wait for an insurance company's approval now you want to wait for the government's approval and then when the government gives you approval you want to wait on a doctor's waiting list because the doctor can't price his services?
If the doctor can't price his services and he gets a check for the government no matter what The same check, Joe.
Whatever it is.
$100,000 a month, $50,000 a month for services.
Why would he see extra patients?
Oh, because he's a good guy.
I'm sure doctors are wonderful.
My brother-in-law's a doctor.
He's the nicest guy I know.
I'm not knocking doctors.
But doctors aren't idiots either, folks.
The administrative staff and the doctors are not going to see 500 patients a day if they can see the same amount of patients, excuse me, for the same amount of money they can see 50 patients a day.
No, they will because they're really good guys.
That's not the way the real world works.
Don't be an economic imbecile.
Incentives matter.
If you could get the same paycheck for doing a quarter of the work, I'm guaranteeing you, 80% of you, the 80-20 rule, 20% of the people do 80% of the work while 80% of the people sit on their butts, 80% of the people would do it!
They would do a quarter of the work for the same price.
Folks, you want a real world example using my show, and Joe, you know this and so does Paulo, he's listening in.
Alright.
Joe, let me ask you.
I'm not messing with you here.
I'm not jerking you around.
I want you to talk candidly.
Why did we do a show last year every single weekday?
We did 260 shows last year.
Why do you think we did not take one weekday off?
We are the only show, I believe, podcast in the top charts that did that.
Why do you think we did that?
Seriously.
Well, I know that we did it out of, um, we know what our audience wanted.
We didn't want to turn our audience down.
Yeah.
You're darn right.
But Joe, for as much as I love my audience, have we met every audience member?
No.
No, we haven't.
But my audience continues to grow at what, Joe?
5, 10 percent?
Sometimes 15 percent a month?
And it does it because Joe and I produce.
In other words, folks, I'm not a saint and neither is Armacost.
We're sinners too.
We're good people.
I mean, I think marginally we've had a pretty good, decent effect on society.
I'm not, I don't wanna.
But we do it because we don't want to disappoint our audience and we don't want you to leave because this is how Joe and I make a living.
Right.
There is an incentive to produce a product you like.
That's why we do it.
Folks, listen, I started this show, seriously, out of the kindness of our heart because we like doing it.
On Sunday, they didn't make us any money.
We didn't even have a sponsor for what, Joe, three years?
Cost money.
I mean, we just enjoyed talking about this stuff, but we did it once a week.
We started doing it five days because there was demand for it.
And eventually, we wound up making a living off the show and the show became a huge hit.
It doesn't mean my heart isn't in it, just like it doesn't mean a doctor's heart isn't in helping people.
It just means he's not an idiot.
They're not gonna work for free.
Gosh, is this frustrating.
You will ration their time.
And their time's rationing will create waiting lists to not only get approval from the government, but to get approval from the doctor's office too.
You will sit and stew on a waiting list forever.
You know, I only wanted to spend five minutes on this, but I'm sorry folks, this is dangerous stuff because the Democrat Party has lost its moorings.
They had some semblance of economic reality during the Clinton years with the Democrat Leadership Committee when they realized their far-left lurch in the Reagan years under Walter Mondale and later under Michael Dukakis was not working.
They got wiped out.
They are right back to the radical far-left socialism we've seen in the past and dumb ideas that are economically unworkable.
Let me wrap this up again.
Health insurance is not access if doctors don't take it.
It is anti-access.
It is A2AD.
Anti-access aerial denial for you military folks out there.
It is anti-access.
Government insurance that doctors don't use is the exact opposite of access.
Never confuse the two.
Second, you can ration or price.
Government control of healthcare means there is no price.
Meaning it will be rationed.
There is no other way to allocate scarce resources.
If you have 10 chairs and 15 people on an island, you can price those chairs and those 15 people can bid on them, or you can ration them.
Uh, let's see, we got 10, so we gotta ration.
5 of you are gonna get screwed.
And who do you think picks who the 5 people get screwed over are?
The government bureaucrats.
And they're not gonna pick the 5 people with all the connections.
The 5 people who get screwed are gonna be people without the connections.
So it's nearly comical that Kamala Harris talks about, we gotta stop these waits with insurance companies.
So you're gonna turn it over to the government?
Because there's no waits, Joe, when the government's involved.
The post office, the DMV.
There's no waits there, ever.
Right, Joe?
Never.
Have you ever waited in a DMV?
Never.
Do you go to the one in Annapolis up there?
You go to the Annapolis one when you go for your license?
I don't even go, dude.
I go to one of these places.
It does it for you.
It sucks that bad.
So you pay extra to not go.
Yeah.
There you go.
Dude, that is your greatest line ever in the five years you've been doing this show.
Thank you.
Armacost, to go get, air quotes, free government services at the DMV.
His tax dollars have already paid for it.
Joe pays extra money, he pays twice, to avoid going to the free service at the DMV.
Absolutely.
That is the greatest example you've ever given.
Nice work, Armacost.
Oh man, I did not plan that with him either.
All right, I gotta get to some other stuff.
I spent a lot of time on that, but it's important.
It's true.
It's coming up, this 2020 presidential election.
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Yeah, baby, yeah!
All right, getting into this Nunes stuff.
So Nunes, Devin Nunes, Republican congressman from California who knows the whole shebang about the Spygate scandal to spy on Donald Trump.
Thanks again, everybody picked up my book, by the way, Spygate.
It is 21 right now on Amazon, so you all are great.
I really appreciate your support.
The book is just, this is like his fourth or fifth run to the top of Amazon.
I love you all to death.
I mean it.
You all are great.
The book is a monster.
Devin Nunes was on Maria Bartiromo's show this weekend.
And he keeps mentioning something.
You've got to employ the Nunes translator.
In the Nunes translator, this is how it works, because he has to be very cryptic about what he says.
When Nunes Joe drops the same line repeatedly over and over and over again in multiple interviews, that means there's something stewing in his skull case.
And that something stewing means we should all be paying attention to it.
In the case of the Bartiromo interview, he mentioned again this weekend the scope memo.
What is the scope memo?
Why does this matter?
Why is this potentially a huge deal about what's going on?
In a nutshell, it says, when Rod Rosenstein decided to bring on Bob Mueller as the special counsel witch hunter against Donald Trump, The initial scope memo, in other words Joe, the bullet points about Bob Mueller, here is your scope memo, here is what you are supposed to do, said it was to investigate Russian interference in our election.
Conveniently, a couple months after, around August, there is a modification made to that scope memo that to this day is classified and Nunes claims he hasn't seen, although I think he has an idea what's in it.
I don't mean that in a weird, disingenuous way like, Creeping around crypto style.
I just mean Nunes has good sources and Nunes never, ever, he's very disciplined.
He never says anything on TV he can't back up.
He just doesn't.
He's become very disciplined from the constant attacks.
I believe, Joe, Nunes has an idea what's in that modified scope memo.
Now, just to be clear, we've seen the initial scope memo.
Bob Mueller, go look at Russia's interference in the election.
The appendix, the modified scope memo, issued a couple months later, is still classified and we haven't seen it.
Now, there are a couple of things about this.
Now, I don't want to repeat a prior show, but in order to get to where I'm going, I've got to repeat a bit of content here.
So forgive me in advance.
There are two potential scandals in this scope memo.
They may both be in there, it may be an either-or, but I don't think there's a third option.
What I'm getting to now, Joe, and again, as the ombudsman, stop me if it doesn't make sense, I'm getting to now what I think they're hiding in classifying this scope memo and not letting anybody see.
In other words, Bob Mueller, do X, Y, and Z. We still don't know what X, Y, and Z is.
Here's option one.
Option one, which Nunes seems to be poking at, is that the fake dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton with the, you know, the p-tape allegations and all the nonsense about Carter Page, which has been debunked.
It's garbage.
It's nonsense.
It's a fairy tale.
Are those allegations in the scope memo?
Now, this is a significant problem, Joe, because by this time in August of 2017, When the scope memo is modified, by this time it's pretty clear to anybody with a brain, Joe, that the dossier is garbage.
They've had it now for almost a year.
The FBI has had it since, well they allege, since September of 2016.
We know now John Brennan has likely had components of it since August of the year prior.
There's no way to verify this, and it's bad enough they used it to spy on a FISA court warrant show, but it would be even worse if they used it in a memo to then go back and investigate Trump himself.
In other words, think about what I'm telling you, folks.
Some of you may have caught what I just said.
Some of you may have went right over your head.
Haven't we been told Armacost the entire time?
That Donald Trump wasn't under investigation?
Yes, we have.
Remember Jim Comey, his briefing with Donald Trump before he got fired at the White House where he indicated to the President he wasn't under investigation?
Now things are starting to make a little bit of sense, folks.
Put two and two together here.
Put two and two together three times, you get six.
Did Comey lie to the President?
And tell the president he wasn't under investigation, when in fact later on, in August, Comey at this point, is gone.
But were there indications this entire time that the president, that this was, that the president of the United States and the FBI were investigating the president himself?
Is the August scope memo an indication, going back, is it, I don't, I want to say this the right way because I don't want to, because you may be saying, well, okay, Dan, the briefing by Comey, Comey's fired, and then in August, the scope memo's reissued, so that's after the fact.
No, no, no.
What I'm getting at here is, is the scope memo, Joe, an effort to use the dossier In a revised appendix to Bob Mueller, go do this memo, the scope memo.
Is it an effort to go back and cover their tracks?
In other words, that they were investigating Trump the entire time.
Oh.
You dig?
Yeah.
You get where I'm going with this?
Now, who would know this if they were investigating Trump the entire time?
Nunes.
Why would Nunes know this?
Because Nunes goes to the White House complex in March of 2017 after Trump's Director of National Intelligence finally swears in.
So now we got a Trump guy running our intelligence apparatus.
Conveniently, Nunes heads right over to the White House complex.
Read some incredibly damaging information.
Goes and gives a press conference, we played on this show five or six times now, where he says, folks, I have seen information here that indicates that people on the Trump campaign were spied on.
Joe, and what does he say?
And it has nothing to do with Russia.
Oh!
[Humming]
[Laughing]
What the heck is that?
It has nothing to do with [Gibberish]
Look at how put it together!
Put it together!
Get the Rubik's Cube together here!
Now it makes a world of sense!
Nunes finally finds out in March and starts sniffing around.
He figures out that they've probably been spying on and investigating Trump the whole time!
They lied to him!
They've been investigating Trump!
When Nunes finds out and starts to shake the trees, Rosenstein says, uh-oh, we're in trouble, Joe, because that's not what the initial scope memo said.
The initial scope memo says go investigate Russia.
Now they find out Mueller's team and others are probably investigating Trump for contacts all over the place.
For foreign contacts.
How would they know that?
Folks, does Mueller's interest now in Middle Eastern contacts, George Nader, Zedjiel Zamel, and all these other people that allegedly met with people in the Trump space, does all of this make sense now?
Let me just take it out to 30,000 feet because I don't want to lose you in the weeds.
They were investigating Trump the whole time!
This revised scope memo is just an effort to put on paper, an effort to backtrack the original scope memo to cover Mueller's caboose!
So I said to you, again, I didn't lose where I was, I'm setting it up this way for a reason, that there are two things, either or, or maybe both, in the scope memo.
Number one, that the dossier information is probably in that scope memo as a reason to go back and rewrite and cover their butts that they were investigating Trump the whole time, Joe, not the Russians.
The Russian thing's a cover job.
Second, Is information in that second scope memo, information gathered from the spying operation against Trump that involves the Trump campaign's contacts with other foreign officials from the United Arab Emirates?
Folks, bookmark this show.
Bookmark this show.
I'm telling you this is what's going to come out.
I'm sure of it now.
This explains why Mueller's primary informant, one of his primary informants in the case, this guy George Nader, the guy involved, according to multiple allegations and reports, of setting up meetings between people related to the Trump orbit and Middle Easterners, not Russians, or Middle Easterners and Russians in the case of the Erik Prince case.
Why that guy's lawyer, the informant who set these meetings up, is being represented by Obama's White House counsel, Catherine Rumler!
The whole thing makes sense now!
The second scope memo probably contains illicit information gathered by a maybe questionably legal, but altogether immoral and unethical spying operation on Trump and his campaign And it also probably contains debunked information from the dossier as a reason to rewrite the initial Mueller charter about what he was supposed to do to cover Mueller's butt and others because they were doing it the whole time!
This has always been an investigation about Trump himself.
I have some forks in the road here.
The scope memo, two questions.
Was the dossier used in the revised scope memo?
Is information gathered from an immoral, illicit, unethical spying operation against Trump himself in that scope memo as an effort to backtrack?
Is Mueller investigating foreign contacts with Trump not because they were illegal or unethical or immoral, but precisely because they thought they would find information on Trump and didn't?
In other words, is Mueller investigating Trump for foreign contacts he made?
Despite no evidence of criminality at all?
And please, understand the Nader connection, which I think I'm... I don't know, I haven't seen it out there, I don't wanna...
Create any friction with anyone else if you are investigating it, hat tip to you for doing it, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Has anyone else picked up on the fact that this was an illicit spying operation on Trump the whole time that Rosenstein and others are probably trying to go back and cover up?
The guy who was a central figure, folks, please understand this, in arranging these meetings that I believe are all setups between members of the Trump team And Middle Eastern and in one case Russian contacts with Eric Prince.
The guy's an informant for Mueller and his lawyer is Obama's fixer.
You don't find any of this odd.
Is anyone in the media listening out there?
Anyone?
Where's the Bob Woodard guy?
Is anyone out there looking to do an expose?
This stuff is real!
George Nader is really an informant for Mueller, who is really being represented by Catherine Rumler, and Nader, the informant, is really the guy that set up these meetings between the Trump team and Middle Easterners that we know were spied upon because Susan Rice has already admitted it!
They had knowledge of the meeting between UAE people and Trump campaign officials before and after it happened!
How would they know that?
Because they were on the Trump team?
No!
They were listening in!
In other words, they were spying on Trump, not just the team.
Are you tracking here?
This is huge.
Now it also makes sense why the Democrats are so focused on the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr.
Because as Nunes has indicated in other interviews just weeks ago, which we covered on our show too, he seems to have hinted to the fact that Hillary Clinton was involved in the Trump Tower meeting where two Russians show up to meet with Don Jr.
that are both connected to people connected to Hillary Clinton.
Was that a setup too?
What Nunes has been indicating and leaking out through the Nunes translator for a long time, Joe, is this was a fancy, elaborate setup.
This was a fix.
The fix was in the entire time.
People associated with the Clinton campaign and the United States government framed Donald Trump.
And one of the lead informants on this framing operation's lawyer is Obama's White House lawyer and is working with Mueller right now.
This second scope memo is simply an administrative Paperwork cover-up to use fake information to go back and rewrite the scope memo to cover what they were doing the entire time.
Biggest scandal of our lifetime.
Again, please read my book.
Listen, again, I've thanked you a thousand times and I mean it from the bottom of my heart.
But please, it is laid out like the most elaborate police file.
You won't be able to put it down.
Go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, just pick it up.
Borrow it from a friend.
I really don't care how you read it anymore, as long as you don't steal it, but please pick it up.
The setup is laid out.
It'll all make sense.
All right, I've got a lot more to get to.
A couple of really cool news stories, too.
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Okay.
Just an interesting story of note I saw in the Wall Street Journal today that I wanted to pass on to you, Joe.
I know Paula loves these stories too.
She always likes the computer pen testing and computer infiltration stories because she's the most talented web designer on the planet, my wife, I think.
I say that as objectively as possible.
But there's a story in the Wall Street Journal today about how, and it was a great analogy, how the United States, Joe, when it comes to cyber intrusions and penetrations, you know, whether it's the Sony hack or the hack into the GAO records where my actual personnel records from when I was in the Secret Service were taken, I got a letter in the mail.
Remember that one?
There's an interesting analogy the guy makes who wrote the piece, And he talks about how we have to focus more right now when it comes to cyber, Joe.
We have to get out of this old school defensive mentality and get into an offensive mentality.
And he makes the analogy, analogizes it to missile defense, how it is far cheaper to build an offensive nuclear deterrent as your nuclear weapon capability than it is to build defensive capability.
And he's right.
You know, to build nuclear weapons isn't cheap, but to build a defensive, a strategic defense initiative like they did under Reagan, which was disingenuously and ridiculously called Star Wars by Democrats who were, you know, at that point cared more about the Soviet Union's defenses than ours.
It is far more expensive, Joe, to build out a defensive network to knock down missiles than it is to build nuclear missiles to use as a deterrent.
Now, if you can build a second strike capability, you would guarantee mutually assured destruction.
So the piece lays out how if you analogize missile defense to what's going on in cyber, the tactical shift, how we've avoided nuclear war, Joe, is largely because we would mutually destroy each other.
Yeah.
If the Russians launched nuclear, God forbid, weapons here, we have a first strike and second strike capability.
So they launched, that's the first strike.
We can fire back, even if they were to destroy our silos, we have the triad.
Nuclear subs, bombers, we can still fight back and guarantee, sadly, tragically, that we would mutually be destroyed.
Conveniently called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.
And Mutually Assured Destruction, Joe, has generated a decades-long, you know, rapprochement, where we're all like, let's not do that, that's not good.
The problem, and one of the reasons, as the piece indicates, that we keep getting hit, I mean, pretty badly hit in the cyber realm, is we haven't yet committed in many ways, according to Andy Kessler, I believe wrote the piece today, we haven't committed, Joe, to robust offensive capabilities.
Now, Kessler, when he writes, I'm going to quote from the journal piece, because he's He says, the U.S.
really needs a second-strike cyber weapons program.
In other words, Joe, you hit us, like the analogy to the missile program, where God forbid we were to get hit with a nuke, we're going to wipe you out.
We may all be dead, but you're going with us.
So Kessler says, hey, the U.S.
really needs a second-strike cyber weapons program as well.
He says, in December 2015, the Russians launched cyber attacks on Ukraine, shutting down three power plants.
The U.S.
should have immediately flickered all the lights in Moscow to show them, we can.
Medal in our elections?
Phil Rush's VK social network with endless Beto O'Rourke dental videos.
Hey, it's only fair.
When the Chinese stole plans for the F-35 stealth fighter from Lockheed, we should have made every traffic light in Shanghai blink red announcing, stop, don't hack us again.
North Korea's Sony hack?
Scramble a state-run TV signal in Pyongyang.
They'll get the message.
You know, I am, um, As you know, I am not a total and complete non-interventionist, but I'm largely libertarian on a lot of our foreign commitments, which I think we should be dialing back.
But I think Kessler is absolutely spot on here, folks.
We need to develop a similar type of check-and-strike capability where you mess with us, we wipe out your entire grid.
He talks about in a piece, forgive me, I didn't take a snapshot of that quote direct, but How Joe, some really talented hacker apparently got upset at a conference at some Scandinavian guy and took down an entire country's internet.
I'm not saying this is good.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm just suggesting Kessler says in the piece that that's the kind of capability we need in United States cyber.
And they talk about how Paul Nakasone, who's running U.S.
Cyber Command now, how they don't know that they've been very quiet about what U.S.
Cyber's been doing.
And Kessler kind of hopes that this is some of the stuff they're developing.
And I have to tell you, I agree.
This kind of stuff in the future with our increasing reliance on the interconnected internet-based world, where everything from home refrigerators to smart TVs to nuclear power plants to water filtration mechanisms, these are all being controlled by the internet of things.
If we don't send a message... Folks, think about in the future what could happen here if someone was to develop the ability, because we have a second-rate internet defense, you could take out our water filtration plants, Our nuclear production capabilities, cooling mechanisms, this is dangerous stuff.
So, I don't get into too much of that stuff on the show, but I thought it was an interesting piece and I think the analogy to missile defense is right.
The reason, thankfully, we don't get into a nuclear war is because it guarantees destruction.
Maybe we need to send a message.
We get an attack from Russia, from China.
I like his approach.
Let's flicker them lights.
Let's see how you like that.
Doesn't feel good, huh?
You don't like them?
I remember Matt Damon at Good Will Hunting.
How do you like them apples?
It's a good article.
Check that out.
All right.
Walter Russell Mead has another good piece out there too in the journal today about Venezuela, and there's a couple takeaways about the collapse of socialism in Venezuela, Joe, which collapses everywhere socialism has tried.
As we say all the time on the show, socialism has a 100% success rate of failure.
It fails, destroys everything it touches.
It leads to deprivation, starvation, economic destruction, death, and basically horror for anyone it touches.
It is a human tragedy on an epic scale.
Now, how socialism has managed to escape the everlasting stain that fascism and other forms of brutality like Nazism did, is sadly due to apologists.
I had this debate on The Five with, um, it wasn't a debate, but Greg Gutfeld and I were chatting on The Five when I was on last week, and Greg is right.
Greg brought up the point, Joe, that You dare bring up Nazism or Fascism in a respectable group of people as a governing system worth considering.
You will be rightly mocked and laughed out of the public space if not looked at in abject horror for being a moron and a dangerous moron at that.
Why?
Why?
Because the historical record is clear!
Fascism and Nazis have been excuses to wipe out and snuff out millions of lives.
But why not socialism?
Which has equally wiped out millions of lives.
Tens of millions.
Why has socialism escaped the stain of it?
And the reason is because of far-left apologists.
Who have apologized for socialism, as we covered on yesterday's show.
And my article up at Bongino.com.
About debunking liberal lies about Venezuela.
Oh, that's not real socialism.
No, it is real socialism.
Whatever death and destruction and depravities involved, it is real socialism.
But there's three takeaways from Venezuela I want to get across today in this Walter Russell Mead piece in the journal that's very good.
Even Putin has acknowledged, albeit tacitly, Joe, that socialism is a failure.
You say, what the heck, Dan?
That's crazy, number one.
And number two, what does that have to do with Venezuela?
Oh, hang tight!
I'll get to that.
Okay.
Joe, Putin knows socialism is destroying the Venezuelan economy.
Sure he does.
Putin's a tyrant, but he's not an idiot.
He is not an idiot.
Putin's main goal is the destruction of the United States as a competitor.
That's what he is.
Putin's a complete tyrant.
He hates this country.
He thinks the greatest catastrophe of our generation is the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He's said as much.
Putin's main goal is to destroy the United States from the inside and the outside.
Now Joe, why would Putin get involved in backing the socialist Venezuelan regime?
Why would that advance those goals?
Because Putin knows socialism is a disaster!
He wants socialism to stay entrenched in Venezuela for two reasons.
Number one, It will collapse the Venezuelan oil market.
Venezuela is one of the largest oil producers in the world.
Who are one of the other largest oil producers in the world?
The Russians!
They don't need this competition.
You think Putin is stupid?
They don't need this competition.
The Russians want as many oil producers wiped off the market as possible so they can corner the market for petrochemicals.
They what?
Putin loves socialism in Venezuela because it's destroying a competitor!
So the longer he can keep the socialists in charge where he can gain influence in this regional battle to get some influence in our region, our part, our hemisphere, Causing hemispheric chaos, which is what he wants.
He wants these people, just like the Cubans, Joe, and the Cuban regime, to stay in charge as long as possible.
Two big goals.
He maintains influence, and he doesn't get any serious competitors in the oil markets.
Reason number two.
So yes, Putin knows socialism stinks.
And he knows it will do exactly what it's designed to do.
Destroy the Venezuelan economy.
Second, Joe, he loves this migration chaos, this hemisphere of chaos he's causing.
He loves the fact that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are pouring across the border in our hemisphere into South American countries, which is pushing people into Central America, pushing people into the United States.
He's watching what's going on in the internal and external chaos it's causing.
He loves this.
Putin knows socialism stinks, will destroy their economy, will destroy their oil markets, will allow him to influence the country, and will push people across their borders, causing chaos everywhere.
He loves this!
But a third takeaway from the Venezuelan crisis, unrelated to Putin, is Joe, this is blowing up in the Democrats' faces.
Why?
Because the immigration crisis, we have seen positive poll numbers move in Trump's direction.
On the wall, on immigration.
I have a piece up at Bongino.com in the show notes today.
In swing districts, the Democrats just won.
Congressional districts that are swingy, 50-50, Republican Democrats, that the Democrats just won in the midterms.
The poll numbers for Trump are solid on the immigration issue and terrible for Pelosi.
But secondly, Joe, I live in Florida.
Yeah.
And Walter Meade makes a very interesting, you're like, yeah, like, oh, okay.
Thanks.
That's your point.
I got it.
Thank you.
Point number three, Dan lives in Florida.
That's not my point.
Walter Meade makes an interesting point.
That this is blowing up on the Democrats, not just because it's moving the poll numbers on immigration towards Trump in many respects, but the swingiest state in the Union, Florida, which is packed full of Cubans and Venezuelans fleeing this disastrous socialism, Joe, is nicely keeping Florida in the Republican column because the people who have fled the disaster of socialism will never vote for a party that advocates this garbage here at home.
Excellent.
Excellent point.
Excellent point.
Okay.
A lot of news today.
This is going to be my final story of the day, but it's another important one.
I have a piece up again in the show notes today from the Daily Signal.
Very well done piece about a CBO report that was issued on Monday.
Joe, it's a report everybody should look at.
If you don't want to look at the report, just read the piece.
It's fine.
I didn't make it through the whole report, but I got through a good chunk of it.
The CBO report on Monday, Joe, talks about our debt and deficit situation and our economic outlook when it comes to government spending.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's not good.
I don't want to leave you on a bad note again, but I don't want to leave anybody in an intellectual vacuum here either.
We cannot solve these problems if we don't understand the depth of them and who's creating them.
What have we been told by the left forever, seemingly in perpetuity, an argument we combat all the time on this show?
We have been told by the left, Joe, that it's tax cuts that are causing our deficit problems and our debt problems, right?
You're cutting taxes for the rich, right?
How many times have we heard this stupid argument?
It's the tax cuts.
The tax cuts are causing a lack of government revenue.
It's driving us into debt.
It's driving us into annual deficits.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a point Joe and I have debunked for now five years.
There is zero data to support that.
It is factually incorrect.
It is made up.
It is an Aesop's fable.
It is nonsense.
The emperor has no clothes on.
It is not true.
All you need to do is look at the data, which is indicated in this CBO report covered by the Daily Signal piece.
I took a snapshot from it.
Let me read this to you so you understand what the numbers say and why your liberal friends are lying to you.
It is not tax cuts causing the deficits.
It is spending.
Okay, from the piece.
Democrats are quick to blame the Republican tax cuts for exploding deficits, but CBO projections show the culprit lies elsewhere.
Over the next decade, annual tax revenues are estimated to average 17.5% of GDP.
Here's the kicker, folks.
That's slightly above the 50-year historical average.
Oh, is it?
How is that?
I thought the Trump tax cuts were costing, costing, air quotes, the government all this money.
How is it that now tax revenue is projected to be slightly above the 50-year historical average?
How is that?
How it is is because the Democrats are lying to you because that's what they do.
They lie just like Kamala Harris telling you that the government's going to prevent waiting lists when all the government does is create waiting lists by rationing care.
The Daily Signal piece goes on.
Meanwhile, the CBO projects total spending will rise to 22.7% of GDP annually.
That's 2.5 percentage points of GDP above the historical average.
Oh gosh, there are a few topics on this show that I think almost sometimes Joe probably gets tired of hearing this too, that frustrate me as much as the ridiculous, stupid, non-fact-based, non-database, dopey argument that the tax cuts are causing the deficit problem when literally no data support that at all.
You are making it up.
Tax revenue is up.
The projections are up.
The spending levels are up, significantly higher than the tax revenue.
So if the tax revenue is up, meaning it's costing, I hate that term, but that's how the liberals discuss it, it's costing the government no money.
It's raising the government additional money, but spending is up higher and is expanding at a rapid rate.
It takes an imbecile not to be able to put two and two together and say clearly it's spending that is driving the debt and deficit.
Spending high, tax cuts, higher revenue.
Higher revenue would not cause a debt.
Think about that.
If you're spending $100,000, you get a raise, you get more revenue, you're making $110,000, and you spend $300,000, what are your deficit problems and debt problems caused by?
They're not caused by your job, you just got a raise, just like the government did.
They're caused by your out-of-control spending.
Spending!
Yeah!
Joe, seriously, is this hard to understand?
Is this complicated?
I just gave you simple numbers.
We didn't even need Jay Zabicus for this.
This is not complicated.
Spending is up.
That's why we owe more money.
Oh man.
I can't.
This is why I wake up every morning questioning what liberal nonsense garbage are we gonna have to debunk today?
Alright folks, thanks again for tuning in, thanks again for picking up my book, I really appreciate it.
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