Coming up, I'll discuss the perils of diversity in the sky.
I'll examine data showing a consistent movement of non-white voters toward the GOP. And author and researcher Peter Schweitzer joins me.
We're going to talk about a potential TikTok ban, China's long-term strategy, and the very strange case involving the government's persecution of a private detective.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Do you remember the headlines of Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the January 6th Committee?
Now as it turns out, Cassidy Hutchinson had been coached for this testimony by Liz Cheney.
She was almost single-handedly prepped And even the other committee members didn't really know what Cassidy Hutchinson was going to say.
And what she said was two things.
One, two sort of outrageous stories about Trump and about January 6th.
And it turns out both of them were massive lies.
The first one is the story about Trump and the limousine.
Trump wanted to go himself to the Capitol.
The... The limousine driver in the Secret Service was reluctant, so Trump leaped out of the back of the limousine, grabbed a hold of the wheel, in fact assaulted one of the Secret Service officers in the process.
And we now find out directly from the driver of the presidential limousine, it's sometimes nicknamed the Beast, that this didn't even really happen.
Trump never assaulted any Secret Service agents.
He did not lunge for the wheel.
It was nothing like that at all.
In fact, what had happened was Trump had raised the idea, sort of, should I go to the Capitol?
They were like, no, Mr. President, this is not a good idea.
Trump seemed a little bit grumpy about that, but that was the end of it.
So, Cassidy Hutchinson was either exaggerating or completely making up stuff.
And we now know the facts.
Here's the driver, quote...
He says, You know, it's been previously pointed out Trump was in the backseat.
The chance that he could somehow reach the wheel and, what, drive it from the back is absurd.
But now we know from the driver himself that Cassidy Hutchison's testimony, which, by the way, was amplified all over the place.
I'm looking at the New York Times headline...
It's played right over the front page.
Aid details Trump's rage on January 6th.
And of course, Cassidy Hutchinson also went on to say that you had a bunch of these January 6th protesters who were armed.
In other words, they brought weapons to the Capitol.
Now again, this turns out to be a lie.
The people who went into the Capitol did not take any arms with them.
No arms were found inside the Capitol.
The only violence in terms of someone dying was the violence perpetrated against Trump supporters.
I'm thinking here of Roseanne Boyland.
I'm also obviously thinking about the shooting By Detective Bird of Ashley Babbitt.
So that's one item in the news I thought I would comment on.
Another one is all this crazy stuff going on with the airlines.
Now, it all started off with one incident.
You remember the window blowing off.
And then there were one or two subsequent incidents.
There was the case of the airline that you could see the tire fall off the plane and go crashing into a parking lot where it damaged some cars.
Then you had the plane where the landing gear didn't work and the plane kind of leans over to one side and sort of it careens a little bit off the runway.
But that's not the end of it.
You also have, more recently, here's a headline, more terror for United passengers after plane is forced to make emergency landing over, quote, complete hydraulic failure, with airlines planes also suffering gear failure, lost wheel, and engine malfunction this week.
Here's another headline.
United Airlines flight 830 from Sydney to San Francisco started leaking fuel right after takeoff.
The Boeing 777 eventually landed back at Sydney safely.
And then Al Jazeera sent some journalists into the Boeing manufacturing plant and they were interviewing people at Boeing.
And they have the audio that they're playing from the interviews.
And these guys are like...
The Al Jazeera reporter asks, would you fly on the Boeing planes?
And these guys go, not me.
No, I don't think so.
I don't think I'd be comfortable doing that.
No, no, no. I work here, but I'm not going to be flying.
They're basically saying that they, the workers...
Don't have confidence that these planes are being properly put together.
Now, you have to ask why this is.
What's really going on?
By the way, we're not dealing with, you know, when you have new technology, oh, here comes the iPhone 13.
Okay, it's got some glitches.
Okay, the camera doesn't, they've got some things to fix.
It'll happen next time.
This is new technology, and so you expect improvements to be coming, but airplanes have been in the air For 100 years.
And safety standards have been in place.
In fact, if anything, air travel should be getting safer and safer.
There are, of course, careful studies every time that there's an airline malfunction.
Those lessons presumably are then incorporated into safety standards.
So what's really changed?
Well, what's really changed at the airlines, I think, is two things, and I think that they're connected.
One of them is DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, broadly speaking, affirmative action, in the hiring of, by the way, not just pilots, But also mechanics, supervisors, air traffic controllers, all the people who populate the critical components, the critical parts of the airline industry.
Now, airlines are in a big way into DEI. I just saw this ad put out by Delta and you've got the, essentially the cockpit door opens and it's all women flying the plane.
And these two women who are sitting in the passenger, their passengers, they start crying.
They're crying as if they're like, oh, we've been waiting for women to be flying the planes all by themselves for such a long time.
They're so moved, they're moved to tears by this sort of affirmation of diversity.
Scott Kirby, who's the CEO of United, is on video basically not only allowing, but participating in drag queen shows.
Here's the guy, he's dressed up in drag.
So this is what these guys spend their time doing.
This is their focus.
This is what they're proud of.
They're even putting it in their advertising.
So the question then becomes, what is the connection between DEI and And sort of airline malfunctions.
And the answer is really simple.
The airlines are moving away from a culture of safety, of merit, and of customer service.
By the way, this is not true worldwide.
Airlines abroad are getting better.
In fact, they're getting so much better that when you now see, I just saw a video of, it's essentially an introduction to the first class at Singapore Airlines.
And you walk in, and it's almost like you're walking down the hallway of a We're good to go.
And everything is impeccably decorated.
Everything looks absolutely beautiful.
In fact, I was thinking to myself, I fly all the time, an international flight, so we make sure to try to go first class just because the flight is so long.
And so that added comfort makes a huge difference.
I can't think of a single airline, American or European, that offers this sort of level of not just comfort, but luxury.
And so while these other airlines are getting better, improving their services, careful attention to customer service, what we have is careful attention to diversity.
Hey, do we have enough trans pilots?
Hey, do we have enough women in the cockpit?
Hey, are we making sure that blacks are being promoted at the same rate as whites?
And this peculiar and twisted obsession with cosmetic, racial, and ethnic, and gender, and transgender diversity, I think is the key factor.
Now, what's happening is that these airlines are kind of reasoning this way.
They're basically saying, okay, listen, we've got these incompetent pilots that we've hired on the basis of diversity, but so what?
Because thanks to technology, you don't really need to know that much to fly a plane.
Planes work on autopilot for the most part.
All you need to do is hit the button.
And so the reliance on technology provides a rationalization for why it's not so bad to have incompetent people in the cockpit.
Because technology takes over.
except technology needs intelligent people to oversee it, to work it.
Sometimes things go wrong with the technology and then you need to have some understanding of how this technology works and what are the different fixes that you can do when you are in trouble.
That's what we seem not to have and that's why we have windows blowing off, wheels coming off, fuel leaking to the ground, landing gear not functioning.
I think this thing is only going to get worse before it gets better.
Why? Because these airlines are so dug into DEI that it's going to take not one, not two, but probably several airline catastrophes before we begin to see a re-evaluation of DEI and a return to merit and excellence and customer service.
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You gotta use the promo code DINESHDINESH. As we approach the 2024 election, there are grounds for concern and worry, and some people would say even panic.
And those grounds involve what the left and the Democrats are going to try to do to unlevel the playing field, what kind of cheating strategies are being put into motion even now.
The attempt to criminalize Trump's behavior, hit him from all directions with charges and hope that one of them or some of them will stick.
All of this is furiously underway.
But there are also some encouraging signs that we should not fail to notice.
And one of them is There seems to be a very significant racial realignment going on in American politics, one whose full dimension and also the reasons for it have not been fully recognized and fully understood.
Now to understand this racial realignment, we've got to start with what the situation has been for the past several decades.
For the past several decades, Republicans have relied on the white vote.
Why? Because non-whites were heavily voting for the Democratic Party.
And this has been true consistently.
Going back several decades, Joe Biden in 2020 enjoyed an almost 50-point advantage with non-white voters.
Now, who are these non-white voters?
Well, it's really three groups.
It's blacks, Welcome to my show!
Nevertheless, Asian Americans are conformists.
A lot of them go to university, higher education.
They want to be accepted.
They want to join the mainstream of American society.
They recognize that that cultural mainstream is the left.
It is the Democrats. And so Asian Americans, almost against their values and against their interests, vote Democratic.
Blacks and Hispanics, at least it was thought...
We're voting their interests in voting for the Democrats.
Why? Because Democrats provide them with welfare programs.
And so there's a direct economic benefit for poorer blacks and Hispanics to align with the Democratic Party.
There was a book that was published several years ago on, well you can call it the browning of America, America becoming less white, more non-white.
And the central premise of this book was Democrats are in great shape because as the country becomes more racially diverse, as it becomes more brown, it's only going to produce more Democratic voters.
And the book wasn't even talking about illegal immigration, none of that, it was just talking about the fact that simply as a result of differential birth rates, and of course to some degree legal immigration, the country is becoming less white.
However, and here's the big story that we're getting to, there have been a spate of recent surveys that have shown, not one survey but many, that Trump has essentially wiped out the Democratic advantage with non-white voters.
Right now, and this is confirmed in a New York Times poll last week, shows Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans.
So he was winning non-white Americans by 50 points That is now down to 10 points.
And so, the question then becomes, who are the voters that are moving over to the Trump column?
Interestingly, it's not Asian Americans.
The one group that you would think has the most natural attachment to the Republican Party that has been voting in the wrong party for reasons of just wanting to be one of the gang, accepted, part of the cultural mainstream, this group is actually sticking with Biden, at least so far. The groups that are moving over are the Latinos and the blacks.
And interestingly, the Latinos are moving over men and women, both, although men more.
And for the blacks, the movement is more concentrated among black males.
Now, the other thing that's interesting is that younger blacks and Latinos are more likely to...
This is, by the way, the opposite of what's happening in white voters.
For white voters, you can consistently predict that younger whites are more likely to be Democratic.
They're more likely to be liberal.
And so the millennials, the Gen Z types, these are the people the Democrats are trying to mobilize.
But that applies only to whites.
When you look at blacks and Latinos, you find that there are older blacks and Latinos who are sort of wedded to the Democratic Party.
They've been Democrats all their lives.
And even if they sense some misfit, some malalignment with the Democrats, it's kind of like that's their comfort zone.
So they're going to be more reluctant to change their patterns of behavior.
But younger blacks and younger Latinos are like, no, we don't feel this kind of...
Long-term attachment to the Democrats.
We're out of here.
And of course, one reason for this, and kind of an obvious reason for this, is that older blacks and Latinos tend to identify the Democrats.
And they have, by the way, going back to the 1930s, All the way from the 1930s through the 1960s, there's this impression created.
It's not entirely accurate, but nevertheless, the impression was the Democrats are the party of welfare and providing for you and caring about the poor, and number two, the Democrats are the party of civil rights.
Now, in fact, it was the Republicans who are the party of civil rights, but nevertheless, it was LBJ who pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It was Martin Luther King.
The Martin Luther King movement became more identified with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
So what happened is that older blacks were like, we owe it to the Democrats.
But of course, younger blacks don't feel that way.
Their memories of all of this, this is all ancient history.
They're looking at the parties and the parties the way they are now.
So, we think of the Republican Party as a party that is making inroads in the working class, and it is.
We're seeing a reversal, a class reversal, in which the Republican Party, which has long been the party of small business, it was also competitive among large CEOs.
In the Reagan era, for example, if you met a CEO of a big company, At least a 50-50 chance that the guy would be Republican.
Republicans, of course, were often painted as the party of the rich, as the party of the haves as opposed to the have-nots.
The FDR coalition was very much mobilized as the have-nots against the haves.
But now there's a kind of a reversal.
The Republican Party is making inroads among the working class.
But the assumption is that the Republican Party is making inroads among the white working class.
And what this new research is showing is that's not really true.
The Republican Party is making inroads in the working class, white and black.
The Republican Party is now speaking the language, the values, the interests of working class people.
Now, some Democrats think that this can be fixed.
If we had the right kind of Democrat, that Democrat could easily win back the Black vote and the Latino vote.
But if you begin to dive a little bit deeper into this research, you begin to see that this is not really true.
What's really going on is that you have a fair amount of conservative Blacks and Hispanics who have nevertheless been voting for Democrats for For years, if not decades.
In other words, by and large, if you find a white family and these people are pro-life, therefore the ability to own a gun, therefore law and order, they're very patriotic, you can safely predict that family is Republican.
But on the other hand, you meet a black family, and they're pro-life, and they go to church, and they're for owning a gun, and they're patriotic and love the country, but guess what?
They've been voting Democrat. And so there's a kind of values misfit in which Democrats, for various ancestral reasons, or even reasons of racial identification, they know lots of other people who are black and are democratic, They have been in the wrong party without really knowing it.
And so the point of this research is that these people are waking up to the fact that they don't belong in the Democratic Party.
They belong in the Republican Party.
And this to me is very encouraging because it's not a matter of these blacks and Hispanics being just mesmerized by Trump.
They're Trumpsters. They'll vote for Trump and Trump alone.
But after that, they will naturally regress back into the Democratic Party.
No, the Trump phenomenon is waking them up to the fact that they have a closer attachment in terms of values and interests both with the GOP and that is a party for them not just to vote for in 2024 but that's a party that is their natural home.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
it's dinesh.locals.com Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast an old friend, Peter Schweitzer.
He's president of the Government Accountability Institute, host of a weekly podcast called The Drill Down.
And he's also the author of a whole bunch of New York Times bestselling books.
Most recently, the number one bestseller, Red Handed.
The website, by the way, for the Government Accountability Institute, g-a-i.org.
Peter, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
We were talking a minute ago about Trump, and I was making the point that at one point it looked like this formidable accumulation of cases against Trump.
And looking at it, there seemed almost no pathway to overcoming these.
Even if you manage to survive one, you're going to get nailed by another.
But now suddenly, one by one, it looks like these cases are imploding, falling by the wayside, getting interminably delayed.
What do you make of this bizarre, this phenomenon of the left's strategy against Trump for 2024?
And it seems to be coming apart.
Yeah, it's remarkable because you're quite right.
When you look at the accumulation of legal power that was thrown at Trump, it looked like it would be insurmountable.
And yet, I think it's a testament to his fortitude.
It's also a testament, I think, to the genius of our federal system, our judicial system, that allows for the debate and the discussion and the legal process to go forward.
And so when you overreach, which clearly seems to be the case with these prosecutors, you end up getting damaged in our judicial system.
We'll have to see where we stand six months from now, but I think from the standpoint of Team Trump, they have to be pretty excited about how they've been able to swat these away thus far.
I mean, wouldn't it have been better, Peter, for the Democrats to say, look, we've got six possibilities here.
Let's kind of pick our best one, at the most our best two, because there's something on the face of it ridiculous to be going after the leading figure in the opposition party with 91 criminal charges.
Not to mention that the Democrats keep inviting new ones.
A Colorado Secretary of State pops up.
She goes, I think I can throw him off the ballot.
Okay, let's try that.
So there's a certain kind of promiscuity in the way that they went about this.
And I think that's what got him the 9-0 slapdown from the Supreme Court.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's hard to get into people's minds, but when you see this kind of approach, Dinesh, to me it speaks more of desperation than it does confidence.
I mean, if you feel like you have the goods on somebody, you are going to isolate that and you're going to nail them on that.
When you start throwing half a dozen different legal actions against somebody, to me it denotes desperation and weakness rather than strength.
And I think they misplayed their hand as well in that it's created a lot more sympathy for Donald Trump.
Even people that may not like Trump or may not like his policies are looking at this and saying you know this is kind of ridiculous.
I mean come on. So I think it's backfired in a major way.
Again, I think it's a testament to his fortitude.
I think a lot of political leaders would have just tried to cut a deal or cut their losses and moved on, dropped out of the race.
But Trump has stayed in there and he has fought at every point.
And I think that's a pretty remarkable thing to consider.
Peter, you've been studying the psychology and the strategy of the Chinese.
And this is the theme of your latest book, Red Handed.
Give us a sense of how the world looks like from the Chinese point of view.
I say this because... In some ways, China, to me, is much more impenetrable than, say, the old Soviet Union.
The old Soviet Union, for all its nefarious strategies, was Western in its basic mindset, could be understood in Western terms.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are a different matter.
They seem sphinx-like.
They seem difficult to read.
What is your take?
How do the Chinese look at the world now?
What do they make of America's position in the world?
And what do you think their next move is?
Well, I think they view the United States as effectively a paper tiger.
It's weak. It doesn't mean it doesn't have political strength and economic strength.
It's just that it has poor leadership, and they're exploiting that.
and they've embraced a doctrine called disintegration warfare. It was a book written in 2010 by Chinese military officials. It's been embraced by President Xi and this strategy I've laid it out in a book that's just coming out by me called Blood Money.
And what this disintegration warfare, Dinesh, really says is...
Rather than going head to head with the United States, we are going to seek ways that we can fragment America and disintegrate America and exploit its weaknesses and its divisions.
And they are certainly doing that with Joe Biden.
If I can just give you one brief example of how this works, Dinesh, we've got this massive problem with fentanyl in the United States.
As I lay out in Blood Money, It's really the drug cartels are the junior partners.
This is a Chinese operation through and through, and I laid that out.
So why is Joe Biden not doing anything about it?
Well, consider this.
The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, who are the kings of fentanyl, were set up in the business by a Chinese criminal gang called UBG. Everybody in Mexico acknowledges this.
The head of that gang is a guy named Zhang Anlo, who goes by the name White Wolf.
White Wolf had a business partner who in 2017 gave a $5 million forgivable loan to the Bidens, which they of course have never paid back.
So you literally got one degree of separation between the fentanyl trade and the Biden family.
So it's not a surprise to me that Joe Biden does not want to talk about this subject, does not want to finger point at China or do anything about it.
And it's the sort of thing that the Chinese see to exploit and take advantage of.
Peter, if I think about that for just a moment, you've got a multi-trillion dollar economy in the United States.
You've got a giant economy in China.
You have a global rivalry with the stakes of control of the world hanging in the balance.
And what you're telling me is that...
You can get a decisive advantage in this fight by spending $5 million on one guy, on the Bidens.
For the Chinese, they must have a sense of wonder that you can buy the United States so cheaply.
A $5 million contribution is a way of neutralizing Joe Biden on as deadly a weapon as fentanyl used domestically within the United States to cause a lot of havoc in so many communities.
Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right.
I mean, these entanglements that China forms commercially with Americans, the Americans view it as, oh, this is great.
We have now this shared interest, right?
Because we're business partners.
We work together. They view it in the political context as something to be used as leverage.
Another example I highlight in Blood Money is Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom, his ties to Chinese organized crime go back to when he was mayor of San Francisco.
When he was mayor of San Francisco, he had a guy on his transition team that was linked to Chinese organized crime.
He was a fixture in City Hall, according to Democrats.
He appointed the head of Chinatown Economic Development as mayor, a guy who ended up being a dragon head or a leader in Chinese organized crime that was involved in the drug trade.
There are multitudes of examples.
When he was mayor, he created a project called China SF, which was designed to bring investment dollars into the Bay Area from China.
His partner was a guy named Vincent Lowe, who in China, who was already known to be linked to Chinese organized crime.
So again, Gavin Newsom, he may not have gotten the $5 million, but these entanglements, these partnerships that he structured...
Are deeply embarrassing.
He does not want them discussed.
And he's afraid to confront China.
And so for the same reason that Joe Biden will not say anything about China's involvement in the fentanyl trade, the same thing goes for Gavin Newsom.
Do you think, Peter, that there's an ongoing debate now in the House about TikTok and the influence of TikTok, and do you see TikTok as a part of the cultural weaponry of the Chinese in America?
I think it was you, but also some others who have highlighted that if you look at TikTok China, it has very different content than TikTok America.
TikTok China is instructions and learning how to play the violin, basic introduction to mathematics and calculus.
It's almost like an educational project, whereas here in America, it seems to be, at least in part, an active promotion of cultural degeneracy.
Do you think that's how the Chinese view TikTok?
Yes, absolutely.
And I would say, Dinesh, we've known each other for a long time.
Don't take my word for it.
Take the Chinese word for it.
You know, I quote extensively from them in the book what they're rendering is of TikTok.
Chinese military officer calls it the Trojan horse that they can use against the West Others say that it's a form of cognitive warfare that dumbs down the West that strengthens China In Chinese propaganda officials. I quote them extensively say This is a the ultimate weapon for propaganda against the West and they lay out how to do it You need to be subtle about it not too explicit You need to appeal to emotion because Dinesh when you
appeal to the emotions of young people They embrace it as righteous indignation. They think they created it themselves Even though it was given to them by someone else and now they're very very easy to manipulate So this is an ongoing discussion in China of how they're using tick-tock against us and for the life of me It's stunning that people here continue to insist. There's a debate about this issue. There's no debate about it in China
They're very open in their internal literature, which I quote extensively in Blood Money, that this is a weapon they are deploying against the United States.
I mean, it strikes me, Peter, as extremely ingenious because it is kind of a way of promoting a tyrannical structure, but within a framework that is free.
And here's what I mean.
Freedom is ultimately the expression of your own feelings, your own wants, your own desires.
And the Chinese are not directly interfering with that.
It's not that they grab some American teenager and say, you must do this or you must do that.
They're operating more in the mode of advertisers of old who said, listen, we're going to allow people to have their own desires.
It's just that we will influence what those desires are.
And that way people can be free.
But on the other hand, we are sort of the puppeteers manipulating their feelings and their desires.
And that's what you're saying.
That's kind of how TikTok is operating.
So it is simultaneously an expression of American freedom.
But at the same time, that freedom itself is being maneuvered and manipulated by the Chinese.
Let's take a pause, Peter. When we come back, I want to ask you about a specific case.
We had Martha Byrne on the podcast talking about her family's ordeal.
It involves China. We'll be right back with Peter Schweitzer, president of the Government Accountability Institute.
Peter, let's talk about this case involving Martha Byrne and her husband, Michael McMahon.
Can you lay out what really happened here?
What I know is that, and I had Martha on the podcast, her husband is a private investigator.
He was given an assignment.
I think he felt he was merely carrying out his duties and suddenly he finds himself under arrest, faced with all these charges.
Talk about what's really happening here because it seems to be a case of political targeting and I want to get the full picture of what's happening.
Yeah, it's a pretty curious case.
Yeah, Michael, look, man, a longtime decorated undercover detective for the New York Police Department, had a stellar record, became a private investigator and took on clients.
And one of the clients that he took on was a Chinese company that said an executive had embezzled or stolen lots of money from the company, was now living in the United States.
And certainly that happens.
I mean, Dinesh, it's a sort of a very murky world where you have dissidents living in the United States who the Chinese call criminals, but you also have Chinese criminals that flee to the United States who pose as dissidents.
And I would contend, I think that the case McMahon was investigating is the latter.
This is an individual who did engage, I believe, in criminal activity.
And McMahon was hired by this Chinese company to try to recruit the money and get some level of economic justice.
Now, as he was doing that, the FBI was running something called Operation Foxhunt, which was to ferret out Chinese spying in the United States, which is a massive problem.
The FBI swooped in and accused McMahon of spying for the Chinese because as a private detective, he was gathering information on this individual who had allegedly stolen this money.
McMahon, there's no evidence that that he was spying for China.
There's no evidence in my mind that he was aware of Operation Box Hunt.
He denied that he knew anything about that was going on.
And then you have this added factor that McMahon had sort of functioned as a whistleblower, as it were, in another case where the FBI was accused of using, let's say, excessive tactics, tactics that might not be legal.
So you have the Browns, I think, set up for that this was a targeting of McMahon.
This was a retaliation by the FBI. There's nothing in his record that indicates that he had any sympathy for China, that he was engaging in any kind of espionage activity.
And yet the FBI has decided and the Department of Justice has decided to throw the book at McMahon.
This to me is also troubling just in the context of the broader problem, which is so many cases of what appear to be clear-cut espionage involving China that there is less rigor by the Department of Justice in pursuing.
And that's just another layer to what's going on here.
I mean, Peter, it's disturbing enough that the FBI would, almost in retaliation for McMahon's involvement in another case, target him.
But I think you and I came up in an America where we believed, all right, let's say you've got some bad actors.
They go after this guy McMahon.
Now, we have a justice system.
We have relatively impartial judges.
We have juries.
One would expect that it would come out in the course of the case.
This guy's not a Chinese agent.
This guy's a NYPD detective carrying out his duties.
And so there's no way...
That they will be able to get either a judge's verdict or a juror's verdict against him.
Can you explain what has happened to our process where it now seems almost normalized that we go, wow, they went after him, but not just they went after him, they were able to get him.
McMahon has a conviction.
He's now trying to appeal, he's now trying to raise awareness about this, but they were able to carry it out.
How? Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, you covered part of this in the police state film.
You know, you have very powerful figures, and this is where they operate.
They operate in the realm of the law, and we have a jury system, but the jury system is predicated on jurors being able to hear all the information.
Oftentimes, the FBI will say that there are national security reasons why certain facts can't be added.
I don't believe in this case.
McMahon was allowed to enter into evidence the information related to the other case where he functioned as a whistleblower.
So these things get excluded.
So it's an enormous problem.
And you're quite right.
I grew up. Believing and saying, you know, we need to trust the FBI. I have shared information with the FBI as it relates to foreign intelligence cases.
But the abuse of power has become too great and is quite worrisome.
And I think you always have to look at the background of an individual.
There's no indication in McMahon's background at all.
At all, that he would be sympathetic for the CCP, that he was paid some, you know, large sum of money by the CCP to obtain secrets.
And you have the added problem that some of the witnesses, I would argue, that the FBI brought forward or the Department of Justice brought forward in this case were individuals that are part of the Chinese emigre community, which is good.
But again, some of them have very murky, tangled ties.
You don't know actually who they're working for.
So it's a very, very difficult case.
I think it's another example of the more light that is shed on it, the better it's going to be for the defendant.
But look, he and his wife are having to fight this entire government apparatus largely by themselves.
And again, why they're throwing the book at him while they're allowing other cases to not be pursued aggressively is troubling as well.
I mean, it almost seems to me, Peter, that even if Trump wins the White House in November, and there is a restructuring of the FBI, the restructuring of the DOJ, and that in itself is going to be a tall enough order...
There also needs to be almost a retroactive review.
Trump has himself talked about the fact that he's going to look at the January 6th cases one by one again to see which of them really deserves to be cleared out.
These people deserve a pardon.
I mean, I would argue that you might consider pardoning everybody for the simple reason that when you have this kind of selective prosecution, this kind of deprivation of basic civil rights, this kind of a virtual show trial, Then it doesn't really matter if someone did something or not.
The whole process has been so irremediably contaminated.
Do you agree that there needs to be a sort of a retroactive sweep of cases like this one to look to see whether there are injustices that can be rectified potentially by a presidential pardon?
Well, the thing that's always bothered me about January 6, I mean, there are lots of things, but one that really bothered me is the creation or the prosecution of these political crimes, right?
Look, if you punch a police officer on Capitol Hill, charge them with assault.
They assaulted somebody.
If you want to charge people with trespass and it's an egregious case, Charging with trespass, but you know, insurrection, conspiracy, all these other charges, I think are ridiculous.
I think if Trump wins in November, his single most important appointment is going to be Attorney General of the United States, and he needs to pick...
A worker or a grinder, somebody who is prepared to go in root and branch of the Department of Justice and clean it out.
I would say, I don't know the politics behind it, I would say a guy like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who works very aggressively, very smartly, would be a great candidate for that position.
Because until you deal with Department of Justice corruption and cronyism and selective prosecution, You are not going to deal with the broader issues that we face in this country.
So that's the single most important appointment that Trump is going to make.
I couldn't agree more, Peter.
That is a great idea, actually, because one thing we can say about DeSantis is that this is a guy who has shown a sort of ruthless attention to detail and an operational efficiency that I think Trump could massively benefit from.
Peter, thank you very much for joining me, guys.
I've been talking to Peter Schweitzer, president of the Government Accountability Institute.
The most recent book, Red-Handed, the new one, Blood Money, and the website g-a-i.org.