Biden Moves US Closer to a Military Draft, Ric Grenell Explains Why, Plus the Jack Smith Scandal You Haven’t Heard About | TRIGGERED Ep.133
Biden Moves US Closer to a Military Draft, Ric Grenell Explains Why, Plus the Jack Smith Scandal You Haven’t Heard About | TRIGGERED Ep.133
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Now, every day I wake up and I wonder whether or not I'm living The Truman Show.
You know, the Jim Carrey movie where they're filming his life, every aspect of it, and he doesn't know it's happening so that they can create all sorts of crazy stuff.
The world is burning under Joe Biden and Democrat leadership.
Our border is wide open.
Ukraine is getting whatever money this country has left.
We're mortgaging our children's future to protect one of the most corrupt countries in the history of the world.
We have pro-Hamas demonstrators setting up camps on college campus across the country, not just protesting for the peaceful existence of a Palestinian people, but literally cheering on a terror group.
that murdered and raped people in the streets of Israel in early October.
And we have a Roomba wandering around the White House, falling down the stairs of Air Force One, making every mistake imaginable, and he's now wearing special sneakers so he doesn't fall even more often.
Our country is becoming a punchline.
It's a joke.
It's a laughingstock of the world.
You see, Italian television and so many other countries just openly mocking the incompetence that is exuded from the White House.
So who better to try to make sense of all of the insanity than former Acting Director of National Intelligence and the founder of Fix California, Rick Grenell.
Rick was our ambassador to Germany.
He went on to be Acting DNI, a leader in the America First movement.
Rick is smart, steady,
A strong, strong, strong America First voice.
And he'll lay out just what's at stake over the next six months.
So guys, make sure you're hitting the like button.
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Well, guys, joining me now, former acting director of National Intelligence, founder of Fix California, the one and only Rick Grinnell.
Rick, good to have you here, buddy.
Nice to see you in pink, Don.
Yeah, I was gonna say, we were joking off camera before we started.
I was like, this feels like a little bit of a role reversal.
You're wearing camo and I'm wearing pink.
You know, I don't know.
I mean, it's fine.
It's fine.
Listen, I know you personally and I know that you're very comfortable wearing pink.
Yeah, and I'm comfortable with my gay friends.
We were also joking about this.
It feels like saying gay is making a comeback.
Not in a sexual way, but there's a couple words that felt like they were cancelable offenses.
You couldn't say gay, you couldn't say retarded.
It felt like for me growing up, either one of those, those two words combined probably made up 50% of the words that came out of my mouth from
Early high school through college.
Maybe a little bit further.
Then they went like full cancel bill and now... Maybe the pendulum overcorrected too far in terms of PC.
Yeah look you know my attitude on all this stuff is like you know someone's heart and you know what they mean.
You know you can't go off and just get offended by every little thing.
I mean a lot of times you know people who are super comfortable and totally for equality and so you want them to be real.
You want them to kind of talk like a normal person.
And use humor.
I mean, look, I think the biggest thing that we've lost through this whole thing is humor.
There are some really funny jokes about religion, sexuality.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that we used to... My dad, who is like one of the holiest people that I knew before he passed away, he would tell, you know, funny religious jokes.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that was okay.
Yeah, of course.
Because I knew his heart.
And that's right.
I sort of feel like maybe, you know, the ultimate proof of like, you know, not being homophobic is being able to have a gay friend like yourself and say these things totally comfortably.
Like it's, you know, it's not like, you know, it's when you are changing your vernacular or whatever it may be to accommodate for, you know, to perhaps not offend whatever, like if you have that worry,
I mean, how good of friends could you actually be?
How comfortable could you actually be with that person?
It sort of feels like, you know, the most anti-racist thing in the world is having real friends that you could joke at any level with and be totally comfortable.
Well, you know, what you're hitting on is really people can sense authenticity.
They know when someone is being completely phony and pretending like they're offended or pretending like, you know, you shouldn't use that word because I never would use that word.
It's a microaggression.
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's where President Trump really took off, is just completely being authentic.
I know him personally as somebody who not only looks at me as completely 100% equal, but also completely 100% responsible for my actions, and he can hold me accountable.
He is somebody who doesn't try to take
He actually just treats you and holds you to a responsible level.
Regardless of who you are.
And so he can joke with me about it.
I got a zillion stories of the president joking with me about just how comfortable he is and how he loves the gay community and the votes from the gay community.
And how do we reach the gay community?
Yeah, because when he appointed you, you know, acting DNI, first you were ambassador to Germany, that was a big deal, but then you were an acting DNI, you know, the first gay man in that sort of level of power, and it was strange, like, you know, I saw no accolades from the media touting the fact that this was the first person, you know, of that sexuality to be put in this power.
I know, you know, our press secretary, she's the first black, gay, foreign-born lesbian, like,
You know, that was a big deal.
I mean, frankly, that seemed to be her only qualifications because she's otherwise incompetent.
You got none of that.
You got no credit.
You know, you would have been the first maybe openly gay person in a cabinet, I think.
And, you know, they made a really big deal about Buttigieg, who you beat by, you know, a few years.
Look, I find it actually huge progress.
Now, the conservatives, I've watched how they've changed on gay issues.
And what I love about the way conservatives and Republicans treat gay people is because they really, at this point,
There's no debate about equality.
There's debate about responsibility.
Are you going to be a responsible member?
Are you going to seek to make our community better?
Are you part of the group of Americans that are loving this country, feeling responsible for making sure and protecting that it
Yeah.
It was nightmarish to hear the language, but we have completely grown, and now, I really believe that you can't be anti-gay in the Republican Party and not be run out of the party.
Yeah, there'll always be a troll or two, but I mean, you said this to me, and it really, it actually struck home because it's so interesting with what's going on right now.
You said this to me, you know, years ago, and it was like, hey man, there's no one tougher than a gay Republican because we went through some shit.
And I was like, you know what?
That's actually a really good point.
And now, though, you've broken through that.
It does feel, like I said, of course there's going to be trolls here and there.
There's always, you know, there's always something like that.
But like, you know, I've been all across the country and no one cares.
I mean, you're a hero in the America First movement.
You know, you're one of those guys that people list in the top five of like, who do I think represents us best?
And it's not like you're hiding this stuff.
So, you know, I think that's pretty incredible progress.
Well, thank you.
But two points on that is that
You know, gay conservatives really believe, and I would say log cabin Republicans, really believe wholeheartedly that government needs to be smaller and that its power needs to be limited because, frankly, we're on the front lines of realizing we're not going to get all these benefits if you're trying to, you know, appease all these groups.
The gay conservatives are going to be the last ones to get anything.
Yeah, you get nothing.
The trainees will get everything.
I think we can say that too now.
But like,
Because I do want to hear your thoughts on that because that's sort of like, that's like one of those like, it's not about equality, it's actually going so much more.
They don't want equality, they want much more than equality.
They want special treatment.
They want special treatment and they want others hindered so that they get even more special treatment and, you know, I'm sort of curious how that jives
You know, in the gay community in general, not even with the conservative gay community, because I probably, you know, I imagine they sort of feel like I do about it, but, you know, within the gay community as a whole, you know, what's going on there?
Because it feels like that movement has sort of been usurped by the QTIA++++, you know, it just goes on, you know, to infinity.
And yet, it does feel like it's at odds with so much of what the, you know, LGB maybe, you know, had accomplished.
I don't know, we don't even understand the Bs.
What I don't understand about the Bs is that, isn't that an admission that there's two genders, if it's a bi?
I think they're ready to kick the buys out as well.
But look, one thing I want to say before I go into that answer is that it's really important for people to understand is that the growth of the Republican Party has been enormous.
Donald Trump
has blown the doors off this process to really welcome gay conservatives in.
But the gay left does not want to make progress on this.
The gay left exists to make sure that gays and lesbians think that this is a terrible country to live in, that we're oppressed.
And what we're left to argue is we've largely achieved equality in this country.
We need to recognize that there are 69 countries around the world that will criminalize you for being gay.
And you even go to the point of nine countries will kill you for being gay.
I just saw that Iraq, we've spent trillions of dollars of blood, sweat and tears to try to move Iraq forward.
And guess what they just did under the Biden administration?
They just criminalized homosexuality.
They went backwards.
We were making progress because we were holding people to a standard that just simply said, don't criminalize it, don't put people in jail, don't kill gay people.
Well, it doesn't seem like a big ask, you know, in the civilized world, but you know, but
But that's the problem, right?
Our elite, you know, the adults were back in charge and they're so pro-LGBT in the Biden administration and yet, you know, Anthony Blinken gets up there with a straight face after the disastrous withdrawal of Afghanistan and, you know, literally before Congress.
I say this all the time because it's so, like, mind-blowing to me that, like, the adults who are back in charge could be this incompetent.
He was, and I quote, shocked and dismayed that the Taliban, I mean, you know, the Taliban did not install a more
Diverse and inclusive government.
I mean, like, was there going to be a little trans-Taliban coalition?
Like, you know, they threw them off buildings last week, but now they have a seat at the table?
Like, what?
Is it just about optics and, like, just saying it and they get a little credit?
It's so just far from reality.
It is about optics.
You know, as soon as these university students in America realize that Hamas isn't for climate change, there's going to be a reckoning.
People are going to freak out.
But they are, but I mean, there's Gaze for Palestine, right?
I mean, I'm seeing, I'm like, you don't, I mean, you don't have to be, like, an avid follower of the news.
You don't have to wake up like me and, like, scroll truth on Twitter to see what's going on in the world for hours on end, and then rant about it at night on your own podcast.
Like, you have to be able to, like, open a newspaper.
Like, it's this daily stuff that's happened.
I mean, they do this, and then one of the, you know, one of the activists over there that is Gaze, you know, literally murdered for it, and it's like, no, it's different.
It's like,
No, it's not.
I think what we have to start with is that, you know, I've become an expert on the gay left and what their motives are.
And their motives are money and jobs.
They really are not concerned about the issue because if they were concerned about the issue, they would declare victory and pack up and move on to something else, like international issues or something where gays and lesbians literally are being criminalized.
But they don't.
They continue raising a lot of money from corporate America, which is one of the things that I'm going after, is to remind corporations that when you give to the gay left, you're giving to a partisan organization who want, they collectively want,
There's a very common sense solution
On the trans issue, but the gay left is absolutely against this because then it takes the issue away and they can't raise money off it.
But here's the common sense solution.
And log cabin Republicans are at the forefront of this solution, which is if you're under the age of 18,
We don't let you put tattoos on your body.
We don't let you put alcohol.
You're not allowed to buy cigarettes.
There's a whole bunch of things that we say you are not yet equipped to be able to make life altering decisions.
Yeah.
And I would say
We could have a debate on whether or not 18 is even the appropriate age.
But society has said it's 18.
If you can go to war, you can make other decisions.
Even if you're signing up for a $500,000 college loan, you're not capable of that.
You're not capable of paying that back.
You had no idea that your gender studies degree wasn't going to pay out.
Shockingly.
I mean, I don't know how that happens.
But yes, at three, you could decide to change your gender permanently and be on life-altering drugs for eternity.
Yeah, and look, what log cabin gay conservatives say is that's not right.
We should protect kids under the age of 18.
No one should be able to get life-altering drugs into their body like that, or surgeries, or make any permanent decisions like that.
That is an absolute.
Protect kids, protect bathroom spaces.
What we have to be able to do is if you're under the age of 18, protect kids even when they and their parents say, no, this child is ready
To go forward and change their gender.
I don't believe that the child has the wherewithal to stand up to a parent.
I think the parent is pushing the child into this situation.
100%.
There's a reason every other family out of Hollywood has a trans baby.
You know, no, but math and statistics don't work.
Like, just, you're artsy, therefore you passed on a trans gene.
Like, no way.
It's a Lambo.
It's like having a Lambo in Miami.
You know what I mean?
It's a Birkin bag.
It's a status symbol in Hollywood to have a trans bag.
If you have trans like twins or like two of them, it's like, ooh, it's even better.
It's like, it's- It's clearly out of control.
And so what we want to say is, if you're under the age of 18, protect the kids.
But at the same time, Don, the same messaging
We have to be able to say, if you're over the age of 18, go knock yourself out.
Be whoever you want.
Well, I got in trouble with this during the primary, right?
Because everyone will find outrage, they're being paid by another campaign, and I go, you know, sort of jokingly, I said it on the show, I go, hey, listen, I'm pretty liberal on the issue, I guess.
Like, if you're 18, you know, whatever legal age we come up with, like, hey, have at it.
I don't want to pay for it.
I don't want to hear about it ad nauseum and, you know, stay the hell away from my kids.
Like, I don't know.
As a conservative, if we're trying to keep government and all these rules out of your lives, let people make decisions, that's fine.
Again, I don't want to have to pay for it.
You see that.
I saw an article on Wikipedia.
The trans community makes up a very disproportional portion of the military relative to their per capita, you know, thing in society.
I'm like, yeah, because our military is now paying for sex change operations, and then once you're on the drugs after the sex change operations, you're not allowed to be on the front lines.
So we've created a system that has scared away anyone who'd actually want to be in the military that would actually fight well, and basically given out free sex change operations where there's no risk of actually having to be on the front line.
You just be like, hey, I took care of this.
And they're doing it like,
They're the greatest patriots in the economy.
I'm like, no, they're gaming a system designed by morons.
Like, of course they are.
Look, my position is protect the kids under 18.
Over 18, be able to do what you want.
But that means responsibility.
If you're going to go through a gender reassignment after the age of 18, and you are going to decide that this is what's best for you,
I actually think that you've got to figure out how to go through that without asking the public to pay for it.
I just don't believe that you have the
You know, the luxury of saying, I'm going to make this decision, I'm going to make the public pay for it.
These are controversial decisions.
These are individual decisions.
I know they're very difficult for adults.
And I'm not judging any adult who makes that decision.
I think if you want to get a tattoo on your face, you get to have a tattoo on your face.
There's consequences to your actions, but yeah.
You as an adult, that's where I come in as a libertarian.
And I'm like, you know what?
Knock yourself out.
Be whoever you want to be as long as you're happy.
As long as you're also not taking away someone else's rights or demanding that they pay for your activity.
And that's where I think we've got to have a better conversation, even about drug use.
This is a whole controversial of how do you get people off drugs?
Do you have to give them a little bit of drugs to wean them off?
Do you do it cold turkey?
Do you throw them in prison?
I don't really think that there's one answer.
I think everybody responds differently.
But I do know this, because I was raised evangelical, that the spiritual side of a lot of these issues are very real.
And I think that if you can bring in the private sector that is really good, the religious community, really good at giving compassion.
Government doesn't give compassion.
Individuals give compassion.
And I think it's really important to bring in the religious community into this conversation as well.
Yeah, it's actually interesting.
I mean, I think there's also probably conversations about, you know, levels.
You see these guys, they keep the, you know, the male body parts.
They're female.
And it's like, well, I committed a crime, so I'm trans and I'm in a female prison.
And they seem to having a great time impregnating the rest of the inmate population.
It's sort of lunacy.
I almost like, hey, if you're going to do this and you're going to get that credit, like, you have to fully commit.
Like, what's the... Yeah, you know, there's a great study.
You can't really have your cake and eat it too here, boys, girls, whatever, you know, Zimzer, like whatever you are, right?
There's a really good study from the Independent Women's Forum.
You should have one of the experts on your show because they went into the prison population and they looked at this issue in detail and there's amazing stories that really show the problem and they have been leading the way on figuring out within the prison population how it's being manipulated with gender ideology.
It's a real serious problem.
I'll definitely check that out.
If you have any recommendations, shoot me a text offline because I'd be curious about it.
It is fascinating to see how, again, this population of society that's, what, 0.02%?
Less than a percent in terms of real.
The lobbying power that they have, it feels like they're the only group in society that's like totally like, you can't, oh, you can't mess with them.
They're trans.
It's like totally beyond reproach.
You know, totally off limits to mess with anything.
And so it's sort of a fascinating one.
But yeah, I'll have to do that more offline.
This is because this was totally off track of where I wanted to talk with you, but given everything else that's going on, because obviously, you know, you're from California.
Uh, there's new data out that actually showing really big increases in the number of registered Republicans.
Uh, this is directly because of your efforts in California with, like, Fix California, people understanding what's going on, people with, you know, believing their lying eyes.
It's, like, shocking.
It's like, oh, wow, the crime has gone up when we've done ridiculous, you know, California Democrat things.
You know, what are the latest numbers?
What have you been doing in the ground out West?
How does that look?
How's that transformation happening?
And what do you think it really effectuates?
I mean, for me, I love seeing it because maybe it means house seats or, you know, state rep type stuff.
What do you see on the ground?
I don't know that you're going to win California on the presidential, but like, all of it's important.
I think if you give us five or six years, we're on our way.
About three years ago, I decided to do something about it.
And it's a very unsexy campaign.
People can go to FixCalifornia.com or FixCalifornia.org.
We are spending $50,000 a month right now to register conservatives who are sitting on the sidelines.
So we found, and we have a database of 1.4 million
Unregistered Californians who we know are conservatives and who were just trying to convert.
So we're spending this money and we're doing a really good job.
President Trump, your dad has really believed in this and has helped us raise money for this effort in California.
The way that I like to say it to people is imagine, you know, 15 years ago, Florida was a purple state.
Yeah.
And you ask yourself, what happened?
Why did they go completely into the red?
And the answer is because a few people got together and started doing digital registration.
It's not the old way of doing registration with a clipboard in front of the grocery store.
It's literally finding digital footprints.
And we in California hired a firm out of Florida who knows how to do this.
They have been doing it in Florida and now they're doing it for us in California.
We've been doing it for three years.
I will say this because you've got a lot of gun owners that watch your podcast.
If you're in California and you're a gun owner,
You probably aren't registered to vote.
And we really need to start pounding that.
One of the reasons that gun owners don't like to register to vote is they don't want to give a blue state management system like Gavin Newsom
Uh, their, their information.
But we are finding ways to protect your information.
We're holding local governments to account.
And we think that it's very important that gun owners register to vote, get involved, especially in California.
We're telling people on the sidelines.
We are making a huge difference.
We just had a month for the first time in about 15 years where more Republicans registered to vote in California counties than Democrats.
Yeah, and that's such a big deal, right?
It may not matter for the presidential yet.
We've got a long way to go, though.
But, yeah, but imagine flipping a couple school board seats and, like, not having the indoctrination of your children or, you know, the other stuff we're talking about.
Yeah, sure, your rainbow-haired teacher says you're trans.
I'm three, I'm gonna listen to my teacher, I must be trans.
Like, you know, imagine what you could do at that level.
So, you know, it's funny, when you look at California, it's like some of the most conservative people I know actually live in California.
I think as a population, it's like the second largest conservative state in the country.
It's just, you know, you got a lot of lunatics on the coast.
But, you know, you go about a mile inland and it's basically, you know, ag land, it's farmland, it's everything that you, and it's, you know, rodeo.
And like, wait a minute, I'm like, how is it possible?
And yet... Let me give you this stat.
The way to flip California is through Los Angeles.
Los Angeles County is the largest county in America by almost double.
It's by far the biggest behemoth county.
All you have to do is flip Los Angeles County
And then you flip California and you flip the entire presidential state.
How do you flip Los Angeles?
Presidential race.
Is that just as an example of statistics?
What we're doing is we're digging deep and finding all of those conservatives for the last 15 years that gave up on Los Angeles and gave up on voting.
We have a whole bunch of people sitting on the sidelines.
Remember, Don, only about 50% roughly, and the numbers are a little bit rough,
But roughly 50% of society is even registered to vote, and then only roughly 40% of people registered are actually voting.
So we've got massive amounts, more people on the sidelines, watching the process.
And what I'm saying up and down the coast in California, and I don't get paid to do this, I do this out of my own pocketbook,
But I travel the state telling people we cannot be an ATM for the rest of the country.
We've got to care about Sacramento.
We've got to care about City Council in Los Angeles.
We've got to care about our local communities.
And so we are.
We're making a big difference.
I stepped out and I endorsed about six people
It's going to take four, five, six years.
We didn't get here overnight.
We're not going to change it overnight.
So I want to touch base on a kind of a big story that has gotten almost no coverage as it involves and surrounds Jack Smith, who's trying to put my father in jail for the rest of his life, effectively, plus about, I don't know, 650 other years and maybe the death penalty, and his actions overseas in Kosovo relating to allegations of massive foreign bribery.
You know, I know you know the region well.
You were our ambassador to Germany.
You worked at the UN, you know, prior to all of this.
You know, so you understand the dynamic that, you know, of course our MSM isn't going to tell us anything about.
What can you tell us about what's going on with all of this?
Look, I've tried to share this far and wide and literally we can't get the legacy media in America to pick it up.
But the president of Kosovo, his name at the time was, his name is Hashim Thaci.
President Fauci was a great man.
Joe Biden actually, many years ago, called President Fauci the George Washington of Kosovo.
So the George Washington of Kosovo was, 20 years after the war, indicted
By the Hague and Jack Smith.
Remember, Jack Smith was at the Hague before he came back to Washington to take the job to go after President Trump.
He was living in Europe, a really cushy life at the Hague, and he was a prosecutor.
And his assignment was Kosovo, Serbia, and all of the war criminals from basically 21 years ago.
And so
We had a series of prosecutors who couldn't find anything on Hashim Thaci, who didn't indict him for decades.
And the previous prosecutor before Jack Smith actually gave up and said, you know, there's nothing here.
I'm closing up and I'm leaving.
And the Hague continued to spend American dollars.
American taxpayers are paying for this.
To continue spending another couple of years, Jack Smith, researching and trying to get to war criminals.
But it wasn't until I announced that Hashim Thaci, the president of Kosovo, and President Vucic, the president of Serbia, were coming to the Oval Office to meet with Donald Trump, because we were about to negotiate and sign a historic agreement between the two.
Right after I tipped off the Department of Justice and told them that we had agreed, the two parties, Kosovo and Serbia, had agreed to get rid of the Hague Tribunal Court.
Okay, this is the key.
I tipped off DOJ and said, just want you to know in the final agreement between Kosovo and Serbia, they've agreed to get rid of the Hague, which is Jack Smith's job.
They agreed to get rid of the criminal court, the international court at The Hague that Jack Smith was running.
And the DOJ individual's name is Bruce Schwartz.
I still have a voicemail from him on my phone from four years ago.
I've kept it.
That individual said, Oh, Rick, I don't know about that.
Jack Smith needs to know he's, you know, this is he's in charge of this.
Let me talk to Jack Smith.
I found out two days later that he said, no, Jack Smith said you can't do that.
And within weeks, within three or four weeks, Jack Smith had announced an indictment of President Fauci.
Before he came to the White House, President Fauci was hauled off to the Hague.
And Don, do you know that four years later, President Fauci is still in prison?
He's still waiting four years later for the Jack Smith team that Jack hired to do something about this trial.
The trial is a sham.
The Europeans should be totally embarrassed.
This is his playbook at this point.
I mean, that's the same thing with Trump, right?
Right now it's, you know, keep him off.
Uh, you know, keep him off the campaign trail because, you know, if he's out there talking to Americans, they'll realize, uh, the, let's just say, rather stark contrast between our incompetent leader, Joe Biden, and, and Donald Trump.
Uh, and, you know, the, the numerous, you know, he can't, he's not allowed to talk about this.
You can't talk about the facts of the case because then the American people would see that it's all bullshit.
And so, you know, today, you know, we may put you in prison for violating a gag order because you can't exercise your First Amendment rights in America anymore, even if it's, you know, something that the vast majority of people believe is a political persecution, which of course it is.
It seems like this is textbook for the Marxist.
There's one more angle to this.
And I want to be very clear that I don't know the facts, but the facts are absolutely worthy of tracking down.
What I do know is several people involved in what I'm about to say have confirmed individual parts of the story as true.
And so I'm competent enough to say
Individual parts of this story are true, enough to where there's definitely smoke and people need to investigate, and yet they're not investigating.
And here's the allegations, and I tweeted them today.
There is a businessman from Kosovo who's very close to Russia, and he did a lot of business dealings in Russia.
He now lives in Spain.
He has said that for a year and a half, he and Jack Smith talked regularly,
And that he was being pushed by Jack Smith to help him find individuals, find individuals that would accuse Hashim Thachi.
And in that negotiation, this businessman was facilitating $16 million to Jack Smith
In exchange for dropping US sanctions and prosecutions on two Russian businessmen, and that Jack Smith took the money.
Now again, this is the allegation from others.
All of this is all over the Balkans.
It's been reported since last December.
People have been looking into this.
And yet no one in the United States has dug into this to report on it.
I find it to be outrageous that we haven't gone and that this individual businessman in Spain who's from Kosovo, who's making this allegation, and by the way, there are recordings with Jack Smith's prosecutors
Uh, where I've heard these recordings and individuals have challenged the whole process to say, that's not what I said.
You're, you're, you're putting words in my mouth.
This is not what I said.
You're making things up.
So the whole case is very flimsy against President Thachi.
It should have been looked at and fallen apart a long time ago.
And in the middle of it is Jack Smith and his tactics and his hate for Donald Trump.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's clear what's going on here.
It's clear, frankly, what's happened to sort of the permanent bureaucracy in America.
But are there elements of that permanent bureaucracy that just hate our country?
Because I see what they do.
I see their view.
And I'm like,
I don't understand, man.
I'm not in government, but I'm a guy with a brain, and these things don't make any sense.
What should our viewers know about official Washington and whether it can actually be dismantled, where their motives lie?
Because none of it makes sense when you think about it.
We're told everyone's a public servant, but it seems like everyone's actually a self-servant, and public service is just sort of the joke around the cocktail party, like, ha ha, I've got them fooled, public servant, my ass.
So I live in Los Angeles, and if somebody came to Los Angeles in an official capacity some way, maybe a politician, maybe a businessman,
Maybe a newspaper person.
But if somebody came to Los Angeles and said, I have a great idea.
Let's get rid of movies.
The entirety of Los Angeles is going to say, kill that person.
Yeah.
Because everyone in Los Angeles knows someone who works at a studio, who works as a subcontractor to a studio, actor, agent, a union, the entirety.
We go to school, we go to church with people whose livelihoods are all about the movie industry.
The same is in Washington, DC.
What we conservatives have to stop doing is we have to stop asking the people who live and work and go to church in Washington, DC,
To somehow make their city less powerful with a smaller budget.
They don't want less money.
They want more money.
They're now cheering for their sports teams.
They've created sports teams in Washington, D.C.
It's a huge system that is always going to protect themselves.
When a vote comes up that says, you know what, I have a great idea.
Let's shrink the budget of Washington, D.C.
and make it less powerful.
You must vote for term limits of yourself.
Yeah, everybody in that city is going to be like, kill them!
So what we have to do as conservatives who want to make Washington more responsible to the rest of the country, and we want to make Washington DC less powerful over our lives,
We have to send people to Washington who aren't from Washington, who don't have a future in Washington, whose job is never going to be surrounding Washington.
We need regular people to stand up and run, go to Washington, vote to shrink that city, leave, go home to go to church, have a social life in Wisconsin or North Carolina or California, wherever you're from, and not be a part of Washington.
You can't go to Los Angeles and say, let's get rid of movies.
Okay, but by that logic though, how many guys do you know?
Because I know plenty, frankly on both sides.
They go in, you know, I was in Montana this weekend and we're, you know, doing a thing for, you know, Tim Sheehy running for Senate there against Jon Tester.
And I didn't know this.
I was literally staying with my buddy.
He was like, dude, well yeah, growing up, like Jon Tester was like my godfather.
Like if my parents were killed in it by a truck, like I was going to move in with him.
And he was like, yeah, he was a school teacher and a meat cutter.
And then he went to Washington DC and he ain't ever come back.
And so, you know, over a 25-year career, you know, you may have come in with the right intentions, but now, you know, Jon Tester in Montana, a pretty conservative state by all standards, you know, is voting 100% of the time with Joe Biden.
He's for, you know, males in women's sports with the trans issue, for open board, just like across the board.
I mean, one of the most liberal people in the United States Senate, and he's also become
I guess the number one recipient of lobbyist dollars in all of Washington.
And this is a guy that started off as a school teacher and a meat cutter from Montana, but over 25 years became the swamp.
How do we prevent that from happening?
Obviously, term limits, it's an idea, but I don't know that any one of these people, because you're not going to get them all at once, are going to vote for term limits.
And while I may love the idea, it ain't happening anytime soon.
Yeah, there's no way that they're going to vote to limit their own power, and we've got to stop asking them to do that.
But I do think that we have power.
I think the rest of us outside of Washington has power, and we need to flex it.
I think term limits are a great idea, and here's why.
I get the argument, the philosophical argument, that we should be able to vote for anyone we want.
And so on paper, the idea that you're limiting terms seems like you're taking away people's right and you have the simplistic view that people should just be able to vote for who they want.
The problem is, is that money in politics has become so huge.
And the power of incumbency has become even bigger that it's not a level playing field anymore.
Mitch McConnell is super out of touch, but he controls the purse strings of the Senate.
That's hundreds of millions.
No one can get elected by going against Mitch McConnell.
And once you take the money, he owns you for life.
Yeah, so I do think that the term limits are going to be important.
But here's one caveat.
If we just limited the terms of politicians, and we left their staff and the bureaucrats in Washington to be there for 25 years, they are going to become more powerful.
Yeah.
When they're running the federal government, of putting people in cabinet jobs that are there to reform, not just cut, but reform.
How do you make it better?
How do you make services better?
How do you use digital technology?
And that means rethinking the way that you do services, but it also means
Hiring people who aren't from Washington, who can withstand the media hits and the lobbyist hits and all of that, because they don't want their city to become less powerful.
But everybody else outside of Washington does.
The rest of America does want Washington to be less powerful.
I think there's a component of that's why they're also going after Trump so hard.
For sure.
Someone who doesn't need Washington, someone who didn't need Washington.
It's not just that they're going after him, it's that they're putting a marker out there for anyone else who's exactly what you're talking about.
Someone where, like, going to Washington DC, you know, whether you like it or not, even, you know, it's kind of a downgrade, not an upgrade.
You know, the people that sort of become part of the swamp, it's because, you know, they became a congressman because it's like, you know, the Distinguished Gentleman, the Eddie Murphy movie.
It's like, the name you know.
It's like, they have the same name as the guy that sat there for 30 years, so they get elected into Congress, and now they're in the big leagues, you know, from, you know, years of working in the state and making no money and getting crushed, and now they're a congressman, and people are kissing their ass, and they're invited to, you know, this and that dinner, and they're seeing, you know, celebrities every once in a while, and it's like, they ain't ever leaving.
They don't want to leave.
It's the greatest gig in the world.
And so I feel like part of the attack on my father is to show anyone else, you know, the entrepreneurial type.
Elon Musk wasn't born in America.
He's not running for president.
But those guys, don't get involved in our game.
If you do, we're going to make you pay for it.
It's not worth it.
You got a good life.
Just sit back, relax, stay in the background, and you'll be fine.
There's no question that that's what they're doing.
It's a warning shot.
And thank God we've got Donald Trump who doesn't care.
About what the media says, and he's getting stronger.
And I believe that God has his hand on him.
There's just no other way to say it because what he's been able to withstand is truly unbelievable.
And I do believe that the people are seeing this more and more, and they're getting more and more outraged because of it.
So, you know, pray for the president.
What we have to do in November is we have to win.
We have to send the outsider, and I think forever.
We need to send outsiders to Washington, D.C.
Stop, you know, I'll finish with this, is that, you know, I do a lot of traveling like you do to help candidates, and I hear a lot of the time when you pick somebody new, like Bernie Moreno, who's never been involved in politics because he's been literally out building businesses, creating jobs, but you hear people constantly say, well, I've never heard of Bernie.
My point is, that's the whole idea of this game.
That's a good thing.
That's not a bad thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you haven't heard of them, it's because they've actually been creating jobs, not running for office for 40 plus years, like Sherrod Brown.
Well, so I want to get your take.
I mean, we're seeing chaos across several of these so-called elite colleges, my alma mater Penn included as one of them.
How much is the Biden administration culpable in this sort of anti-Israel, anti-Semite extremism?
And how much is it the faculty and administration, how much are they to blame in all of this?
Because it seems like they seem to be leading the charge.
Look, what I think is,
The Biden team is responsible because they don't know what side to be on.
They're trying to play both sides.
And therefore, they say one thing, they say the other.
They're inflaming both sides.
They're not being a leader and saying this is the way.
The opposite is true for President Trump.
President Trump has three messages.
I'll just concentrate on two of them right now, that are incredibly powerful with the pro-Israel, pro-evangelical wing, as well as Arabs and pro-Palestinians.
He doesn't have to change his message.
And the message there is, this war wouldn't have happened if I were president.
We would have had more Arab-Israeli peace agreements.
And two, you can't fund Iran and not expect to have terrorism and war.
We squeezed Iran.
We had them complaining about not having money.
And then the Biden team came in and gave him hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, cash and credit.
So I actually think that Arabs and evangelicals and pro-Israel groups and Jews all see this.
They see that President Trump is very consistent in how he views this.
We shouldn't have this war and don't fund Iran.
That message works across the board.
And that is where Joe Biden has failed, and Jake Sullivan has failed, and Anthony Blinken has failed.
They don't know what side they're on.
They're still trying to negotiate with Iran.
They still don't understand
I don't know.
I mean, listen, it seems like every American adversary is just flagrantly taking advantage of Joe Biden's weakness.
If you end up, God forbid, what would a second Biden term look like?
I mean, it feels like the next natural progression is China invading Taiwan and we lose our semiconductor business.
But there's no other plausible explanation because of the weakness that we've exuded for so long.
Look, if Joe Biden is reelected and he continues on these policies, we're going to have to have the draft.
Because we are going to be fighting a lot more wars.
And we already know that Joe Biden has really failed to recruit a volunteer force into the military.
Our recruiting numbers are at the lowest they've ever been.
It's a crisis.
But at the same time, we're picking fights around the world, and it's getting more dangerous.
And we're getting involved in a lot more places.
So if you just take the trajectory of both of those,
Fewer people volunteering, more conflict.
We absolutely are going to have to have a draft, and I know I'm going to get hit by people for saying that, but I think it's the truth.
Joe Biden is re-elected.
Get ready for a draft, because these policies cannot continue without recognizing that we don't have enough people to fight, and there's a lot more conflicts to fight.
So, you know, a big one that we saw in the last couple of weeks, you know, was, you know, the renewal of FISA and all of that.
You understand exactly how FISA works.
I mean, you're, you know, the Director of National Intelligence.
Can you explain the, you know, the civil liberties issues at hand so that people understand the nuance?
Because everyone's like, no, you got to renew FISA so that you can spy, you know, on foreign adversaries.
And like, I'm fine with that, but like, they spied on 370,000 Americans too, like,
Yeah.
You know, like, I don't have a feeling that 370,000 Americans had somehow real terror links, but it's like, ah, well, we signed a warrant, so it's fine.
So, you know, we've shortchanged all of it to basically be able to go after Americans.
How easy is it ultimately for Biden's administration, his weaponized DOJ, the FBI, etc., to spy on whoever it wants to through FISA?
It is very easy, and I'm very uncomfortable with people who don't know about this process just saying, oh, we've got to have FISA to get the terrorists.
Look, if you want to stop the terrorists right now, close the border, because we know there's a whole bunch of terrorists coming through the border.
So, it's hard for me to take anyone very seriously who are screaming about the terrorists when they're not screaming about an open border.
That's the first point.
The second point is, look, there are a lot of good people within the intelligence community who are working hard gathering intelligence.
But one of the things I've talked about this before, one of the problems that we have in Intel, are the analysts.
Because now you have Intel gatherers who get the information, maybe they're listening and they're doing all sorts of ways to get the raw Intel.
But then you have a group of people who look at the pieces of raw Intel and they come up with an analysis.
They say, ah, I see this A, I see this B, and I see this C. You know what's going to happen is D. So then they give this warning, this analyst warning across the Intel community saying, this is coming.
Now that's based on raw intelligence, and we need to do a better job of holding the analysts to account.
Because remember, the analysts are the ones who said if you move the embassy
From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
World War III.
There's going to be World War III.
And not only were they wrong, but they were absolutely wrong because we actually had Arab-Israeli peace after that.
We literally had peace agreements.
So the analysts are the problems in this scenario.
And imagine this, Don.
Imagine if you opened up a newspaper and you went to the editorial section and you had no idea
Who wrote the editorials because nobody signed them.
So you don't know if you're dealing with a total partisan or a total expert.
Yeah.
You have no idea who is writing this and that's what the analysts are doing to us.
Well, it feels like, you know, two parts, right?
It feels like you could solve a lot of this if there were like actually severe criminal penalties for those who took some liberties with these things, right?
You actually put some consequence up there and there's not.
It's like, oh, I lied to a judge.
Just kidding.
Oh, it's fine.
Go amongst your day.
You know, if you actually put people in jail for this stuff, I think you'd create some honesty in the analyst community.
But I also feel like, you know, it's sort of amazing.
You see guys, you know, they're really against Ukraine funding.
They're really against the endless war.
They're really... and then it's like, well, we met with the intelligence people and, you know, they showed me a report.
Like, I got to reverse my entire opinion.
It's like...
They're lying to the, like, does anyone believe that these reports mean anything other than to have the desired effect of, let's call it, big war or the military-industrial complex?
It's like, yeah, I could craft a report to, like, if you read this as the gospel, oh, we gotta fund Ukraine for the rest of eternity, otherwise, you know, the world is gonna explode.
We're good to go.
Look, the briefing process is a real problem.
My first intelligence briefing was in 2001.
I am a total expert on what the intel community gives public policy officials as an intel briefing.
I've been through thousands of briefings.
I know exactly how they do it.
And what I've learned through this process is
When the person, when your briefer is sitting in front of you giving you this information, you got to ask questions.
You got to say, where did you get that?
How old is that?
Who gave that to us?
If you don't know how to dig down, it can be pretty flimsy.
And I think the crisis that we have in the Intel community is what we're giving as top secret classified information, or what we're giving in the briefings.
A lot of the stuff is not top secret.
It's found somewhere online, or it's going to be online in a matter of days after you tell us.
We've got to do a better job on the collections and the analyst process.
But I will say that a lot of people who look at Intel and can get manipulated by it, it's because they haven't been through enough briefings to know, I better ask some questions.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like, you know, they roll the Republicans with this every time.
Like, we have where we want to be, we understand what it is, and... You know, I changed my mind entirely because someone gave me a briefing that conveniently covers every point that Big War would want, or whatever it may be.
It's like, it feels insane.
And again, that's probably because a lot of, you know, people in Congress, you know, they've just been bureaucrats.
Like, maybe my eyes are open because I was targeted by these people.
So it's like, I'm a little bit more skeptical of everything these days, as everyone should be, but they don't seem to be in Congress, which is weird.
Yeah, look, Congress is not briefed that often.
They don't get regular intel briefings.
So, you know, it's very rare for them to.
Now, some individuals might request to go to a SCIF and get it.
But still, what they're given then is not
Uh, is not detailed enough because if you're getting a briefing every day and you're involved in the dynamics of it, and it's very dynamic where you're asking questions and you're directing the team on the information.
If you're not doing that on a daily basis, then you're not really getting a real feel for what's happening.
You're going to get a picture rather than a video.
And it's really important to get a video picture in real time of what's happening, what changed yesterday, what changed today.
And that's where I think Congress really lacks.
What can you talk about that you witnessed as Director of National Intelligence that perhaps shocked you the most?
I mean, you've had probably some of the highest clearances available.
You served in the highest position.
You served in lower positions, like I said, from the early 2000s on.
What was the thing that sort of shocked you the most in all of that process?
Look, I think intelligence gathering and diplomacy is an art, not a science.
And too many people just think that they can plug in the equation and it comes out in the perfect way.
And you've got to be involved.
Like, I don't believe that being a diplomat means that you're weak.
I don't believe that it's culinary diplomacy like Anthony Blinken does.
I believe that you have to be tough.
If you want to avoid war, you better have some real SOBs sitting at the table trying to solve problems.
It's very difficult to be a diplomat, a good diplomat, that finds alternatives to war.
It's a lot easier to transfer the file over to the Pentagon because the Pentagon doesn't negotiate.
So, what I would say, what I learned is that we have a system where too many people are thinking that it's a science, not an art.
We need to celebrate the real tough diplomats.
We need to be able to reward people who go in as a diplomat into the war zones.
Right now, Anthony Blinken is vacating our embassies when there's a crisis.
I know foreign service officers who want to be on the front line.
They signed up to solve problems.
Now, we got to make sure that they're protected and that they're not going into dangerous situations, but they also sign up knowing that it is dangerous and we've got to allow them to do their job.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd expand because that, you know, that was sort of the intelligence side of it, but you served as our ambassador to Germany.
And, you know, unlike it felt like so many of our ambassadors, you know, when Trump was like, hey, I need you to do this, you know, Germany wants us to pay for NATO indefinitely and pay for all of it.
They're not kicking in their share, but they want us to up it because they want protection from Russia while they're simultaneously negotiating a pipeline deal with Russia.
To get cheaper energy, so I'm like, you're enriching the enemy that you want us to protect you from, and there's no accountability, and you went in there and were like, no, this doesn't work, and that had to be an uncomfortable situation, but, you know, why is it that it feels like so many in that diplomatic corps and ambassadors, well, I would rather be liked by the press than do what my job is, which is to serve your president and ultimately your country.
Yeah, I think you just got to remember that you work for the American people and that and that's your job is to make us safer.
Remember, the three things that President Trump and I were pushing in Germany were Nord Stream 2, stop it, stop the pipeline, pay the 2% fair share.
And the third thing was stop having German companies work with Iran.
All three of those things have been proven right.
Now, I don't expect to have an apology from Chancellor Merkel.
I don't think we're going to have an apology from the German media.
But I will tell you this, the German government has changed their position on all three of those, and their position is now Donald Trump's position.
He was an early mover on this, and they should have listened to him.
Well, it feels like, you know, with some common sense and with some action from the American people, we can get back to that kind of policy, because God knows, we don't just need it as a country.
I think we need it as the world.
Yes.
Well, Rick, as always, buddy, thank you so much for being here.
Really appreciate you joining.
I'm sure, hey, the coming months, we're going to be busy and active.
There's going to be a lot to talk about, so I'm sure we'll be talking to you again soon.
So be well, and I'll also, I'm sure, see you out on the trail in the not-too-distant future.
All the best, Don.
Thanks.
Be good, bud.
Guys, that was great.
Rick, thank you again.
I think that was awesome.
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