All Episodes
Previous Next
May 10, 2025 - Lionel Nation
01:11:26
The Clinton Foundation Scam: Ortel Breaks It Down, Lionel Lights It Up
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I bring back to gracing the portals of Lionel Nation, the one, the only, the inimitable, the ineffable, the ineluctable, the incredible Charles Ortel.
Charles, welcome back, dear friend.
It's great to be back, and in your honor, Lionel, I had this book, Rebound, which you probably used when you were...
It's right in front of my face.
It's Chase's Blackstone, fourth edition.
But I had a beautiful rebinding of it.
Beautiful.
Now, is that a fake internal part where you can hide your weed and your derringers?
No weed.
No, I'm an avid book collector.
I had the first book that I got when I was five months old given to me by my grandparents.
I just had that.
Rebound as well.
And I've been collecting books for almost 70 years.
Well, that is.
You know what?
It's part and parcel of your imane genius and the range of your interest.
But let's get down to brass tacks.
Do not let this man's panache, the posh exterior for you when it comes to unearthing the deep.
Dark, dank, underbelly of political theater.
Nobody does it better.
When we last met with you, you again gave us this just incredible litany, this indictment of the Clinton corruption machine.
What is on our plate tonight?
And I have no idea.
We don't prepare this at all.
What is on your agenda tonight, good sir?
One outrageous disclosure that has occurred in the past week is Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, announced that his team had determined that one-third of all of the payments made by the Treasury Department, trillions of dollars, one-third, had no information concerning what the money was spent on, and therefore one-third couldn't be audited.
Now, I come out of the for-profit, And under Jack Welch, who I don't admire at General Electric, he pioneered this idea that businesses should strive to know 99.99999% of everything that was going on, whether it's revenues or expenses.
It is outrageous in 2025 and in recent years that our government would be this cavalier with our money.
And so what began for me looking into the Clinton Foundation in 2015, a friend asked me to take a look at it, and I was horrified by what I saw then.
I thought maybe then that it was just the Clintons and maybe the Bushes and a few other people who would abuse charity lands.
Now what I think we've discovered is the most corrupt class on earth are the politicians who live in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, and in other parts, in other governments.
Who understand that corrupt prosecutors have discretion to target political enemies and to protect political friends.
That's what's been going on until now under Trump.
And so the scale of the corruption...
In 2016, I said that I thought the Clinton Foundation fraud was $100 billion.
Now I would say that global fraud is probably...
The cumulative value of the fraud could be $50 trillion.
You know, and really, if I had anything to do, and one of the reasons I'm in retirement far away from America is that I don't want to get mired in this type of a mess, but if I were brought back into it, I would say that it is a rebuttable presumption that any senior politician is corrupt.
In other words, I'd put any senator, any representative, any governor, any cabinet official.
President and Vice President, all of the above.
It's almost right.
It's rebuttable, and it's also a default position that before you start, you start off with this, and then maybe you might work.
Oh, I'm with you 100%.
My ancillary version of that is everybody's crazy, and then you start off with that one as well.
Charles, a couple of questions.
Let me just make sure people understand this.
Imagine that this would be impossible.
I'm H&R Block.
Charles comes to me to do his taxes.
He hands me his checkbook.
I open it up and I said, Charles, there's no...
It says here, 50, 100, 2,000.
Where did this go?
I don't know.
What do you mean you don't know?
I don't know.
That's part of this.
The other question is, when you say 50, 100 trillion, you have a...
Better understanding of this.
I don't.
$50 trillion from where?
What is it?
What are we taking this from?
We're creating zeros and ones out of nothing?
Explain that to me.
For now, anyway, the United States government and state and local governments have the ability to borrow money that they are not able currently to repay.
Unless the Ponzi scheme continues.
And the reason that is possible is that as bad as the situation is in the United States, I like to characterize it as being the least dirty shirt in the laundromat.
Europe is in much worse shape, and portions of Asia are in horrible shape.
So people who actually have legitimate wealth and large amounts of wealth need to put it someplace.
Are you going to put it in Belgium?
I don't think so.
Are you going to put it in Canada?
I don't think so.
Or China or India.
So there is a bid for the U.S. dollar.
There's a bid for U.S. securities.
And in this tenuous shape where we're hurtling over the cliff, maybe we're already over the cliff, Scott Besson, who's a very smart guy, I don't know him personally, but he's a very smart and accomplished investor, he must see this.
He must understand, and Trump certainly understands, that we have to reshape the profile of government.
In the United States of America, we've got to put government on a starvation diet, Twitterize it the way Musk did, taking 80% of the workforce out at Twitter, now Musk, and now X, rather.
And we've got to not simply say, well, what did we spend last year?
Let's only grow it by 2% or only cut it by 10%.
We have to ask the question, why are we doing it?
Why are we protecting Europe in 2025, 80 years after?
We assisted in winning World War II.
And why are we still have the military footprint?
And why are we increasing it, as Hegseth wants to do, up to a trillion?
I don't understand that.
Oh, listen.
I don't even know where to start.
First, I don't even know.
There's so much here.
Charles Ortel, hypothetically, thought experiment.
I'm the president.
And I'm going to bring you in here.
And I say, Charles?
Sir Charles are your friends.
You pick up the name, call yourself what you want, pick the division, whether it's Treasury, Commerce, I don't care, DOJ.
What do we do?
Where do we start?
And who would be first?
Let me guess.
Who would be first on your list?
Because as you know, sometimes you have to hit the biggest person to send the shockwaves out that you mean business.
What would you do, sir?
And to whom?
I think it's a great first shot that Harvard has fallen under the microscope because Harvard certainly is not today a public charity.
A public charity must have nothing to do with partisan political activities and can't be creating financial and other benefits for the people associated with the charity.
So the opening position I would have on Harvard is even more aggressive than perhaps the Trump team has.
I'd ask the question, what is Harvard?
Give me a list of every element of Harvard.
Now give me a financial report that shows me where you're making money and where you're losing money.
And I'll tell you, without even doing the work, Harvard Business School mints money.
Harvard Law School mints money.
Harvard Medical School mints money.
And these should all be taxed.
These are for-profit operations.
They're training people to make more money.
And then you go through, and you're going to find that within Harvard, I'm aware of several.
There are things that call themselves, I think it was called at one point, the Harvard AIDS Initiative.
It doesn't exist legally.
You know, it's just a professor's idea.
You get some stationery printed up.
You get donors sending money to the professor.
Who knows how much money that goes into the central treasury.
It sounds like something I remember years ago was called the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Clinton Trust, the Clinton, you know, but that's so correct.
How has this happened for so long?
And if this were to shut down tomorrow, Harvard's not going to disappear.
What is it?
Nine, ten billion dollars?
What is their endowment?
How much is it?
Fifty-three.
Fifty-three billion.
Close.
I was close.
I don't think they need this.
But there's also something...
I'm sorry.
Please go ahead, sir.
So the solution is one that I proposed for the Clinton Foundation.
I think what I would do is place Harvard under conservatorship.
And I would say, you know, we obviously don't want to destroy our oldest universities.
We're going to place it in conservatorship.
And then we'll have a special person, say somebody like Ed Martin, work on these different charities and decide...
Who is Ed Martin, for those who don't know?
Ed Martin, the person who was...
Oh, Martin, yes.
The one who was just passed over for the, or dropped for the D.C. But he's already been announced that he's going into justice to head up the weaponization investigation.
Don't you love what Trump does?
He moves you here.
He says, okay, I'll get rid of Orchell, but I'm going to make him the president.
Wait a minute.
This is worse.
They say, be careful what you ask for.
Judge Jeanine Pirro is going to be a subject.
I'm sorry.
A great lady.
What I would do here is I'd say as a first step, we're going to place the hostile fake public charities into conservatorship.
And that would be Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Princeton, the whole long list.
As a next step, we're going to ask special counsel to investigate whether the trustees or the people responsible for these universities discharge their duties of care, loyalty, and obedience to the law.
As they should have.
And I would argue that the president, I get, because I went to Harvard Business School, I get these emails from this idiot who runs Harvard now, where he's trying to raise money off what Trump is doing, as if I'm going to give Harvard any money run by this lunatic.
And he thinks that he's basically, Harvard thinks that they're above the law, they don't have to comply with the law, you know, we do what we want, because we train all these powerful lawyers and business people.
And I would ask the question, did these trustees discharge their duties?
And if they didn't, I believe there's civil and maybe even criminal remedies against these trustees for putting Harvard in the place where it now is.
You know, we were talking tonight in a very, very sad, sad moment on The View.
The View is sad, and I don't watch The View.
Joe Biden, for some particular reason, they're dusting him off.
And as I perceive it, you know, Charles, when people like Bill Clinton stepped down, I don't think he took money while he was in office.
Maybe he did, I don't know.
But afterwards, he just said, now we're going to work.
And they had the...
Of the Clinton Foundation and Health Access Initiative and the Foundation.
And if somebody came to Bill and he went to Harlem and he set up his thing, if somebody says, hey, listen, Bill, can you help us out?
I run a railroad in Mumbai.
No problem.
I pick up the phone.
He was out and he does speeches and he's fun and he's exciting.
Barack Obama, say what you want.
Glimb.
People love to see him.
He can do his stuff.
Joe Biden can't put words together.
He's run out of gas, and the Biden family doesn't work.
He's got to come up with money.
And that cash cow, whatever that funnel, that font that we talked about before, whether it's USAID or whatever, it's gone.
So this pathetic man is out there trying to...
I won't say, do you see what fraud has done?
He doesn't understand the gigs up.
If that makes any sense.
It does.
And when I first got into trying to explain this, one of the early shows I did was the Business Model for Charity Frog.
I think I did that in 2017.
And what we have here is when it comes to corruption, the present system does not deal appropriately with two income couples.
It doesn't check carefully enough into, for example, Jill and Joe Biden.
And when you see a political family with somebody in power and another member of the family running one or more charities, that should be stopped.
It's impossible to do that because that's obviously a way around campaign finance laws.
And you look at the template.
Ronald Reagan, who was one of my idols as the president, should never have gone to Japan in 1989.
And taken the large speech payments.
I think it was like 3 million bucks for several speeches.
He shouldn't have gone, taken office space in Marvin Davis' place out there in Los Angeles.
He shouldn't have let his supporters buy him a home.
He was plenty rich without their money.
And he shouldn't have gotten an outsized book deal.
With that template, every subsequent president has gone into this saying, you know, what sacrifice it is for my family to be flown around in a 747 and limousines and state dinner.
That's such a sacrifice.
It's an intrusion into my privacy.
And look at all the money I'm giving up.
Then they come in and they cash out.
Bill Clinton set a new record and model for speech payments.
The notion that you could get up and give the same freaking speech to a whole bunch of people.
And get paid $300,000 for, you know, just repeat, just extemporaneous BS.
One question that I haven't asked pointedly yet, I wonder, because, you know, in the Clinton cases, they make a big deal about how they provide their income tax forms.
That's true.
Their federal taxes are explained, but they have not provided their state income tax forms.
And my understanding is that when you're a professional athlete, you win a tennis tournament in Los Angeles.
You have to pay California state income taxes on that.
Similarly, if you're giving a speech in California, you've got to pay California taxes in New York.
There's no evidence that I've seen yet of how the Clintons accounted for all these speechifying payments, which I think they add up to tens, if not 100 million all told.
Then the question of book deals.
I'm finally getting around to shaping a book proposal.
And thinking about what's a reasonable way to be compensated for it.
And, you know, this idea that Joe Biden and Jill Biden would get a $30 million book deal.
I mean, for producing something that will probably be less interesting to read than the instruction booklet for a Samsung phone in Korean English.
I mean, it's...
Than Michelle Obama's book.
And remember, Joe's also thinking about doing maybe a podcast.
You know, there's an analogy somebody brought up one time, which is very interesting.
In the old days of Paola, Charles, you might remember people like, you know, Marie the K, not Marie the K, but Alan Freed and, you know, you pay me and I'll play your song.
It was Paola.
It wasn't really against the law, but nobody thought about it, but they went crazy.
Oh my God, you're taking money.
Yeah, okay.
So what they did was they tried to get around it by having something where your wife has a little art shop.
And you happen to be Alan Freed, so I go to your wife's workshop, and I buy some painting or some statue, and I pay $10,000 for whatever it is, and it, of course, goes to you, but the mechanism is that, no, no, I just, I'm an auteur or a lover of art.
I'm an artiste, I should say, and I love the classic.
Well, that happened with, what happened, with who?
Hunter Biden, between finger painting.
And what was so interesting was, Charles, they didn't even care.
They didn't even hide it.
They loved to do it in front of you.
If there's a memo you've poured through, you were responsible for basically the collapse or the destruction of GE.
You're going through arcane documents.
Here's something from Hunter that says, here's an email, I need 10 grand for the big guy.
I mean, it's...
You don't have to be Milton Friedman or whoever, some investigator.
How did they get away with this for so long?
How?
Well, you know, the mainstream media, when you and I first got together on doing media hits, I think it was 2016.
And back then, the legacy media was failing, but it was still very powerful.
And indeed, you know, as I tried to get...
Attention focused on the Clinton Foundation, people who knew how to do that said, you're going to have to get the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post to write a critical article.
Because until then, the producers on TV and radio, they're not going to want to take your stuff.
So I was able to do that.
And now I don't think that's the case.
The mainstream media has been so discredited.
I honestly do not care.
What the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journalists say about anything.
I used to read all those.
It's not relevant.
It's not the Washington Post anymore.
And if you go back to Operation Mockingbird from the days of Phil Graham, that was...
Nobody really knew about that.
Oh, I agree with you 100%.
Do you think that we're ever going to get to...
Well, let me give you an example.
Not to jump around.
You know...
There are levels and layers and strata.
I am convinced that if I were to go to the highest level, the peak of where organized crime is, there's no mafia today.
We don't care about that.
We're talking about money.
And people, not only with Silicon Valley and big tech, but people named, and they're not bad guys, Peter Thiel and Palantir and Elon Musk and money and this Epstein feller.
You know, A Limited Hangout is this partial introduction of a story that lures you into thinking that's what it's about.
The story behind Epstein isn't about what he did in blackmail.
How are you going to blackmail Bill Gates?
It doesn't matter.
It was the money laundering.
The shell corporations.
That's where the Al Capones are today.
This stuff doesn't even matter.
It's ditty.
Look at the infiltration of organized crime in the music business, but not just to have a freak-off party, but for structures of payments.
I mean, I'm perhaps articulating it poorly, but to me, the real Al Capones today are people you've never heard of in places you've never been who are very quiet.
Well, yeah, I mean, people like, for example, Klaus Schwab, who's now out of business and his replacement is even worse than Klaus Schwab.
He's the former CEO of Nestle, which is, you know, I used to think it was an interesting company.
The more I read about it, the less excited I am about it.
In fact, the more concerned I am about Nestle.
But, you know, the World Economic Forum is, I think, irrelevant at this point.
I mean, no sane, The honest multinational CEO is going to continue to go to that hooker fest in Davos.
And we don't need to be, none of us need to be lectured to by the son of a Nazi about, you know, how we ought to just give our possessions away and be happy to live in a tiny apartment.
I mean, so those ideas are foolish.
The European project is foolish, and it has harmed the private sector workers.
So that's, I think, a good thing.
People are growing to see that.
The best investment opportunities in the world are in the United States of America right now, under this president.
And that's why, at last count, $8 trillion in fresh capital, that's a lot of money.
$8 trillion is a gigantic amount of money for the private sector in any one year.
I think it's probably four times what is normally spent in the private sector in a year.
So that's a big...
And he's only just getting started.
Look at the tariffs.
People, I don't think, have a rudimentary understanding of what happens.
But by virtue of what's happening with the UK, if that's not a victory, I don't know what is.
That was...
It's great.
Do you agree?
And if so, explain to our novices why what he's doing is correct.
Well, everyone likes to talk about equality.
But the reality is that the American consumer market, Right, right.
You've got to be selling it to America.
And to the extent you're not doing that or there's a big tariff placed upon you to do that, you're in trouble if you aspire to be a globally significant economy.
So I will answer the question precisely, but… When I got into the business of exposing GE, I discovered to my shock and horror, and I'm not going to name names here, but the very famous journalists who covered that company and business in general would begin every discussion with me saying, you know, I'm not very numerate, I don't understand finance, and I don't understand accounting.
So why don't you tell me, you know, I think to myself, well, wait a minute.
You know, we all remember the people who did well in English.
And couldn't pass the math SAT.
Those aren't the same people who should be writing about business.
And unfortunately, a lot of the people who succeeded as journalists really, you know, get scared when it comes to looking at tables and charts and numbers.
And I think another thing I would say is there's one guy, and I don't know if he's still alive, and I'm forgetting his name, but he's a very famous and controversial analyst of what's going on in D.C. And his advice to me, he said, listen, I said, so where do you live in D.C.?
And he said, well, my number one rule is I spend as little time in D.C. as possible because that's how I get the perspective, to be away from it.
And so I think the mainstream political commentators are, excuse me for saying this, they're ass clowns.
I mean, they're more concerned about going to the next country club party or cocktail party or getting the wife on the right committee of the benefit than they are.
Really asking the types of tough questions that should have been asked of Mitch McConnell.
You know, exactly how did he make so much money and what are his wife's family interests?
Pointed questions need to be asked by people across the swamp.
Lindsey Graham, what's up with that dude?
How can a person who goes to Congress, who makes $174,000 a year, come out?
I think they were talking about Mikey Sherrill, this congresswoman from New Jersey, all of a sudden picked up $7 million.
And ipso facto, it's a prima facie, I think of as many legal terms, it's a prima facie case of you cannot do this were it not for you breaking the law.
It just doesn't lend itself.
Who was it who said Truman or somebody said...
Perry Truman left with his World War I pension and drove back to Independence in a car.
I mean, you were going to laugh at that.
And when you mentioned Reagan, Reagan was, it was chump change compared to what's going on.
This everybody does it kind of thing is, you know, people, in order for us to get to the next upward It
doesn't matter the name, but examples need to be set.
And the clearest examples in the land of charity need to be, if you're raising money for a charity that technically doesn't exist, and you're a lawyer, you need to go to prison for a long time.
If you're the people in the IRS, in the Department of Justice, who are fighting the Clinton Foundation whistleblowers, there's a matter going on in the U.S. Tax Court, I think since 2018, where our taxpayer money is being used by the IRS.
To obstruct a detailed, underseal, whistleblowing case, which would blow all of this, the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, the Bush Foundation, all these crooked foundations, blow them out of the water and put most of them in conservatorship, collect a lot of money in penalties, interest, and fines that could be used to reduce our debt.
You know, who at the FBI, who at the IRS, who in the state attorney general is fighting the efforts?
To expose charity fraud.
I think we know the big players.
I'd love to know if Gavin Newsom's wife has a charity.
We know that Tish James is deeply involved.
Charles, I was just going to say this.
Especially, now, if you would think somebody was saying, now, Tish, now listen.
Before you say that you're going to go after Trump, and before you basically...
You found your campaign on targeting him.
It's like Leverenti Beria.
Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
Are you sure everything's okay?
Yeah.
It's okay, but when you talk about Trump, no, no, it's okay.
You sure now?
In your real estate, of course.
Because we're still getting over Ilhan Omar marrying her brother.
Look, I'm all for keeping in the family, but enough's enough.
So she goes out and basically, You know who was the Charles Ortel of this?
You know who blew the lid of this?
Crazy Eddie.
Yeah, Sam Atron.
So, anyway, it's shown by the most conspicuous and obvious of skullduggery that she basically married her father, according to documents, and wanted to claim Virginia, I believe, as her primary residence when she...
Is it because...
I don't think she's a stupid woman.
I think she figures...
Well, what do you mean stupid?
But here's a person who figures, you don't understand.
I never had to worry...
I gotta worry about this now?
What?
It's like they rang the bell, but she didn't hear it.
Everybody out of the pool.
It's over with.
She didn't hear it.
Well, you remember Countrywide Financial and that perpetually fake-tanned Angelo Mozilla, who had a Friends of Angelo program, allegedly, when he ran this SNL.
So you're a politician.
You need to have two residences if you're a rep or a senator.
And it's tough to, you know, if you're from a rich, expensive part of New York, that thing's going to cost you money and you don't want to slum it in D.C. Where do you come up with a loan?
Angelo.
And then when time comes to go after shady SNLs, you know, Countrywide is not on the list of those attacked.
This is an old game.
I think it predates Countrywide.
And there needs to be, these disclosure forms are ridiculous.
There need to be real disclosure forms.
And people have to pay, some people have to pay taxes quarterly.
I think those forms should be updated quarterly.
And I think they should be independently audited.
You should be forced.
To declare your financial interests, if you pass them out of your direct control to a family member, we need to understand that.
If it's an extended family, we need to understand all that.
And, of course, that is not being done now.
And you look at Nancy Pelosi and her vast wealth.
I have been, one way or another, involved with the stock market for a long time.
And I don't spend full time on it, but if you spend full time trading individual stocks, There's no way you can compile the record that Nancy Pelosi and her family have compiled.
So it stinks to high heaven.
I don't think people who serve in the federal government should invest in individual stocks.
That's a risky game for professionals and experienced retail investors.
So it shouldn't be a huge sacrifice to say that.
Blind trust or something?
Yeah.
But also, but Charles, the story is that...
You get her husband, Paul, who basically gets literally hammered by some guy who he might have met someplace.
I don't know.
Thank God he's okay.
But he's been appointed as, you're going to be the genius.
What?
You're going to be the genius.
I think it was either Maxine Waters or someone else, had either a daughter or somebody else, the appointed genius.
Gavin Newsom, if you look at the California mafia from the Browns, the D 'Alessandros, from Nancy, the Pelosi's, of course, but also the Newsom's and Getty's, the Getty family, Balthazar Getty in particular, and how that works.
There's a sick part of me that says, I would love to see Gavin Newsom, because I thought he had it.
I'm not so sure about now.
We will be able to see this new version, this California mafia nobody's ever seen before or knew about.
Are you familiar with those folks?
Oh, absolutely.
I was born in California.
But I think the real A-trick, and again, the business model for corruption needs to be explored.
A-trick that...
Is used, I believe, and I think George H.W. Bush was a beneficiary of this.
He was invited to give a speech in a company, I think, I forget, it was like Global Crossing or something like that, and the speech fee was going to be, let's say, $75,000.
And I think it was Terry McAuliffe who said, don't take it in cash, take it in stock of this company because it's going to go to the moon.
And he did, and the stock went to the moon.
He sold out near the top, and then it went bankrupt.
So it's that sort of approach where you say to somebody, look, I've got this investment idea over here.
It's in a very early stage.
Therefore, we can price the share price very low, and we can let you in on the ground floor in a deal that is reasonable, right?
It's risky.
We don't yet know that it's going to succeed.
However, you're Peter Thiel.
I'm not saying he's doing this, or Elon Musk.
People have track records of taking many risky ventures from the beginning up to Mars.
You could argue it's risky, but is it really risky?
And you can give a politician or a member of a politician's family a chance to participate in this free ride up to the moon.
I think the people tasked with looking into that are not...
You take a guy, the head of the SEC, one of my many classmates in the class of 1980 Harvard Business School was Gary Gensler.
Gary Gensler was the finance chair for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.
I know the guy.
He's a very smart guy.
He certainly must have understood how crooked the Clinton Foundation was.
His job was to finance that campaign.
And they reward him eventually under Biden.
He's the SEC chairman.
Kind of like putting...
Was it Jack Kennedy?
Not Jack Kennedy.
Who is John F. Kennedy's father?
Joseph.
Joe Kennedy, yeah.
The first head of the SEC.
I mean, give me a break.
But anyways, there's a lot of talk coming out of Washington, D.C. Trump has had a fair amount of time now.
We can't say he hasn't had time to put his team together.
He's getting the team together.
I like the way the Diddy trial is progressing.
I like the fact that there's nothing on this U.S. tax court case yet.
I would expect a decision soon on that.
And I like the chatter coming out of the Epstein revelations and Hillary was there too, supposedly, and maybe Bill was there or whatever.
Maybe we can hope that this mess is in a place now where a lot has been covered up for a long time.
People are looking at Trump and they're saying, you know what?
This guy is the president of the United States.
He is installed.
It's time to...
You know, have a reckoning.
And let's get wise as Democrats.
Let's get rid of the sludge and get a new team position.
So let's go after the Clintons and maybe let's go after Biden.
Exactly.
Right.
That could be coming.
I don't know if you're into this one, but even the Pope, even that, I have a...
I did two videos with my dear friend, Professor Eric Thaddeus Walters, from Rome.
And this, I'm not going to say it, but just to throw in, if you think this is good, Pope Francis Bergoglio may not have been the Pope.
Ever.
And any number of cardinals, over 120, voids, it's void ab initio, the entire conflict.
So let me just, everything from Tish James, Diddy, The Vatican.
Name it.
Publishers.
Clearinghouse.
Every part of our society.
And I mean this.
It's corrupt, Charles, by this systemic sense of fraud where the rules don't matter.
No matter what it is.
Doesn't matter.
Nobody's caught.
So far we've got, what, three judges?
Maybe two, three judges?
State judges who have been arrested?
That's it?
Do you think Pam Bondi's doing her job?
Well, you know her, I think.
I am not impressed so far.
And another point I would make, I have done a little bit of sleuthing on Chief Justice Roberts and his wife.
And his wife runs some kind of consulting firm that helps people figure out how to navigate the court system and makes a lot of money doing that.
I think that should not be permitted.
She wants to run a plumbing outfit.
An electrician shop or a car dealer shop, that's fine.
But to be so adjacent to what are...
I mean, her husband has enormous power in terms of shaping what cases get heard and the politicking and how these...
You're a lawyer, I'm not.
But it's an awful appearance of conflict, certainly.
Then we get back into the Obamacare decision, which I think was wrongly decided and sloppy.
It's absolutely sloppy.
And it's not even care.
It's insurance.
It's the forced sale of insurance to the American consumer.
And nobody has gone through and said, all right, who put money up for that?
And how much did the insurance industry gain from this ridiculous decision?
And what speeches and contributions have gone to Obama for his library?
His vanity exercise.
Yeah.
You know, nobody's putting all that stuff together.
You know, you talk about something where you mentioned about the Chief Justice and what cases are heard.
It's interesting to note that there is a lot that's not heard.
And one of the things which I have been waiting for, somebody, somewhere, the case, the seminal case involving the mandatory application or forced...
I think of it in terms of some kind of biomedical tyranny or martial law, but forced vaccines, irrespective of your own health, your own particular personal disinclination to do it, maybe religion, whatever.
The case that is there is Jacobson against Massachusetts, 1905.
And it dealt with small, for different reasons.
And we now have privacy laws that affect us.
We still don't even know that.
We don't even know.
And the guy that I'm really looking, I'm so impressed with, is Alito.
I think they, I thought he was kind of like this, kind of a milquetoast, quiet, you know.
I think after they went after his wife, who had the flag upside down.
We have articles one, two, and three, executive, judicial, legislative.
We need a complete and total.
Up and down clearing.
Do you know, Charles, that there has never been an audit of BLM?
There's never been even the slightest investigation into Antifa?
There's never been.
Nobody is.
It's right there.
What is Pam Bondi waiting for?
What is Kash Patel?
In panel of grand jury, you have a fascist, anti-fascist, domestic terror organization with all the intel you want, all the evidence.
I mean, what's going on here?
Well, exactly.
I mean, as a guest, again, I'm not a lawyer, but as a guest, prosecuting complex financial charity crimes means thinking about what the jury is going to look like and will the jury...
Can you put together a jury in a jurisdiction where you can hope to get...
The kind of victory that you want.
I think in Washington, D.C., to prosecute a charity fraud case would be very difficult.
Same in New York.
I think it would be, particularly in Manhattan.
So I think, I hope what they're doing is thinking through the best way to attack this.
Now, I believe that the way it can work is that if the IRS becomes aware of a significant fraud, Without going through a standard court, it can determine itself.
I can say, you know, Charles, unfortunately, your charity doesn't exist.
You've never filed an IRS report.
We're just going to send you a letter saying it's our determination that your charity doesn't exist.
And therefore, you have 90 days or whatever the time period is to come back and try to convince us that we're wrong.
But it's up to you to convince the IRS that we're wrong.
Right.
And then the IRS, in its sole discretion, just says, you're cooked.
Your goose is cooked.
And by the way, you know, since you haven't been in charity, they say until what?
They can go back as far as they want.
They can go back to the Clinton Foundation and say, you know, you didn't file a tax return in 1997 at a time where you were trying to convince Monica Lewinsky not to come forward.
People might have been paid with money that you had control over from the second inauguration fund.
It was never been audited.
You owe income taxes, the group of you that have been operating this, who say you're the trustees.
You received all this revenue.
You're going to pay tax on the revenue.
Penalties, fines, and interest.
We decide how big those are.
And that's it.
There's no court process involved in this, as far as I know.
And so that approach is one that I think should happen promptly.
It should have happened years ago.
And with that...
With that, people will see this.
You know, when you tell somebody, you know, cherries, no, no, no, no, no, that was the article.
You know, when the mob figured out, let's go into unions, why?
Pension funds.
So when you talk about going after the iron fitters local, that doesn't sound like, that's where the mob is.
That's where it is.
You have to train people.
I have to ask you a question that has nothing to do with it, but I think it'll be near and dear to your heart.
What do you think, Charles, about the collective mentality or the morality or lack of morality of people that were lionized through this weird apotheosis of this Luigi Mangioni who shot this man down like a dog on 54th Street right up the street and somehow he's been elevated to Robin Hood or something?
What do you think about that?
This is what happens when universities run amok.
You know, I got out of Yale in 1978.
In 1979, when the Department of Education was created, the U.S. educational system was ranked in credible surveys number one in the world.
I think it went off of that a long time ago, perhaps after 1989-92, when international opportunities opened up and suddenly...
The number of students applying to these brand-name schools probably went way up.
The places didn't go up.
Tuition could go up.
Salaries could go up.
And endowments could blossom for these places.
And they became insulated from reality.
Propaganda mills.
And they knew, the people running these places knew, that they could always fill up a class.
There was no question about that.
There were always many more.
Qualified students for the places, right?
So they went riot.
And a lot of the scholarship out there, I would say from 1970 forward, I would be, if I had Elon Musk's money or a lot of money, I'd say, why don't we do this?
Let's examine every peer-reviewed article.
There's a guy called Chris Ruffo, who I think is leading the charge on this kind of stuff.
Every peer-reviewed article published from 1970 forward, We should assume that at least a third of them are gibberish.
Right.
And we need to go out, clean that up, and reinterpret all this work.
You know, mathematics from a gay and lesbian perspective.
Come on.
You know, math is math.
And that's a big, big job.
And I think when you feed impressionable youth garbage.
From a position of authority as a tenured professor at Columbia, you end up with people who love this killer.
You end up with the people who are on Columbia right now on these college campuses disrupting commencement exercises.
And it's really tragic.
I mean, honestly, I have no grandchildren yet.
But if I had some right now, college age, and a qualified student came to me and said, Grandpa, I want to go to Harvard like you did or you know, I said, no, no way.
You know, let's take twice that amount of money and I'll design a program for you with tutors and other ways where you're not going to be infected with them.
And that's also going to be what AI and AGI do.
That is, if there's one thing that could destroy.
And improve, but destroy humankind.
It's artificial general intelligence, which when they say it's not here, that means it's there.
Try explaining that to people.
You know, let's work in reverse.
If I said to you, I want you to come to our country, the United States, and I want you to destroy it.
Not through bombs, but I want you to destroy it internally.
Cause a socio-political cancer.
You wouldn't...
Be able to do as much or as well as what's being done right now.
Familial.
Every aspect.
Family.
Gender.
I don't even know if kids date.
I don't know if they drive a car.
I don't know if a kid can look you in the eye and shake your hand, sign his name, play sports.
They have been affected.
Everything from digital is kind of like these intellectual concentration camps.
I have a relative of mine who teaches fourth grade and hurts children because they've never played.
I know this may sound silly.
Because they've never played ball.
They've never actually looked at a ball and held it.
And you're standing there and I'm trying to gauge the distance by virtue of the weight.
And my brain's doing all these.
They can't track to read because their devices blast them.
And you have that, gender, bad health.
No activity.
Ask a child, what is a love letter?
In one generation almost, it seems like the interstitial foundations of everything that makes a country a culture with tradition, it's gone!
Or almost gone.
I tip my hat to the genius of this societal cancer.
Doesn't it just...
Overwhelm you?
Well, yes, and I'd thank higher powers that the cackler-in-chief is not the President of the United States because perhaps you and I, had she won, we'd be in prison.
So let's hope that Donald Trump has the freedom to attack as hard as he's trying to attack these root causes.
He's got a good team.
I mean, I don't understand what Pan Bondi's up to.
I don't understand what Kash Patel's up to.
I wish Pan Bondi would spend less time on Fox News and more time indicting people.
And going back to the Clinton Foundation, there is a public record.
There's a four-part FBI vault file on the investigation that occurred between 2001 and 2005.
What happened there is that in the dead of the night on the 20th of January, 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned not simply Mark Rich and Pincus Green, but Susan Rosenberg and the Puerto Rican terrorist bombers and really bad people.
Susan Rosenberg has resurfaced, I think, connected to Act Blue.
And there was such an outrage that the records show that a grand jury was convened by mid to late February 2001.
So don't tell me it can't be done in 2025 when you have much more powerful tools to evaluate evidence.
AI can do some of that.
The Clinton Foundation should have been indicted and discontinued long ago.
The Barack Obama Foundation, there's some snarkiness going back and forth that apparently Trump made some good and pointedly negative comments about this vanity.
I mean, no one other than perhaps you and me seems to be asking, where are Barack Obama's presidential records?
Who has had custody and control of those records?
I'm still trying to figure out how his chef died in a foot of water.
And he was a good swimmer, apparently, too.
There's something about that, right.
And the thing which is the most important, you know, going back to what I'm saying, I'm fascinated by this Vatican.
There's this sedivacanti, sedivacantism, this notion that there was the impedency.
And to make a long story short, when somebody said, do you know what it means if you have If you can invalidate the legitimacy and the position of a pope and everything prior to that, I say, yes, I understand what that means.
Everything is void ab initio.
All the judges, all the legislation signed, everything.
It's nullified.
Yes.
And remember how when people brought this up, you were an absolute racist of the first order.
And this is a guy also, Charles, who could have said, Somebody could have said, Mr. President, we own the printing press.
We make everything you want.
What do you want?
Make a new Magna Carta.
What do you want, a birth certificate?
You got it.
No problem.
And the thing about it is that they want to do it in plain view, in open view, in plain sight.
They want to do it to make you question, am I losing my mind?
Could they be this obvious?
I believe that because it's so easy to cover this up.
Well, and that score, you know, even Joel Gilbert, who's been all over Tish James, he made some comment about, well, after all, Barack Obama was a smart guy.
He was editor of the Harvard Law Review.
No, he was not.
He was publisher of the Harvard Law Review, and you know the difference in law school.
My understanding is that in any law school, to get on the law review, to be taken seriously on the law review, you have to write an article that gets approved, right?
And then he never even wrote an article.
He certainly wasn't editor.
He was the business manager of the Harvard Law Review.
Probably.
It was just a gift to him.
I wonder how much...
He's not a particularly hard-working individual.
No.
And I don't think that was a great fit at the time.
So he was just anointed, got his book deal, and he was one of the many who I think were being placed to be in these high roles and then controlled.
I'm sorry.
No, please go ahead.
So one of the epiphanies I had in looking at the Clinton Foundation, Is when I looked at this memorandum of understanding, struck, I think the official date was sometime in either November or December 2008, for my work doing corporate takeovers, I know the difference between a letter of intent and a binding and complete merger or purchase and sale agreement.
A memorandum of understanding is a worthless piece of garbage.
It doesn't mean anything by design.
And I look at that thing, and I realize that every single representation made by the Clinton Foundation was a lie.
It was wrong.
Everything they said in there was wrong.
And then I realized on the other side, the other party, was Obama's transition thing, whatever you call it, the presidential transition thing, which disappeared on Inauguration Day.
So, you know, the Clinton Foundation was when Bruce Lindsay signs a letter lying under oath, or lying in the document about the true state of the Clinton Foundation, having received in early November an internal memorandum from Kamiki Gibson saying, we've got serious problems at the Clinton Foundation.
I've only looked, Kamiki had only looked, she says, at the U.S. operations of the Clinton Foundation.
The cancer is outside the U.S. You've got heart disease inside the U.S. It's not like a good news there, but you've got terminal cancer outside.
So Lindsay is prepared to lie to the Obama transition team, and the Obama transition team says, you know what, I need a good independent lawyer.
Why don't I get Cheryl Mills, who works for the Clintons, to advise us?
It's ridiculous, right?
And where is Maggie Haberman, who I sat down with in 2016 two or three times?
You know, her answer, well, it's outside my bandwidth.
You know, true answer, I just want to, you know, put a knife into Trump.
And her father-in-law was a trustee, a significant trustee, in the Clinton-Hunter Development Affiliate, which also doesn't exist.
You know, so the mainstream, the eighth key takeaway from all this is we need to think for ourselves.
We can't...
You can't turn over education to Randy Weingarten or the president of Harvard.
I'm very fortunate that I had a father who had three degrees from Yale and a mother who had two degrees from Yale.
My fathers were in physics.
My mothers were in music.
And I'm the eldest child, so they took a keen interest in me that I learned in school.
I learned early in life that learning is a joy.
It's not drudgery.
You can expand your horizons if you spend time learning.
So they instilled in me a love of learning, which continues to this day.
I try to learn something new every day.
But the attitude I think that I see in other parents through the course of raising my own children, many parents just say, look, once the kid is poor, it's not my problem.
Let the public school teacher educate my kid.
How come my kid isn't educated?
Well, because you didn't spend any time instilling a love of learning in your child.
That's one reason.
And, you know, so we have a lot of learning to do, and there needs to be a reckoning.
Mother's Day is this coming Sunday.
And what a nice move it would be by Donald Trump to recognize the mothers who have lost children because of the Catholic charities, for example, that were very centrally involved taking Biden donations.
To wreak havoc across our southern border by importing a stream of illegal immigrants.
And not only that, not only the Catholic Charities, but also CPS, how they have been arms of the state in trafficking activities.
Human trafficking is today bigger.
And my wife is just...
I thought, well, this was just...
You know, if you and I wanted to go into something really easy and I say, you know, let's go into cocaine travel.
I say, I don't want to do that.
I got to go over there.
They got to grow the plant.
They got to buy off all these federales.
They got to make it, bring it over there.
No!
Give me a child that I can just, I mean, a thousand, four thousand, five thousand.
Today, right now in the state of New York, in the city, the number one, And this is her opinion and my opinion, but this is from law enforcement.
The age range is zero to two.
And one day, there are people who've said, in no uncertain terms, they want to make New York the destination hub for sex tourism.
And there are movements right now.
There are movements right now in this trying to declare, you know, I always was kind of like the libertarian type, whatever that means.
I said, you know, prostitution, it's really nobody's business.
Well, let me tell you something.
There is something called the Equality Act, which basically says, okay, let's decriminalize prostitution for the prostitute, but nobody else.
And I tell people, I said, you know, you're going to have brothels in your neighborhood.
You don't understand what's happening.
So it goes back to at every layer.
Children, family, gender, sports, tradition, music.
Go down.
Nutrition.
Keep going.
Throw out something.
Throw out an area that has not been contaminated by wokeism or DEI or whatever it's called.
Tell me one area.
Sports.
Leah Thomas, Pennsylvania, the swimmer.
Everything.
There is not one area of either our society.
I mean, it's...
Can you imagine if your father just popped up out of nowhere and said, Charles, what have I missed?
Where would you start?
You would say, you're not going to believe this.
You know, it blows by.
By the way, quick question.
What do you think of, since Harvard and these schools were in the news, for a person to be either removed from school or denied or basically who was, quote, Anti-Semitic versus somebody who actively engages in aides, counsels, procures, hires, and acts to promote violence or something.
But what if you just have in your school somebody who hates America, hates Israel, hates France, hates, hates, hates, hates, hates, hates.
But that's not it, if that exists.
Doesn't really interrupt anybody, but it's just hateful.
Do you...
I'm a little troubled with the idea of somebody being expurgated from school because of a thought crime, if that's truly all they did.
What are your thoughts?
Well, again, I think the admissions process to these brand-name schools and most schools has been corrupted.
And one of the things I see out here in Malaysia and Indonesia, other parts of Southeast Asia, there's a very positive spirit out here.
And people are very, you know, hopeful for the future, family-oriented, pleasant.
And if I were running an institution in America, I wouldn't want, I wouldn't, if somebody's application is a screed of hate, you know, I hate my parents, I hate, I just wouldn't let them into the institution.
You'd go hate on some other place.
I don't want this to be a hate fest.
And what's more troubling to me, actually, at these institutions is that they're closed.
They're intolerant.
I wouldn't want to go to a university that was 100% Republican.
And indeed, one of the lessons I've learned formally in my study of history is that the status quo doesn't like reform.
And great genius is often maligned.
Galileo is an example.
There are many other examples.
So you want...
Controversial, insightful, and positive thinking.
You don't want to say, well, clearly you're a white male, and therefore everything that you believe is wrong because of censorship.
Who was that idiot who wrote that book, Fragility, or whatever it was called?
Some woman consultant who was basically arguing that white men are horrible, she being a white woman.
And then she gets into the consulting fee gig, and then there's another guy who was in.
You know who I mean.
Right.
I just can't remember the name.
But I mean, that is just, if you want to run a consulting practice, you know, arguing that outside of university, go for it.
But inside a university, we should be advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
That's what you should be trying to do.
My father, being a nuclear physicist, had many patents, many papers, and he would always tell me.
That, you know, there is no such thing as settled science.
A true scientist is going back and reevaluating.
My father was a scientist.
After Yale, I was conceived in Copenhagen while he was a postdoctoral student for Niels Bohr.
So, you know, I think I know more about settled science, though I'm not a...
The issue of whether science is settled, though I'm not a scientist.
And universities have lost their way.
The presidents are out there swanning around in private jets trying to cultivate billionaires for cash.
In Harvard's case, I would have been way tougher even than Linda McMahon.
I would have said, until Claudine Gay is expunged for the university, she's the president who confessed to being a plagiarist, who is still on the payroll.
Right.
That's precisely, yes.
Outrageous.
Outrageous.
That's the thing.
And you know and I know why she was there.
Look, one of the best ways for me, there's two things if I want to destroy something.
If I want to make racism more virulent, I will hire the most incompetent.
I will hire the most blatantly unqualified.
And then I'll wait for you to sit back.
And call me on it.
And then when you do, I'm going to say, not only have I just destroyed the institution, but I've pulled out all these people.
Say, go ahead and say it to her.
I'm what?
It's about her being what?
And that's where we are right now.
We went through.
Do you realize that everything that happened during COVID, everything that was being said about myocarditis and about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, all of that now is settled.
It's settled.
That would have gotten you.
And then how we use, the government used social media as a proxy to do for it what it couldn't do.
I mean, it's almost brilliant.
And what if I told you, imagine your beloved father, you could say, Dad, they set up a clearinghouse to determine misinformation, disinformation, data information, the official rule.
Imagine telling Einstein.
You better not buck that Newtonian physics thing.
I don't want to hear about this curved space business.
And all you string theory guys, if you know what's good for you, I mean, so this is anti-intellectualism.
What about in New York?
We have our prestigious Bronx School of Science, Stuyvesant High School, that Bill de Blasio wanted to remove the entrance test because too many Asians were getting in.
Who cares?
Bill de Blasio is terminally stupid and crooked.
You know, where is an accounting for the $800 million that his wife got?
The Thrive, the mental health, yes.
There's more to a billion.
Yes, where is that?
The woman, by the way, who was a lesbian, but now she's not, but now she is, and he's on it.
That's another story.
His son got into Yale, of course.
Yes, Dante.
Who got his father elected because he had an Afro.
In any event, now we're getting into people right now are listening to go, what are they talking about?
It's true.
People, it's true.
We know what we're talking about.
You know, Soylent Green are people.
You know, it's true.
Charles Hortel, as always, this is just a, oh my God.
I am both disgusted and relieved and delighted all simultaneously by talking to you.
I have to just comment that when you brought up the idea of Joe Biden doing a podcast, I think they'd call it a clodcast, not a podcast.
As many people will watch that as are watching Michelle Obama's clodcast.
Right, or a slog.
And for this woman to sit around and talk about how she was so...
The U.S. was pretty damn good to her and her husband.
Have you ever seen the pictures of them when they were...
Married?
Anyway, it's a weird thing, but I'm getting too deep into this.
But here she is, you know, just blasting the ignominy and the opprobrium of having to fly in that Air Force to live for eight years.
I mean, this was...
And she was this woman who wrote her thesis over at Princeton or whatever about how black people...
You broke a ceiling.
You did something that you should be proud of.
But that doesn't sound...
And she sits with that brother of hers, who's another story.
And I don't know if it's a Yenta, Kvetching, I don't know what the proper Yiddish word is, but what are you...
Well, and since you brought it up, Kvetching, Bernie Sanders, I mean, the appearance with Brett Baer, where he's...
I have to fly private.
I mean...
That guy reminds me.
I think I've been to Peter Luger's only once.
He would probably have done a lot better for himself and have more mansions if he'd been a waiter at Peter Luger's.
But I mean, he's a moron.
And this was the guy who was doing great until all of a sudden he said, you know, your wife has some very interesting tax situations.
Maybe you should go away.
And that scene of him, I think at the convention, he's crying.
Next thing you know, he shows up with a $600,000 house.
I mean, this guy.
And to team up with, here's the best, AOC lamenting oligarchy.
I mean, listen, if I came up with this as a script, as an idea of a pitch for a show, you'd say, this is ridiculous.
You know, I've got this old man.
And, oh, in the complete, Tucker Carlson interviewed Ben Cohen, I think from Ben and Jerry's, and I immediately thought, oh, this guy's crazy.
He made more sense regarding this ridiculous notion of us in Ukraine.
Wait a minute.
I'm agreeing with what?
With Ben?
No, no.
In 2016, when I was so much on Fox and also progressive radio, I figured out back then...
And I knew it actually from college as well, that there is a lot of common cause between authentic conservatives and certain types of progressives, not the communists, but people who fear overreach of the central government.
There's a lot of common cause there, so it doesn't particularly surprise me.
He's a little bit kooky, Ben and Jerry guy.
But I'll go one step further.
The real Silicon Valley people, the ones who...
You know, it's funny.
If you've been to Newport and you see the guild and the cottages and Jay Leno's palace, the people today walking around on a skateboard and a t-shirt could buy and sell, but they're not into that.
Okay, fine.
Because there was this idea of doing good.
Really!
The Silicon Valley, the original manifestation, the early iteration of it, was that.
And then all of a sudden, that changed.
Big time.
Next thing you know, we're You're doing defense contracting and all this kind of stuff.
Anyway, so yeah, every now and then we...
I thought free speech was a leftist.
That's what I thought.
Stupid me.
And then even Charles Ortele, an hour and ten minutes of absolute intellectual bliss.
You are an emollient.
This is great.
Let us do this again, please.
Of course.
Undisclosed location, part of a witness protection thing.
I promise not to say this.
I'm actually happy to say where I am now because I've moved in.
I'm in Penang, Malaysia.
I have to say that it's a wonderful place.
If I were the wrong type of person, I should probably say it's horrible, don't come here.
It's a melting pot of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Western.
Cuisines and cultures.
It's an advanced developing country.
It's not like going to Thailand.
It's very well ordered.
Panang Island is an inward recipient of billions of dollars of investment by multinationals going back to Intel in 1971.
And it's pretty well located within this part of the world.
To many, many interesting places.
An hour flight, two-hour flight, three-hour flight.
I'm only four hours from Bali.
And Bali's pretty nice.
Well, and because of this magic, the internet, as it were, it's incredible.
Charles Ortel, again, my dear friend, thank you so, so much.
Let us do it again.
You have just...
We have benefited yet again from your brilliance.
Thank you, good friend.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, my friend.
We'll talk soon.
The late.
The great.
Forget.
I'm tired.
The great Charles Ortele.
All right, my friend.
▲
Export Selection