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Aug. 10, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:20:34
20230810_potential-biden-impeachment-and-explosive-revelati
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Impeaching the Biden Family 00:15:16
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
It is being called perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism so far this year.
And we have an interview with the man at the center of it.
David Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of the book, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Have you read the tablet magazine piece with him?
If not, listen to today and then go back and read the piece.
Well worth your time.
Tablet interviewed Garrow, and boy, did it make headlines.
Among them, Garrow, again, who did this comprehensive biography on Barack Obama, saying that the former president is as insecure as Donald Trump, calling Obama's own memoir a work of fiction, discussing Mr. Obama's apparent anti-Semitism, and as if that's not enough, his gay fantasies.
Garrow's here today to tell us all about it firsthand.
That's coming up.
But we begin today as key GOP leaders weigh whether to open an impeachment inquiry into current President Joe Biden with one of the people who will have to vote on that if it actually goes forward.
Joining me now is Congressman Wesley Hunt of Texas.
Representative Hunt, it's great to have you here.
Big fan, listen to you on the Ruthless program.
And those guys are your fans as well.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much for having me, Megan.
Really appreciate it.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Oh, my pleasure.
Okay, so let's start with that because he has Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader over in the Senate, weighing in on this just this week, saying this is not a good idea.
This is not good for the country.
He said, you know, I said this during the Trump two impeachments, that this is going to be taking us down a slippery slope.
It's not good for the country to be doing impeachment of this guy, impeachment of that guy.
Kevin McCarthy's only saying an inquiry, like sort of figuring out whether we want to proceed with articles of impeachment against Joe Biden.
So where do you stand on it?
So I've said this a few times on various shows.
It's my opinion that even politically, this might not be the smartest move for us to impeach Joe Biden.
And I say that because this is the worst approval rating that we've had for a president in modern history.
We want this guy to run against the GOP nominee in 2024.
We want him to be as wounded as possible.
And I don't want to rally the troops around him.
With that said, I got to say he's done enough.
He has earned impeachment.
And at some point, we as a country have got to look at this corrupt administration, this corrupt Biden family.
And at some point, we got to say, you know, maybe it may not be in our best interest politically.
Maybe it might not be in our best interest, as Leader McConnell was saying, to continue to divide the country.
But then at some point, we are seeing millions and millions of dollars being funneled to this family through Joe Biden's son by using his influence and literally peddling our country away to other countries.
At some point, enough is enough.
And if articles of impeachment are brought to the floor, Wesley Hunt will be a strong yes.
So let's talk about it because yesterday, James Comer, head of the oversight committee, who's been all over this, and thank God, you know, thank God, because this needs to be exposed.
Whether you love Joe Biden or you don't, this needs to be exposed, showing that by his tally, the number is now up to $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates.
Most of this was during his term as vice president.
Payments from Russia, from Ukraine, from Kazakhstan.
And this is, so if you take, let's table the FBI Forum 1023, which said Joe Biden got a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians to get that prosecutor off of Burisma's back.
And Hunter was on that board.
And not to mention a $5 million bribe to Hunter as well, alleged.
Let's table that.
They haven't been able to prove it yet.
The memo itself says they'll never be able to prove it.
It says that the payments were made in such an obscure way.
Good luck finding them.
But if you look at what we do know, Representative, I'm curious because we know that millions of dollars, the IRS whistleblower said it was over 17 million.
Now Comer's saying it's 20 million that went to the Biden's Hunter and other family members during Joe's vice presidency from these foreign companies who are paying for nothing other than access.
Hunter has no skills.
He has no, there's a Jim Biden who's providing no services.
So it's truly just, it's just access.
So we know that happened.
But it all happened while he was vice president, not president.
So how do we impeach him for it?
So even though it may have happened while he was the vice president, what we do know is that Hunter Biden has continued to use his name and use his family to funnel money to his family.
Basically, Hunter Biden has been his errand boy for the past, you know, six, seven, probably longer than that, probably for the past 20 years, even while he was a senator.
Your question is very interesting, though, you know, in terms of him being the vice president.
And is that an impeachable offense?
I would like to think that this just didn't stop when he was the vice president.
I would like to think that over the course of the past few years, this behavior has continued.
And I think if we just look a little bit deeper, we're going to find even more nefarious dealings with Joe Biden while he was current president of these United States of America.
But what's really frustrating to someone like me is to think that we have a family that we know for a fact has gotten millions of dollars from a Ukrainian national energy company and Burisma.
And now we are giving the Ukrainian government hundreds of billions of dollars of our taxpaying money.
And if we don't think that that's a conflict of interest and now we are not entering the realm of this being an issue of national defense, then I really don't know what is.
We've seen a smoking gun.
We already have the receipts.
And look, if this is not about actually introducing our articles of impeachment, okay, that's fine.
It still is up to us on the judiciary committee.
It's up to us, we in the halls of Congress, to make sure that the American people are well aware of what this president has done to this country, well aware of his son's actions, and to make sure that we decide very, very cautiously and very, very carefully in 2024.
This is we the people.
Now you know everything about the Biden family.
Please choose wisely.
Because you got Joe Biden, according to these allegations, his family at least, taking millions from these Ukrainian oligarchs.
And now we've got, as you point out, all this funding of Ukraine.
You've got the relationship with the Chinese and the total disinterest in pursuing anything with respect to their spying on us or their spy balloons, not to mention the origins of COVID.
And then you have this Russian oligarch's wife.
She was the former first lady of Moscow, Yelena Badarina.
And we knew this before, but there's an interesting sequence on this.
So follow me on it.
It's not that Joe Biden's going easy on Russia.
We all know, you know, he's on the Ukrainian side in that whole battle.
But this particular woman who gave $3.5 million to one of Hunter Biden's shell companies, $3.5 million back in 2014 when Joe was vice president, she managed to escape Barack Obama's sanctions on Russia after they annexed Crimea in 2014.
And she managed to avoid President Biden's broader sanctions against Moscow's business elite and oligarchs after their invasion of Ukraine.
This woman, I mean, that was a full dragnet he laid down, Biden did on the Russian oligarchs after they invaded Ukraine, but not this lady who had given his son $3.5 million.
And while we don't have proof Biden cashed any of those checks, we do have the Hunter laptop talking about how 10% goes to the big guy.
The big guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oftentimes on Judiciary Committee, we talk about a two-tier justice system.
Ma'am, I cannot believe you've, by the way, you've done this perfectly.
You have laid out the case as to what's wrong with this family perfectly.
And thank you so much for this.
Could you imagine if this were anyone else?
Could you imagine if this were Donald Trump Jr.?
Could you imagine if this were any other former president, what would be happening right now, not just to his family, but to the president himself?
This is absolutely insane.
And the American public is sick of this two-tiered justice system.
If you're going to turn a blind eye to this, then we have to stop indicting former presidents if we're not going to indict this current president.
If we're going to continue to turn a blind eye to the nefarious actions of Hunter Biden, then that means we have to turn a blind eye to the nefarious actions of basically any other regular citizen in this country, regardless of whose son you are.
And I think the American public are absolutely sick and tired of watching these people get away with literally literal highway robbery.
When is enough enough?
We keep laying out these cases.
We keep seeing the smoking guns.
We keep, we have receipts.
We are seeing the millions and millions of dollars being funneled through this family.
When is enough enough?
If the average citizen doesn't get this kind of treatment, then what makes Hunter Biden so special?
Remember, they were so mad that Ivanka Trump got an expedited approval of, I think it was like a patent or a trademark application in China while Trump was president.
Okay, so that seemed to be somewhat taking advantage of the role her dad had.
I don't remember the exact circumstances, but let's give him that one for the purposes of this discussion.
Where are those same people now?
Where is their interest in what in the $20 million minimum we know that all the Bidens were getting while this guy was the sitting vice president?
And then it's not like he left the world stage.
He's the sitting president right now.
But the thing on the payment from the Russian wife is interesting to me because that came out in 2020, the fact that this woman, Yelena Batarina, had sent $3.5 million to Hunter, his shell company, 3.5.
We learned in 2020.
And what did the Democrats say when that came out?
They said, oh, it's unconfirmed.
That's unconfirmed.
You have no proof of that.
That's just like Republican pie in the sky.
Well, now what's happened is Comer got the bank records and he's, it's proof.
It's that happened.
And now the response from the Democrats is, that's old news.
Everybody already knew that.
They don't care.
No, they don't.
Do you remember the debate that President Trump had within candidate Joe Biden?
And he asked him, President Trump asked him specifically about his dealings, about Hunter Biden's dealings.
And did he know about this?
And Joe Biden lied on national television to the entire world.
He said, oh, I have absolutely nothing to do with Hunter Biden's dealings.
I have absolutely nothing to do with his business deals.
I know nothing about it.
I've never traded anything.
I've never traded my name for it.
Nothing.
He didn't talk about the Biden brand.
He didn't talk about Hunter Biden's qualifications to be on Barista's board.
None of this stuff.
He said, I had nothing to do with this.
And now we have bank statements.
Now we know who the big guy is.
Now we know he was in the room when Hunter Biden was calling in these favors.
And he was saying that basically, my father is sitting right here next to me.
You better do this.
At what point do these people just stop lying and just say, yeah, you know what?
We're caught.
It was us.
Let's just try to move on from this.
They were on the take.
They were clearly on the take.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, we haven't yet established that with respect to Joe Biden, other than Hunter's references on his laptop.
But with respect to the other Bidens, for sure, another thing that Comer's memorandum proves is that in April of 2014, I mean, anybody doing business with the Kazakhstani oligarch when their father's the sitting vice president, it's like red flag, red flag.
Kazakhstani oligarch Kennis Rakhizhev wired the exact price of Hunter Biden's Porsche to a bank account used by Archer and Biden.
That's in addition to the million dollars a year he was getting from the Ukrainians via barisma.
But he, I mean, so he got, they bought, they bought his Porsche.
They paid a million dollars a year out of Ukraine.
All this other million, 3.5 million from the Russians.
And Barack Obama sat by and did absolutely nothing about this.
Joe Biden sat by and did absolutely nothing.
Joe Biden ran for office as president as the new squeaky clean version.
You know, he was going to be scandal-free just like Barack Obama, unlike the East.
The adults are back in the room.
The adults are back in the room.
Yeah, the adults are back in the room.
And now, you know, what we have from the media is just a collective yawn, like there's no there there.
I went to Politico this morning.
You were coming on.
You know, you're a politician.
I always like to check Politico.
What's happening?
Every single headline is about Trump.
The indictment, Trump, his spats with Jack Smith, whether he's going to debate.
There's nothing, nothing about any of this.
This is the dishonesty of the media that we are seeing, especially the media from the left.
And what I always like to articulate, especially when I'm talking to people right here in my own district, a lot of people are very, very frustrated with the media and their lack of intellectual curiosity if it doesn't adhere with their agenda.
But I tell people all the time, do you know that the media right now, especially the left, they have a lower approval rating than the halls of Congress?
And that's actually really bad.
It's really low.
It's hard to do.
No one believes them anymore.
No one believes them anymore.
So we have to stop blaming the liberal media for them not reporting on these things.
And it's up to us to take our message to the people through our social media outlets, through shows just like yours and doing exactly what you're doing by articulating what's wrong with our system.
This is how we get around this.
And it's working.
And I know it's working because right now, President Trump is up 18 points against Joe Biden amongst independents.
And this is very early polling.
And it's only going to get worse from here because the average American is looking at all this and they're saying, you know what?
I don't really care how I feel about President Trump.
I don't really care about what happened in the past.
What I do know is that we have a two-tier justice system.
We are going after a former president and we are making a victim of a former president that's a political opponent of the current president.
And we are sticking the DOJ, the FBI on him with all these charges.
And we know they're all bogus.
What's going on in our country?
It's resonating.
It's working.
And even if Politico or CSNBC are seeing it, even if they may not report on it, we are reporting on it.
You are reporting on it.
And it's working and it is resonating.
We are fed up and we are sick of it.
Peter Ducey of Fox News had a moment to shout a question at Joe Biden about Devin Archer's testimony.
I've got thoughts on how this went down.
I'm going to play for the audience here.
It goes, and then I'd love to get your take on it.
There's this testimony now where one of your son's former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them talking business.
Is that what?
Never talk business in that.
Christie's Political Jeopardy 00:15:14
I knew you'd have a lousy question.
What do you?
Why is that a lousy question?
Because it's not true.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Okay, so can I give you here's my back of the envelope take on that?
Peter Doocy failed.
I like Peter Doocy.
Thank God for Peter Doocy.
He's the only one who asked him tough questions.
But that was a fail because that wasn't consistent.
If I were a lawyer, I would, I mean, I am a lawyer, but if I were in a court of law, I would have stood up and said, assumes facts, not in evidence.
That's not what Devin Archer said.
He didn't say they discussed business.
The whole thing was he'd call in during the business meeting.
He'd gladhand.
It's basically just a show of, hey, I'm Joe Biden and I'm sanctioning this entire discussion.
But he's smart enough not to say, like, so are we getting the 3.5 million, madam, you know, wife of the mayor of Moscow?
So it's just a lesson in reporting, I think, to like, you have to be very precise.
You have to know exactly what was said.
You have to stick with the actual facts alleged.
That wasn't the right question.
And unfortunately, the president got to wiggle out of it and look like the one who was adhering to the facts.
Meanwhile, we know that's not true.
I mean, honestly, I've said, Representative, I said, go right to him and say, why when you were the sitting vice president of the United States and in charge of investigating corruption in Ukraine, did you allow your son to sit on a corrupt Ukrainian company's board?
Why would you do that?
And what explanation do you have for that for the American people?
Just zero in on that one.
Yes.
That's the way to do it.
I think Peter Doocy, he had that, he had that one shot to try to get as much as he could in.
I can't agree more with you, but I still think to the average American, they watch that.
And at the end of the day, we know he's lying.
Now, you are absolutely correct.
Would Joe Biden ever say, yes, I sanctioned $3.5 million?
Yes, I'm responsible for $20 million.
He's never going to say that.
But I think the insinuation that he is even on the phone call, the fact that his son can say, hey, my dad's going to call you and my dad's going to be on this call.
And all I want to say is, hi, hi, I'm Joe Biden in a very slurred Joe Biden way.
That's all that's needed to know that these oligarchs and these people can pay for access to the United States of America.
That's all they needed.
And we know better than that.
But I think you're absolutely right with your line of questioning and being precise when you're dealing with people that are this squishy and this wiggly is something that we have to be very, very careful of.
Yeah, this woman, the former wife of the mayor of Moscow, she had dinner with them at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C. When the hell else is the wife of the mayor of Moscow going to have access to the vice president at a dinner, it's absurd.
Just the mere fact that Hunter was able to orchestrate that told her everything she needed to know.
And now we're just all going to ignore this like it was absolutely nothing.
You know, on your subject, on your subject of Trump, I think you're absolutely right.
I, as you know, when he was running for office the first time, I asked him that debate question about the way he's referred to women, right?
That was controversial.
And Trump's tweets were controversial.
But the truth is, like now, it all just seems so smallball now that he's been president of the United States, now that he's under indictment three times and facing a fourth, the two-tier system of justice.
And yet the media is kind of still on the name-calling game.
And to me, like I see it very differently now.
I love my question still.
I stand by it, but I'm just saying, like, today, all over the media is the fact that he kind of referred to Chris Christie as a fat pig, not exactly, but kind of.
Here's what he said.
And like without any acknowledgement of what Chris Christie has been calling Donald Trump.
All right, here's what happened.
It's stop four.
He's eating right now.
He can't be violent.
Sir, please do not call him a fat pig.
That's very disregarding.
Don't call him.
See, I'm trying to be nice.
Don't call him a fat pig.
Okay.
So is it a nice?
I mean, it's not, it's not nice.
But Chris Christie's basically said, I mean, every chance he gets, he calls Trump a criminal.
I'd rather somebody call me a fat pig than a criminal.
Absolutely.
And this is, and this is theater.
This is politics.
And President Trump gets this better than anybody else.
He knows how to properly attack his opponent to drive their polling numbers down to get them out of the race.
And that's exactly what he's doing.
If we've watched, if we've known anything over the course of the past few years, President Trump is kind of the master at painting someone as something, and then they are done and not just done really at the time.
Their political career is actually going to be in jeopardy for the future.
And that's all this is.
This is actually a very smart play by President Trump.
If we can, if he can even show some compassion by saying he's not a fat pig, but he's out eating.
It's so tongue-in-cheek.
And it's so tongue-in-cheek.
And even watching it, I cannot help but laugh.
And I think that's where a lot of Americans understand how President Trump operates.
I being one of them.
I watched that and I just kind of smiled and spoke.
I was like, oh, that's a very, it's a very savvy move by a person that's that's a that's that's an expert at branding and he is going to brand uh of all his opponents uh at some point to make sure that he is going to be the victor in 2024.
It's, I mean, it is.
It's like, don't go there, right?
Like, if you, if you're going to get nasty with him, he's going to get nasty with you.
That's just the way it is.
And also, and also, I appreciate you, you're bringing up Chris Christie.
He has said a lot of horrible things about President Trump over the course of the past few years.
It's just simply a response to that.
Yeah.
So it's like, then it falls flat when he tries to sort of take the high road and like I'm the one who's above all this.
Here's actually Chris's response in stop five I've known it for 22 years is I am so in his head.
What's he doing talking about me?
It's because now I'm in second place in New Hampshire.
And if he looks at everything I've done in my career and what he wants to talk about is the way I look, fine.
Because I'll tell you this: there are tens of millions of Americans who have struggled with their weight the same way I struggle with my weight.
And they look at somebody who talks like that and they say, that's a child.
That's a child.
So let them keep talking.
You want to say something?
Two weeks from tonight, show up.
I'll be on the stage.
He punches the defenseless.
What do you make of that?
He punches the defenseless.
Chris Christie, again, you've already articulated this.
He has said so much.
He has been running his mouth for the past few years against President Trump.
And President Trump is simply fighting back.
That's who President Trump is.
He is a fighter.
And trust me, if you punch him, he's going to punch back twice as hard.
And why would President Trump show up to a debate when he is up 35, 40 points in almost every single poll?
That doesn't make sense.
It doesn't help him.
And if Chris Christie thinks that he's second in New Hampshire right now, but if by second, you mean you're still 35, 40 points behind the front runner, then fine.
You're a second.
You're a distant second.
You are literally the first loser.
And if he's going to continue to try to talk tough and continue to try to punch at President Trump, he's going to eventually pay the piper.
And look, if he wants to be the victim right now and complain about his weight or his laziness or his struggle with weight, that's fine.
But we all know that's not what we're talking about here.
We are talking about President Trump fighting back at somebody that has been talking trash about him for the past few years.
That's all this is.
And you cannot, you cannot fool me.
I know what you're saying.
I don't think there's one heavy set Trump supporter who actually is going to be offended, thinking, oh, he must think I'm a fat pig.
Like he's using these very derogatory terms to insult somebody who he can't stand.
It's not about his Trump's, I mean, Trump's admitted that he himself has got a bit of a weight problem in the past.
He's going to talk about yes, yes.
All right.
So now, speaking of the debate, Trump went on with Eric Bowling on Newsmax last night and was asked about this.
And here's what he said about whether he's going to participate at the August 23rd Fox News debate.
Yeah, I've already decided, and I'll be announcing something next week, and I wouldn't sign the pledge.
Why would I sign a pledge?
There are people on there that I wouldn't have.
I wouldn't have certain people as, you know, somebody that I'd endorse.
So they want you to sign a pledge, but I can name three or four people that I wouldn't support for president.
But I don't have to use that right now.
I don't want to do that.
There's no reason to insult him.
So he says he's made his decision about whether he's going to attend the GOP debate.
He's going to announce it next week.
The head of the RNC has said he's got to tell them within 48 hours because it's not that easy to just pop up a lectern.
I would challenge that.
I was at a debate that Trump skipped and we to the last second had the lectern ready to go.
Now, he had not yet been the sitting.
Yeah, he had not yet been the sitting president.
It is more tricky, the Secret Service protection and all that.
You know, they follow the former presidents.
But do you, do you think he will go?
Do you think he'll go?
You know, I can never speak for President Trump.
You know, he makes up his own mind.
But if I were guessing, I just, I don't see why this would help him out at this point.
He has done a very good job this campaign.
He has run a very solid campaign.
He has clearly surrounded himself with people that know what they're doing.
And he is taking this run very seriously.
Even watching that clip, you know, to kind of show that restraint when asked, you know, what three people would you not want to see the president of the United States or be or would you not endorse?
I thought to myself, wow, he wouldn't even name these people.
President Trump is laser focused on getting our country back and talking about the things that actually matter.
He's talking about making us safe again and securing our border and getting our economic status back to where it should be prior to COVID and making sure that people can afford to live in this country again.
He's focused on these things.
And so by going on a stage against people that you're up 30 points against, that doesn't help you.
It doesn't, it doesn't change the fact that I think the average primary voter has already made up their minds.
And Megan, my wife is from a small town in Iowa.
I was just in Iowa last weekend.
I'm going to be in Iowa next weekend.
Iowa is Trump country.
So if you already know, and I'm, and I've, I mean, driving around that small town, seeing the people in Iowa, being around my in-laws, it's, it's absolutely apparent that these people want somebody to walk in here on day one and get our country back heading in the right direction.
And he cannot run again after this.
It's critical to get him back.
He knows that.
So getting on that stage and getting into getting into a debate with Chris Christie is not going to help anything.
Last but not least, I saw you at a hearing recently bringing up the gender issue, and I was cheering you.
You know, there's a cartoon that goes around on the internet as some meme where the little child is saying to the parent, it's a girl, I think, saying, Mommy, I think I'm a boy.
And her response is, but no, honey, you're a girl.
And the caption is good parenting.
It's called parenting, right?
Like people are injecting these doubts into our children's heads, like teachers.
That happened in our own school where teachers tried to inject doubts.
Didn't work.
But every week they were asking my son and his other classmates whether they were sure they were still boys in the third grade weekly.
And we left that school.
I mean, it's just absurd.
But I saw you talking about the absurdity of letting these minors make these life-altering decisions that is not disclosed, that they will be infertile, that they will mutilate their bodies in a way that is not reversible.
And this is how you put it in the clip that went viral, SOT1.
What would happen if we affirmed every thought that our children have?
I'd like to show you a food pyramid.
Now I know what you're thinking.
This is not the FDA's approved food pyramid.
This is the food pyramid, according to my four-year-old and my two-year-old daughters.
If my children had their way, they would have ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and for every single meal in between.
Oh, the wisdom of children.
But in the same country, we know that children are mature enough to make adult decisions that will impact the rest of their lives.
That's why we have parents.
It's beautiful.
It was actually so beautifully said.
But it's scary the path we're on, you know, because so many on the other side, it's weirdly become a political issue where these Democrats seem to think it's like a liberal thing to allow the four-year-olds to tell us whether they're girls or boys.
This is ridiculous, and it's kind of sad that we're even here at this country, but here we are.
So I don't care how we got here.
This is the fight that we have.
We've got to step up and make sure that we secure the future for this country by fighting these kinds of culture wars.
I am a combat veteran.
I'm a West Point grad, flew 55 combat air missions in Baghdad, Apache pilot.
I fought for the rights of people and adults to make their own decisions.
If you're an adult, if you're a mature adult, and you want to use your own money to transition, do whatever you want with your body, I cannot stop you.
Knock yourself out.
That's what I've served in combat for.
Our children are different.
How dare us allow other people to mutilate our children and allow them to make these kinds of decisions before they reach the age of being an adult?
It's wrong.
It's actually child abuse.
And the only thing we are stating here is the obvious.
We cannot allow children to make adult-like decisions.
That's why we are adults and that's why they are children.
That's why you cannot join the military until you're 18 years old.
That's why you cannot drink alcohol until you're 21 years old.
And if you can't do these things until you are deemed to be an adult, then why would we allow you to change your gender before you are of the age to make adult-like decisions?
That's all I'm saying.
I am not transphobic.
I'm not, I'm not scared of people that want to transition.
What I'm saying is, is this: our children should not be making these decisions, and we as adults need to act like it.
Here, here, and the medical community that allows it ought to be punished, in my view, right now, the news today is that the American Academy of Pediatrics is going to be reviewing its gender-affirming care.
But as they say that, they have no choice.
The UK has already reversed itself on this.
Sweden has reversed itself, saying we are not giving hormones to people under 18.
You know, cross-puberty blockers into cross-sex hormones sterilize children, period.
So, they're reviewing it.
And now, finally, we say, okay, we'll review it.
But at the same time, they say, oh, but we reaffirm our gender-affirming care policy.
Everything we're doing is right, and we're going to do a review, but everything we're doing is right.
So, we'll just see about that because more and more bold, brave, honest politicians like you, Representative Wesley Hunt, are trying to hold them to account.
Thank you.
Thank you for it.
All right.
Well, hopefully, you'll come back.
We look forward to continuing the conversation.
Any time, thank you so much for having me.
Really appreciate it.
And God bless you, ma'am.
You as well.
Thank you for your service.
Thank you.
Reviewing Gender Care Policies 00:10:21
All right.
We will be right back with journalist David Garrow.
You're not going to want to miss this.
I'm excited for this interview.
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Få.
a moment, I'm going to be joined by author and historian David Garrow.
But first, just a bit of background on his incredible span of work.
In 1986, Garrow released Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
For it, he won a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1994, he wrote Liberty and Sexuality.
It is considered the definitive account of the fight for abortion rights in America.
In 2017, Garrow wrote the book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
He interviewed over a thousand people during a nine-year period, including the then president himself, for over eight hours.
He unearthed documents from every stage of Mr. Obama's life before politics and tracked down a previously unknown girlfriend, someone who had never spoken to the press before.
Now, a new tablet magazine interview with Garrow is making its own headlines for Garrow's incredibly frank assessment of how he views the former president's rise and continued stature in the Democratic Party, among other things.
David Garrow joins me now.
David, so nice to meet you.
You are the most talked about person on the internet right now, and that's a feat, sir.
So well done.
Thank you.
All right, so Rising Star hit in 2017, and maybe you can explain to the audience why do you think we are talking about this six years later, as opposed to when it hit, why didn't it go totally viral and dominate the headlines?
When Rising Star was first published in May of 2017, you know, Barack had left office four or five months earlier, and we were in the early stages of the Trump presidency, you know, following that astonishing 2016 election.
One of the times that I went to see Obama in the Oval Office was in early December.
And while our conversations were officially off the record, it was very clear then.
My previous visit had been in October before the election.
It was very clear then in early December how shell-shocked the White House was that Trump would be the next president.
And I think that took a lot of air out of the room, so to speak, because Barack really disappeared from public view once he left office in January of 2017.
I mean, everything disappeared from the headlines other than Donald Trump from the moment Trump won for the next, well, you could argue till today.
So I see the point.
But wasn't there an issue with people not publishing it or excerpting it?
Or was that with respect to the King revelations from the FBI tapes?
No, I didn't encounter any opposition or pushback.
I mean, Rising Star made the New York Times bestseller list for at least one week when it first came out.
And generally speaking, I was very happy with the review attention.
The Washington Post named it one of the 10 best books of 2017.
So I think there was, you know, certainly, you know, Barack's, you know, disappearance from the public stage after having been maybe all too visible day after day after day for eight years.
So I don't feel any chagrin about that at all.
Okay, yeah.
So I confused my facts because I know that when you did your reporting on what those FBI tapes showed of Dr. King and what allegedly happened with a rape victim, they were less interested in that.
And it was a shocking revelation.
We can get to it later.
Let's stay on Barack Obama for now.
So one of the big gets that you got was you tracked down not just Barack Obama's ex-girlfriend, but somebody to whom he had proposed marriage not once, but twice.
And the story she told you about why their relationship ended kind of reframes a narrative that Barack Obama himself was trying to pitch to us in his book, Dreams from My Father.
So can you explain that story to us and how you found the ex-girlfriend?
When Barack first really came to successful attention as a presidential candidate in early 2008, I was intrigued.
And so I was living in Britain at that time.
I ordered a cheap paperback copy of Dreams from My Father and actually read most of it on holiday in Portugal.
And right from the get-go, it's pretty clear that it's not a work of history, that it's telling his life story, but it's transparent that most of the characters have pseudonyms or are composite figures.
And so that very much intrigued me.
And for the balance of 2008 into early 2009, up through when he was inaugurated, I sort of read everything I could long distance about his life up through when he went into the U.S. Senate in 2005.
And then in March of 2009, I made the decision to start doing interviews focused on his years as a community organizer in Chicago, 1985 to 1988, because that's really the centerpiece of Dreams from My Father.
I mean, I wanted to solve this large number of mysteries as to who were these people that he'd worked with.
And so my focus very much was on the organizers who hired and trained him, the local people in the far south side community with whom he worked.
And so I did several years of legwork of tracking down people.
And, you know, for folks who are like living in a public housing development, they're not the easiest people in the world to find.
You know, if you've gone to Harvard Law School, as Barack did, it's pretty easy to find Harvard Law School classmates.
But that work on the far south side, finding these people who knew him as a young man, you know, before he got into politics, was deeply rewarding.
Some of these folks had spoken to a reporter or two, but many of them had not been found.
Now, to your particular question, during most of that time that Barack was working down in Roseland at Hawk Hill Gardens, he was living in Hyde Park, the integrated community around the University of Chicago.
And it was public record information that he had had a girlfriend with whom he lived for a big chunk of that time, someone who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, though no journalist had ever named her.
Now, as someone who spent all my adult life in universities, as anyone who has done that would know, you can find a student directory in the university library for any given year.
And so, knowing Barack's address, the address at which he lived in those years, I had Alex Lerner, my young University of Chicago research assistant, go to Reganstein Library, pull the student directories for 1986, 1987, 1988, and let's see who else lives at that particular address.
So, that's how I found Sheila Yeager, the woman with whom he lived.
We also found this nice couple that lived directly above them, who were both professors at North Carolina State University.
I went and talked with them too, and they had nice memories of knowing Barack and Sheila from the laundry room in the apartment building.
It's so fascinating because, of course, we're used to people doing these exhaustive bios and deep dives on our presidents.
And yet, you were the first to find Sheila Yeager.
Reverend Wright and Loyalty 00:13:35
And her response upon you, I mean, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author contacting her was something to the effect of, I'm so glad it's you who found me.
And she really did have a story to tell.
I think the reason you tell me what you think, but I think the reason the story about why they broke up, the real reason, according to her, because they diverge on the stories about why they grew up, why they broke up, is resonating because people already, especially in the Jewish community, had a suspicion that Barack Obama may have a strong anti-Semitism in him.
Anybody who sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for as long as he did would be suspected of this because he would rant about his anti-Semitic views.
And that's sort of where her story takes off.
So what was the story she told you about how they broke up and how does it differ from what Barack Obama said in his 1995 memoir, you know, Dreams from My Father, about why he broke up with the pseudonymed version of Sheila?
Well, Megan, two things.
First, I have a very positive opinion of Jeremiah Wright.
He said any number of unpleasant, wacky things.
But perhaps the person who was the greatest formative influence on my life was the late Jim Cohn, James H. Cohn, the founder of Black Liberation Theology.
People view Jim as a radical.
Jim was a lovely person.
And I'd say the same thing about Jerry Wright.
People view Jerry as a dangerous radical.
But to me, as someone who has spent much of my life immersed with Martin Luther King Jr., Jerry is Jerry during his time in active ministry was very much a combination of Dr. King and Jim Cohn.
Now, that's not to defend everything Jerry said, because particularly that one time at the National Press Club with Barbara Reynolds, he said some offensive things.
But it's certainly a part of my King training that we do not judge people by the one or two worst things that happened in the course of their lives.
Sheila Yeager is half Dutch, half Japanese.
And it's important to highlight in the context of what David Samuels in the tablet interview really very much predominantly focused on, that Sheila's paternal grandparents in the Netherlands during World War II actively worked to protect Jewish people.
And they are enshrined, if that's the right word, at the memorial to heroes of the Holocaust in Israel.
So that family history for Sheila is very important.
This is from the tablet magazine interview, writing that what you documented after tracking down Sheila was an explosive fight over a very different subject from the one that Barack Obama said ended their relationship.
In Sheila Yeager's telling, the quarrel that ended their relationship was not about his self-identification as a black man.
Sheila's white.
And the impetus was not about a play regarding the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago's Sparris Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a black mayoral aide named Steve Coakley, who in a series of letters organized by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.
In Yeager's recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple's relationship was Obama's stubborn refusal to condemn black racism.
He would not condemn these comments, and she was upset that he would not condemn Coakley.
In the end, they broke up.
So this seems to be her saying, you know, maybe not that he's anti-Semitic, but he's certainly not going to not going to condemn these particular comments about that seem anti-Semitic because they came from a black man.
That's David Samuel's summary account.
I won't quarrel with it in full, but I'm not at all sure that Sheila would 100% endorse that summary.
But he's saying she was upset about it because she's got the Dutch heritage.
And I understand, I mean, the Dutch did a lot to try to save the Jews that they could.
But that seems to be the reason that it resonated with her.
She was offended.
Yes.
And I should say, too, that I think it's accurate to say that Sheila, because she's half Japanese, does not identify herself as white.
Okay.
All right, stand by because there's much, much more to get to.
I got to squeeze in a quick break and we'll come right back with David Garrell, who stays with me.
Don't go away.
David, just to pick up on the Jeremiah Wright thing, and I don't know Jeremiah Wright, never heard him referred to as Jerry.
You know, there is that.
He's a lovely person.
Okay, he may be lovely, but I remember the goddamn America, the chickens that come home to roost on 9-11, not lovely, not at all.
And the reason people thought he was anti-Semitic was he said the reason that President Obama had not spoken with him in a long time was, quote, this is from him directly, them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me.
I told my baby daughter that he talked to me in five years when he's a lame duck or in eight years when he's out of office.
They will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.
I said that from the beginning.
He's a politician.
I'm a pastor.
He's got to do what politicians do.
So them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me sounds about as anti-Semitic as somebody would ever openly get in modern day America.
Granted, on that one quote, Jeremiah was very hurt and angry about how Barack treated him once Barack began running for president.
They had been very close.
Barack and Michelle were married by Jerry at Trinity United Church.
And I don't normally say things like this, but if Barack ever had a quasi-father figure in his life, it was Jeremiah.
And Jeremiah's work at that church for decades was just superb.
That congregation had a huge positive presence on the far south side of Chicago.
So that's why on balance, I very strongly defend Jeremiah.
He understood my background in King World with movement people and introduced me to members of his congregation so that they could speak to me about Barack and Michelle.
And it bears saying that once Barack and Michelle were married and Barack began in Illinois politics, they weren't doing much of anything at Trinity Church.
They were not active weekly members of the congregation.
Jeremiah's impact on Barack back 86, 87, 88 was very important.
But I think it's fair to say that Reverend Wright was hurt by how Barack increasingly distanced himself as his political assent went up and up.
Right, right, as he became a potential political liability.
But you write in the book about how he doesn't really have, he doesn't hold on to people.
Like he doesn't have the long-term relationships that you would typically see.
You compare him to Jack Kennedy, who was very different.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean, this is what I said to David Samuels in the interview.
I mean, no matter what we say about President Kennedy and some of his behavior in the White House with young women is atrociously.
Oh, yeah.
But Jack Kennedy was intensely loyal to people who'd been with him going back to high school.
One of his closest friends, Lem Billings, was an openly gay man in the 1950s, in the 1960s, living in part at the White House in the early 60s.
Dave Powers, Kenny O'Donnell.
I have very mixed feelings about President Kennedy, but his loyalty to people close to him was sky high.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, he remained quite close to several of his high school buddies from Hawaii, like Mike Ramos.
But the people with whom he remained close were not people who ended up going to Harvard Law School and becoming almost public figures because of Barack's achievement as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, 1991, when multiple major papers and magazines wrote profiles of him way back then.
And in particular, in Illinois, the people who were just essential to Barack's ascent in Illinois politics, Dan Shoman, Carol Harwell.
One would expect more long-term loyalty from the average human being.
But he moves up.
He sort of moves up on the social ladder and finds new friends instead.
I mean, you point out that even Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod only go back to 2003 with him, and that he quickly sort of fell in with the Beyoncé Jay-Z kind of crowd and enjoyed his time on the yachts, which turns out was a personal goal of his.
The two things he once said he most wanted were, it wasn't a yacht.
What were the two things?
Oh, a valet and an airplane.
Okay.
Who wants a valet?
That's a British thing.
What American man is thinking about getting a valet?
Like, what do you mean?
Valet?
Like a valet who dresses you, or like a valet who parks your car?
No, and as we tragically saw just a few weeks ago with the drowning on Martha's Vineyard, how many people have 24-7 personal chefs living with them?
I mean, I don't think that's true of all former presidents.
I doubt very much that Jimmy Carter over the years has had a personal chef.
George W. Bush does not either.
Okay.
But what I should say is that, and this goes back to the Obama first term presidency when I was interviewing scores and scores of people, Black people in Chicago whom had known Barack and Michelle back then.
You know, even during the presidency, this outsized interest in hanging with celebrities began to appear.
And the accurate summary is that Black Chicagoans were not astounded that Barack developed this interest in somehow elevating himself by hanging with celebrities.
But they were very disappointed and pained that Michelle was a part of this change because they, quite rightly, quite understandably, had always viewed Michelle as this plu-perfect product of working class Southside Black Chicago,
coming from a humble but very hardworking family, both her dad and her mom.
Her brother, likewise, Craig, became very successful as a basketball coach.
And so for Michelle to lose that grounding, I think a lot of people in Black Chicago found just inexplicable.
Michelle Obama's Chicago Roots 00:15:28
You write about how there wasn't a ton of loyalty.
There wasn't a ton of loyalty nor interest in the pitfalls that came to the lives of some who supported him.
And in particular, the end of one of their lives.
Talking with Tablet about Claire Sediak.
Forgive me if Serdiak, okay, who died at age 50, leaving behind a four-year-old.
And why is the story of Claire interesting to you?
Springfield is a small town, politically small town.
And particularly in the world of the Illinois State Senate back then, relationships and friendships were bipartisan.
A number of state Senate staffers who were officially Republicans worked closely, helpfully with Barack.
And it bears emphasizing that Barack himself in Springfield, this is a very important aspect of his life story, that Barack was very active and outgoing in working and negotiating and making deals with conservative Republican lawmakers,
lawmakers more conservative than most of the folks he was dealing with in the U.S. Senate or U.S. House as president.
And Barack's success in Springfield lay in the fact that he was both personable and bipartisan.
Barack's most strained relationships in Springfield were with other black Democrats, guys from the hood, let us say, who very explicitly didn't think Barack was black enough.
That was a predominant theme in Chicago politics, especially when Barack unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Congressman Bobby Rush in a congressional primary in 1999-2000.
Barack was defeated by really a humiliating margin of getting 31% of the vote, in part because the Rush campaign did a very powerful job of painting Barack as this multicultural newcomer from Hawaii and Indonesia.
But in the world of Springfield, when someone has a life crisis, a medical crisis, the community pitches in and everybody contributes through a GoFundMe type of web contributions.
And you can skim those contributions.
There was a fellow who's very helpful to Barack named Matt Jones several years ago developed a very serious cancer.
And when I went to that contribution page, I may have given, say, $50.
I mean, I had a very nice, you know, hour and a half, two-hour interview with Matt Jones.
But you could go down that list and see everyone in Springfield, Democrats and Republicans, had all kicked in to help support the Jones family.
Same thing when Claire Sadouk died back in the year 2000.
She had been the head finance person on Barack's 2003-2004 Senate race, a crucial early figure.
And again, you go down the list of contributors on that page, and it's everybody who worked on that Obama campaign.
Not the candidate, but everyone who worked on the campaign.
Not so, not Barack.
I mean, why?
Why do you think that is?
He's not a generous person.
He's not a loyal.
Like, what does that show you?
The most poignant example of this is Dan Schoman.
Dan is a really lifelong Illinois political operative, was on the state Senate staff when Barack first got to the state Senate in 1997.
And Dan ended up devoting years of his life to advancing Barack 365 Days a year.
And Barack could not have made his rise through Illinois politics without Dan Schoman.
And that's not just Dave Garrow saying that.
You could find 500 people in Illinois who'd say the exact same thing, particularly people from Springfield.
And Dan gets sort of pushed aside in 2004 in the Senate campaign.
Recall how Barack goes from a sort of unknown third-rank primary candidate to winning that Democratic senatorial primary in early 2004.
And then his speech at the summer 2004 Democratic National Convention is what he wants to national celebrity states.
But Dan, you know, again, I think the average human being, the average politician, would have shown much more loyalty to Dan Schoman than was the case with Barack.
We skip past the question of the girlfriends without mentioning one of the other barn burners, and that is there was another girlfriend that he had whose letters with Barack were produced to you.
She gave you letters between the two of them, except for the one paragraph that would then wind up going public via other means via Emory University.
You sent a research down there to go, researcher, to go print what was in that paragraph.
In the letters that were given to you, it just said a paragraph about homosexuality.
This has made a lot of news, but it turns out that he was writing to his then-girlfriend.
This is back in the younger years, about how he had repeated fantasies of having sex with men.
Now, what do you make of this?
It's like, is Barack Obama a gay man?
Is he a bisexual man?
Like, what is your takeaway of the significance of that paragraph and why she didn't want to produce it to you and why no one's really gone there on the reporting, even though it has been out there once it was made public via Emory?
Several things, Megan.
Both Alex McNair, who was Barack's girlfriend 1981 to 1983, and Genevieve Cook, who was his girlfriend in New York in 84, 85, both shared with me all the letters that Barack had written them back then.
Barack was very much someone who was sending handwritten letters and postcards, not just to girlfriends, but to other friends during the 1980s.
This may sound very quaint to younger people today who the idea of people actually mailing handwritten letters to the Postal Service.
This is how we used to have to do it.
We didn't have email.
We didn't have texting, right?
Like even when I got together with Doug in 2006, he would write me letters.
I would write him letters.
I mean, it's like not so long ago, we used to do that.
So when I first went to see Alex McNair out Eastern Long Island, it's been 2009, 2010.
So Barack is president.
So Alex let me read and take very detailed quotational notes from all those letters, but she redacted one paragraph, said it was too sensitive for while he was president, said it was about homosexuality.
And then after Rising Star was published in 2017, it was announced that Alex had sold these letters to Emory University.
And there were a number of news stories.
So the Atlanta Paper, the New York Times, published stories about these letters.
But none of the stories made any reference to this paragraph that had been redacted from me.
And so I asked one of my oldest friends, Harvey Clare, K-L-E-H-R, who's a very distinguished historian of American communism, has been a professor at Emory his whole life.
I asked Harvey to go to the Emory archives, visit the Emory Archives.
They wouldn't let even Harvey make a photocopy of that page in the letter.
And so Harvey had to copy down the missing paragraph, you know, pencil and paper and emailed it to me.
And so that language about Barack telling Alex that he regularly fantasized about relations with men, that's in the paperback edition of Rising Star, which was published in 2018.
But I believe only one fairly obscure conservative website mentioned it at the time.
So I'm frankly bemused that that has been sitting in public view in the paperback of the book for over five years now before most people decided they wanted to discover it.
Right.
Well, I mean, you can bet everything that if Trump had some letter in which he talked about repeatedly fantasizing about having sex with men, it would be everywhere.
To me, as a member of the media, this just seems like the media running cover for him on this is something that would be embarrassing potentially to him.
And they don't want to embarrass Barack Obama.
Well, I mean, certainly in the context of when Emory put out the story in 2017 of having acquired the letters, one might think that the journalists covering that would actually read the letters in full.
I mean, now, perhaps Emory didn't encourage them to do that.
Maybe they were shown only selected portions.
But it's the same thing with, you know, my finding Sheila Yeager in 2009.
You just have to have the historical discipline of a historical motivation to go to the library and read things.
That's crazy.
What you seem to be expecting of journalists.
I don't understand this high bar that you've set.
Do a little research.
I think there too.
There too.
To me, it's like the elevation of Barack Obama was important to the left in this country.
It was important to them.
It was, you've made this point too, that they were working something out of their own about their own history, their own feelings, race, and so on.
And factoring in, You know, yes, point taken that uh Sheila is half Japanese too, but also half Dutch.
Uh, so she looks white.
So a white-ish ex-girlfriend fantasizing about having gay sex.
That was not part of the program, that no one would have any interest in that.
They only wanted to elevate the 2004 Democratic National Convention speaker.
There is no black, red America, there is no blue America, there is only the red, white, whatever, the United States of America.
And he would go on to govern in a very, very different way, as even he would ultimately admit.
The Obama presidency turned out very different than what people who'd known Barack back in Illinois politics would have expected.
And indeed, as you just emphasized in terms of that 2004 Democratic Convention speech, Barack was in no way, up through that time, someone who embraced or advocated what we nowadays call identity politics.
Barack during those early years was much more someone in the Dr. King tradition of a multi-racial progressive coalition.
That's the Barack Obama who was running for the U.S. Senate, running for the presidency.
Yeah, what happened?
I think there's no question.
I may have said this to David Samuels, perhaps not.
But my three days of conversations with President Obama in the Oval Office left me with the very clear feeling and belief that the experience of the presidency had made him blacker.
That by 2016, he is much more consciously identifying as African American than he was in, say, even 2008.
Now, I think that that change in Barack's feelings was the result of how much over-the-top hostility was directed towards him from the right during his presidency.
I think one of the major mistakes that the Obama White House made was in not releasing the quote-unquote long-form birth certificate very early on when birtherism was first challenging Barack's birth in Hawaii with these loony notions that he was born in Kenya or Indonesia or wherever.
I think the fact that Barack is this multi-racial figure, someone with a truly African father, someone who spent two or three years of his young adulthood in Indonesia because his mother's second husband, his stepfather, was Indonesian.
I think the fact that Barack was this sort of multinational, multi-racial figure made him seem more unfamiliar to some people than had he been just an average, if we can say, U.S.-raised African-American man.
Barack Obama's Mixed Heritage 00:03:08
Right.
So he was, I mean, he's a mixed-race guy from Hawaii.
But why wouldn't he have just submitted the long-form birth certificate?
I mean, why, like, he could have put that to bed quickly and relatively easily, but he didn't.
Correct.
I think it was, I think they refused to take it seriously, that they thought this was so crazy that it would be, you know, wrong to give this the time of day.
Well, politically, that was an unforced era.
It was self-harming.
David, I definitely want to talk about MLK, but before we close out the Obama discussion, one of the comments you made to Samuels was that this sort of chasing after wealth, status, celebrity friends, it leaves one hollow.
I think that's true.
I think that's true for any man or woman, president or not.
It's probably not an unusual feeling for someone who runs for president, because let's face it, you've got to be a little nuts to want to be president, especially in today's day and age.
You just, it's just such an extraordinary sacrifice and your life changes dramatically, especially if you have young children and all the things.
So when you look at Barack Obama, is that what you see?
Someone who is hollow?
How would you describe him in that way?
I view him as a disappointing figure.
It was certainly a disappointing presidency, particularly in the foreign policy realm, where there were multiple instances of grave disappointment.
Syria, Crimea back in 2014.
But in terms of a post-presidency, let's not forget Jimmy Carter.
Now, Jimmy Carter, needless to say, did not have a successful presidency either.
But ever since leaving the White House, Carter built a tremendous life of public service.
So there's a model out there that you could follow if you're Barack Obama.
Not hanging with, I doubt Jimmy Carter has ever met Jay-Z or Beyoncé.
There's another path to take if you're a progressive Democrat and wants to continue living by the values that you once had.
Why isn't he?
I mean, he's not living his life.
He stayed in D.C. for a long time.
He's at Martha's Vineyard.
He's more on the CNB scene lane.
Again, I said earlier, Megan, in Black Chicago, people are most surprised that Michelle did not keep them grounded in who they once were.
I guess they were expecting too much of her.
Maybe they misjudged her and what's important to her as well.
Dr. King's Shocking Revelations 00:06:27
Okay, so let's talk about Dr. King because you are the biographer.
I realize a lot of biographies have been written on him, but you want a Pulitzer Prize for your work.
And it made a bunch of headlines.
I think it was 2019 when you, did you get access to the actual FBI tapes or transcripts of the tapes?
Maybe just set it up for us so that the audience knows what we're talking about because you wrote the biography and we knew that the FBI had taped him.
And then what happened?
What happened in the addendum, like the 2019 reporting that led to that revelation?
Certainly.
This is a little bit complicated, so bear with me.
In 2018, the National Archives put up on the web hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence community documents that back in the 1970s had been shared with congressional privately, secretly, shared with congressional investigating committees.
That's pursuant to the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Act, which some viewers will be familiar with because everything that went to the congressional investigating committees was then given to the National Archives.
Now, one of those committees looked into the FBI's harassment of Dr. King.
Another of the committees looked into the King assassination as well as the Kennedy assassination.
So in this JFK Records Act, humongous amount of material, there's a lot of stuff about Dr. King.
That's been released in dribs and drabs over the years.
The 2018 release was especially notable because it included a lot of unredacted material based on the FBI's wiretapping and microphone bugging of Dr. King.
Now, part two of the complications.
Back in 1997, a federal judge put under court seal for 50 years all of the raw materials from the King wiretaps and hotel recordings.
Those sit in a vault at Maine Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C.
The court seal expires at the end of January 2027.
Okay, and so you got access in a way that no one else has to what's in there.
I mean, it's a preview of what we're going to see in 2027.
And the shocking revelation to me and to many was that Dr. King allegedly witnessed and potentially egged on the rape of one of his congregants by one of his colleagues.
Is that correctly stated?
Not one of his congregants.
Dr. King did not view women as the equals of men.
And that was manifest in his treatment of women who worked in his civil rights organization.
Dr. King was also, myself and other biographers believe, never a monogamous person.
There's a superb, very recent New King biography by my friend and colleague Jonathan I, E-I-G, titled Just King.
John's is a very nice, important updating of My Bearing the Cross.
Dr. King also had, certainly by 1964, a serious drinking problem, a binge drinking problem.
And he had a set of friends, male friends, most of them fellow pastors, who were his sort of party companions.
And they would do group parties would be a tasteful way to say it.
The first time that the FBI records Dr. King in a hotel room by putting up, having microphones installed in the lamps in the hotel bedroom, is at the Willard Hotel in Washington in early 1964.
And the fruits of that recording, according to the FBI documents, involved one of King's fellow preacher buddies forcing himself upon a woman, a woman, black woman who worked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
We've known the basics of that story for over 40 years.
There's a garbled version of that story in my 1981 book, Before Bearing the Cross, The FBI and Martin Luther King.
But what was new in the 2018 National Archives release was that King himself was allegedly in the room when this other pastor forced himself on this woman.
Now, I'm always ambivalent about stressing that King could be very drunk at times because it sounds like we're making a sort of frat house or frat boy excuse.
Oh, he was just drunk.
Well, that was a problem for King.
King was under tremendous public stress, always in demand, always feeling pressure.
And the drinking got worse as the years went by.
You know, to me, it offers a more complete picture of the man who's been almost deified.
And there, you know, no one is perfect, just to put it in very simple terms, not even Dr. Martin Luther King.
No one is perfect.
It's not to excuse anything he did, but we need to have that understanding when we look both at the figures who we've lionized of the left and the left could bear this in mind when looking at the figures on the right of whom they are so quick to condemn when they make a misstatement or a misstep.
No One Is Perfect 00:00:32
It just is human nature.
I love the discussion.
I look forward to reading the whole book and I'm sorry that I failed to do so the first time when it came out, Rising Star.
David, thank you so much for all of your great, great work and we look forward to reading you more.
Thank you, Megan.
All the best.
And thank you all for joining me today.
I want to tell you that we have a new episode coming out as an extra weekend show.
That's out Saturday morning.
See you soon.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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