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Jan. 2, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:36:46
20240102_record-breaking-illegal-immigration-numbers-and-wh
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Wonderful Christmas in Montana 00:02:54
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111, every weekday at least.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy new year.
Hope everyone had a great holiday season with your family and your friends, getting some rest and relaxation, ideally, like we did.
We were in Montana for the full two weeks.
You know, the first week we did tape shows of a deep dive into the Idaho quadruple murders, got a lot of great feedback on our own investigation into the facts that have been unearthed in that investigation and that crime so far.
So thank you all for tuning in.
And now we're back.
I will tell you, we had a wonderful, wonderful Christmas with our kids out in Montana.
And we actually brought the dogs as we did last year.
And this year, we did not give Strudd the tranquilizer on the plane, which led to a gas-free trip.
It was wonderful.
And actually, he behaved.
So the plane ride was a lot more pleasant for all involved.
Unfortunately, once we got out there, though I do studiously avoid leaving anything he can eat anywhere out around him when I don't have eyes on him, he's fast, ladies and gentlemen.
He's fast.
And one morning, Santa brought Strudwick and Thunder those little bones that you can eat for fresh breath.
You know, those things?
And he did have bad breath.
I'm not going to lie.
So I gave him one and I gave Thunder one.
And then I forgot.
I elevated.
I put it on the counter, but that's not good enough with Strudd.
You have to put it up high, like where a human would have to reach.
And he was out of sight.
And I was like, where's Strudd?
And whenever you ask that question, it leads to bad results.
So I went looking.
And can I tell you, the entire huge bag of those fresh breath little bone treats was almost gone.
I just gave it to them that morning and I read the directions that said maximum one per day.
He had eaten 22.
22, 22.
So I speed dialed poison control, which as you know is button number one on my speed dial.
And they said to do the thing that I've done many times with Strudwick, which is he had to have a little hydrogen peroxide mixed in with some yogurt.
Maximum three tablespoons a day for a dog over 40 pounds, just FYI.
I got the rules down.
And then Strudd and we had a rather unpleasant 48 hours.
But, you know, all things considered, it wasn't so bad.
It could have been a lot worse with Strudd.
I'll tell you one other thing.
I got Doug a miniature diesel engine replica for Christmas, you know, for his book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel.
And Strudd tried to eat that too.
But, you know, powered by diesel really means something.
He couldn't.
That was one thing Strudd could not destroy.
He tried.
I'll show you the pictures of the box.
He got the box.
Extraordinary Year for Our Country 00:15:03
Other than that, we had a fun costume night, which I will show you some pictures of.
We do a theme every year.
One year we did Willy Wonka.
One year we did Gilligan's Island.
One year we did superheroes.
I mean, you name it.
We did Cobra Kai last year.
And this year we did the 10 Commandments.
And it was amazing.
The 10 Commandments outfits were so fun.
And we watched the 10 Commandments every year around Easter.
So it's sort of a holiday thing.
So it tied into Christmas.
And Doug and I, according to Barry Weiss, made some excellent Israelites as Moses and his wife.
And you can see the picture here.
I said this to Barry Weiss saying, Barry, I never got around to buying that menorah you wanted me to put in the window, but we did do this.
So God bless our friends in Israel, my Jewish friends.
And Doug and I gave it our best.
Okay, this is officially our first show of 2024.
It's going to be an extraordinary year for our country.
I mean, I truly like, I can't get my arms around how big this year is going to be news-wise.
I don't think we've ever had a bigger one.
I really don't.
This month alone, we're going to be covering the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, finally here.
There might be a few debates.
They're not sanctioned by the RNC, but there might be.
Trump's not going to any of these.
And we will likely witness the U.S. Supreme Court taking center stage again in a U.S. presidential campaign in the 2024 presidential campaign in particular.
as this question about whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution goes up to the Supreme Court, along with the question of whether Trump can stay on the ballots.
That was the biggest piece of news that broke while we were all on vacay.
It's Colorado and some unelected official in Maine decided Trump doesn't get to play at all in the political process, removing him, or at least issuing rulings that he should be removed from the primary ballots in those two states.
Those decisions are not going to be enforced until we get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
And that, mark my words, will reverse this lawlessness.
Trump will be on the ballots.
This is insane.
It's not going to stand.
We'll get to a lot of it.
Okay, joining me now, no one better to talk about all of this than Ben Shapiro.
He's editor emeritus over at the Daily Wire and hosted the Ben Shapiro show.
Ben, welcome back.
Hey, good to see you.
Happy New Year.
Great to see you too.
Did you see the picture of me and Doug as Moses and Sephora?
We went, look, we nailed it, Ben.
You tell me on our costume meeting.
Absolutely true to history.
This is exactly what Moses and Sephora look like.
Absolutely.
Well, we tried.
We do a costume theme every year.
And I'll tell you, this is the one thing I spend my money on.
I don't get diamonds.
These are fake in my ears now.
I don't do that, any of that crap.
I spend money on these dumb costumes that we wear once a year when we have costume night over the holidays.
I was so happy.
So, and historical.
Nice.
They definitely have higher resale value.
You just sign those, put them on eBay, they'll have higher resale value than the diamonds.
There's the whole cast and crew.
You got Pharaoh, you got Ramsey's, you got them all.
Okay, so let's get down to the news.
I want to start with the border, which was that just broke a couple of days ago, the latest numbers.
And that's really like, I don't even know what to say about where we are right now on the border.
The news is so dire.
302,000 immigrant encounters in December alone.
In December alone, the worst ever, Ben, put it in perspective.
So 300,000, those are enormous numbers.
I have to say, the single best political move, maybe of all time, is all these Republican governors sending illegal migrants up to these various blue cities and all these blue city mayors suddenly being forced to understand that illegal immigration is actually really bad.
Not when it hits the 10,000 person South Texas town, when it hits their giant city that is supposedly incredibly wealthy and capable of enormous social services.
It hits Chicago.
It hits New York.
And then all of a sudden these people are like, illegal immigration is really, really bad.
One thing that I talked about on my show today was just that this is going to be the year when a lot of chickens come home to roost.
The illegal immigration chicken is going to come home to roost for Joe Biden in a very, very serious way because everybody left, right, and center.
I mean, look at his immigration numbers.
They understand that leaving the border open to this extent is just insane.
And it began literally when he became president.
I mean, if you look at the numbers, they spiked in January 2021 and they've stayed at these extraordinary levels ever since.
300,000 people showing up on the border just in December alone.
These are insane, insane numbers.
And again, I think even people in blue states and blue cities are beginning to feel the impact of that.
It was nice when you could relegate the illegal immigration problem down to a bunch of red states along the southern border.
Now that a lot of those people are moving into the interior of the United States and into cities governed by Joe Biden's supposed Democratic allies, you can see that this is going to have a pretty significant effect on Biden's administration.
I would not be surprised to see Biden make some moves to shore up the border simply to shore up the moderate flank of his own party.
Yes, he's going to have to do it.
Here are the numbers.
So, as I mentioned, in December, over 300,000 immigrant encounters, highest monthly total ever recorded in American history.
Since October 1st, there were more than 785,000 encounters, the highest first quarter on record.
This is all per Fox News.
January, we had 157,000 last year.
Then in September, we had almost 270,000.
And now by December, it's up to 300,000 migrant encounters.
This doesn't include the gotaways, the ones who ran and we didn't get them, not to mention the ones we just don't know about.
And then just by way of comparison, we went back to 2019, to be fair, because we excluded 2020 because we had the pandemic, we had all the special rules.
So let's be fair and compared apples to apples, Trump to Biden in a non-pandemic period.
December of 2019, there were 60,000, 60,000 border encounters under Trump.
Now 302,000.
And listen to this, Ben, to your point about how Biden now has no choice but to do something about this.
Not that he cares.
He clearly wants this, but he's miscalculated politically because in a political year, he has to pay attention to the numbers.
And the Hispanic poll numbers, my God, just look at Hispanics.
People think Hispanics might be in favor of this.
Maybe it's like somebody they know or they have empathy for.
No, no, they're very, very against this.
In 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, according to the latest USA Today and Suffolk University poll.
65 to 32.
He was beating Donald Trump.
So it's almost twice, right?
Or is it?
It is twice.
It's twice what Donald Trump had: 65 to 32.
Today, it's a Donald Trump advantage, 39 to 34.
Hispanics have swung entirely over to the Trump camp.
Yes, they care about inflation.
They care about all the things that we all care about, but listen to how they feel.
This is according to Monmouth earlier in December, how they feel about this issue, immigration.
Do you approve or disapprove of how Joe Biden has handled the following policy areas?
Immigration.
Approve 30%.
Disapprove 67% of Hispanic voters disapprove of how he's handling it.
So what do you make of all of it?
I mean, it's insane.
The number that you cited before about Trump's numbers versus Biden there is really quite fascinating because what it suggests is not that everybody swung over to the Trump camp, it's that they left the Biden camp.
So what that means is that they're up for grabs, right?
Because the first stat you read was 65 to 32 in favor of Biden, which means that Trump was at 32.
Well, in this election cycle, what you say is that Trump has the advantage up to 39.
That's a seven-point gain.
What you're really seeing there is a 30-point drop off for Joe Biden among Hispanics.
And this is what you're seeing all over the place for Biden, this massive bleed in voters.
Now, the question for the 2024 election, of course, is going to be how many of those voters, quote unquote, come home, right?
How many of those people are expressing dissatisfaction with Biden before there's an actual opponent on the ballot, before you get down to it?
But bottom line is this: I think that when it comes to the election, virtually everybody has an opinion on these two guys.
It's going to be exogenous circumstances, extraneous circumstances that decide this election, which is why Biden has to do something about the southern border.
If he does not, then Trump's just going to run roughshod over him with regard to the southern border.
It's his number one issue, Trump.
It's always been his number one issue.
And how better to run against this than to just point at Joe Biden and say, this guy has opened the border up wide?
I mean, those stats that you were citing there, Megan, about where we were in December of 2019, 60,000 illegal immigrants coming across the border in 2019, December.
126,000 single men came across the border in December of this year, of the last year.
Twice as many single men as humans came across the border in December of 2023 as they did in December, 2019.
Those are astonishing numbers.
And we don't know who any of those people are.
A lot of those people, I'm sure, are going to be on the terror watch list.
A lot of those people are not coming from the Northern Triangle.
A lot of those people are coming from Africa.
Many are coming from Asia.
Many are coming from the Middle East.
I mean, the border needs to be shut and everybody knows it, which is why you got to say that Biden's either inability or unwillingness to turn to his left flank and just say stop, it's actually politically insane.
I understand that it's his unwillingness to do what needs to be done on the border that is holding up the thing he says that he wants the most right now, which is this Ukraine aid package, Israel-Taiwan aid package.
The thing holding that up, Republicans are willing to give that to him if he will solidify the border.
And he's been saying no, which makes no sense.
He could get all the things, right?
He could, he could cave on the border.
He could then turn to his left flank and say, listen, guys, I needed to do that because I needed the Ukraine money.
And then he could turn to the American people and say, listen, I worked with the Republicans in bipartisan fashion to shut the border and try to neutralize that issue.
The fact he hasn't done that is so politically crazy, it boggles the mind.
The number of illegal migrants who came into the United States last year, they're saying now at this point, exceeds the birth rate in America.
Exceeds the birth.
We had more illegals enter than we had actual American babies born.
What's honestly, what's the thinking that those are the future Democratic voters?
What is the thinking behind a complete sieve from coast to coast along the southern border?
Yeah, I mean, there's the cynical practical read, which is that these people are going to come in.
They'll become Democratic voters after becoming wards of the state because they'll be on welfare.
They don't have skill sets that are necessary to get jobs and all the rest.
That's the cynical political take.
Then there's the ideological take, which is that somehow the United States owes it to the rest of the world to give everybody citizenship, which is totally insane.
But there is a wing of the Democratic Party that truly believes that, which is that you have a right.
And I believe the mayor of Boston actually said this yesterday.
You have a right to- We have that immigration.
Let me play it, Ben, and then I'll give it back to you.
Let me play it.
Here's Michelle Wu, mayor of Boston.
Every person, every human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum or shelter.
And those policies have been in place for a long time.
Go ahead.
I mean, that's not true.
I mean, you have the legal right to show up at a port of entry and then try to get in, I suppose, but then we have every legal and moral obligation to reject you if we don't want you here.
And that's what it means to be an American citizen.
There is that part of the party that truly believes that as well.
And then there is this weird sort of globalist economic program that suggests that if we're not going to have babies in the United States, then we need to import a labor base in order to keep wages down.
And that, of course, is ridiculous on its face as well.
So there's a lot going on here and they all cross streams, but the American people are not in favor of this.
It's one of Biden's weakest points in the polling data.
And again, what I've, I've never understood this about Biden's presidency.
It makes no sense to me.
He won the nomination being not Bernie.
That was literally his program.
I'm a dead person who's not Bernie Sanders.
And then he won the president, the presidency saying I'm a dead person who's not Donald Trump.
So what people actually just wanted was a dead person, as it turns out.
And then it turns out he gets into office and he's a dead person who's actually imitating every wild left-wing policy that he rejected when he was fighting Bernie Sanders.
It makes zero political sense to me.
He's going to have to wise up or he's not going to be president for much longer.
I mean, and you know what?
The long-term history of Hispanics coming to the United States does not suggest they are going to be Democrat forever.
So he really better be careful when it comes to what he wishes for.
He's going to have to, he sent somebody down there.
I mean, like, supposedly, this was like the big, they were taking a serious look at the border.
They're not doing anything.
Oberdor is going to have his own way.
He didn't make any promises that were meaningful.
Nothing's going to change unless Joe Biden actually feels this pain and maybe his voters will get through to him between now and November.
That's not the only insanity going on in our country right now.
On the trans front, I wasn't surprised to see Maryland and others make this so-called gender-affirming care, which is really what we're doing is cutting off the body parts of minors who say they're gender confused or sterilizing them with puberty blockers into cross-sex hormones.
But they call it gender-affirming care to try to get it through.
And because there's a big money-making industry around this whole thing, I wasn't surprised to see Maryland and some other blue states approve it in.
you know, law, make sure that it's protected.
I was surprised to see Ohio Governor Mike Dewine reject a ban in what is clearly now a red state, Ohio, where you've got Republican supermajorities in the legislature.
He banned it.
He refused to ban it.
He refused to sign the ban, which they signed in Idaho, which they signed in Louisiana.
But apparently it was just a bridge too far for Mike DeWine in Ohio saying, I've looked the parents in the eyes of these supposedly trans kids.
And, you know, this really can be a life-saving thing to cut off their penises when they're minors or what have you.
And therefore, I felt the need to do it.
Now, the Daily Caller's got a report out today saying he received at least $40,000 in donations from the hospitals who perform these very lucrative procedures on minors.
I don't know how big that, you know, pot of money is, whether it would have changed his view or not, but I think it's a complete betrayal by Mike DeWine.
What did you think?
I mean, it certainly is a betrayal of his voters.
I'm always hesitant to attribute politicians' views to pure bribery.
I think that in this particular case, you probably see these people supporting DeWine because they knew that he believed that thing, which is typically the way that money flows in politics.
You know, that a politician supports an agenda item.
So you give money to that politician.
DeWine has been squirrely on a bunch of issues.
I mean, if you go back to COVID, he was a real lockdown governor.
I mean, he really promoted everything up to it, including the possibility of mandatory vaccination, if he could have gotten away with it in Ohio.
So it's not super shocking coming from DeWine, but in a red state like Ohio, it does show that, again, there is a class of sort of Republican moderates who are pretty squirrely on this issue.
You saw this, I believe, also from the governor of Utah, which again is a super red state.
You see, some red state governors who seem deeply hesitant to wade into what they term a culture war issue.
I mean, honest to goodness, if you can't use the power of government to protect minors from adults who are preying on them, because that's what this is.
The Trans Insanity Debate 00:06:30
I mean, when you're talking about irreversibly destroying a child in the name of a perverse gender ideology, they call it gender-affirming care.
Gender and sex, as they say, if those things, as they term them, are somehow in opposition to one another, the better term for gender-affirming care would be sex-denying care, because that's actually what they're doing.
They're denying the actual biological sex of the child.
I mean, that's child abuse.
And the fact that Mike Dewine is somehow treating that as a generous act on behalf of the child is sick.
I mean, it's perverse.
I'm going to show you a clip.
It's leading into a clip with Dave Chappelle, which you've probably seen.
It's gone kind of viral.
He's back at it.
But before we get to Dave, I want to set it up with this actor.
His name is Tommy Dorfman.
And we see these clips posted a lot online and on Twitter on X of trans people who say they're trans trying to harass civilians who are in the public service industry for quote, misgendering them, misgendering them.
You know what?
If you were clearer in your fake gender, the person would probably be clearer in their pronoun choice.
But if you didn't fool me, that's on you.
If you fool me and I go along with your fake pronoun, great.
If you didn't fool me, I have no obligation to talk the way you want me to talk.
So this guy, Tommy Dorfman, who first went to they them, now says he's a she, was dealing with a Delta Airlines employee over the holidays.
My God, I don't even know what we're looking at on the screen right now and decided to harass the guy by posting his exchange with the Delta Airlines employee and apparently trying to get this Delta Airlines employee in trouble.
I'll tell you this.
What's happened since Tommy posted the clip is he had to take it down because Team Sanity has taken the side of the Delta guy.
Watch it.
What about when an adult employee misgenders you intentionally?
While she's talking, while he's talking, you're talking.
You just misgendered me again.
Okay.
Multiple times.
Gotcha.
Both of you have.
Sorry.
Wasn't intentional, but if you want to take it personal, that's awesome.
Well, she did do it intentionally twice.
You said she, and then you said he.
You're being condescending.
And if you want to continue, I have full authority escort you out the building right this moment if you want to play that game with me.
Okay.
Would you like to continue three days before Christmas?
I really don't mind.
I'm going to put this on.
So effective, right?
By the way, is that not the way to deal with it?
Absolutely.
I mean, again, this sort of stuff is insane.
The entire sort of push of the trans movement is that it's somehow not an imposition on the rest of us to be told what we have to say to a certain group of people.
And that is totally wild.
One of my favorite instances of this over the past couple of weeks, there's some TikTok video that came out of a woman, and she's married to a man, and she is talking in this TikTok video about how she's very insulted by her husband.
Why?
Well, because she has decided that she's actually gender non-binary, and yet her husband insists on calling himself a straight man.
And she says that denies her gender because he's actually a man married to a non-binary person.
So actually, he should also say that he's a member of the queer community since he's a man who's married to a non-binary person.
Whereas her husband's like, no, I'm straight.
I just like women.
So, you know, again, this bizarre, crazy idea that you have the ability and right and should have the legal ability actually to compel people to call you what you want to be called is so insane.
And the backlash to it is just beginning, honestly.
Like it really has only started at this point, especially because there are so many people trying to cram it down.
I don't know if you saw Megan this video of Lieutenant Colonel talking about how there's a man who says that he's a woman now, who says that tolerance is the highest value that the military can bring about.
That really it's acceptance and tolerance is the core military value that needs to be pursued.
I don't know anybody in the military who actually believes that.
That's an insane proposition.
Oh my God.
And it's a no.
I mean, you know, I've talked about this piece many times, but pronouns are real hip null.
They need you to go with their preferred pronouns or accuse you of misgendering them because it's all part of the delusion.
You have to participate in their delusion.
It requires like the first step in disillusioning you that gender is real, that sex is real.
And so you go down that path and it's a very slippery slope, as I've talked about at length now since I sort of decided not to do this.
All right, that brings me to Dave Chappelle, who he's been so good on this issue and so fearless right from the get-go.
He lands this, the audience, I'm sure you've seen it, but the audience, just wait for it, wait for the end.
Listen.
And they said, cut, this nigga was still Andy Kaufman.
So much so.
Talking about Jim Carrey.
Everybody on the crew called him Andy.
I didn't know any of that.
I just went there to meet him.
And when he walked into the room where we were supposed to meet, I screamed, Jim Carrey.
And everyone said, no.
Call him Andy.
In hindsight, how fucking lucky am I that I got to see one of the greatest artists of my time immersed in one of his most challenging processes ever?
Very lucky to have seen that.
But as it was happening, I was very disappointed because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey.
And I had to pretend this nigga was Andy Kaufman.
It was clearly Jim Carrey.
I could look at him and I could see he was Jim Carrey.
Anyway, I say all that to say, that's how trans people make me feel.
So good.
That's it exactly.
Why do we have to participate in their delusion?
That's what it boils down to.
Yeah.
And that actually is part of a broader sort of reshaping in Western society, which is that I am my feelings.
My feelings are me.
And therefore, if you deny my feelings, what you are doing is erasing me.
This is why you hear this sort of language used all this time.
This erasure language.
What harm does it do if I call you by your biological sex and you believe that you're not a member of that biological sex?
Normally in life, if you call me something I don't believe I am, that's all right.
Like, okay, you're wrong.
And we all sort of move on.
But the sort of obsession with what other people call you, again, it goes to this idea that the only part of you that's important is your sexual identity and your feelings about that thing.
And so if somebody denies that to you, it's an actual imposition.
It's a microaggression against you.
That's dangerous thinking, obviously.
You've got the trans insanity.
You've got the border insanity.
And you do indeed continue to have the racial insanity, which we've seen in this country for quite some time now.
Poverty and Welfare Systems 00:02:32
In Chicago, the mayor there, I'm just Chicago is just, it's lost.
There's no turning around.
Once they elected this far left Dem, when they could have had somebody who was a little bit more middle of the road, it was lost.
But so this new mayor there, Brandon Johnson, is now saying that he wants reparations to the black people of Chicago as a cure to Chicago's crime rate, to the homicides in Chicago.
He says if you would just give reparations to the black people in Chicago, you will lower the crime rate.
That's the solution that he's actually proposing now for his city.
Of course, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that there is no evidence that there is a connection between crime and poverty.
That's not what's causing crime.
Poverty is not causing crime.
But that's his solution, Ben.
And who knows whether the citizens of Chicago are going to go for it?
Like we've seen, you know, some willingness in San Francisco and California, your old state.
I mean, obviously that's total craziness.
I mean, the same thing that causes crime very often causes poverty, which is bad decision making.
It doesn't mean not in terms of where you start, but certainly in terms of where you finish.
I mean, there are certain decisions that you can make in life that make it significantly less likely that you're going to end your life in poverty or spend significant portions of your life in poverty.
And one of the things that cuts against making those good decisions is a welfare system, a system of payments by government that are designed to alleviate the consequences of your own action is that this idea of helicoptering cash around high crime areas as though that's going to alleviate the crime rate, as that's going to change how people make their decisions is totally wrong.
And that was the premise of the entire Great Society program that was pushed by the LBJ administration back in the 60s.
We've tried that for half a century and it has not alleviated in the slightest many of these social maladies that we're talking about from crime to single motherhood to the poverty rate.
Helicoptering cash around doesn't change the underlying decision-making structure that actually allows people to escape poverty and build excellent lives for themselves.
But it does make a great pitch if you're a politician, because the worst thing you can say if you're a politician, this is true on all sides, the worst thing you can say if you're a politician is that 90% of your problems are your own making.
That's a very difficult thing for politicians to say because it's a difficult thing for people to hear.
Much easier to say, no, no, no, it's somebody else's fault and they need some form of reparations from you in order for them to fix all of their problems.
You know, black scholars have been saying this for quite some time, but they say, if you want to make sure you avoid poverty, graduate from high school, get a job, get married, have a child in that order.
It's pretty simple.
Harvard's Unbreakable Immunity Badge 00:05:53
Like if you just do those few things, you've set yourself up for success much better than somebody who hasn't.
And it doesn't have anything to do with money being given to you by some pandering politician.
But the obsession with race, you know, reducing everybody to the color of their skin, promoting it as though it really means something about character continues at every level of our society, whether it's the Chicago mayor looking at the Chicago projects and saying, here's the solution, or whether it's Claudine Gay holding on to her job as the president of Harvard, despite how many instances now of plagiarism?
One of my favorite things over the holidays was seeing all the Twitter memes of like, Luke Babylon B had one headline, which was Claudine Gay rallies people to her side in the midst of plagiarism scandal with inspiring I Have a Dream speech.
She's become a literal joke.
Yeah, I mean, it is amazing.
And honestly, I'm glad that Harvard's keeping her there because I don't think that Harvard should be able to shield itself from the criticism it's receiving simply by firing Claudine Gay.
She's part of a broader system of corrupt thought that has just honeycombed its way through nearly all of our major universities and institutions.
And getting rid of Claudine Gay doesn't fix the problem.
It's the entire DEI substructure that, again, is present in nearly every major institution and virtually all of our colleges that has destroyed higher education completely.
And Claudine Gay is a perfect example of this.
She was always at best a mediocre scholar.
Her publication history was nothing special.
She was put in place specifically to fill a particular diversity quota.
And that is the reason that she's not being fired right now, because if there were any other major university president who, let's say, was a white man who was found to have engaged in this level of plagiarism, they would have been gone yesterday.
I mean, by the way, if you're a white lady and you're a University of Pennsylvania, you're already gone.
I mean, the one who's escaped censure so far, by the way, is the president of MIT.
I think that is going to come soon.
The president of MIT so far has escaped the blowback from the Elise Stefanic hearing near the end of last year, all about whether you're allowed to call for the genocide of Jews on campus without any sort of consequence.
But Claudine Gay, being able to live through all of this, is just another example of how DEI is corrupt.
It's evil.
It leads to a belief that you are owed something based on the color of your skin or based on your group identity.
And that sort of politics simply can't be sustained in a rational state.
It's so pervasive, this ridiculousness of like Claudine Gay, the Free Beacon just had another six instances of plagiarism, examples by her that just came out.
As you point out, most people who get appointed to the position of president of a university like Harvard have been established scholars.
They've written multiple books, textbooks that have become the textbook when it comes to a certain subject matter.
She had written like 11 to 17, depending on what you consider a scholarly article, scholarly articles.
That's it.
No books.
And now in more than half of those or something like half of those, they have repeated instances of plagiarism, which the school just keeps downplaying as like uncited or uncited works, like uncited sentences.
And in the latest instances by the Free Beacon, there's no citation whatsoever.
She's plagiarized without even citing the guy.
Maybe she stuffs his name in the bibliography, but she takes full paragraphs of somebody else's work, shoves them into her piece as though it's Claudine Gay's original thought.
And truly, I mean, I know I'm kind of enjoying this because I do think the name Harvard is becoming a joke.
And honestly, I feel for the black students there in particular, because now more than ever, people are looking at them like, well, we totally get what your university stands for.
And we have no reason to believe you earned your way in there.
And we have no reason to believe you belong there at all because now we see what they do when it comes to academic and ethical standards for people of color.
So Harvard, ironically, is humiliating its black students day by day, even though they may or may not have been diversity admittance or professors who got accepted based on gender.
One of the things that's amazing about this is that if you actually look at the history of who Harvard gets rid of, it is pretty astonishing, right?
Larry Summers was the president of Harvard when I was at the law school over there, and they got rid of him because he committed the grave sin of suggesting that maybe there weren't enough women in sciences because women didn't actually like going into STEM jobs nearly as much as they liked going into jobs where they weren't working with like machines, where they actually liked working with human beings.
They got rid of him over that.
Cloudine Gay and the people she was involved with at the upper levels of administration at Harvard got rid of an excellent black scholar named Roland Fryer over allegations that I believe ended up being debunked of some sort of sexual harassment.
It was complete nonsense.
And Roland Fryer is an excellent scholar.
I mean, his stuff is really fascinating.
He doesn't happen to be particularly right wing.
He sort of sent her to the road at best.
And they got rid of him over that.
If he'd been a hardcore left-wing DEI scholar, would they have gotten rid of him over that?
I have very serious doubts about that particular reality.
So again, the badge of the kind of immunity that you get from being a left-wing Harvard black woman is apparently just unbreakable.
That's an unbreakable level of immunity, apparently.
And the left-wing piece is important.
It is important because Roland Fryer, of course, as you point out, this is a black man, but his big sin was he committed, he did a study that did not confirm bias in police shootings by white cops against black men.
He did not find a trend showing that you're more likely to get shot by a white cop if you're a black man.
And suddenly he had all these, I mean, they were BS Me Too problems that ended his lab, his research lab at Harvard.
And then there was the other professor who was like a dean of one of the schools who made the sin of representing, I think it was Harvey Weinstein, right?
That's too right-wing for them.
Like they've punished black scholars at Harvard, but not ones that are left-wing or adhering to left-wing causes, like Claudine.
So they really are at a sort of fork in the road now when it comes to this woman.
But I agree with you.
I'm enjoying watching them suffer with her at the helm.
A Fractured Right-Wing Election 00:15:01
Duplicative language.
That's what they're calling it.
Duplicative language that she's been using.
I mean, really, I look forward to seeing some student just completely copy somebody else's like very well-known thesis or doctoral dissertation and just, what do you mean?
It's duplicative language.
How what, you know, like somebody's got to put this to the test at the student level.
And I really hope it's a white guy who doesn't fall into any diversity box.
All right, Ben, stand by.
Quick break.
More with you just ahead.
Ben, I'm sure you are not wanting to discuss this.
So I'll just hit it quickly and we'll move on.
But you've been in the news over the past couple of days because you and Tucker have been kind of going back and forth on Israel, who's right and that kind of thing.
And it's gotten a little personal on his end a couple of times, including in an interview he gave to Sagar and Jetty, in which Sagar mentioned you in particular and some of the skirmishes and the disagreements you guys have had on Israel.
Here's what Tucker said.
There are people on the right who have spent the last two months every single day focused on a conflict in a foreign country as our own country becomes dangerously unstable on the brink of financial collapse with tens of millions of people who shouldn't be here in the country.
We don't know their identities or the purpose of their being here.
Like stuff that could destroy the country for real and make it impossible for my kids to live here.
They've said nothing about that.
And they're focused with laser intensity on foreign conflicts.
They don't care about the country at all.
And that's, you know, that's kind of their prerogative.
But I do because I have no choice because I'm from here.
My family's been here hundreds of years.
I plan to stay here.
Like, I'm shocked by how little they care about the country, and including the person you mentioned.
And I can't imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claimed to care about America because he doesn't, obviously, right?
Right.
Your reaction to that.
I mean, a bit of an astonishing statement there from Tucker.
I would never doubt his love for the country, even though he and I disagree wildly about a number of topics.
First of all, he attributes to me a bunch of things that simply are not true.
If anybody has listened to my show, which has a few listeners over the course of the last several months, you'll see that I talk about all the issues that he mentions there, including the border issue all the time.
If you watch my show, he actually attributes to me, I believe in that interview, the view that, for example, the United States has some sort of duty to import Palestinians from Gaza.
I've overtly opposed that because it's ridiculous, silly, and be awful for the United States of America.
So he just attributes to me a bunch of views I don't hold and then proceeds to say that I don't care about the country.
Yeah, obviously, that's silly and that's untrue.
I think it's part and parcel of something that Tucker has had a habit of doing recently, which is we disagree, therefore you don't care about the people that I care about.
You don't care about the country.
As for the notion, by the way, that his people have been here for hundreds of years.
All four of my grandparents on both sides have been here since the early 1900s.
So over a century, my family has been here on both sides of the aisle.
I also have no intention of moving.
So, you know, I don't know what more there is to say about that other than it's an absurd accusation.
It's unfortunate.
I certainly don't feel that way about Tucker as much as I disagree with Tucker, as we said, on a wide variety of issues.
No, I don't either.
He loves America and so do you.
And I know you both very well.
So it's unfortunate to see that the kind of skirmish.
But to me, whatever, you guys will move past it.
What's more interesting about the whole thing, Ben, is we are seeing a very fractured right.
I mean, a very fractured right, right?
You've got the America first crowd.
You've got the neocons.
I never really consider you a neocon.
I mean, our friends over at Commentary, John Pedoritz, Noah Rothman, now he's at National Review, open neocons.
That's not how I see you.
How do you describe yourself and how do you see like what's happening now within Republican, within conservative circles on like sort of this, it's not as strong as to call it a civil war, but there are real differences that are leading people like Tucker to say, if Trump were to choose Nikki Haley as his vice president, I would actively campaign against the ticket.
There would be a complete meltdown on, you know, on Team MAGA.
I mean, honestly, it would be fascinating to see if Tucker actually did that, if Trump did pick Nikki Haley, because that would be de facto campaigning, I would assume, in favor of Joe Biden by that same sort of logic, because presumably one of those two people is going to be president of the United States.
But when it comes to the fractures on the right, of course, there are a lot of fractures on the right.
There have historically been a lot of fractures on the right, going all the way back to battles between William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan.
I mean, like, there's nothing new that's happening here on the right.
It's just louder.
And I think that's because there is no sort of guiding voice of ideology inside the conservative movement writ large or inside the Republican Party, because Donald Trump, who is the leader of the conservative movement or Republican Party until deposed, he doesn't have a thoroughgoing ideology and he's open to a bunch of different perspectives, meaning sometimes he sounds a lot like Tucker on foreign policy and sometimes he sounds a lot like me on foreign policy.
And there's a lot of in-between.
When it comes to sort of the arguments about foreign policy, where I put myself is in sort of the hawkish realist camp, meaning that there are a lot of conflicts in which the United States should not be involved, but a complete United States isolationist retreat from the world is going to make for a significantly more dangerous world.
So for example, I don't think the United States should go to war in Iran.
I don't think the United States has an interest in war with Iran.
I think what the United States does have an interest in, however, is, for example, destroying the Houthi ability to stop up the shipping in the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and Babel Mandem Strait.
I mean, those are areas where the United States has a very strong interest in the freedom of the seas, not just because 10% of all world oil goes through that particular area, but also because if you don't actually demonstrate that the United States, through our naval power, is willing to guarantee freedom of the seas, there's a pretty solid shot that China is going to blockade Taiwan and then bottle up the Taiwan Straits, which is going to block up world trade almost entirely and therefore lead to a massive economic recession, which does impact American citizens.
I think that there's a view of foreign policy that basically things that happen far away don't affect Americans.
I think that that's wrong.
I think that we can have debates over which area particular foreign conflicts fall into.
But again, I think there's a sort of black and white rhetoric that's very often used with regard to arguments in which views are misattributed and accusations are made about policies that people don't even actually hold.
And that I find weird.
All right, let's talk politics for one second because it's a good segue into it.
What happened in Maine?
What happened in Colorado over the past week to 10 days?
I mean, do you agree with my assessment that there is zero chance the U.S. Supreme Court keeps Trump off of the ballots, upholds these decisions that he ought to be removed because he engaged in a quote insurrection?
The Supreme Court's obviously going to strike it down, but the whole purpose of Democrats pushing this thing up to the Supreme Court level, which is what was going to happen the minute the Colorado Supreme Court did what it did, the whole purpose here is to delegitimize the Supreme Court.
I think folks have to understand this has almost nothing to do with the ability of these states to boot Trump from the ballot.
The goal here is to continue to undermine the credibility and faith in the Supreme Court, therefore to allow, if Joe Biden got a second term, the packing of the Supreme Court or the attempt to depose certain justices or the impeachment of members of the Supreme Court.
You saw Jamie Raskin over the weekend do this with regard to Clarence Thomas suggesting that Thomas should recuse himself in the Colorado or Maine cases, despite the fact that, again, Clarence Thomas is not involved in the election of 2024.
The idea is that because Jenny Thomas is pro-Trump and because Jenny Thomas, Clarence's wife, was a believer that the election was stolen, this means that Thomas can't sound off on whether or not the law allows for the simple booting of candidates for no criminal offense whatsoever.
Again, the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court did what it did is totally insane.
The Supreme Court's going to strike it down, but I just don't think it's really about whether Trump makes the ballot or not.
This is the thing that scares me about the 2024 election.
I think that the stage is set, that no matter how this election goes, things are going to get hideous right after the election.
Can you imagine, Megan, any situation in which people go quietly if Trump wins?
I mean, it's just not going to happen.
I mean, it's going to be totally insane because they've set it up that Trump is a fascist who is going to actively threaten democracy if allowed to be president again.
And so you will get large-scale riots.
Similarly, if Trump loses the election to Biden, if he's the nominee and he loses the election to Biden, Trump is going to say the same thing this time that he said last time, and with actually significantly more credibility, right?
He's going to say the election was stolen from me.
And one of the ways the election will have been stolen from him is in the militarization of law enforcement against him, four separate criminal trials in four separate jurisdictions, all of which are either specious or strained, and all of it directed at kicking him off the ballot in particular areas or in having him lose the election via the use of, for example, the Department of Justice.
He's going to have a lot of credibility in saying that sort of stuff.
And so if Biden wins, there's going to be a feeling on the other side that the election was illegitimate.
I mean, this is setting up rifts in our society that are almost impossible to bridge, specifically because we've spent 50 years destroying all the intermediate institutions of society that used to bridge the gaps, right?
It used to be that even if you disagreed with the guy next to you about who to vote for in the election, you went to the same church.
But if the church no longer exists, now you just hate that guy because he's next door.
You don't even know him.
And he's going to vote for the guy who's going to destroy the country.
I don't think the U.S. Supreme Court will do anything to delegitimize itself in this whole thing.
I think we're likely to get possibly a 9-0, a 7-2 ruling in Trump's favor, and they'll find some ground other than saying he did not commit an insurrection.
They'll say something about the 14th Amendment.
The language doesn't apply to a president.
There are other ways for them to come together and avoid getting, they know, they remember what Bush V. Gore did to them, not to the country, but to them, the U.S. Supreme Court.
I just don't think they're going to take the bait.
They're way too smart for Jamie Raskin.
That's my prediction.
We'll see whether it holds.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about the GOP primary, such as it is.
Trump is completely dominant going into, you know, here we are a couple of weeks out from Iowa and New Hampshire, and then Super Tuesday in March will be here before we know it.
DeSantis now basically tied with Nikki Haley, which is not good news for DeSantis.
She's been edging up, though they're both so far behind Trump, it's kind of not even worth mentioning.
Big article in the New York Times or a couple of days ago from one of his top campaign aides saying that DeSantis, that they're basically in the keep the patient comfortable stage of his campaign, which is just a devastating line.
It's kind of mean.
It may be true.
So what do you make of where DeSantis is, where Haley is, and where Trump is?
Yeah, I mean, basically, there is only one route for this primary process to continue beyond South Carolina.
And that's at this point for DeSantis to pull off some sort of upset win in Iowa, Haley to finish second, Haley to win New Hampshire.
She goes down to South Carolina.
It's her home state.
She wins the state somehow.
And now it's sort of an open ballgame for Trump to lose all three of the first primaries.
I think if Trump wins Iowa, he's very likely to then run the table.
I think he's likely to win New Hampshire based on that momentum and then win South Carolina based on that momentum.
You know, there are a bunch of problems inside the sort of opposition to Trump, but the biggest one is that Trump is very popular inside the Republican Party, period.
I mean, it's very strange.
You have almost the opposite situation with the Democratic Party.
So among the base, the Democratic Party really does not like Joe Biden, but the elite understand that he has to be the guy because if it's anybody else, it's a mess.
On the other side of the aisle, the elite in the Republican Party are like, man, I really wish it weren't Trump.
But the base really, really likes Trump.
And that's, you know, I feel bad for DeSantis to that extent because, you know, in terms of governance, he's much more conservative, just as a person who governed than Donald Trump was.
He's a person who knows actually how to govern, I think, better than Trump did based on knowing where the levers of power are.
If the primary were held in my home state, which is Florida today, I would vote for DeSantis.
But the love for Trump inside the Republican Party remains.
It's not going anywhere.
It's jogged every time he's unjustly persecuted by the DOJ and all the rest.
And so he's in sort of a no-win situation.
And meanwhile, he's being threatened on his flank by Nikki Haley.
Many of Nikki Haley's people are exactly the sort of old school establishment Republicans who would love Nikki Haley above DeSantis, right?
Even if it were a Haley DeSantis race, they would like Haley more than DeSantis.
And so they're backing Haley, but that's splitting whatever possibility of support there is in an anti-Trump move.
I mean, what people I think in the Nikki Haley camp are sort of missing, the people who are promoting the idea that she's the real rival to Trump as opposed to somebody like DeSantis, is that if DeSantis drops out of the race, a lot of his support's going to go to Trump.
The number two, I mean, if Nikki drops out of the race, her support probably goes to DeSantis.
If DeSantis drops out of the race, I would say at least half his support probably spills over to Trump.
So ironically, Nikki actually needs Ron in the race in order to guarantee her a shot at, say, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
If he drops out before that, Trump's going to consolidate that base of support.
And I think that Trump probably finishes her off in South Carolina is sort of the math here.
There was one outlier poll that showed her within a few points of Trump in New Hampshire.
The poll is given, I think, a C-plus rating by Real Clear Politics.
It's not really respected, but there was one showing her a little close to Trump.
All of this sort of she's going to win New Hampshire stuff kind of requires on Chris Christie jumping out of the race and giving her, you know, they presume again, his 10%, because that's all Democrats and she's sort of the closest thing in the Republican field that they might find acceptable.
She's a little bit more moderate on some social issues.
He was one of the first to attack her when she had her slavery gaffe over the holidays, which was just absurd.
She was asked by, yes, it was obviously a Democrat plant.
What caused the Civil War?
And she didn't fucking say slavery.
I mean, it's stupid.
It was, I don't know why she did it, whatever.
It was a dumbass answer.
She sounded terrible.
But I did think it was interesting Christie was one of the first to pounce on it.
Didn't suggest to me he's getting ready to jump out and suggest his 10% go to her.
Well, first of all, the forces of gravity prevent him from jumping anywhere.
But beyond that, Chris Christie is not a person who should be in this race at all.
He exists apparently only to commit political murder suicides, right?
He did it in 2016 against Marco Rubio.
Rubio had a bunch of momentum coming off Iowa and going into New Hampshire.
And then, of course, there's that debate where Christie basically shellacked him, but blew himself up at the same time.
And so both of them end up being casualties of war in that particular race.
And then you see the same thing happening now.
Chris, there's no reason for Christie to be in this race.
I mean, if he really opposes Trump that strongly, he should get out and he should endorse Haley because she's the only one who has a shot in New Hampshire.
Once again, you know, politics is a hell of a drug.
And there's so many politicians who believe they've been sort of a God-given tap on the shoulder that they are going to be president.
And guys, spoiler alert, virtually all of you are not going to be.
And that's particularly true of Chris Christie, who about this time, three weeks from now is going to be getting Trump coffee again.
Yeah, he's ripping on her.
He's ripping on Haley for, among other things, saying nice things about Trump in his first term.
Chris Christie gave Trump an A on his first term when asked to rate it before he decided he was the answer to the GOP's problems in this race.
So it's like, whatever.
Chris Christie has zero chance.
He's trying to rebuild the reputation that he ruined himself with Republican voters.
This is not the way, my friend.
Ben Shapiro, such a pleasure, as always.
Thanks for coming on.
Great to see you.
Hunter Biden Whistleblower Notes 00:16:05
All right.
So check him out over on the Daily Wire, or you can subscribe to him on YouTube and get Ben's take on all the day's news, which I listen to as well.
And like Debbie Murphy, Canadian Debbie, I've gotten to the point where I can listen to Ben on 2.0.
I like to take in my podcast at 2.0 because then you can get through a bunch of them.
Even Ben, who talks so fast, you can adjust yourself to getting the Ben Shapiro podcast in 2.0.
And I highly recommend taking it at any speed.
We're going to be right back with those two IRS whistleblowers.
A lot happened with Hunter Biden over the past couple of weeks.
And a lot is about to happen to Hunter Biden and their thoughts on this critical moment that happened when they testified before closed doors on whether there is direct evidence linking Joe to those crimes.
Stand by.
It is shaping up to be a very busy January for politics and the law as Hunter Biden's legal troubles threaten to overshadow his father's reelection campaign.
I mean, this month and beyond, this thing's not going away.
In just one week from now, Hunter is expected in court to be arraigned on tax charges, felony tax charges.
This comes as a separate gun case against him moves forward.
That gun case is interesting because he's raising Second Amendment arguments that the right has been using to challenge some of Joe Biden's gun laws.
Now, Hunter Biden's using those same arguments to challenge the case against him.
And he also has, Hunter does, his own civil lawsuit against the IRS.
That relates in part to my next guests.
They're actually at the center of this whole story.
Last year, they came forward to allege sweeping political interference in the Hunter Biden tax case that had initially resulted in a sweetheart plea deal for the first son.
And that plea deal would have gone through, giving him total immunity on everything other than these misdemeanor BS charges, had it not been for that smart judge who started paying attention to what was being put before her after these whistleblowers came forward.
The deal was ultimately tossed by the judge.
And months later, Hunter was indeed indicted on what remained of the case.
You remember that this David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware and now the special counsel investigating Hunter, he's the fix is in.
We've said for a while, we believe this guy is not an honest broker, but he's the one who tried to shove this plea deal through.
And he ultimately was forced to do what he should have done, which is indict Hunter on the remaining charges after he let the statute of limitations run on the most serious ones, the ones that would have linked Hunter and his nefarious overseas dealings potentially to Joe.
So the whistleblowers have been raising the red flag about all of this.
They have been smeared repeatedly.
I just went back for kicks just to see what the Hunter team was calling the whistleblowers as they came forward to say, hey, there are real charges against this guy, and they've been either slowrolled or allowed to expire by a complicit DOJ that's covering up for the Bidens.
And in response to this, they were called disgruntled, biased, and axe to grind, aggrieved.
I could go on.
Well, David Weiss, who is again very sympathetic to the Bidens, appears to agree that the whistleblowers had their facts all along.
Otherwise, he couldn't have charged these felonies.
Joining me now, the IRS whistleblowers, who gave us their first joint interview back in July.
Gary Shapley, an IRS supervisory agent, and Joseph Ziegler, an IRS special agent.
Guys, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Megan, for having us.
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
So much has happened since you came on.
I mean, so much has happened, right?
Like the number one thing being David Weiss was indeed forced to indict several felony cases or counts against Hunter for the very things you guys said he did and were called aggrieved and biased and disgruntled for saying were legit crimes that ought to be charged.
So let me ask you first for your reaction.
I mean, do you feel vindicated?
Gary, I'll start with you.
So yeah, I mean, all along we brought the facts forward.
And, you know, this wasn't something that we chose to do.
It was not something we wanted to do.
We had to do it because, you know, it's all about the equal protection of individuals under the law.
And it was clear that the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office and the Department of Justice wasn't treating this particular taxpayer the same as he would anyone else.
So in turn of vindication, I don't really need to be vindicated.
I'm fine.
I'm going to be fine because I'm doing what I know is right.
But yeah, I mean, him coming forward and charging what we, you know, Joe and Joe and I recommended all along is just really support for the fact that DOJ needs to assign someone to come in and look at Weiss's conduct and his team's conduct.
Joseph, when you saw that plea deal fall apart, because that judge went through it with a fine-toothed comb and realized, though it had not been appropriately fronted to her, that they were trying to give him this sweetheart deal that would have gotten him off on everything, on everything, not just what was explicitly reflected.
Were you, I mean, you must have been so proud of her.
You must have just felt like, thank God, there's some, there are honest brokers left in this system.
Yeah, I felt, I felt at that point listened to.
And after I reviewed that plea agreement and the statement of facts, I kind of understood that they were misrepresenting stuff to the court.
And it was very apparent in that statement of facts that they put forward.
And the crazy thing for me is that if that would have been pushed forward, we wouldn't be sitting where we're at right now with a felony indictment for tax charges.
We wouldn't be sitting here right now, him awaiting these charges.
All the things that we said all along is the reason why Gary and I came forward, the equal treatment of taxpayers.
That's so important in this.
So what do you make of the actual charges that have been brought against him?
The felony counts on tax evasion out in California in particular.
But again, not for the years 14 or 15, the years he was dealing with Burisma and the Chinese energy company.
Those did not make the dance because they let the statute of limitations require.
But what do you make, Joseph, on the actual charges that have been brought?
Yeah, so I think that it's important for your listeners to understand that in this indictment, there are felony tax charges.
So all along, the Biden family attorneys have been saying that all the taxes have been paid.
This is a civil issue.
Like we shouldn't be dealing with this anymore.
They would never charge this case.
But if you look at count six and seven in the indictment, it's the evasion, tax evasion, and false return charges.
And those actually allege that Hunter willfully filed a false tax return and claimed deductions that he wasn't allowed to.
And that would come up with an amount of tax due and owing or additional taxes that he's owed that is not paid to the IRS.
And any of those things, any of those things are, we would hold everyone else accountable under the law and it's equal treatment under the law.
That's exactly what his lawyer says is not happening, Abby Lowell Gary, saying any average citizen would not have had to pay and would not be charged with these felonies.
And the only reason he's being charged is because his name is Hunter Biden, saying he paid back the money.
You know, he had the sugar daddy friend who paid back the money.
And the IRS under these normal circumstances with a regular civilian would have said, you know what, we got our dough.
Let's move on.
Is that true?
No, that's not even close to accurate.
I mean, early on, we gave a case that of Daryl D'Souza, who is the police chief of Baltimore City, who had, you know, a tenth of the tax loss, and they only charged him with misdemeanors.
And, you know, he went to jail.
And, you know, you can simply go to the Department of Justice Tax Division and they'll have press releases on cases that they work.
I mean, you can see hundreds of them in the last year or two where the tax losses are much less and the conduct is much less egregious where they're criminally prosecuting these people.
And, you know, I have a long career of doing that as a supervisor and an agent.
And if this person with over a $2 million tax loss was anyone else, was a corner store, they'd be in jail.
I mean, and it's just, it's just, you know, it's antithetical to the mission of IRSCI.
All right, I've got to get into something.
This is a little in the weeds, but it's important.
And my audience is up to speed because we've been following it closely here on the show.
One of the key allegations that you made, and in particular, you, Gary, you were the person running Heard on this at the IRS.
And Joseph's like one of the most respected investigators within the IRS, apparently.
You guys are like special forces of the IRS working together on this.
But one of the allegations you made when you first came forward was that you talked to David Weiss, the U.S. attorney, who was investigating this whole thing before he was made special counsel, after you came out saying, hello, we need something, need some more authority here, was that you had a meeting with David Weiss when you were pushing for him to indict this case.
And you were going to need to indict it in California and in Washington, D.C., where the most serious charges were, not just in Delaware, where Weiss obviously had authority because he was the U.S. attorney for Delaware.
And you documented in your notes a meeting in which you said that David Weiss admitted to you, I don't have the authority.
I don't have the authority to bring the charges myself in California and D.C. DOJ hasn't given me that.
And I've explained to the audience, we've talked about this many times, that happens often.
The U.S. Attorney for Delaware would not have the authority to go charge something in California normally, but they may be investigating a case in which crimes from their defendant have occurred there.
So it's very simple.
They go to DOJ Central and they ask for a permission slip and they get it.
And then they work with the U.S. attorney out in California or wherever to bring the case.
This happens all the time.
But you alleged that David Weiss admitted to you he had not been given that authority because you were like, let's bring the charge in California.
Let's what, you know, why isn't it happening?
And he denied it.
He denied your charge.
And so did Merrick Garland.
They basically came out without using the word liar and called you one, saying you're wrong.
He had full authority all along to do whatever he wanted.
And I'm going to play those soundbites.
And I want the audience to understand as they listen to them, David Weiss, once he got under oath in front of Congress behind closed doors, admitted Gary was right.
All right.
So these statements are not true that I'm about to play for you, but they were said by Merrick Garland repeatedly.
And I could do David Weiss's too, but they were on paper.
Here he is, first of all, after you came forward in June.
This is Merrick Garland saying the DOJ did not block Weiss from prosecuting anywhere.
Here it is, SAT 18.
I don't know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution, given that he has this authority.
He was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own.
Okay, so this is Merrick Garland, who clearly doesn't want responsibility for having said, no, you're not getting the slip.
You're not getting the permission slip to bring those charges against Hunter.
And here he is in a longer montage saying similar things throughout this case, trying to lead us all to believe he had given him complete authority.
It's all a David Weiss operation.
Me, Merrick Garland, who, me?
I only authorized everything.
I never stopped or slowrolled a thing.
Sot 20.
The U.S. Attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority to make those kind of referrals that you're talking about or to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it's necessary.
And I will assure that if he does, he will be able to do that.
Weiss has told Congress that he has been granted ultimate authority over this matter.
Sir Weiss had, in fact, more authority than a special counsel would have.
He has complete, he had and has complete authority, as I said, to bring a case anywhere he wants.
I don't know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution given that he has this authority.
He was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own.
Well, what we learned was that when David Weiss got called before Congress and actually had to give testimony about this under oath, which is very different than putting out a paper statement to the media, he, according to Jim Jordan, and as reported in the New York Post, testified as possible.
When he was specifically asked, did you ever request special attorney authority?
That you'd be labeled a special attorney if you were sort of the guy from Delaware prosecuting in California or in D.C. His answer was yes, that he did request it, but it was not granted.
He did ask to have the special permission slip in California, in Washington, D.C., and he was told no by DOJ.
So you were right.
And once again, they smeared you and then had to admit it when the rubber met the road.
Gary, what was your reaction when you heard that news?
Well, I'm just happy that he actually told the truth.
So, I mean, all along, I knew what the truth was and we knew what the facts were.
And we were, I was, I was made point for IRSCI to deal with David Weiss.
I had multiple meetings with David Weiss, calls with David Weiss on a Hong Kong basis.
And to see him, you know, actually answer the question affirmatively and not legalize, you know, legally some language and a letter was actually pretty comforting.
And it gave me a little bit of faith restored.
But, you know, at the October 7th meeting, I mean, everything that happened, we have the luxury now of seeing what happened after the fact.
And everything that I said, all the notes I took contemporaneously, handwritten and then emailed to my supervisors, have been absolutely confirmed.
And, you know, I just knew all along what the truth was.
It was just up to others to tell the truth.
Just go through a couple of them.
So, for the audience at home that's not nearly as up to speed on this as you are, go through a couple of the ones that you've seen be vindicated in the months since you first came out.
Sure.
So, stop me when because I go through them all.
So, first was not the deciding person, right?
And immediately under there, there's a bullet in my notes that says Department of Justice Tax Division has to approve first.
Now, Merrick Garland said that under oath that they didn't have to approve it, or he wasn't sure if they had to approve it.
But David Weiss, U.S. Attorney Graves, U.S. Attorney Estrada, and the head of Department of Justice Tax Division, Stuart Goldberg, all confirmed that they needed DOJ tax permission before he could charge it.
And that permission was not given.
It was held all the way up through the beginning of 2023.
So he couldn't charge anywhere without their approval first.
So that's a start.
Then you move into the point that you were just talking about.
He went to the DC U.S. Attorney's Office to try to charge their U.S. Attorney Graves even said that Weiss told him that he was looking to bring the charges in that district.
And then he wouldn't cooperate with him.
He wouldn't partner with him.
And, you know, Weiss's June 30th letter says, I don't have authority outside of Delaware.
I would need it was a departmental process to partner with that U.S. attorney, that local U.S. attorney.
Complex Loan Repayment Cases 00:15:28
And if they don't, I'd have to request some type of special charging authority.
Now you find out that he did request that special charging authority, just like I wrote in my notes and that email about the October 7th meeting.
How would I have known that he went to Maine DOJ to ask for that special charging authority if he had not told me that he did so?
He even used the same language.
He was told to follow the process.
And that's in lies the political influence here: they knew that that process led them through to U.S. Attorney Biden-appointed United States attorneys.
So, I mean, the same thing happened when it went to California.
I don't know why in March of 2023, they brought it to DC and they didn't, he decided not to partner.
And then he's requesting all this stuff from Maine DOJ and getting denied that request, told to follow the process.
It took them six months to bring it to California.
The facts didn't change.
We already had all that evidence.
They know that.
We know that.
The facts and the law didn't change.
But, you know, it's interesting to see the timing of that.
When did they bring it out and present it to Central District of California in Los Angeles?
The same week that the President Biden appointed United States Attorney Martin Estrada was confirmed by Congress and began his time there.
So, I mean, we could just go hard.
In other words, just to put a fine point on it for the audience, you're saying once Biden got his guy in there, then they were like, sure, you can go ask.
Sure.
See if they want to cooperate.
Why do you wait six months when the facts and laws don't change, right?
Like, why do you wait?
Is it just an amazing coincidence that they wait until that exact week?
I just find that interesting.
They were worried that he was going to get a yes under the previous guy.
They did not want him getting a yes.
Okay.
Well, if you look at what Estrada said, he actually said that he didn't have the resources to assist.
I mean, the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's Office is one of the largest in the country.
And he went with, I didn't have the resources to assist when there was already two prosecutors assigned to the case and two Department of Justice Tax Division attorneys who were sauces in the Central District of California.
There are special United States attorneys there, they were going to prosecute the case.
So it required very little resources from Central District of California other than some administrative paperwork.
So, I mean, it's just, they just keep feeding lines and it's really hurting DOJ's reputation.
And just so I have you say it instead of just me say it, the consequences of losing now through all this 2014 and 2015 on any charges against Hunter because the statute of limitations ran is what?
What are we missing an investigation into in federal court?
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, you bring 2014, 2015, and you charge them the way you should.
The way that the IRS senior leadership, they agreed in their testimonies is they agreed with those charges.
We had raised issues to them for years.
They disagreed with none of the issues we were raising.
They agreed that they were issues and yet, and then they agreed that 2014-15 should be charged.
And then they took no action to support us in that.
And they just put it in the middle.
So but just you, but underscore for the audience, what was in 15 and 14?
Like, what is it that, is it the burisma stuff, the CEFC, Chinese energy company?
Like, what has Hunter now managed to dodge as a result of those two years expiring?
All of the conduct that he engaged in result with the burisma income in 2014 and 2015 is completely left off the table.
And to bring that to trial and to bring that in front of the American people on a trial, it would have raised several issues and investigative paths that would have been very controversial for the Biden administration.
So Joseph, you've been taking, you know, you're the forensic guy.
Like you've been looking first line into all this stuff.
You were the guy who had all this data and had to figure it out.
And what did he do?
And he's saying this is your business expenses and they're prostitutes.
And I mean, I can only imagine what it was like to be you night after night as you like came home from the office thinking, my God.
But now, and just before we move on from the blowback against you, instead of saying, you know what, Joseph was right, I apologize to Joseph Ziegler.
I apologize to Gary Shapley, Abby Lowell, Hunter's attorney, the Democrats who are running cover for the Bidens seem to be doubling down on you guys are just, you know, you're still confused.
You're still confused.
For example, we've heard the chief cheerleader for the Bidens is Dan Goldman.
And this was Dan Goldman over the summer.
This would have been before the current indictments were brought, but while they were trying to shove this plea deal through, trying to explain your testimonials that Congress had received.
Take a listen to him, stop 21.
I think they are good faith actors who misconstrue the thirdhand information that they received.
And I think that like many law enforcement agents, they want to charge every possible crime, but they are not responsible for making that decision because they're not the ones who have to prove it in court.
And ultimately, I think they worked really hard.
I think they were frustrated that the case didn't move forward as they had hoped after all their hours.
They were frustrated that they were removed from the case after there were significant leaks to the Washington Post.
And they're expressing their frustration in this way.
A lot in there.
Clearly implying that you guys leaked and got removed from the case because you're leakers.
And now you're just frustrated because you, you two dumb old IRS agents who don't know anything like the big, bad, brilliant federal prosecutors, you just didn't understand that there wasn't a case here to be brought.
And that really frustrated you.
Your thoughts?
Yeah.
So I think it's really important that people understand, in addition to our testimony, we provided, I think, I turned over six additional affidavits, thousands of pages of documents to support my whistleblower claims.
And it's frustrating to hear that, but I expected it.
As a whistleblower, you expect people to attack you.
And it's why I've turned over things like I turned over my performance reviews.
I'm a highly rated employee at the IRS.
And I think that that was important, that I'm not a disgruntled employee.
I actually brought up examples of a case where I worked that was super complex that we didn't agree on the charging and we moved forward with that.
And that was something that, okay, that made sense.
But in this case, all four attorneys agreed for the felony and misdemeanor charges.
They brought forward only misdemeanor charges.
And then he ends up getting special counsel.
That plea agreement falls apart, ends up getting special counsel.
And now we see the full picture of the indictment presented in front of everybody.
And I think it's important that people read through our most recent testimony to Congress, the closed door testimony.
They read through that indictment.
They see the conduct that was done over the last, I think it's since 2014 is the first date that they start talking about things in the indictment.
But I think it's important that your audience reads that.
What's amazing is you have Dan Goldman and others saying, I mean, really, he's basically saying you're too dumb to understand, like the person who went to law school, that there's no case here.
There is no felony to be brought.
And like the perfect irony of the fact that David Weiss, under this political pressure, was ultimately made, quote, special counsel, which is different from special attorney, as we explained.
And he is the one who brought the very charges that he, the big brained one, well, you know, he was smarter and he knew you couldn't bring these charges.
Oh, so weird how he had that perfect 180 and wound up bringing all the charges that hadn't yet expired based on all of your work.
So where do you go to get your reputation back, which I'm sure is one of your questions?
Yeah, I mean, from talking to previous whistleblowers, it's very hard for us to return back to some normalcy.
I never wanted to do this.
I tried to blow the whistle internally at the IRS and I was shunned.
I was told I might have broken the law and that I should cease and desist from doing that.
I tried internally telling people higher than me what was going on.
We did it for years.
And I think I want in the future, I don't want people to go through what Gary and I have gone through.
There needs to be some policy.
There needs to be some law in there that prevents this from happening again.
You should, David Weiss shouldn't have been allowed to go to another president appointed U.S. attorney to bring forward these charges when they're trying to leave out this political bias.
So all those things we really need to reflect on.
And in order for us to move forward, like that, that's, we need change.
Okay.
The biggest question, of course, as interesting as the Hunter charges are, and they are interesting, is whether there's any link to Joe Biden.
And this is sort of where the Democrats politically have landed, right?
Now that they can see Hunter's in a whole lot of legal trouble, it's kind of veering more towards, well, Joe had nothing to do with it.
I mean, Hunter was a hot mess, but Joe Biden had nothing to do with any of this.
And I know from listening to you guys and interviewing you and preparing for these exchanges that you did have evidence about Joe.
You were not allowed to pursue it.
Leslie Wolf, the assistant U.S. attorney, was turning you down at every turn, saying, no, that's a no-go.
We're not going into anything about Joe Biden.
And then when you were about to search this storage closet that Hunter Biden had, she told Hunter's lawyers, right?
She told them, or was it the Secret Service agents around them, but she blew it.
And, you know, if you're somebody who's committed a crime and you get the heads up that the feds are about to come investigate your storage closet, that's very helpful.
That was just one example.
But here's why I raise it, Joseph, because I saw when you guys testified in front of Congress, I think it was most recently, Alabama Representative Terry Sewell, a Democrat, who was in December, asked you guys, both of you, came after you hard, on whether there was any evidence, quote, that directly proves that Joe Biden has done something illegal.
Yes or no.
Gary, you responded, there is evidence.
Sewell, is it yes or no?
You, yes.
Just suddenly Sewell's like, never mind, I'm going to go to the other guy.
So Sewell goes to you, Joseph, and says, please show me the direct evidence that actually proves Joe Biden did something unlawful, illegal.
And then you did.
You did.
And what just is such an impressive TikTok of what you knew, including exhibit 11.
Hunter Biden states in his email that his original agreement, this is when Sewell cuts you off, but you get back in and you answer the question, ticking off a couple of things.
Can you, do you have it in your head here or do you need the exhibit in front of you to walk us through a couple of the examples tying Joe?
No, I have it in my head.
So, I mean, it's there's a, there's a lot of information.
There's so big picture.
At the end of the day, this is about access to a family, an administration, the Biden family, and it's access for individuals in foreign countries, and it's the enrichment of that family.
So it's enrichment of Hunter Biden, enrichment of various family members of the Biden family.
So doing these things for these other people, access the administration in return for money.
And that's, I think, the biggest, like that's, that's at the end of the day, what this was.
And then IRS comes in because you didn't pay taxes on that money.
You earned these millions or these millions of dollars of income and you didn't pay the taxes on that money.
But the links to what I was trying to get across in that statement was you have the email August 2nd, 2017 that says introductions alone at a rate of $10 million per year for a total of $30 million.
And this is why it's so lucrative to me and my family.
Okay.
So that's August 2nd, 2017.
A couple of days prior to that, you have the email where, or the WhatsApp message to where he says, I'm sitting here with my dad.
We're ready to make a deal.
And that was with CEFC Chairman Ye and the director of CEFC.
Then you have, now you go back two more months prior to that and the sinohawk deal that they were trying to set up, you have 10% held by H for the big guy.
So now you have the signal deal with CEFC that falls through, indicates that you have some form of ownership for the big guy, which we know to be Joe Biden.
And you have that deal end up going through under a different name called Hudson West 3.
And now you even move forward from that and you have repayments of loans from James Biden, who is receiving money from the CEFC entity in the form of repayments of loans to Joe Biden.
So look at the timing of all that.
And I think it's now you take it one step further.
Well, what did we do with it?
We didn't do anything with it because we weren't allowed to follow leads that led to Joe Biden.
We weren't allowed to follow those normal investigative processes.
And I think that is the most disheartening and discouraging thing looking back on everything.
And that's what, that's why Congress needs to step in and do it.
And they are doing a quick question before I give it to Gary.
If all those things that you just mentioned, August of 2017, July of 2017, 2017, Trump was in the White House.
Joe Biden was no longer vice president.
And so is there an argument that this was illegal if access to a former vice president is not nearly the same as a sitting vice president.
Understanding, of course, the man would go on to become president.
Yeah, let's go to March of 2017, which was listed in the indictment.
You had a $3 million payment that comes from State Energy HK, which we know is an entity linked with CEFC.
That money from CEFC or from State Energy HK comes in two months after Joe Biden's out of office.
And I think that it's important for people to understand the timing of that, that this is for paid after.
And I believe it was in Anthony Bovolinsky's interview memo that he says that that was paid after on purpose.
They wanted to wait until he was out of office.
So now you have add in all that information related to CEFC.
And I think that that paints a pretty clear picture.
It's very chilling, Gary.
You know, when you watch all this play out with charges actually brought against Hunter, but it does seem like Joe Biden is fairly protected at this point, at least in the criminal investigations.
Closed Door Deposition Strategy 00:05:44
There's the House impeachment inquiry, which is going forward, but we all know that's not really going anywhere because the Dems control the Senate.
So even if he's impeached, he's not going to be found guilty.
What do you want to see happen in this process when it comes to Joe Biden?
No, I mean, we didn't come forward because of an impeachment of Joe Biden.
We came forward because of the Department of Justice misconduct and unethical and improper treatment of one individual taxpayer and just happened to be Joe Biden's son.
So, I mean, it's been really mind-blowing to me to see how egregious the Department of Justice is obstructing what Congress is trying to do.
They're not giving access to certain witnesses.
When witnesses do come forward, they're saying, oh, you know, we're going to come forward.
And then they have such a narrow line of questioning that they're allowed, that they'll answer that it gives them the ability to answer the questions they want that they think helps them and then not answer the questions that get to the meat of it.
And that's why the whole like private or public testimony, right?
Like that's why these people need to go in for depositions behind closed doors.
Because the format, which before this process is, I couldn't have told you what the format is, but the format of a deposition is that both sides of the aisle get one hour blocks of questioning.
As an investigator, you need that time to ask the questions, ask follow-up questions, go down the road to figure out what's actually going on.
And the way that a public setting works is that each member, it's the member themselves, they get five minutes to ask a question to which you talked about one member that didn't want to hear the answer, so they just cut us off.
So, I mean, that's what Congress has to do.
They have to get the line level people in there.
They have to get the people that aren't alleged to engage in misconduct so that they're not just covering for themselves.
They need to ask all the questions, get all the documents.
And I hope that they do so because that's the only thing that's going to restore the faith in the Department of Justice for the American people is to have that oversight and to not allow the obstruction by Department of Justice and the administration.
Now, Gary, it seemed to me like Leslie Wolf was one such witness who was David Weiss's deputy.
And she, according to your testimony when you came forth in the summer, was, I think, this is my word, she was interfering at every turn.
This was the woman who was like, no, it's a no on Joe Biden and it's no on Hunter Biden's adult children inquiries.
And oh, everybody should know that they're coming down to search your storage locker.
I mean, so she went in there to give testimony.
And this is in mid-December.
She spoke to house investigators.
And from what I read, she just kept saying that over and over and over.
She just kept saying 79 times that she was not authorized by the Justice Department to answer questions about the case over and over and over.
Is that, was she heavy-handed in the investigation when you were running it?
Yeah, I mean, there were four main prosecutors.
She was definitely the front of that.
And of course, David Weiss was the one, you know, calling the ultimate shots at the end of the day.
But it just goes, this is how not allowing the witnesses to actually answer these questions.
I mean, if you go back to an FBI witness that came in and he testified on Monday and on a Sunday, he got a letter from Department of Justice and FBI saying that he should be answering questions about X, Y, and Z.
And that he was allowed to answer one line of questioning.
And that was that before the day of action on December 8th of 2020, the Secret Service and the Biden transition team were tipped off about that day of action the night before, which, you know, appears to have negatively impacted the witnesses who we were able to interview.
But I mean, that's just, this just goes to show, like, these, the FBI witness, he can answer a lot more questions, you know, but they, they, they scare him into it or they don't allow him to go into it.
And then it's really, it appears to be part of the strategy, right?
Like we need a special counsel to investigate Weiss and the team, and that includes us.
Feel free to investigate us.
You know, we didn't do anything wrong.
We don't need Weiss to be given special counsel, right?
They needed it because that clip you played of Merrick Garland says, oh, well, he actually has more authority than special counsel.
Well, then did you demote him when you gave him special counsel authority?
I'm not really sure.
But it just, it's a shifting stories on and on.
It changes here.
You have representatives saying that we're just frustrated.
Well, what are we now when these prosecutors come in and actually charge what we recommended?
I'm not frustrated.
I'm energized and I'm focused now on trying to create fixes to the issues to which we brought up.
And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot that has to happen here at IRS criminal investigation to ensure that this type of thing doesn't happen again.
Yeah.
My God, you're so right.
We needed a special counsel to investigate the U.S. attorney who's now special counsel, David Weiss.
Stand by.
There's more to get to.
Gary and Justice stay with us.
And I want to tell you that you can help support them at defendwhistleblowers.com.
These are not rich guys.
They took quite a risk coming forward.
Defendwhistleblowers.com.
Check it out.
More just ahead.
And actually, we're going to come back with a bit of breaking news.
Breaking News on Claudine Gay 00:03:33
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If you are listening to us live, we have breaking news about Harvard president Claudine Gay.
She has now officially resigned.
She just posted a statement in which she writes, quote, after consultation with members of the corporation, Harvard has this board, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign.
That resignation comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism, many uncovered by conservative media, including Chris Ruffo, who's been on the show many, many times, and the Washington Free Beacon.
You know, that publication and Eliana Johnson.
We'll talk to her about it next time she comes on.
About that, Claudine Gay decided to write the following: quote, Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor to bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am.
And frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
I mean, I neglected to mention in my conversation with Ben those 11 to 17 articles she's written, like literally every single one of them was about alleged racial animus or what it's like and how hard it is to be a person of color and how bad America is and how disparate the treatment.
I mean, okay, to the end, to the end, it's about her race.
Notwithstanding the fact that the UPenn lady who got booted was as white as the driven snow.
Gay also gave disastrous congressional testimony in early December, where under questioning by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, she failed to say that calls for the genocide of Jews constituted a form of harassment under Harvard's code of conduct.
Representative Stefanik tweeting out just now, quote, two down, meaning the third is the MIT lady.
Harvard knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the anti-Semitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history, end quote.
Three weeks ago, the Harvard Corporation said it had unanimous support for Gay.
This is all these like muckety mucks, people who are heads of law firms and so on, who sort of sit on this advisory board and decide what's going to happen at Harvard.
Claudine Gay was president of Harvard for just over six months.
It's the shortest tenure in the university's history, we're told.
No word on who will be appointed as interim president.
We'll have more on this tomorrow with the fifth column.
Hunter Biden Financial Involvement 00:07:31
But now, back to my guests, IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.
Okay, so I've got to ask you about the fact that Hunter Biden, who defied the congressional subpoena last week and is probably going to be held in contempt of Congress because he did not testify, they wanted to do what you said, depose him behind closed doors where they could have a meaningful cross-examination.
He said, I'll only testify if it's in view of the public with those meaningless, you know, couple minute stints by Dems and Republicans alternating.
So he's likely to be held in contempt.
He, one of the things he's done is filed a lawsuit against the IRS.
Mention it in the intro and he's claiming you guys disclosed his confidential taxpayer information and that that wasn't allowed and that that leads to a civil lawsuit against the IRS that he should get paid in.
Uh, it's about the decision by IRS employees, their representatives and others to disregard this is his allegation their obligations and repeatedly and intentionally publicly disclose and disseminate mr Biden's protected tax return info that IRS agents have targeted and sought to embarrass mr Biden.
That's what his claim is, so Gary.
Any response to that?
Yes, i'm not going to get in lawsuit too much.
I I just I just wanted to to say that we we filed the law at every single uh a corner that we turn.
Uh, you know, I I saw counsel in november of 2022.
So, I mean, it wasn't until april 19th of 2023 where the letter actually went to Congress.
So um, you know we, we painstakingly followed the law.
We had advice of counsel with um, my attorney, Mark Lytle, and then, on Power Oversight I mean, in the last hearing um, Empower Oversights AND Nonprofit that's helping represent me I mean the, the they tried to make a big deal that it was GOP staffers that started that.
Well, they didn't say what GOP staffer it was.
It was, you know it was um, you know, the patron saint of uh, of whistleblowers, right like so uh, they knew what to do, they knew what the law was and that's what yeah yeah, i'm sorry I didn't say Chuck Grassly yeah, and Chuck Grassley and uh, you know.
So they knew how to deal with the whistleblower laws.
They, they were the perfect place to go and uh, and that's what we did.
So we filed the law and uh, you know, that's what's going to happen at the end of the day is they're, they're gonna, they're gonna, the court's gonna decide that we followed the law.
Joseph, one of the things he's allegedly mad about is when you guys came on this show, we're mentioned, we always get mentioned.
We get mentioned a lot of lawsuits um, but you know it's.
It is your whistleblower blower's right to come out and tell the full story, do you?
Did you have any doubts about that when you saw his lawsuit saying you shouldn't have disclosed in detail the specifics about my taxes?
Yeah, so I, i'm a former public information officer for Irsci, so I would be the law enforcement face to the media and I mean, I went through extensive training for that and a lot of that is, if it's in the public record, you are allowed to go out there and talk about it.
So that's, I think, very important and it states it in our policy that if it's out there on the public record, you're allowed to go out there and talk about it.
And and I think their move to uh that the lawsuit was to silence us and I I think that it was important that uh, for Gary and I that hey, this is we're, we're bringing these whistleblower claims.
This isn't.
This is much bigger than just Hunter Biden.
This is about Department OF Justice, this is about the inequitable treatment of taxpayers and and it's about time that change happens and it happens to be that this person is Hunter Biden.
So I think that is super important for people to understand.
Right.
And it may be about a presidential corruption too, or vice presidential corruption, depending on where we are in the timeline.
I do want to ask you about your reaction to the changing narrative on Joe Biden's involvement in all of this.
You know, it started on he did not discuss any of his son's business.
It's changed, including last month when Hunter came out and tried to restate what Joe Biden had or hadn't done.
Here's a bit of that in SOT 16.
I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything he's going to do with their business.
He stands by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son's overseas business.
Yes, I stand by that statement.
The president was never in business with his son.
Let me state as clearly as I can, my father was not financially involved in my business.
So it's never discussed, never in business, and now it's not financially involved in my business.
I'll ask you first on that one, Gary.
You noticed the change.
You think it was intentional?
Yeah, I mean, they were forced to change their story as more evidence and more facts come out.
I mean, there's not just our testimony, but other witness testimony that clearly refutes knowledge by the president of his son's business dealings.
And then it just goes further and further.
So I have a sneaky suspicion that you're going to see the story change again in the future as more facts, as more facts come out.
So you weren't surprised either, Joseph, to see it change, evolve to now, or the closest they'll get is not financially involved in his business.
Yeah, so I was not surprised at all.
I mean, look at emails that were turned over.
So one of my emails and one of the affidavits was from Vadim Pazarski.
He was part of the board of Burisma.
Thank you for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.
That's April 17th of 2015.
That is directly from a foreign business person associated with Burisma.
Thank you for, we were never given that opportunity to interview Joe Biden related to that.
What did you guys talk about?
So that I think is why the narrative is changing is that this, that the evidence keeps coming out.
Was there though, I mean, just to take a minute on it, there was evidence of his financial involvement.
There's a ton of evidence of just his involvement in the whole scheme, meetings with people and so on.
But was there evidence of his financial involvement in the son's business dealings?
Yeah, so looking back at everything, everything done with Hunter seems to be in the form of a loan.
And loans are used because they're non-taxable, typically non-taxable.
So it's the burisma income, part of that was claimed to be a loan.
The CEFC money, part of that, Hunter was claiming to be a loan.
The money, the 4.9 million coming in from Kevin Morris, saying it's a loan.
And then you have, now that you've had the committee that's brought forward the money coming from James Biden to Joe Biden, that was return of return from a loan.
It's just more of the same type of thing.
And you go back to the one email, 10% held by eight for the big guy.
When someone's holding equity for someone else, that is a taxable event to both parties.
And if you don't follow all the investigative routes to figure that out, we're not doing a complete and thorough investigation.
Taxable Equity Events Explained 00:00:26
Yep.
And there's a reason we're not.
Gary, Joseph, you guys are heroes.
Thank you so much for coming on and keeping us updated.
Thanks so much for having us.
I appreciate it, Megan.
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
And we'll be back tomorrow with a full rundown and everything, including Claudine with the fifth column.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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