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Co-hosts Jared Yate Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the very real investigation into President Biden's discovery that he, in fact, had kept a few top secret docs laying around in his garage, among other places. There is a very real possibility that this could begin the process of derailing a 2024 re-election campaign. They also wonder if there can be some bipartisan governing over Big Tech and the protection of private data, before ending on the War On Gas Stoves.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Rick Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Baxton.
I'm here with Nick Alseman.
Nick, I gotta tell you, before we even start this show, before we even get to the headline, I'm already sick of this shit.
I, you know what, um, what do you expect?
This is Joe fucking Biden.
It's his whole career has been littered of things with things like this.
So I, you know, of course he's going to get documents in his Corvette and his garage.
Oh God.
Oh God.
We got to talk about it.
Okay.
So Joe Biden's group.
Hi everybody.
Thanks for coming to the show.
I'm so aggravated and pissed off about this.
So While previous President Donald Trump has been under investigation for his handling of classified documents, Joe Biden's offices and staff have been hard at work looking around, seeing if maybe they had made a mistake here or there.
Turns out they made a couple of mistakes.
Nick, turns out that there was classified material first at the Penn-Biden Center, which has been basically Biden's office before he was president.
Then it turns out, oh man, Joe had a couple of documents in his personal library.
And Nick, if that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that he had some classified documents in his garage.
Of course, we have already treated this situation with maturity and nuance, and it hasn't become just another bullshit situation.
But yet, here we are.
Before we get into the specifics, how do you feel?
How's this treating you?
My first instinct was to be like, great, let this kind of mollify them for a long time.
This will take up time and whatever, won't be a big deal because ultimately it'll be like the, oh gosh, what was the report they've been heading and waiting for investigating the FBI for the starting of the investigation?
What's the guy's name?
Anyway, that guy.
And that became nothing and all these things become nothing.
You'll see, deep state, yada, yada.
So let them spin their wheels in the mud and whatever.
I will, well, all right, what's your initial thought?
Well, I'll go ahead and I'll tell you this.
This sucks.
This sucks.
I hate any... And listen, we're not a podcast that carries water for Joe Biden.
We're not a podcast that carries water for the Democratic Party.
This is wrong.
People should not be carrying around classified material that, by the way, belongs to the people, right?
They shouldn't be carrying around mementos or whatever the hell Trump was doing.
This was a mistake by Biden.
Probably, it turns out, broke law.
There's a difference between what he did and what Trump did on different levels.
Trump stonewalled These people for a very long time, which of course led to the raid at Mar-a-Lago.
Biden has been acting in concordance with these people.
There is a massive difference.
But it is going to open up Biden to criticism, and as we know, it's going to lead to God knows how many investigations by the Republicans in the House.
On top of that, Merrick Garland, citing extraordinary circumstances, has now appointed, and by the way, every time I say this stuff, it just, it kills my heart, a special counsel by the name of Robert Hoover, who was a Trump-appointed U.S.
attorney in Maryland, It just sucks, man.
It sucks.
It sucks all the way around.
It's an unforced error.
It's going to absolutely take up all of the time over the next couple of years.
We'll talk about the specifics of what's going on and where it's leading.
But yeah, it ain't great.
Ain't great.
Well, remember, it's funny because really this is all about trying to sink Biden in 2024, just like Benghazi was intended to sink Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Which, by the way, McCarthy, I had forgotten this a little bit, I think the biggest reason why McCarthy was turned down for Speaker back in the day was because he acknowledged that exact fact and said it out loud, which then, how quaint it was a few years ago, you weren't supposed to do that.
But here's where Biden needs to be a little bit concerned.
And again, I want to make sure that you understand.
I think this is a shit show, too.
He's a clown.
This is the clown show for the Biden administration, too.
And it'll probably turn out to be something like, oh, like, you know, he had his people pack up after eight long years and they just were throwing shit in the box.
And but the point being is where he has to be really concerned is that in this investigation by the House, they request every document that has been retrieved from his office, not just anything that was related to the the top secret documents.
So obviously what they're trying to do is find anything they can on on Hunter Biden.
So and they mentioned Hunter in the investigative letter is establishing the committee.
So, obviously, they're going to try and find something that's related to him and Hunter Biden in business deals or whatever, probably from outside of when he was even vice president, and somehow get that to be the impeachment process for him, if they don't impeach him for this anyway.
And that very well could be something.
They might end up finding something that could be really damaging to him with Hunter.
Well, I mean, all you got to do is take a look at, of course, what happened with Ken Starr.
R.I.P.
in what happened with Bill Clinton.
This is how it works.
It's a fishing expedition.
And by the way, again, we've said this before, if Joe Biden broke the law, if Hunter Biden broke the law, hold him accountable.
I have no problem with that.
I'm not sitting here playing partisan politics.
Get these investigations or whatever, but do it in an actually fair and nonpartisan way.
But this is going to turn into an absolute mess that is going to Haunt our lives for the next couple of years.
And I want to take a look here in a second at what Biden has said about it.
And I just, this just reaffirms for me, he's not the guy for the time.
He's just not.
And this is just going to make that even worse.
But yeah, before we get to that.
Well, really quickly, I was thinking that we complain a lot about the Republicans using these committees and these investigations just as political hit jobs.
But there isn't much of a difference, if you think about it, on the other side.
Now, I know that Trump did all this up to himself, and it wasn't like the Democrats created out of whole cloths some sort of investigation that's going to sink him.
But it's the same process, it's the same result, right?
The Democrats are clearly wanting to hurt him politically.
And by the way, there's Republicans who want to hurt Trump politically so he doesn't run again in 2024.
So I kind of was wondering, is there even a difference at this point?
Is it semantics?
You know, is there a difference in the sort of nefarious nature of how these investigations get started?
Well, it has to do with how both of the parties treat their situations.
And by the way, you know, it just occurred to me, do you know who probably one of the happiest people in Washington, D.C.
is right now?
Merrick Garland.
Probably very happy that this has happened, because probably looks at this as the possibility of canceling everything out.
This is not a person who wanted to prosecute Donald Trump.
This is probably a thing that has kept him up at night, because he is an institutionalist first and foremost, and this is just an opportunity to kind of like wash the hands, right?
Sort of like a negative cancels out a negative.
Um, in the midst of all of this, we both know this.
We know that the Republican party would stab their own mothers in the back, you know, if it, if it led to half a bump in approval and or fundraising numbers, the Democrats, they, they, they wring their hands and they're absolutely terrified to use the power of the state or, or, or power in general.
And, and the way this is going to work is that the Republican party is going to go after Joe Biden in the way that many of us have wanted the Democrats to go after Donald Trump.
And in a way, it really is a type of situation of just desserts.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you want to play hardball in any type of way, you better make sure that the guy at the top isn't doing this shit.
And it turns out that Joe Biden and his staff were reckless.
I mean, let's call it what it is.
This doesn't just happen.
And by the way, Well, we're going ahead and laying the blame.
Hillary Clinton had this problem.
Bill Clinton had this problem.
Like, this is endemic within Washington, D.C.
in the halls of power.
The people who carry out these operations are incredibly reckless when it comes to these records.
Because they are privileged and they see it that way.
Like, these are their documents.
It's not our documents.
That's how the elite see these situations.
Now, is there a difference in what Trump did and what Biden did?
Yes.
Yes, there is.
And we still haven't even gotten into the iceberg of what Trump did with those documents.
But I do want to, Nick, can you play this from this press conference today?
Or, well, this impromptu question from Doocy from Fox News.
I want to give everybody a glimpse of where all this is going.
Classified material next year Corvette.
What were you thinking?
Let me uh, we're going to get a chance to speak on all this god willing soon, but as I said earlier this week People and by the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage Okay, so it's not like you're sitting on the street.
So at any rate Yes, as well as my Corvette um, but as I said earlier this week Awful!
By the way, Nick, you and I, and I gotta tell you, you know, this is a podcast, it's not a visual medium.
For those who can't see it, I've got gray in my beard from the mishandling of Hillary Clinton's email scandal in terms of how they responded to it.
Did Biden and his administration learn from that?
Doesn't seem like it, Nick.
Who among us hasn't had classified documents locked up with our vintage Corvettes?
My God!
I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm just thinking about, you know, some songs about the Corvettes that we know really well.
But, you know, the idea that... First of all, he tries a Corvette.
It's weird.
And then he... I don't... Do you lock your car in the garage?
I don't, nonetheless.
That's weird.
It's all strange.
It's all like, please talk about anything else besides that.
I want to talk about my Corvette.
Hey, let's talk about the cam, twin cam, whatever brake pads they have, whatever.
I don't know.
Because he's desperate to talk about anything else.
It is, here's what's interesting to me is that like, obviously, they knew almost exactly what they were looking for for Trump.
They there's like here are the records.
We didn't get them back.
We have a checklist.
And where are they?
How did that not happen with Biden when he was leaving the White House?
You know, and it's like all those TV shows that we watch about Jack Ryan and all these things.
It's like this must be completely made up out of whole cloth, because I get the impression that like everything is locked down and they have to protect all these sources.
And it's it seems to me that what we've now gotten behind the curtain is that none of this shit really matters.
I mean, like Jerry Kushner is the kind of guy who lied 100 times on SF-86 forum, which is the kind of thing you're supposed to go to prison the next day for.
And like nothing happened to that guy.
He got more clearance for it.
So I suppose maybe this is all a sham.
The whole what's it called?
the intelligence community, like all that stuff must just be a bunch of guys fucking around and not, not doing their jobs.
And by the way, what you're talking about is exactly right.
One of the things that's happening right now, and it's a reason why we're having so much change and we're having so much strife is it's becoming clear that like, we thought, we thought adults were in charge, We thought that like this whole thing was like an operation or a machine that we just needed to stay away from.
This is a moment for us to take a look at this and actually see it as a moment of reform.
How in the hell is classified material floating around like this?
I mean, for real!
And that's not just Biden.
Again, there is an institutional failure in all of this.
And what we keep seeing, whether or not it's the attacks of 9-11, it's all of the reveals of how the intelligence community has been wrong about everything, how law enforcement is absolutely filthy with right-wing extremists, how they get one thing wrong after another.
The adults are not in the room.
And they haven't been in the room for a very, very long time.
Now, there's a difference between talking about that and what we're getting ready to see.
And by the way, the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which James Comer is now in charge of, has already told Biden that they're going to investigate this thing.
I mean, my God, Nick, how much were the House Republicans salivating over this story as it popped up?
Can you play this from this interview with Comer on CBS News?
Yes.
My pleasure.
So what is it that you most want to know when it comes to these Biden documents that were marked classified?
We simply want to know the same things we asked when Mar-a-Lago was raided.
Who has which documents?
What level of classification are we talking about here?
How many documents?
And what was the process involved with making the decision to raid Mar-a-Lago versus the decision to apparently do nothing with President Biden?
I mean, and by the way, it's just going to turn into an absolute sham.
And I want to point out how it's already being twisted.
We need to talk about what the right is already doing.
This letter, the intention for the investigation from Comer to Biden's administration, Quote, President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, as you've already mentioned, Nick, also plan to share an office with an individual affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, which raises questions about who else had access to these highly sensitive documents because of President Biden's, quote, totally irresponsible actions.
Nick, can you share people, like, what's already happening on Fox News and what we should expect for the next couple of years?
Biden was stuffing classified top-secret documents at the Penn-Biden Center right in the middle of Washington, D.C.
Right next door to a steakhouse.
And a short little walk from the Chinese embassy.
There it is!
That's the story for the next two years, Nick, is that the Democratic president of the United States of America not only mishandled documents, but intentionally stole them in order to give them to the Chinese Communist Party.
It is the next front in the new Cold War, but also a glimpse at how this new era of McCarthyism is going to be used by the Republican Party in order to go after the Democratic Party and also gain power.
Right.
Well, he's going to give all those documents to the Chinese nationals while eating steak, I think.
All I got from that is a steakhouse.
I'm really hungry right now.
I'd love to have a nice steak.
Without question, they're going to do that.
I mean, by the way, and they love like the Swalwell thing.
I was going to get fooled in this too, right?
Because he had a relationship with someone who was maybe a Chinese spy or was a Chinese spy, whatever.
You know, I love this stuff.
This is great.
This is great.
Um, you know, uh, you're right.
It will dominate and it will probably not get it.
Like, here's the real question is, do we, do we care if we're going to let the kids play in the sandbox for a while?
You know, give us a break while you guys do all that shit and they can actually get some governance done.
They can find a few of the people who are going to be Republican, uh, moderates who might want to do a couple of deals and like, you know, with, um, with McCarthy and they'll, you know, they have the Democrats on board.
Because the other thing that's interesting about this is that, remember, if it goes to an impeachment and it goes to the Senate, they get to do the same exact bullshit that McConnell did when he was in charge of the impeachments.
So it's, you know, maybe we can figure out a way where we can just sort of ignore it and not deal with it.
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