PBD Podcast | | EP 127 | Former Governor of Illinois: Rod Blagojevich
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PBD Podcast Episode 127. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and the 40th governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich
Follow Rod Blagojevich on Twitter here: https://bit.ly/3gSzlTB
Instagram: https://bit.ly/3LNAxpw
You can check out his podcast "Lightning Rod Today" here: https://bit.ly/3h4Xjeq
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
About Guests:
Rod Blagojevich is an American former politician, political commentator, and convicted felon who served as the 40th governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009, when he was impeached following charges of public corruption for which he was later sentenced to federal prison. A member of the Democratic Party, Blagojevich previously worked in both the state and federal legislatures. He served as an Illinois state representative from 1993 to 1997, and the U.S. representative from Illinois's 5th district from 1997 to 2003.
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Follow Adam on Instagram: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj. You can also check out his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Connect with Patrick on social media: https://linktr.ee/patrickbetdavid
About the host:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurship with more than 3 million subscribers. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Bet-David is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development while inspiring people to break free from limiting beliefs to achieve their dreams.
Follow the guests in this episode:
Rod Blagojevich here: https://bit.ly/3gSzlTB
Adam Sosnick: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: info@valuetainment.com
Check out PBD's official website here: https://bit.ly/32tvEjH
0:00 - Start
2:10 - Who Is Rod Blagojevich?
6:13 - Why there is such a Love/Hate relationship with Rod Blagojevich
12:55 - Who wanted to convict Rod Blagojevich
17:20 - What would rod have done differently
24:09 - Why did Barack Obama throw Rod Blagojevich under the bus
30:34 - Was Rod Blagojevich jealous of Barack Obama?
32:59 - The recording with Rahm Emmanuel
39:58 - Is Illinois more corrupt than other states?
43:36 - How Rod Blagojevich's father-in-law got him arrested
47:24 - Did Rod Blagojevich want to run for president
49:29 - Rod Blagojevich is fighting to run for office again
59:10 - Are Democrats afraid of Rod Blagojevich?
1:06:18 - How the right embraced the 'false claim' Hillary spied on Trump
1:13:31 - Are there any good "up and coming" politicians?
1:16:00 - Character Assassination
1:25:20 - AOC
1:39:17 - Trudeau and Canada
1:43:27 - Ukraine/Russia
1:50:12 - Speed round
You missed some good stories here about where Adam was conceived.
Great stirs.
Anyways, today, we have a special guest with us.
Very special guest.
Yes, we have a special guest with us.
Former governor of Illinois, the fifth largest economy, I believe, in America, Governor Ron Rod Blagojevich, who also ended up going to, out of the 24 counts, one of them, you were found guilty, and you ended up going to jail, I think, for 168 months, but you only served eight of it because you were pardoned by President Trump, and we'll get into that as well.
And a lot's changed from then to now, but it's good to have you on the podcast.
I'm glad we were able to pull this off.
Well, thanks very much for having me.
I appreciate you guys, and congratulations on your success.
Welcome to America.
You're the American Dream.
In my next life, I want to be you.
I don't want to be me.
You know, it's crazy.
And by the way, on this podcast, you can be free to curse.
You don't have to worry about it.
So I saw your video on either the video.
The documentary starts off saying, there's going to be, be careful.
There's, you know, what kind of language?
They say excessive use of foul language.
And then they give you the disclaimer, and then he gives it to you to start off the documentary.
Last night, I'm up.
These guys, he tells me about the documentary.
I'm like, I'm going to try to watch it.
So last night, Binkin comes over.
We're talking about the next book, and we had an hour and a half session.
Then we watch All-Star Game at Fourth Quarter, because I don't miss the Fourth Court.
It's a sick game, Fourth Corridor.
The way he finished it was sick.
Michael Jordan there, all that stuff.
And then I have to sit there and watch your documentary until 1.30 in the morning.
And then I was with my trainer this morning at 6 o'clock.
So I have eight hours of sleep, and then four hours is what I did.
But for some people that don't know, you're from Yugoslavia.
Your family is, your father, I believe, is from Yugoslavia.
And when I was at Germany at a refugee camp, one of the families we got very close to were Yugoslavian.
His name was Miodrag.
Miodrag, and the wife's name was Ana Maria, and the daughter's name is Ana Maria.
They're in Canada now.
But I remember spending time with them.
We had a lot of things in common, escaping the kind of life that we had.
But for folks who don't know who you are, if you don't mind taking a moment and sharing your story with them, that'd be great.
Sure.
Well, thank you.
First of all, let me say my dad spent three years in a refugee camp after World War II, waiting for the United States Congress that one day his youngest son, that'd be me, passed a law called the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed my father and millions of others like him with these long and hard to pronounce last names, a chance to come to America.
So my late father had something in common with you because you spent a couple of years, right, in a refugee camp in Germany.
Look, in so many ways, in fact, it was.
My life was the American dream.
My mother and father were working people.
My mom was American-born.
If she'd have come from the old country like my dad, I think my first name would have been as hard to pronounce as my last name.
I'd have never been the governor of Illinois, but then again, I'd have never been inmate number 40892424.
But my life's been the American dream because of the success that I was fortunate to have because so many people helped me.
Then it was the Copcast nightmare that came after it when I was sent to prison and was compelled to shelter in place for eight years for politics, not for crimes, from what the Wall Street Journal called practicing politics.
But, you know, the values that have made you so successful, Patrick, are the values my mother and father instilled in me, that you're fortunate and lucky to live in a great country like this, a land of opportunity.
It's supposed to be a land of freedom.
It's a fragile gift that we have that we shouldn't take for granted.
I've learned some hard lessons about that.
But it's a place where if you dream, you can reach those dreams if you're prepared to work hard to make those dreams real.
I've been working since I was nine years old, shining shoes.
And I'm still working.
And when I was in prison, it's funny because I was earning about $5.25 a month in prison.
I earned more money as a nine-year-old shining shoes in Chicago than I made as a former governor in my early 60s.
And a lawyer.
And a lawyer and all the rest.
So, you know, I've been up, I've been down, but there's an old Irish proverb that says, even God can't make two mountains without a valley in between.
So I'm climbing back up.
And it's fun, as you know.
The journey is even more fun than the destination.
So what's next for you?
I watched a documentary, and here's one of the things I noticed about you.
It didn't matter when it was, whether it's you're walking out and you're about to go to jail, you're shaking hands.
Hey, you're hugging this lady and your wife's to your left and you're hugging her.
You're kissing her on the cheek and you're hugging this other lady.
You're always in campaign mode.
Have you always been this guy that's shaking hands, building relationships?
Have you always been that guy?
You know, I don't know.
I guess so.
I don't know.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
When I was shining shoes, I know when I was a kid, in order to get the tips, you got to hustle, right?
You got to get out there and schmooze a little bit and try to do a good job shining shoes and try to keep the black shoe polish off the white socks of the guy who's an engineer who shouldn't be wearing white socks with black shoes, right?
They should fire that guy.
Or maybe he's a fan of Jerry Lewis.
I think Jerry Lewis used to do something like that.
He used to wear white socks with black shoes.
Right.
That's right, those old movies.
But, you know, I guess so.
You know, I wasn't exactly great in school.
I went to public school in Chicago.
I wasn't set the world on fire at school.
Who were you in high school?
Like, if we were in high school together, who was, if I asked one of your classmates that was in high school with your 10th grade, 11th grade, who was Rod?
Somebody who didn't do so good in physics and got a D in algebra, which was a classic case of great inflation.
You know, I played on the high school basketball team at Box Golden Gloves in Chicago.
First time I ever got my name in the newspaper.
Chicago Tribune was the Golden Gloves when I was 17, 18 years old.
I grew up a real city life in a big city like Chicago.
But I was lucky to have great parents that, you know, worked hard and sacrificed so I can go to college.
And it was them, their hard work and sacrifice, that gave me a chance to get up high in politics.
Now, as I said, looking back, it's a mixed blessing in view of what's happened.
But I do believe, and I had 2,896 days to think when I was sheltering in place in prison.
And I do believe God has a plan for all of us.
And I think as bad as that was, as is written in Genesis, what they meant for evil, God meant for good.
And I feel like there's some service that I can still provide, as well as working hard to build a better life for my daughters and my wife.
You know, I watched your story, and I watched all the clips, read all the stories that's out there.
So I've seen the good, bad, and the ugly about you.
And I see the love and hate relationship.
There are those who hate you.
And I called some friends, and these are guys that are in business who are from Chicago.
And I said, tell me what you think about this guy.
And they said, well, let me tell you who he is.
You know, there are people here that like him.
There are people here that think he's innocent.
There are people here that think he's guilty.
But it was a mixture.
It wasn't just all good and all bad.
Some people that I thought were going to be saying nothing but bad things about you were like, no, this guy was actually trying to do some stuff, but he got caught doing what everybody else does.
And he went to jail for it.
The other guys didn't.
And then some of the guys I talked to, they just said, Pat, don't let him fool you.
He's a charmer, charismatic, this, this, that.
You have to understand where he's at.
He's a very good persuader.
So why this love-hate relationship with you?
Well, isn't that the case when you take strong positions?
I mean, with all due respect, if you were not those things, that means you didn't stand for anything, right?
Franklin Roosevelt said, ah, you've had to meet good.
That means you stood for something.
And, you know, I think as governor, I was the first Democrat governor in 26 years, elected in Illinois, but I didn't want to raise taxes on the people.
My party loves to raise taxes on regular people.
We claim to be the party of the little guy and working people, but every chance the Democrats in Illinois get, they keep jacking up taxes.
That's why Illinois is the highest tax state in the nation.
So I was determined to invest more money in health care and provide health care to kids and other families, do things like free public transportation for our seniors, which we did, preschool for our three and four-year-olds, and a lot of other initiatives without raising taxes on the people, which meant to pay for those things, you got to move the money around.
That means you're taking it away from others who benefited from it.
And when you do that, you piss them off.
So I think a lot of it had to do with the establishment came after me.
And, you know, I sat in prison and watched with horror what the same people using the same playbook were trying to do to President Trump.
And what they did to me, a Democrat governor at the AAA level, they tried to do at the major league level to a Republican president.
Fortunately, he was able to beat it because he had a lot more support and he had the ability of the Oval Office and the bully pulpit that the president has that governors don't have.
But it's the same thing.
And this is very scary for our democracy.
It's not a Democrat or Republican issue.
It's an American issue.
It goes to the heart of our freedoms.
We, the people, should choose our leaders in free, fair, and honest elections and not have the choices taken away from us by corrupt prosecutors who would criminalize legal things.
I didn't break a single law.
And yeah, you have those naysayers over there in Chicago.
Everything I did was legal.
They were conversations that began because President-elect Obama sent an emissary to me to make a political deal about the senator he wanted, the person he wanted picked as senator.
We discussed what we could get in that political deal, all legal.
I mean, I got a Dean Algebra.
I'm not claiming to be the smartest guy in the room, but I'm not that stupid.
How do you fucking steal a Senate seat when you're the governor and get away with it?
You can't be that stupid.
And you don't mind me swearing right now.
No, no, you're fine.
You guys are fucking golden.
But go back to that when you're saying.
Go ahead.
Right.
So, you know, they expected they, what they did was the prosecutors did, they brought shock and awe.
I was Roger Stone before Roger Stone.
In other words, they came to my house with SWAT teams at 6 o'clock in the morning on the 9th of December 2008.
I'm a sitting governor.
You don't arrest a governor or anybody unless the person's a threat to run away or a threat to his neighbors.
I was neither one of those things.
But they did it for the big show, and they did it to create an environment where they create this inevitable, foreseeable chain of events that would invite the media to see the super sensational story and run with a narrative that they fully expected I would just give up and give in and cut my losses and maybe take 18 months.
But I would never do it.
And so I fought back, and they didn't convict me at our first trial.
They tried me a second time.
They used an unlawful standard to convict me on legal things.
No one even alleges that I took any money.
It was all politics.
And the so-called sale of the Senate seat, which I'm known for, was reversed by the appellate court on the 22nd of July 2015 as I sat in prison.
They could never uphold that unlawful standard they used against me.
But they kept me in prison for three fundraising requests where there was no quid pro quo, which means no crime.
But they moved the line and instructed the jury to convict if we asked for campaign contributions from people or groups who had business interests with the state, which is how politics works, completely legal.
But I think it was such a big deal that somebody had to go down.
And you know, when you're fighting back against that kind of power, deep down, you know you're going down, but you make a decision, I'm going down fighting, because as Winston Churchill said, nations that go down fighting come back, but those who shamelessly surrender don't.
So I think I've got a big, powerful comeback ahead of me.
Yeah.
When you're saying, you know, they did this, they did that, they did this, who is they?
Can you define?
Is it Michael Casey?
Is it who's they?
Well, the U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who's real close with James Comey.
These guys worked together.
He was in the FBI, number one, number two guy in the FBI.
Mueller was the FBI director when they arrested me.
It's the same people that were doing to Trump what they did to me.
And I think President Trump recognized that, and that's among the reasons why he sent me home.
What was his reasoning, though?
Because he didn't have beef with you to start.
There must have been something you have done where he said, uh-huh something's up with that guy.
Where did this all initiate?
You know, I learned after I was arrested, I learned that they had been investigating.
First of all, I knew they were investigating my administration and me since the very beginning when I became governor within six months.
For what reason, though?
They were looking at some people that I was close to, a guy by the name of Tony Resco, who was close to Obama and me, raised money for both of us.
But I had nothing to do with any of the things that they were looking at him at.
But I was well aware that they were looking.
And, you know, you come out of Chicago politics.
You just assume those people look at you.
So everything I tried to do was to make sure we were super careful.
We didn't do anything to cross lines.
The irony is those FBI tapes for six weeks they were taping me.
I assumed it was possible they could be listening.
I was discussing the sale of the sentence seat.
I was talking about every possible idea so that whatever we did was legal, didn't cross lines, and was the best possible decision I could make on something that was F and Golden.
It was fucking golden.
You got this thing.
Everybody wants it.
And you can make a real good political deal that could be helpful, hopefully, to people if you do it the right way.
So it wasn't like I wasn't aware that they were looking at me.
They were very much intensely looking at me.
Yeah, so you've seen the movie American Gangster with Denzel.
Who's in it?
Russell Crowe, isn't it?
With Denzel, right?
Am I getting the right word?
Russell Crow?
And then there's this scene where Russell Crowe is sitting there and he's got this person at the top that he's thinking is the main guy behind Blue Magic.
I think it's called Blue Magic.
And, you know, he's the one that's doing it.
And then all of a sudden he realizes, no, no, the guy out there all the way at the top is Frank Lucas, right?
And Frank Lucas, three quarters of a billion dollars during that time he earned.
Anyways, later on, he comes in and he throws everybody else under the bus or whatever happened with the case at the end of the movie.
But so you said Fitzgerald, Mueller.
You say all these names, right?
And same thing that Trump, Comey, right?
All these names you're saying.
Who is the boss of them that's like, who are they supporting?
Who's the guy at the top when you play the same game?
I'm not even sure I know.
To this day, I'm still trying to sort it out and figure it out.
I do believe that there was some collusion with the Democratic House Speaker and chairman of the party, Michael Madigan, who's now facing federal, intense federal investigation.
I do believe there was a collusion when they impeached me because they wouldn't allow me to play tapes.
You see, here's the thing, you guys, Patrick and Adam.
They taped me for six weeks.
They played snippets, selected snippets of conversation out of context to make me look bad.
This is fucking golden.
I'm not giving it up for nothing.
That was the day after the election.
That was the day after I was approached by this labor boss who said, Barack called me the night before, wants to talk to you about a Senate seat.
What do you want?
So I mentioned that to my aides.
We discussed what can we get for this.
And there was no, they don't play the rest of the tape where, you know, the conversation is put in a proper context.
Do you have that?
Do you have the recording?
I have all those tapes.
I've had them for years, but we're not allowed to play them publicly because immediately after they played those snippets and arrested me, they went right into court and got a seal order to keep those tapes under seal.
And it's against the law if you release them.
And then we tried repeatedly in court to play those tapes at the trials.
I was promised by the judge in the second trial that if I agreed to testify, I could play the tapes to corroborate my testimony.
So I agreed to get up there and testify because I knew that if I testified under the tapes, the prosecutor is going to do exactly what he did, and that is lie to the jury and say, go back to their jury room and see how many times you hear tapes corroborating what he says.
Well, I get up there.
They won't play the tapes.
To this day, they won't play the tapes.
And the tapes show a very different story from what they tried to have people believe.
They are lying scumbags.
They're corrupt motherfuckers.
You can say that here, right?
Yeah, you can't get it.
I was watching the part where you're like, I'm going to testify.
I will testify.
I'm going to show you.
Wait till you hear it.
I want everybody to be up there.
I'm the opposite of Nixon.
Nixon said, no, I want everything to be out there.
And then when it comes down to it, you didn't testify.
And you said your lawyer wanted you to testify, but the father encouraged you to not testify because you don't have to.
And you said something, if there's one thing that I'm guilty of, it's sometimes I talk too much or something like that.
He said, right?
So from your end, I mean, I've heard the answer on the documentary.
Unless if there's a different answer, why didn't you eventually testify?
If you know you're innocent, why don't you testify?
Right.
Well, I did at the second trial.
What you're talking about in that Hulu documentary is the first trial.
And at that point, their case was so ridiculously, there was no crimes that the decision by the lawyers was don't even bother putting a defense on.
They proved nothing.
And so therefore, if you don't put a defense on, you can't testify.
So that's what happened.
And all those charges, none of them were the corruption charges, none of them were convictions.
Okay, they were all hung jury.
So they declared a mistrial.
I didn't realize they can try you forever.
They try you a second time.
If we didn't, if I was successful the second time, they tried me a third time.
But so they tried me the second time, and there I testified on the promise by the judge that if I agreed to testify, I could play the tapes to corroborate my testimony.
And the judge lied.
And I got up there, and I wasn't allowed to play those tapes.
And the prosecutor lied directly to the jury.
He's a liar.
His name is Reed Shar.
And I challenged him to challenge me.
He went up before the jury and lied and said, you heard him testify about the Senate.
See, go back into the jury room and hear how many times you hear tapes.
If there were 102 conversations on the one particular subject that he was accusing me of lying about, and he knew those tapes existed and they wouldn't play them.
Well, Governor.
It was a total frame-up.
I'm sorry.
No, no.
There's nothing worse than being accused of something that you genuinely didn't do.
Agreed?
Yes.
I mean, there's nothing worse than that.
And I'm not here to play jury, judge, executioner.
That's not my job here.
You know, the jury was out, and you're not admitting guilt.
And more power to you.
If you're freaking innocent, I would be in the same position as you.
But my question is, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?
There must have been something you would have like, you know what?
Yes, I'm innocent, but I could have done a little better at that.
What is that?
Look, I had all those years to think about it, right?
I mean, I'm sitting in the higher security prison.
I'm the only governor to be in a real prison where my home was a six-foot by eight-foot prison cell.
They put me there for 32 months, all designed to squeeze me and try to break my will to resist.
When you're in a place like that, and then you have all those other years afterwards, you've got more than enough time to do a lot of stuff, including think.
Not that healthy to think too much, but you can't help it sometimes.
And of course, I asked myself the same question you asked me because my children have been harmed, my little girls and my wife.
And I asked myself, did my pride get so caught up in my pride that I should have been more sensible and willing to maybe cut my losses a little bit and give in, not so much for me, but for my kids, so that I won't be gone so long.
Probably could have been gone 18 months.
They were floating that around after the first trial.
It was a plea deal, you're saying?
They were floating the possibility of 18 months.
I rejected it completely because that would require me to plead guilty to something that's not a crime.
I wouldn't do it.
And so I asked myself those questions.
So I'm answering your question this long way just because I've gone through it myself many, many times.
And I would answer, here's how I've, in my own mind, I feel like I made the right call.
If I was a businessman and you're looking at this from a business point of view and your obligation is to your business, your shareholders, your partners, your family as well, maybe you make a business decision, you cut your losses, and you say you did something you really didn't do, or you plead guilty to a non-existent crime that they're criminalizing in your case, because this is what they do.
They take legal stuff, they turn them into crimes, and make you plead guilty to these things.
And maybe you do that if you're a businessman.
But I was the governor of Illinois.
You know, politicians talk about the Bible and stuff, but twice I swore on the Holy Bible to serve and protect the Constitution and the rule of law.
And I was elected by the people to do that.
And I just couldn't get over the fact that I'd be selling out the people as well as myself if I gave in to this.
Plus the fact that I think I'd be a drunk because I'd hate myself.
Wouldn't be able to look at, I couldn't look myself in the mirror, which is something I like to do too often.
Well, you got a great head of hair.
Those are the rumors about you.
I'd comb it less because I would hate myself if I gave into it when I know absolutely everything I did was legal.
And those conversations were all about making sure we did everything right because these people were chasing me.
So the final analysis is it's been a long, long, hard journey.
The hand of God reached in, used President Trump as an instrument.
The unlikely convergence events that Trump would have me on celebrity opponents.
I don't know if you guys know that.
I was on that show.
And I get to know him a little bit.
Great guy.
He saw what they were doing to me.
And the years would go by.
He'd be the president.
They'd do the same thing to him.
And there I'd be in prison, exhausting all of my remedies.
And the guy I endorsed for president, the first governor, Obama, passes me by, and Trump's the one who saves my ass.
It's remarkable, right?
Well, you know, Obama passed you by because I read someplace some of the comments you made about him when you said, I've done more for the black community than he's done.
And you said something about I used to be a shoeshiner.
And you made a few comments about Obama.
And that was made years ago, which he probably held that against you, why he didn't want to pardon you.
Because in every possible way, no one in a million years thought your crime should be 14 years, 168 months.
Everybody said, okay, two, three, five years, fine.
14 years?
It's a little too much to go away for 14 years for what you did.
So that's why a lot of people, you know, that I read about, it's like, you know, Obama should have come out and pardoned you.
But I think it was a fennel by a comment you said to him years ago.
Would you agree or would you say it's otherwise?
I think he passed me by because he was involved in the case.
He's the one who started the whole thing.
He sent someone to me and we talked about making a deal based upon his overture to me by sending that labor boss to me on the night of the election.
That's where it all started.
That's why I think he passed me by.
About that comment you're making.
Leah, look, I just admitted that I wasn't so good at algebra.
I also admit sometimes I say stupid things.
And I was talking to some reporter.
He was doing an Esquire magazine, doing a profile on me.
I'd run eight miles earlier that day, hadn't eaten all day, watching Manny Pacquiao fight Ricky Hatton.
Remember that fight two years ago?
And I had my host, Italian-American guy, great guy, Bill Conforti, gave me this drink called a Lemoncello.
You ever have that?
Yes.
It's like lemonade with alcohol in it.
And I was thirsty because I'd run and I hadn't eaten all day.
This is why you were the governor?
No, I was thrown out of office by then in the middle of my trials.
I think it was before the first trial.
And so I had that Lemoncello, and I was a little bit too loose-lipped.
And I'm talking to this reporter.
You can't trust those sons of bitches, right?
Esquire Magazine.
And I'm pointing out Hatton and Pacquiao, especially Pacquiao, who I have great admiration for.
I like boxing.
And talk about how you have to have chip.
In life, you got to have a chip on your shoulder, man.
It starts in the schoolyard when you get your ass kicked and you got this real hunger and desire to overcome adversity and stuff.
So I started going off on that.
Then I got into Obama.
And here's where I said the stupid thing.
Not altogether wrong, but you shouldn't say it as a white guy.
I said, I'm blacker than Obama.
Obama's lifestyle.
I mean, he went to Hawaii.
He's growing up.
He went to Harvard.
Not really an inner city guy.
I grew up in the heart of the city.
I went to public school.
They wouldn't let me in Harvard.
They let him in.
And, you know, I had those jobs, as you say, shine issues and all these other jobs.
Just my life experience.
And I did talk about how my policies were tremendously helpful to the African-American community.
I'd like to thank everybody else, too, far more than his would ultimately be, because he could have done so much more and he didn't.
So I said it in that context.
But a white guy should never say he's blacker than a black guy.
So I did apologize for that.
I said it.
And was it around the same time that Harry Reid made those comments as well?
Because I think Harry Reid made some comments as well about him saying the reason why he got elected because he doesn't have the accent of something, some his dialect isn't.
And do you remember this title?
Yeah, Harry Reid made a comment.
Is it Harry Reid or Joe Biden?
No, no, it's Harry Reid.
Harry Reid said the reason why Obama got elected is because he has a dialect of a white man, something like that.
Anyways, okay, you can find it so we can, because we don't want to.
So go back to it.
So go back to the question I asked you.
And you went one direction, and then you went to, he asked the question about what things you would have changed.
But when you said they, and I said, who is they?
Who's at the top of they?
And you said Fitzgerald and he said Comey, and then he said, you know, Mueller, some of these names that you said.
And then now, when I said, why didn't Obama pardon you?
Because you said Obama was a part of it.
So now let's go to that part where you said if Obama's a part of it, my speculation becomes if Obama.
So because sometimes I feel like, you know, when Jerry Buss gets a call from Shaq and Shaq says, hey, Jerry, Riley and the Heat offer me $20 million a year.
If you match me, I'll stay with you at the Lakers.
You know what Jerry Buss told him?
He said, I think you should take that offer because I can't match that offer.
And what does Shaq do?
He goes to Miami.
What does Jerry do?
He locks in who?
Kobe, right?
Okay.
Similar call happened when Pat Riley called Jerry Buss and said, hey, listen, I'm getting a massive contract from the Knicks.
You want to match it?
I'll stay.
I don't want to leave the Lakers, but they're offering me like $5.5 million a year, whatever the number was.
And he's like, dude, I can't pay you that.
You go take that contract, right?
I feel like at one point, and I'm seeing this trend on both political parties, when they lock onto someone, everybody becomes indispensable, right?
And somebody has to almost take a blame for something.
So during COVID, you know, the first six months, the rock star of COVID was who?
Cuomo.
Cuomo.
He was a rock star.
Right.
Every day we heard Cuomo, Cuomo, Cuomo.
He's the next presidential candidate.
Him and his brothers would go at it.
And then something happened behind closed doors that I don't think any one of us will ever know what happened there.
Where he either didn't say yes or he either thought he was bigger than the political party, Pelosi and these guys flipped on him.
Next thing you know, hey, you got to resign.
He resigned.
Then his brother, boom, then you know, Zucker, boom.
Then CMO, boom.
We saw what the triple effect was all the way down.
Do you think it was a position where at that time all these guys behind closed doors said, look, that guy's a governor.
He's probably not going to be the president.
This guy's a senator.
He had a great speech at the DNC in 2004.
We can get behind this guy.
Let's back him up.
Let's throw this guy under the bus and let's go.
Do you think a conversation like that took place behind closed doors?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think it was like that.
I think it was that these federal prosecutors, some of them are just unscrupulous guys who abuse their power and make big names for themselves by being big game hunters.
And this guy was chasing me for a long, long time.
I think he was also chasing Obama because of Resco.
And so when Resco got indicted on stuff that had nothing to do with me or Obama.
So he was trying to get Obama as well.
I believe this is my belief.
I'll give you my belief on how it all shook out.
So what happened was, because Resco was closer to Obama than he was to me, he actually bought him property.
Obama bought a big mansion after he was elected United States Senator, and then the lot, the adjoining lot, this guy, Resco, bought for Obama.
And then when the heat was on politically, Obama gave him a bill and Resco paid $13,000 to put a fence up.
But the $750,000 lot that was paid at this price by Resco was basically for Obama.
It was like an adjoining lot to the mansion that he bought.
So they were looking at both of us, I think, because of Resco.
And they were right to look at Resco.
There were allegations related to stuff that he was doing.
In any event, he finally gets convicted, Resco does, and they're squeezing him to say stuff about the two of us.
He puts out a letter to the sentencing judge and says that these federal prosecutors are trying to make me say things about Governor Blugojevich and Senator Obama.
He actually listed me first.
I'm not going to lie about those two guys just to save myself.
I've never been involved in any wrongdoing with them.
Resco.
Resco says that.
Yeah.
It's a matter of public record.
Made the front page of the Chicago Tribune.
The big fear was, would Resco lie to save himself?
Because they squeeze these people, you know, with scare them with long sentences, but if they'll say certain things they want them to say, singer compose, you know, then they get lighter sentences.
That was the big fear.
But when Resco did that, both of us were in a real good place.
That's when they started putting the FBI tapes on me.
But then when they arrested me, here's what I think happened with Obama.
They immediately went to Obama and they interviewed him because he was involved in the case.
And those are called FBI 302s.
To this day, they still won't give us, my team, my lawyers, the FBI 302s of Obama's interview, which is absolutely relevant to a criminal defendant, me, facing what I was facing.
They have to give you that.
They didn't, and they still won't.
So they've got that sort of under seal as well.
I think Obama made a calculation, his political people made a calculation, that when Fitzgerald made that big move, arrested a sitting governor in such a dramatic way the way he did, I was politically radioactive.
They did this on purpose.
Everybody ran.
It's like the ship is sinking and everybody jumps overboard, right?
Obama was no different.
And he was saving himself politically, not wanting to get caught up in any of that.
And so I was sold out in the process.
You seem like a very ambitious guy.
Very.
You seem like super ambitious with a chip, which I relate to, on the understatement.
I would say that's projection considering your background.
God bless you.
That's high praise, by the way.
It's America.
No, no, I see you as an extremely ambitious guy with a very unique quality.
When I'm listening to you, and you're like, we're sitting there with my wife and Amy and the girls, and we go to sleep and I'm telling them we're going to stay strong, we're going to stay strong, and I'm not breaking, I'm not crying, we're not going to cry, we're going to get through this because the truth is this and all this stuff.
And then, you know, you say, we go to sleep, we put the kids to sleep, and I wake up in the morning and I woke up at 4 o'clock because I was about to go away to jail and be in 14 years and I'm getting and I'm still not crying.
You're telling the story.
You're not breaking, right?
And then you said, I'm not going to turn around because I've been replaying this in my mind.
That if I go out the door, I'm not going to look back and I go out the door and I look back and it was the hardest thing I had to do my life.
And then next thing, you know, the reporters are out there.
I'm like, this guy is so mentally and emotionally like he is not going to allow the opponent to win, whether he's right or wrong.
You got to respect an opponent like that.
You got that tough skin that you can't teach that.
And that's what family, because family is emotional.
That's a very difficult thing to go through.
And then you sitting here and hearing the story with Obama and you.
As a person that's extremely ambitious with a chip on his shoulder, I'm curious to know what your answer is going to be to this.
And I think, I hope it's not the answer that I think you're going to give, but I hope you tell the truth, the real truth.
And I'm just curious to know what you'll say about this.
Were you at all envious, jealous, upset that a one-term senator became a president and the governor of Illinois didn't, where you felt you were more qualified to be a president than him?
I would say I was more resentful than jealous.
I admire his skill.
Right.
You know, he gave a great speech in Boston in 2004 that catapulted him.
Look, I had a good relationship with Obama when we were in politics together in Illinois.
It was not close, but it was good, it's friendly.
You're both Democrats.
We're both Democrats on opposite sides of town.
We were both pretty much the same generation coming up at the same time, both considered rising stars in the 1990s.
And, you know, I became the governor two years before he became senator.
So we were both on that trajectory way up high.
You became governor two years before he became a senator.
Yes.
So on paper, you're the guy that should have the lead on running for office more than him.
Yes, I think so.
And I was a governor, too.
And historically, governors are more apt to be presidents than senators.
And fifth largest state.
We're not talking governor of like Kansas, right?
But you said resentful.
So what caused the resentment?
The resentment was that I truly believe that the Resco issue was used by Obama, David Axelrod, who used to work for me.
And I like Axelrod.
Look, politics are rough-ass business, okay?
Very obvious.
And, you know, people do things to you on a Monday.
They stab you in the back and they screw you.
But you got to work with them on Tuesday, right?
And so you build up a certain immunity to this.
Now, when calamity comes on like it did to me and to my family at that level, it's a lot more serious.
But I think what they did was they were dumping Resco on me, making me the guy who was closer to Resco because the feds were looking at Resco.
And as Obama's political aspirations were rising and his presidential hopes became more realistic, they were dumping Tony Resco more on me.
And this was a design.
And the media was all over that.
And they were protecting Obama and screwing me.
And there was sort of like an affirmative action approach to this.
In other words, they were elevating him and making me wear all the negative stuff.
And so I think that's what it was.
It was more the resentment of how I was being treated by my own party and by the media, as opposed to like a fair assessment that both of us had some misjudgments with a guy that we thought was not the guy he turned out to be.
So going back to the recording and an Adam, I'll turn it over to you if you got any questions.
Going back to the recording that you had, right?
Because I think the call was Ram Manuel said, here's four names, pick one of them.
This is who Obama wants.
What do you want?
And I think at the top of the list was, what, Jesse Jackson Jr.?
Because when a sitting senator goes and becomes a president, the current governor is able to appoint somebody in that seat.
And a lot of times that's a leverage point, right?
Historically, that's not the first, you're not the first person that went through this.
This happens regularly, and there's some kind of leverage and negotiation.
Sometimes it's political, sometimes it's campaign support, sometimes it's an endorsement, sometimes it's a lot of different things that you read about.
But the recording goes, I got this thing and it's golden, right?
Fucking golden.
And I'm not giving it up for nothing.
I'm not going to do it.
There's a life after that if I do it, right?
You guys are telling me to sit here for two years as a governor and do nothing.
Everyone is passing me by, give it up for nothing.
And then, you know, he says, who's passing you by?
And who's doing this?
And you said, everybody, right?
You wanted Jesse Jackson.
And then at the end, you said, only 13% of you think I'm doing a good job.
And then Ram says, you know, I want Jesse.
Anyways, the problem is, how do we take some of my financial pressure off of me?
That was the one statement that you made.
How do we take some of the financial?
And what's funny is, even though they had that in recording, out of the 24 counts, they didn't hold you.
You were not found guilty for that statement.
So it was for a completely different count, something that happened in the past donation they were talking about earlier, right?
Fundraising stuff.
Fundraising stuff that happened.
So while you're in this moment and going through this and you hear that the recording is public, and it's Michael Casey, I think, that approved it.
Michael Ucasey, I don't know exactly what his name is.
That's right.
He was the assistant attorney general.
He was the attorney general.
He was the one that approved recording you and wiretapping you to listen to this.
With no probable cause, by the way.
With no probable cause.
Which, by the way, this goes back to some of the things when I talked to Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy Giuliani said this whole thing with Rico, we changed it because that professor from Rutger University, I don't know what university it was, that he said, here's how we can get the mob.
Let's just change the laws on RICO, and they changed it, and we know what happens with that.
They were able to get the mob to go away.
So while you heard yourself when the recording came public and you heard it, what was your initial reaction?
Ouch.
Are you kidding me?
I cringed when I heard, especially the F-word.
I was flinging it around.
By the way, Ram Emmanuel says it way more than I do.
He's on the tapes all over the place.
Of course, you can't play him.
And that's no justification that's down in the diamond against him either.
It's just, you know, sometimes we talk locker room among the guys.
There were no women on those calls when I was using that word.
But real quick, that was a career day call.
In other words, we spent two hours on that call.
You couldn't play, they wouldn't let us play any of that tape other than what they played, that snippet where I'm venting.
Because the discussion, part of the discussion was, do I just not be governing more?
Because The FBI had gone out and ruined my wife's real estate business by going to all of her customers and clients, and everybody was afraid to do any business with her.
So we were actually facing some difficult financial circumstances.
And the discussion was, do I just no longer stay as governor?
Or do I stay as governor for two years?
Or should I make myself a U.S. Senator?
And how would that work for our family?
Unlikely I would ever do anything like that, but that's brainstorming.
And you're supposed to be able to talk freely and honestly in conversations.
They're not crimes unless you actually do something that's actually criminal.
None of those things were.
You could legally make yourself a senator.
I was unlikely to do it.
But these were discussions that we had for two hours on that particular call.
And I was angry too because I knew these feds were on my ass.
I knew it.
And I was fearful that they were going to do everything they could to get me because they had such a big investment in getting me.
The irony is it's those very conversations where I'm super careful, I don't do anything wrong, that they twist and take out of context and make these things sound worse than they are.
I, on average, talk to my lawyer three times a day during that period of time.
We could never introduce that into evidence because I asked him, can I do this?
Can I do that?
How do you do a deal like this?
Because everybody was coming to me with different ideas, creative ideas on what you might want to do with the Senate seat.
Like Oprah Winfrey, we discussed her for two days on whether I should appoint her senator.
She wouldn't take it, but we discussed that realistically.
I even did something really stupid.
You want to hear this?
Which they played at the first trial.
We can swear here, right?
Yes.
All right.
And this is stupid and it's childish.
I'm on the phone, a bunch of guys on the phone.
We're talking about, I'd like ideally to appoint a black person to the United States Senate because Obama's the only black person.
He's leaving.
There'll be 99, 100 senators that we don't replace him with somebody who's African American.
No black people in the United States Senate in the age of Obama.
So I would like one, ideally.
But I don't want the usual old people in politics.
And, you know, some people, you know, they have their own agenda.
You know, I'm asking my chief of staff to find me a black person with a strong military background, somebody like that who's not known.
Let's keep thinking creatively and think outside the box.
So then I do this stupid thing.
I say, hey, Quinlan, he's my lawyer.
Hey, Quinlan, what's the law again about residency to be a senator?
How long do you got to live in Illinois?
He says, you got to live in Illinois for one day.
You got to be 30 years old.
And it's okay if you're a naturalized citizen.
So then I say, hey, why doesn't somebody reach out to Halle Berry in Hollywood, have her move to Illinois for one day?
I'll make her a senator.
Maybe I could fuck her.
You say this.
I say this.
Of course, I'm not doing any of this.
This is just childish, ridiculous locker room talk with a bunch of guys.
So there I am at the first trial, okay?
And boy, that's a bad place to be.
And they're playing these tapes, okay?
And you got this big notebook in front of you, and you can leaf ahead and see what they're going to play next, what they're going to play next.
I don't remember half of this stuff, okay?
So I'm looking ahead.
It's about 11.40 in the morning.
Generally, the judge will break for lunch at noon.
Media's all over the place every day, right?
My devoted, loving wife there in the front row, right by her husband, my wife Patty.
And I look ahead and I, whoa, and I see, here comes that, they're going to play the Halle Berry tape.
It's got no relevance.
It's just going to be designed to prejudice the jury against me, okay?
And cause friction with my wife.
That's why they're playing this thing.
I see it.
I look at the clock and I say, they've got a few more tapes to play.
Maybe we can get to noon.
At least I might be able to diffuse this a little bit if I get to lunch break before they play this and warn her that this is coming after lunch.
Sure enough, we got there, okay?
They didn't play it yet.
I take the book, I tap her on the knee, I show her, look, they're going to play this after lunch.
Just want you to know I was joking.
She looks up at me and she says, what are you?
15?
That was all.
That's what she said.
That's all.
Yeah.
Ain't nothing wrong with Halley Berry.
She's a trooper, by the way.
She is a trooper.
She's unbelievable.
Yeah, no, Hallie Berry's beautiful.
But of course, that was never going to happen.
But you see, when they play that stuff out of context and that's all that's there, and then they start telling the public that these things are somehow illegal, you're fucked.
Yeah, my thank you.
Yes.
Great segue.
And now, shout out to Hallie Berry if she's watching.
You had mentioned that, and clearly everybody knows this, politics is a very dirty business, beyond.
And you got caught up in it as bad as anybody.
But what you dealt with, is that just, hey, it's politics as usual.
Hey, welcome to the game.
Or is there something specific about Chicago, Illinois politics, then dirtier than most states?
I think four governors of the state of Illinois have been in jail, including the governor preceding you, Governor Ryan.
Your arch nemesis, Mike Madigan, I believe his name is embroiled in political turmoil.
You see what's going on in Chicago, and, you know, they're calling it Chirac and just everything that's happening there.
My question is, what the hell's going on in Chicago and in Illinois?
Yeah.
The answer is, is it worse, corruption, more endemic in a place like Chicago and in Illinois than in other places?
The answer is yes and no.
It is far more so than, let's say, our neighboring state to the north of Wisconsin.
Their politics, their government's a lot cleaner, no doubt about that.
But it's not that different from Washington.
That's the sad reality.
I mean, you think about the stuff that happens in Chicago, Mike Madigan, they all got rich.
Madigan's the former Speaker, been speaker since 1983, been a state rep since 1973, the same time Biden became a United States Senator, right?
Well, both of those guys got super rich in the job.
How does that happen if you're doing it straight, right?
So when I think about Biden and Hunter Biden and the allegations relating to the Biden family in China, I think about the Bush family in China and their economic interests.
I think about going to war in Iraq, and we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction, and Dick Cheney's the vice president and Halliburton, and they break that country up, and then his company gets in there to rebuild it.
I think about that sort of stuff.
And I think Chicago and Illinois isn't that much different from Washington.
There are states that are much better, straight, cleaner.
Illinois is not one of them.
But it's not that different in Washington than it is.
It's funny.
I just pulled up the most corrupt states in America.
Okay.
You got to see this.
Type in the follow-on word.
The most corrupt states in America.
It's a Forbes article, the most corrupt states in America.
It's by a mile.
There you go.
Click on that one.
Go a little lower.
Go look at that.
Make it bigger.
Number one is D.C. Look at that.
Number of federal public corruption convictions per 10,000 inhabitants from 1976 to 2018.
D.C. is like the Wayne Gretzky of corruption.
They're just crushing number two.
They're not even a state.
No, it's not.
And then it's Illinois third.
Then Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Jersey, Georgia, next on that list.
These aren't red or blue states.
It's not like they're all blue states or red states.
So how do you interpret this map right here?
You know, I don't really know a lot about what's going on in Louisiana.
I'm not surprised with some of the history there, right?
A lot of it is tradition and customary practices, okay?
And Illinois customary practices.
Here again, I'm the only one who didn't get rich in that business because I wasn't like those other people.
They do it through legal corruption.
They pass the laws that benefit themselves, their law practices, and they get really rich.
But I would say this about Illinois.
Illinois is so corrupt politically that even our U.S. attorneys can be corrupt, like those corrupt motherfuckers who did to me what they did.
They're dirty, rotten scumbags, and they're corrupt, and they abuse the rule of law.
And instead of going after the real corruption, and maybe what's happening now with Madigan, that's happening.
Instead of going after the real corruption, they went after a guy so they can look like they did something because I had a high office and they make names for themselves and they just add another governor to the list of the trophies that they win.
In that recording, you said maybe I should just gone back and listen to Mel Bell and, you know, not even done any of that stuff and just kind of, you know, Mel Bell being your, not Mel Bell, Dick Bell.
My father-in-law, your father-in-law, right?
Who helped you come up, by the way.
A lot of the things he played, and you give him a lot of credit for him helping you come out, but then you guys had a fallen out once you became a governor where he felt like he no longer had influence over you and you were kind of becoming your own man and you were doing your own thing.
He couldn't get any influence.
And then he turned on you, and that kind of led to you getting arrested.
Would you agree with that?
Very much so.
He had a landfill.
You see, my father-in-law, look, I love him.
The strange is this, yet he's, I think, had a big hand in what happened because he had a landfill that was operating in violation of Illinois environmental rules.
I learned about it, and I had to make, I had to act.
And I had three options.
I chose to shut it down, let him go to court, clean up the environmental issue, let the court decide what should happen.
But in the meantime, as we were exploring this and learning about his issue, he was threatening me through third parties.
If I shut this down, he's going to do X, Y, and Z on all the rest.
He ended up having mobsters involved in the whole thing.
The whole thing was rotten and dirty.
And I did my job and I shut it down.
And he was in fact down here in Florida at the time vacationing.
He had a home in Sanibel Island on the West Coast.
And he called a press conference.
He went to Fort Myers and just started bashing me.
And he attacked one of my good friends who was my top fundraiser, saying that he was trading board and commissioned appointments for $50,000 campaign contributions, a big lie that he later on would retract because he was being threatened with a lawsuit.
But once he did that, he unleashed the furies on me.
The FBI got really interested, and within a month, they were in my life.
He started it, and he knew it.
And he was smart politically.
He's an old Chicago ward boss.
That whole system that I was up against.
I married into it.
I love his daughter.
Part of him I love too, still in spite of it all.
But he's a son of a bitch, man.
And this is your father-in-law.
This is his father-in-law.
You're still married to Patty, yes?
I'm still married to Patty.
He was over at the house on Christmas Eve, of course, and he's 80%.
How do you navigate this nonsense?
You know what?
My Christian faith instructs me to forgive.
Imagine Thanksgiving, how it's like Christmas.
The guy that puts you away is your father-in-law, and you're still married to his daughter.
Well, he wasn't the only guy.
He is not the guy that put you away.
He kind of came out of Fort Montgomery.
But you're saying he had a hand in it.
He did.
He unleashed the furies.
He knew what he was doing.
I don't think he anticipated it would get as bad as it did.
I don't think that.
But did he know that the FBI is going to come calling when he makes an allegation like that?
He's a seasoned pro in Chicago politics.
He'd been there since the 1970s.
Yeah, he knew.
Well, yeah, a lot of the stuff you got.
What did he get you?
Did it start off with Congress?
What roles did you have before he became a governor?
Yeah, and by the way, he was helpful to me when I got started, but it helped his politics.
This wasn't exactly, you know, here's my son.
I want to groom him to be my successor.
I'm the son-in-law.
You know what I mean?
It was, you know, as long as my wife Patty loves me, I'm fine with him.
But other than that, he could care less what happens with me, right?
So his political interests were such that he needed a candidate to run for state representative.
Because in that Chicago, old Chicago ward boss world, if you don't have a state representative, that's your guy.
You're emasculated.
You're not such a big, tough boss.
And so he was getting screwed by the politics around him in the neighborhood.
He needed a candidate.
He had somebody in the family who was a lawyer, thought might be able to give a speech.
I had a name nobody could say.
We expected to lose.
I ran against a 12-year-old incubator.
Turned out I was good at it, and we won big.
And then all of a sudden, we had higher aspirations.
He was very helpful to me in that race, helpful to me in my congressional race, then helpful to me in the governor's race.
But the higher you go, the less influence somebody like that has.
And he felt estranged.
But the problem was that landfill.
And anyway, it's very complicated.
I'm telling you, man, my next left, I'm going to be you.
I do not want to be.
What a life you've lived.
Well, let me go back to this.
So some say you had many strong aspirations of one day being a president.
Was that true?
Like, you wanted to be a president one day?
You know, yes and no.
You become the governor.
People start talking about you that way.
I wasn't saying it.
They were talking about me that way.
And look, anybody who's up that high in politics looks at the next position.
So I wouldn't say I wasn't interested in it.
But let me say this.
I honestly thought, and this might sound like bullshit, but for the first time in my life, I was in a position, governor, chief executive of a big state, with real power to actually do real stuff for people.
I spent six years in Congress.
I think I was a good congressman.
But you don't have a lot of influence there, especially when you're new and young.
It's seniority has a lot to do with it.
And it's also a collective body.
So it's not like you can just do things.
Now, suddenly, for the first time in my life, I've got power.
I was the youngest in my family, so I never carved the turkey or, you know, my fatherlock harvested turkey Thanksgiving dinners.
Now here, suddenly I'm the governor of Illinois.
I can actually do stuff.
If I wanted to, if I was pursuing a presidential path, and that was my big aspiration, I wouldn't have ruffled feathers.
I wouldn't have pushed the stuff that I was pushing.
I'd have played nice with all the political leaders, and they'd have been happy to kick me out of Illinois and run me for president if I was doing it that way.
Frankly, with Obama, all due respect, all show no go.
I mean, he gives a good speech.
There's not a lot of substance there.
No real achievements for people.
And he became the first black president in American history, a great opportunity for our country to bring us further together on race.
But he left in his wake a country further divided on race because he played politics with that issue and he's made our country a less united place, in fact, a more divisive place and an angrier place.
He could have been a great president, and he fucked it up, in my opinion, because he wouldn't invest political capital in it.
So to answer your question, maybe the mistake I made if it was being president only was that I was truly trying to get stuff done for people and use my power that way instead of just being nice with all the politicians, courting people, and going up higher.
Maybe that would have been the better play, and I would have gone to the White House and not the shithouse.
You know, a story comes out.
Obviously, you know the story, NBC Chicago, and you've been talking about this nonstop for a minute.
Rod Blogoevich files lawsuit seeking the right to run for office again in Illinois, right?
Former governor of Illinois filed a lawsuit in August of 2021, arguing his civil rights were violated when the Illinois State Senate banned him from running for state or local office more than a decade earlier in 2009.
The Illinois General Assembly removed Blugojevich as governor and barred him from seeking elected office in Illinois ever again.
I think they even put your name in there.
In federal civil rights complaint, Bogojevich, now 65, declared what happened to him was unconstitutional because he was denied the right to call witnesses and to cross-examine the government's witness.
The governor also claimed he was denied the right to present evidence, especially certain undercover tapes.
And as a result, according to the court rulings, people have been denied the right to vote.
Who in the past has had a similar situation like you who went to jail, did time, came back, and they were able to run again and they went back into office in some sort of an office in the past.
Has anyone ever done that?
Oh, yes.
Marion Berry, the Washington, D.C. mayor, we have an alderman in Chicago by the name of Walter Burnett, bank robber.
By the way, a great alderman, been there for 27 years.
He's been allowed to run.
I'm the only one that expressly has been put in legislation that says I can't run for anything.
And there's a story behind that.
Marion Berry, what happened with Mary Berry?
He was caught doing crackers.
He cracked cocaine on tape, and then he came back and was elected mayor again.
In 1916.
Maybe you should have been doing crack rather than selling a sentence seat.
Hold on, no, no, no.
There was never a sale of the sentence seat.
I just got to say on July 22nd, 2015, the appellate court confirmed it.
They called it routine political log rolling.
I was vindicated on that.
Okay, so in 1916, by the way, the socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, got something like 2 million votes in a presidential race while sitting in the state penitentiary in Indiana.
So he was actually able to run for president while sitting in a prison cell in Indiana.
But Look, there was a story behind that too.
They came to me after I was arrested, the political leaders in Illinois.
This is how cynical they are.
And they were offering me a deal.
If I step aside, don't pick a senator, and temporarily become incapacitated.
There's a law that allows a governor who, if he or she is sick, can be incapacitated temporarily.
The lieutenant governor assumes the responsibilities of the office.
They were going to extend that law to me.
This is what the offer was.
If I agreed to do this, then I could keep my pay as the governor, something like $170,000 or $190,000 a year, my security detail.
And once I clear my name, I can become governor again.
That's what they offered me.
I turned it down for many reasons.
And part of the deal was you can't pick a senator.
I turned it down for many, many reasons.
Chief among them was I did nothing wrong.
I'm not giving it at all.
And they know I did nothing wrong because this is legal politics.
That's routine.
It happens all the time.
So I picked a senator, which pissed them all off.
I picked Roland Burris, an African-American respected person in Illinois politics, former attorney general in our state.
I did it in spite of the fact that every Democratic senator, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, all wrote me a letter saying, if you send us a senator, we're not taking one.
And so I sent this African-American man there, and for the first day they wouldn't let him in.
It was like in the age of Obama, our first black president.
We had gone back to the early 1960s, and James Meredith is trying to get into old miss.
They wouldn't let this guy in, the most exclusive club in the world, the United States Senate.
Well, America watched this on television, and within a day, I think the African-American community around the country saw it.
The Democrats folded, and they let him in and held a dinner for him that night.
Typical politicians, right?
So when I was doing that, they said to me, if you pick a senator, we're going to throw you out of office before Groundhog Day, and we're going to pass a law that disqualifies you from running for anything.
That's how that happened.
And I argue it's unconstitutional directed at me.
And I should have a right to run.
But better than that, the people of Illinois should have a right to vote against me if they want.
I'm not interested in running for anything necessarily.
The first primary I'd have to win is my wife.
She's made it clear.
If I run, I'm doing very good.
Are you saying you're not interested in running?
Even if you win this lawsuit, are you trying to tell me with all your political acumen and everything that has been built up with you over the last decade, you have no interest in running for public office again?
Look, because I don't believe it.
I feel like I see a politician, a well-polished politician who has a story where he's been dragged through the mud and you have something, you have a chip on your shoulder, like Pat said.
So even if you win this lawsuit, are you saying that you don't want to run?
Okay, I don't know if my wife's watching this, but let me answer this as best I can, okay?
Because I'd have to get through that.
Because she's been clear.
If I ever get in politics again, I'm doing it with my second wife.
And she's unbelievable.
She did say that by the way.
Yeah, she says it repeatedly.
What a wonderful wife.
She defied all the odds.
Nine to one odds when I was arrested, the Vegas Oddsmakers had it that she would leave.
I know as a statistical fact that a woman and a man, if a guy's in prison for four years or more, there's better than 90% chance she's out.
She leaves.
She can't wait, especially if he's got a lot more time to do, which was the case with me.
She's defied all the odds.
She's a wonderful mother, best person I've ever known.
I love her.
She's great.
And she's gone through so much because of the career I had.
She suffered greatly.
So do I need to be a better husband and think about her?
Of course.
And that's the first priority.
In the event that I was somehow successful in this lawsuit, and I say somehow just because I've had nothing but bad luck in that building.
But if that happened, are you asking me, would that whet my appetite?
Would I be very interested in exploring the possibility?
I'm like one of those boxers who fights into the 50s, right?
You just can't get out of that arena, right?
You want to get back in there and get that title back.
So there is that element I have.
And I do look at Chicago.
I look at our horseshit mayor.
She sucks.
Our city is crazy with violence.
You're no fan of Lori Lightfoot.
She's a bad mayor.
I actually like the fact that she's a woman.
I like the fact that she's black.
I like the fact that she's a lesbian.
The thing that disqualifies her is she's a former U.S. attorney.
But she's a terrible mayor, and she's given payment.
Sounds like a woke dream right there.
And she's gone on to this whole defund the police stuff.
She's not backing the police.
We have tremendous crime in our city.
75% of the victims are black kids, black people, and it's just tragic.
Anyway, to answer your question, if I won that lawsuit, I would, of course, be really interested.
I might want to tippy toe and tap my wife on the back, on the shoulder, and say, honey, can we have a talk?
And maybe see, perhaps, maybe she might have an open mind.
What would you run for, though?
If you could, what would you run for?
Would you go senate or would you go straight governor?
Would you go mayor?
What would you run for?
Well, I mean, you know, I wouldn't really, I don't see myself being governor again.
I'll tell you, Mayor of Chicago would be a great job.
I'm not saying that, though.
I don't want to make any noise or news because it's high.
Right now, there's a law that says I can't do it.
But that'd be a job that'd be really challenging to bring you to the next step.
What would you do differently than what she's doing right now?
Again, with the whole Chirac thing, and every time you turn on the news, more murders in Chicago, July 4th, New Year's, Chicago.
It's just constant.
What would you do differently?
How could you change Chicago?
I'd hire 10,000 more police officers.
I'd get them from around the community, a lot of them from the black areas, the black neighborhoods, train them the way you're supposed to be trained.
In other words, I'd double the police force.
I'd have the backs of the police, and we know where the gangbangers are, and we'd go out and arrest them.
So you're not trying to defund the police in Chicago.
Just the opposite.
I dramatically increase funding for the police.
You don't sound very much like a woke Democrat to me.
I'm an orphan Democrat.
That's why I call myself a Trumpocrat.
I think millions of others like me across America are like this.
Break that down what that, what the you're the first person I've ever heard use the phrase Trumpocrat.
Obviously, he ⁇ you're the first person to be fired by Trump and then pardoned by Trump.
You're an exclusive company right there.
What does it mean to be a Trumpocrat?
A Trumpocrat is someone who's still on the side of working people, everyday people, the silent majority, forgotten voices, who recognize there is a ruling class in America.
They're elitist snobs, and they screw ordinary people.
They lie to them all the time, like that Canadian Prime Minister Judea, what a liar he is.
We'll go into that in a minute, maybe.
And that Trump has started a political movement that's part of the realignment of American politics, where a lot of traditional working class men and women who voted Democrat historically have recognized the Democratic Party has taken them for granted and in many ways sold him out, like trade agreements with China and some other countries that have sent their jobs overseas.
Those types of voters have always been the ones that have been the ones I really fought hard for.
They were like my mother and father.
So I think I would say that that's a Trumpocrat.
And I think, you know, he's got his own style.
Everybody has their own style.
But the actual movement that he started, I think, is for real.
And there's a political realignment that's going on in America.
And I predict that Democrats are going to see a tremendous loss of black support in this next election.
And the growth of the Latino voters for this new kind of politics that Trump is backing, not the old-line Republican Party of Romney, McCain, or McConnell, but the sort of new politics that Trump has created.
I think you're going to see an increase in Latino voters.
Eventually, they're going to become predominantly Republican voters.
I do believe that because they work hard, live in the American dream.
They're like the new Italian-American community in America.
And they're growing, the fastest-growing community in all of America.
So let's go through a couple stories.
I want to get your reactions on them.
So, one, there's a story here from Brad Bard Blugoevich.
Democrats, very fearful of what I know.
Ex-Democrat, I don't know, governor turned Trumpocrat.
Rod Blogoevich said he believes Governor J.B. Pritzker tried to keep him in jail because Democrat establishment is afraid of what he knows and what he will say soon.
The ex-governor blasted Pritzker for reportedly calling Trump not once but twice, requesting to keep him behind bars.
J.B. Carl Trump, not once but twice, joining with the most Republicans to say, keep him in, don't let him out, keep him in, don't let him out.
Why did he do it?
Bilgovich continued before it foreshadowing his willingness to expose the underbelly of his former party.
I truly believe it's because J.B. Pritzker, Governor Pritzker, and some of the Democratic political establishment is very fearful.
They're very fearful of what I know and what I can't say and what I'm likely to say and what I will say soon.
That's why I think that he did that.
So what is it that you know that they're afraid of?
Well, there's a lot of things, a lot of them are on the tapes.
And that's one of the reasons why those tapes are under seal.
So a lot of the stuff that's on those tapes, I can't speak about, except for the ones that have been released.
Some of them actually illegally.
The Chicago Tribune was able to get tapes, notwithstanding the court seal, and the Republican candidate for governor uses them against J.B. Pritzker and our governor in the race, his race for governor back in 2018.
Pritzker's on the phone.
He called me up and asked me to make him a United States Senator.
So he's on the very calls that ended up sending me word I went.
And I politely had full discussions with him about his aspirations to be a senator, told him it was unlikely that I'd pick him.
I had a good relationship with him back then.
He asked me then if I could, he was shopping around for an office, if I could make him stay treasurer, because I had the power to do that too.
And he anticipated the vacancy of the state treasurer's office.
I told him that he had a better chance of me doing that for him than the United States Senate.
Nothing illegal about these conversations, but within the conversation, he was referring to my desire to appoint a black person to the Senate as being a political problem, my black problem, he called it, which almost indicates certainly some insensitivity about race.
And if you're these neo-racists, these neo-racists that keep pointing their fingers at everything being racist, I mean, he'd certainly be one of their poster childs, wouldn't he, for saying that?
I'm not saying he is.
I'm just saying he said it.
But I had a good relationship with him.
I had pointed him, he had supported my opponent in the Democratic primary for governor in 2002.
But then when I won, he asked me if I'd make him the director of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, and I did.
And as far as I know, he did a good job.
And then when calamity came after he made those phone calls, that phone call to me, and we talked politely, I understood that he stayed away because everybody did, and they were right to do it.
Because when you have what I have, that's leprosy.
Nobody wants to come near that.
That's lest they catch it.
But then when I'd been in prison for all those years and Trump had publicly said that he was going to let me out, indicated he was letting me out.
He had called my wife, Patty, in July of 2020 or 2019 that he was going to do it.
And this was a little bit before his call on that Ukrainian phone call, right?
Five Republican congressmen wrote President Trump a letter saying, don't let him out.
And then Pritzker called Trump twice, urged him not to do it.
And, you know, if he wants to say publicly, keep him in, he's a corrupt son of a bitch and all the rest, I get the politics of that.
I don't like it, but I get it.
But to go the extra mile to actually call the president and try to keep him, to keep me in prison when I have young children like he has, and I'd already been in prison for seven and a half years.
Why would he do that?
I think because of the political fears that they have on the things that I could do and say that would expose them.
Some of that on those FBI tapes, I think.
Governor, you seem like you're in pretty good shape right now.
Yeah.
Okay, I'm not sure.
A lot better shape than Governor Pritzker.
That's my question, actually.
Have you seen a picture of what Governor Pritzker looks like?
Let's take a look.
So my question to you as they pull up his picture seems like you're a fighter.
You've mentioned that you were a golden gloves boxer.
Pritzker doesn't seem to be working out as much as you.
My question is this.
Politically, if you were to fight him, who would win?
And then if you actually stepped in a ring with Governor Pritzker, who would win that fight?
Well, I may be a no-brainer, right?
That could be no contest.
Hillary would be a tougher fight than him.
You think you'd knock him out?
What do you say?
I'd go right to the body.
Yeah.
Right?
He'd bend over me.
That's unfortunate.
I wonder why they do this with him.
I mean, he was inherited a lot of money.
Yeah, the Hyatt family, Pritzker family.
I'm well aware who they are.
I say things I shouldn't say, and I'm going to say it again.
I know this is wrong because I shouldn't make fun of the fact that he's we have a chubby governor.
Rotund.
Beyond rotund.
But he was born with a silver ladle in his mouth.
And that's not right.
And the reason I say it is because of what he did when he called Trump to keep me in.
Otherwise, I wouldn't make fun of him like that.
But if I step away and try to be good as I should try to be, I feel bad for him.
That can't be good.
He shouldn't be like that.
He should spend all that money and time to, you know, take a walk and do it consistently.
He's just not good for his health.
And I think the stress of the office is partly causing that.
Yeah.
I think.
And politically, how do you think you would match up against him?
Let's say you could run again for governor.
I assume he's going to run again for re-election.
How would you fare against him?
In a Democratic primary?
Sure.
I think I could be really competitive.
I really do.
Now, he's got, you know, he spent $170 million of his own money that he inherited to win governor the first time.
$170 or $175 million.
By the way, if I was going to sell a Senate seat, isn't he my guy?
I mean, this is the guy he would have bought it because he wanted to be something.
He asked me to make him senator.
Then he asked me to make him treasurer.
He just wanted to be something.
And if I was what they said I was, this is my guy.
I could have, you know, given him a discount, $30 million.
I will say that he is giving you a run on the great head of hair campaign.
Both of you, governor, former governor is killing it in the hair game.
What do you say to that?
Yeah, good.
I mean, look, I miss the old JP that I used to know and like.
I mean, I never realized he has that mean streak that he has.
And by the way, he's been a terrible governor, too.
And the way he's mishandled the COVID situation, he's politicized that.
And in such a way where people in Illinois don't trust him.
And it's not unlike some of the other governors, too.
They don't practice what they preach.
They're big hypocrites and they don't lead by example or join in the shared sacrifice.
And when you're asking people to make sacrifices, you should be the first one making those sacrifices.
Rod, how closely are you following the story with Durham, Hillary, Trump?
Are you following pretty closely?
Yes, because I recognize that stuff.
I know it.
So I want to see it from your perspective because we've read the other side of stories, the one that's from Fox News or Breibart or Daily Wire.
I want to read you WAPO's perspective on what happened here.
We read the Vanity Fairs, well, where Hillary was like, I didn't do anything.
You know, here's what they're trying to do.
It's a spin job.
You saw her speech she gave last week in regards to Durham.
But here's the WAPO story about it, how the right embraced the false claim that Hillary Clinton spied on President Trump.
The group includes anonymous Twitter accounts such as one called Techno Fog.
Conservative journalists, such reporters for the Epoch Times, Red State, former administration officials, Fox News, Newsmax, then led the charge on conservative television, often in misleading ways.
In many ways, the highlighted phrase, executive office for the president of the United States, formed the core of the conservative news coverage that followed a claim that Democrats had spied on Trump even when he was president.
But Durham's filing, which is written in confusing prose, did not actually say that Trump's internet traffic had been monitored during his presidency.
Rodney Jaffe, tech executive one, who's not been charged, is an internet entrepreneur who founded the world's first commercial internet hosting company.
Sometimes some statements by Jaffe spokesperson to and Sussman's legal team insisted that the data Sussman provided to the CIA in 2017 meeting pertained to the time before Trump became president when Barack Obama was still president.
So what do you know about story?
How much credibility is there behind the story?
Which story?
Durham.
Oh, Durham?
Yeah.
Oh, I think every bit of it.
I believe every bit of it.
My regret is it's gone so slow.
I think it's going to, if they do this honestly, you're going to find a lot more people involved.
Here's what I think really happened.
I think this was opposition research by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
It was conducted by that law firm Perkins and Cooey, which incidentally represented me on my political stuff, campaign finance stuff and things like that.
Prominent Democratic law firm.
They got this guy steal to drum up a fake dossier and all that stuff they said about Trump and Russian collusion and having sex with prostitutes.
I mean, this is really familiar when you're in that ugly business like politics.
You see this.
Some people will do that on the other side.
They'll cross lines and do it.
And, you know, let's, I mean, I think most people would agree who understand Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.
Those guys, they play, not her, she and him.
They play hardball politics.
So the whole thing was predicated on a big lie, manufactured by them for political reasons.
And then Trump won, in spite of that.
And they were determined to destroy his presidency and, in effect, cause a coup d'etat.
And having been a victim of one myself, I recognize it when they're doing it to somebody else.
And, you know, Obama and Biden were in meetings with General Flynn and early on during the transition period and suddenly Flynn is facing criminal charges.
The whole thing seems to be part of a concerted campaign to undermine the succeeding president.
They didn't really want him.
The irony is they didn't accept the outcome of that election in 2016.
And from the very beginning, were out to destroy his presidency and destroy him.
And they still are.
Rod, you hear the story when people say, you know, politics is such a dirty game.
I mean, how many times have you heard that?
But how many people?
Everybody says that.
I mentioned a dirty game.
Five times on this plane.
It's a dirty game.
It's a dirty game.
How dirty is it really for a guy that's been on the inside?
How dirty of a game is politics?
I did 2,896 days in prison.
That's how dirty it is.
It's fucking dirty.
I didn't break a single law.
I didn't care.
And I'll never stop saying it because I didn't.
It was a political hit.
I believe the evidence would show, if I'm allowed to dig deeper into it, that the U.S. attorney was politically motivated and had worked with the Democratic House Speaker on the impeachment against me.
And I think that we have a real dangerous problem in America.
Forget about me, what happened, happened.
But moving forward, we have a real problem with federal prosecutors with uncontrolled power, no checks and balances on these people.
They have unlimited resources.
They can terrorize and destroy people, make people say certain things that they don't say it.
They'll destroy them.
So they say things against somebody else.
They're using it now against political leaders.
If you've got a politician who's taken cash in a brown paper bag, throw his ass in prison, of course.
But they're criminalizing things that aren't crimes.
Russian collusion, the sale of the Senate seat, it's like they went to the same Madison Avenue advertising firm to come up with these clever names.
And the media, they're such, they're all about the advertising dollars.
Rather than do their jobs and seek the truth, they're out running with these narratives.
And they create a political environment that inevitably leads to what you saw with Trump and then with me.
With Trump, it was polarized and divided between the parties, attempt to throw a president out and impeach him on nothing.
He had nothing to do with any of it.
In fact, it came from the other side.
And then the second impeachment on the Ukrainian phone call, maybe, you know, it wasn't polite, but nothing illegal about that phone call.
In fact, the President of the United States has an obligation as a chief law enforcement in America.
If he has reason to think that the former Vice President of the United States and his son are doing kinky stuff in Ukraine and getting wealthy on it, he has an obligation to look into it.
Does he actually?
He does.
Yes, he's the chief law enforcement of the United States.
He has responsibility to the Constitution.
If there's reason to think that somebody's doing something that's illegal, you have an obligation to look into it.
Being that politics is such a dirty person.
So you asked the question.
Yeah, being that politics is such a dirty game, and I know we've alluded to the fact that, you know, maybe you would run again if your wife would be so gracious.
Sorry.
If you could, because again, I'm going to go back to the fact that I think you're a brilliant politician, whether people, you know, love you, hate you, whatever, you got that it factor.
But if you could build these days the perfect politician, someone who can withstand all the drama, social media, you know, bring the country together.
Who would you, like, if you could take, I could take a little of JFK, I would take Trump's, you know, arrogance, I would take Barama's eloquency.
How would you build the perfect politician today for president?
Yeah, that's a great question.
In other words, a little bit of Abraham Lincoln, a little bit of Franklin Roosevelt, a little bit of Ronald Reagan, right?
Yeah, I think you could piece certain things together.
Reagan's ability to talk to the American people would be one skill set that would be very helpful, soothing, calming, trustworthy.
You know, it's interesting when Reagan was president, if you polled people on the specific positions Reagan took on most issues, they didn't agree with him, but they trusted him.
So I would say that would be a piece of it.
Clearly, Lincoln, his kindness, his goodness, and his strength, there's elements of that.
Franklin Roosevelt's ability to articulate and lead.
I'll give Obama points there as well.
Maybe take some of that.
But ultimately, to be a great leader, I believe, you got to have it inside of you.
And the toughness inside gets revealed by the circumstances and the events of the time that you have to face.
Lincoln rose to the challenge and showed a real toughness inside.
Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing.
One's a Republican, one was a Democrat during times of great crisis.
Some of these, you can take Obama's eloquence and his ability to give a speech, but underneath that, there isn't that greatness that those other two have.
And if I were to say the ideal combination, I would frankly, if I were to limit it, I would say Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, both great communicators in their own way.
Who do you think is the best up-and-coming politician?
Obviously, you know, Trump has been there, Biden's been there, Bernie's been there, Nancy Pelosi's been there, you know, John McCain, I mean, the list goes on on McConnell.
These are guys in their 70s, 80s.
Who in their 40s do you look at and say, damn, that guy's got it or that girl's got it?
Who comes to mind these days, the young up-and-comers?
I don't know that we know who that person is yet.
It could be somebody from outside of politics.
I do think that more and more people who are outside of politics could be helpful to the system.
I do think this, though, I would say, you know, America is so divided.
When I came home, so much has changed.
I didn't recognize my party.
You know, it was eight years that I was gone.
And, you know, social media, all this stuff is so different now, right?
Everything is so quick and people have all these views, which is important that they have those.
This idea of cancel culture and this wokeness, it's a very different thing and a very dangerous thing, I think.
I think freedom is in danger in the United States.
And I think that the hyper-partisan nature of our politics is making things worse, not better.
And I don't know that I have a direct solution to it because both parties are sort of locked into their positions.
It's all about winning the next election.
I do think the Republicans are going to have a very good year, 2022.
I do think there's a realignment going on in American politics, which could be very helpful and get us back on a good track.
But I think the hyper-partisanship is so extreme that it's just turning off too many people and dividing us too much.
It would be nice to see some person come out who might be able to find a way to unify without selling out his or her principles.
And so a guy like Reagan had that ability.
Roosevelt had that ability.
Lincoln had that ability.
Somebody like that.
Do I see anybody on the horizon right now?
I don't.
I'm obviously very biased towards President Trump for what he did for me.
I mean, I think stylistically, you know, he is what he is.
Some people love it.
Some people don't.
But I do think that a lot of the stuff he's been working at and talking about is right for America.
You know, the more I'm thinking about this, and, you know, he's saying what he's saying, FTR, you know, Lincoln assassinated, Reagan attempted assassination.
You know, these guys.
Franklin Roosevelt, too.
Did you know that?
Yeah, Franklin Dolson and then JFK same.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of these guys who push the envelope, they have a target on them, right?
Now, today, assassination is a different kind of assassination.
You got character assassination, which is worse sometimes than, you know, some may say is worse than the actual assassination, right?
Can I say something about that, Petro?
Sure.
During my troubles, look, you know, I make light of it, right?
I mean, but those were hard years.
And when you got this, and they're after you like that, and they have all that power, and you know deep down you're dead, but you're going to go down fighting.
I would frequently find comfort late at night when I try to fall asleep.
And I'd imagine myself walking in that federal court building and someone rescuing me from what I was facing by walking up to me and shooting me dead.
In other words, assassinate me.
I'd much rather have that than what they were doing to me.
Because a timely assassination, it's good for your obituary and people remember you in a more positive way.
But being sent to prison for corruption when you didn't do it seemed to me a far worse result.
And so when you call this the new kind of form of assassination, you're speaking to me.
Because in my own mind, my preference would have been the other than rather than what ultimately happened.
Now I'm finally through it.
It's over.
And I'm lucky.
I guess I'm glad I wasn't assassinated because I believe in second acts.
But you hit it right.
This is the new form of assassination now, this politics of personal destruction with the use of fake criminal charges to get people.
Yeah.
So this almost makes me not trust people that are career politicians.
It almost makes you think like, what do you have to do to be a career politician?
Not somebody that comes in, does the job, and leaves.
Hey, I'm just going to come.
I'm going to do two terms.
I'm out of here.
Okay, I did my time.
One of my rules I follow in our family is make your money.
After you make your money, take care of your family.
And once you can take care of your family, go get back to public service in one way or another, be a mayor, be a congressman, be a senator, be a governor, do something, and then leave, right?
Matter of fact, the shorter you're in, the more I trust you.
The longer you're in, I trust you less.
Because how many deals do you have to do behind closed doors?
How much do you have to play the game?
You know, in some industries, tenure is a respectable thing to do, right?
In some industries, you think about it, it's a respectable thing to do.
Some industries, like politics, I think tenure, it almost works backwards because you eventually are going to have someone that's going to show you something that they're going to try to, hey, if you don't do this, we're going to introduce this to the, we're going to send this to New York Times.
We're going to say this about you.
We're going to tell this to your wife.
We're going to tell this to your kids.
We're going to tell this to your family to ruin you.
And then you're tempted to say, shit, okay, what do you want me to do?
I need you to do this.
And then they have you forever, right?
That's what I mean when I say, how ugly is politics, not what you went through.
I really want to know how ugly is the job of being a politician as a career politician.
I think one of the biggest problems in America is the fact that we have a permanent ruling class made up of career politicians, lobbyists, former congressmen and senators who are lobbyists, permanent staffers who are all over Washington.
I call it the political industrial complex.
It exists in Washington, D.C.
It exists in state capitals across America.
Presidents come and go.
Governors come and go.
These people are there forever.
And when they leave Congress, they're lobbyists.
So there's the same people, and they talk amongst themselves, and their worldview becomes that world, not where the rest of us live, the other side of the Potomac.
They make good money, five, six million a year.
No doubt about it.
It's very wealthy.
And they protect themselves.
They support themselves on the backs of everybody else in America.
It is the permanent ruling class of these career politicians against we the people.
And that's part of the realignment that's happening in politics.
That's why it's changing.
And so there's a lot of anger, understandably so.
And it exists in both parties.
No one party is more guilty than the other.
They're both very much part of that.
And what's interesting, too, is that the idea of term limits, for example, when I first became a state rep in 1993, I supported that.
And the guy that was pushing it would ultimately be my lieutenant governor.
He was the state treasurer at the time.
He pushed it just to put his name on a bill so he can say it was for it, but he didn't care to even try to pass it.
There's a lot of that baloney that goes on in politics.
Then a lot of these guys that got elected in 1994, Republicans, promised term limits.
They were going to limit themselves.
Eight years.
When they got close to eight years, you know, by then people forgot the promise and they made excuses and they stayed.
But I do think term limits is something that should be seriously looked at.
And you know, the irony here is our first president, one of the greatest Americans of all time, George Washington, was all about what you just said.
He served two terms and that was it.
He could have been king.
He didn't want to be king.
He could have been a three-term president.
He didn't want to be a three-term president.
He believed, like in the old days of the Roman Empire, this Cincinnatus.
He was a farmer.
He'd leave the farm and go serve his country and then go back to farming and till the soil.
That was what Washington's view was of American politics.
And he set an example very early on.
But over time, that example has forgotten.
And now you've got Joe Biden as president who's been there.
Get this now.
He was 29 years old when he was elected, 30 when he was sworn in, the constitutionally youngest age he could be senator.
His whole adult life has been in Washington.
How could he possibly really understand the fact challenges that everyday people face because he's been so far away from it?
And just the opposite.
He's a creature of that swamp.
And it is a swamp.
And it's the same old people.
And it's them against us.
Let me ask you.
You know when sometimes you say there's crooked cops, right?
And then, well, you know, there's crooked pastors, right?
There's crooked preachers.
You know, there's crooked accountants.
There's greedy capitalists.
Crooked killer.
What I'm saying is, is the percentage of crookedness higher in the job of a career politician than any other occupation?
That's what I want to do.
You understand what I'm asking?
Yeah, exactly.
What I'm trying to do is.
There's always a few badasses.
Always in every industry.
But I wonder if the percentage of bad appliances is higher than other industries.
What would you say to that?
I'd say yes.
And I'd say part of it is because a lot of the crookedness is legal.
They make the rules that benefit themselves.
Remember that.
The rules are unfair and wrong, but they benefit themselves and therefore they're legal.
But it's crooked because it ain't right.
Who's the most crooked?
Is it the actual senator representative?
Is it the lobbyist?
Is it the campaign finance person?
Is it the person pulling the strings?
Is it the people donating the money?
Is it the Koch brothers?
Is it George Soros?
Like, who is the most corrupt in all this?
Well, I think it's a system.
I think it's a system.
And a lot of the things that you're referring to, the people you're talking about, aren't breaking laws.
They're just involved in the way the system is set up.
People don't like the idea of public funding for elections, okay?
But I wonder if that would not be a better play where you take money completely out of politics because they pander to their political donors.
And the new politics now is you have these grassroots contributors.
And Obama started this.
First, I thought this was a very good new development because he was able to encourage people, everyday people, to send small dollar checks and raise a-Bernie made his market.
And AOC now, right?
But on the political right, President Trump raises a lot of money that way, and a lot of conservative Republicans do.
So initially, I thought this is really going to be good because it's giving everyday people more of a voice.
But here's what it's done.
It's created further division.
Because if you even look like you have an open mind about the other side's point of view, you're going to run the risk of losing your toners.
They won't send you checks anymore.
So it's almost better for you to be even more strident against the other side.
And both sides will do this because it generates support among their donors.
I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
I don't know.
And the reason why I don't think it's going to change anytime soon is the following.
What percentage of career politicians, what percentage of our politicians today, and I'm talking Congress, Senate, governors, okay, take those three.
What percentage of them have been in politics more than 10 years?
Is majorities over 10 years or majorities less than 10 years?
More than 10 years.
Or even close.
What percentage would you say is more than 10 years?
60%, 70%?
Sure.
70%?
It's not going to happen.
You understand what I'm saying when I say it's not going to happen.
They're in too deep.
You're in too deep.
That's what they do.
It's like a young freshman senator.
I'm going to come in and I'm going to change Washington.
They're going to do one or two things.
You have a backseat, buddy.
Yeah, they're either going to destroy the guy's reputation or they're going to say, you have two choices, bro.
You either fall in line or we're going to do this to you.
Which one do you?
And there's got to be somebody that goes and has that conversation with them.
It's a tough gig.
But the differentiator these days is social media.
Look at AOC.
She hasn't exactly fallen in line with Nancy Pelosi or anything like that.
So look at Tulsi Gabbard.
Social media these days is the great equalizer before you left politics.
That's a very good point.
Social media wasn't really that prevalent.
So now if people don't agree with you, it's like, fuck all you guys.
I'm going to my millions of followers to raise money.
Matter of fact, that's what AOC just did.
Here's a newsweek story.
AOC slams Tucker Carlson as trash after he calls her rich white lady.
Representative AOC has referred to Fox and so Tucker Carlson as a creep after he falsely claimed that she was not a person of color, but instead a rich and titled white lady.
Carson insisted that AOC was white despite her shade while discussing the upcoming book, Take Up Space, the unprecedented AOC.
Carlson took exception to the book.
Books author writing that the congresswoman had fully outlawed white female asking whether they are referring to a trans thing because arguing that no one has done more personally to degrade American womanhood, AOC responded by sharing a clip of Carlson making the claim to Twitter alongside the caption, this is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with a dejo, okay, and referring to the Spanish language term pendejo, right, is what she's talking about.
But what do you think about AOC and her rise?
She's come up.
She's got nearly 50 million Twitter followers, and when she talks, she gets millions of views.
How do you think that happened?
She's a generational leader.
She's speaking to her generation.
I have two daughters, my older one, 25.
Not exactly all in on AOC, but her politics, not unlike some of that Bernie Sanders type socialist politics that sounds good, but realistically is ridiculous, doesn't work.
But she's a generational leader, and she's taken full advantage of the new mode of communication through social media.
What she's saying there, though, is an example of how these elitists, and she's now become part of the elite.
She's got a different backing, but she's part of the elite now.
How these elitists want us to believe stuff that we know our common sense tells us isn't true.
So, I mean, if you look at AOC, Tucker Carlson is not altogether wrong in how he said what she is.
I mean, she's from the suburbs, came from a nicer area that wasn't raised in the Bronx where she represents.
And can you say this?
But she's, it looks to me when I see her, she has light skin.
So she's saying she's a woman of color, but she seems.
But is he making the same mistake that you admitted making the same mistake when you said that you were more black than Obama?
She's light-skinned.
I think she looks Hispanic.
I don't like that.
Definitely Latina.
I'm just saying this goes down to the neo-racism race card.
I know you have strong feelings on that.
I'm just putting that out there.
She capitalizes off of opportunities like this.
She's a total capitalist.
You have to realize that.
Except her method of capitalism is different.
She capitalizes off any moment to play the victim card to get her audience to say, you know, he's this.
And hey, this is why we need to come together.
She's a very, very good, young, up-and-coming star of a politician.
She's a very good politician.
You've got to give it to her.
Less than 10 years, clearly.
Most politicians, 70% of them.
I think, do not be, how, Paul Parade right now, She's 32 right now.
I think she's 32 or 30.
You know, her name keeps coming up.
Age, AOC age is 32.
Yeah, she's 32, October 13th.
And she's a Libra.
Come on, AOC.
We're five days apart.
She's 32.
What does that say about her?
Pat is very big into the horse.
What does that say?
That's the 30%.
That screws it up.
Because there's no way you're going to hold her that's balanced.
There's nothing about her that's balanced.
She's not one that's willing to.
But is this the new politician, someone that doesn't bend for their party, that just builds up a massive social media?
I mean, you can compare her to being like Jake Paul or Logan Paul, where they're like, look, I don't give a shit about you, Dana White, UFC.
I don't care about you boxers.
I got my own following.
I'm going to go make my money.
The people are going to follow me and get in line or don't get in line.
I'm doing my own thing.
Social media has been the great equalizer these days.
Look at her career right now.
No, I think that's right.
What you're saying is right.
And she speaks for her generation.
She's appealing, and I could see where people would follow her.
But I think what Chuck Carlson is saying, I want to defend him only because it's my understanding she was raised in a suburban area, not in the Bronx, in the hood, like she's claiming.
Or maybe she doesn't claim it.
And while she has every right to express her views and support the people of her community and seems to be doing that in many ways, because that district, as I understand, has always been real far left.
She's, in some ways, what she accuses other people of being, privileged.
She doesn't come from there.
And so she has skill and talent.
Privileged side, I get.
Is she privileged?
Wasn't she a waitress before this?
Barista, she was working at AOC.
I think she was working at Starbucks as a barista just like 10 years ago.
She came from money or anything like that.
Clearly not.
The thing they're talking about the other day, she was flying first class, and she booked a flight on first class, and she was getting key to say, now you don't want to sit with the common people.
you want to sit in the first class with rich people.
She's going to get, and the reason why she's going to get that hate, girl from Bronx AOC who beat high-ranking Democrat Joe Crowley faces questions over her working-class background after it's revealed.
She grew up in a wealthy suburb north of New York City.
Yeah, but this article is like five years ago.
It is five years ago.
So she was a working class claim.
She has made 40-minute commute from Bronx or Scotland, but her architect father bought a house in wealthy Westchester County in 1991.
Ocasio-Cortez went on to attend Boston University and interned for Ted Kennedy.
Yeah, there you go.
I stand by what I say.
That's not representative of the Bronx.
I mean, I came from the city of Chicago.
I wish I could have been an intern for a U.S. Senator when I was coming up before I went to college.
I don't mean to say that this is some negative thing about her, but she's had some that part of the Democrat Party points their fingers at white guys and other people for being privileged, and yet their background is no different of the very people that they point fingers at.
That's the only point I'm trying to say.
But if you're asking me, is she the new form of political leader today?
No question about it.
She is.
And social media gives people whatever their political viewpoints might be a certain freedom where if they can build up support like you've done here with your podcast, you can be a separate individual entity and independent.
And that could in the long run, maybe serve our democracy in a good way.
Well, the analogy there is like we are no longer beholden to the mainstream media or the mainstream big government.
If you can create your own lane like a PBD or like a Rogan or like an AOC, the world is yours.
Exactly.
Today, this is the only difference, though.
You have to realize what's going on today, which is scary.
Today, for the first time, 40 years ago, complainers didn't have the mic.
40 years ago, you didn't hear complainers having a mic.
We heard from doers is what it was, right?
Whoever spoke was a doer.
Whoever had the limelight was a doer.
Today, the world is a little bit confused because complainers can get up there and sell a great argument in a convincing way and recruit other complainers.
And that mic today is very, very loud.
And they're better recruiters than doers.
Here's why.
A lot of times a doer will do the following.
Here's the weakness of a doer.
The weakness of a doer is the doer eventually goes and says, you know what?
I don't even want to, you know, that whole argument if you are seen arguing with a, you know, if you wrestle with a pig, you know, how does that saying go?
If you wrestle with a pig, you're going to get some mud on you.
Yeah, you're going to end up being the same thing, right?
So a lot of times if you argue with somebody that's just a, you know, person that makes no sense, others are sitting there saying, why are you even defending yourself, right?
Argue with an idiot and look in the mirror basically.
Yeah, you are the idiot.
So why are you associating yourself with an idiot?
So a doer will say, you know what, I'm good at man.
I'm going to leave.
But this guy's not going to stop talking, the complainer.
The complainer is going to keep going, And others will interpret that and say, did you see?
The complainer had a point.
He won because the other guy walked away.
Where in reality, the doer just said, I don't have time for you.
I got to go build my business.
I got to go in the arena.
I got to go get the hate.
I got to go try to build an economy so other people can have jobs and see what I can survive and still raise a family and still raise kids and still do all this stuff that I'm doing.
So the only difference today with the great equalizer of the mic is a complainer with a very persuasive way of communicating could baptize more people into the mindset of a complainer than a doer.
Well, I don't know, because let me give you a different perspective.
Sure.
Because nobody argues and debates with more complainers than you.
You have socialists and communists come on and you have great arguments and disagreements with them.
And one of the things that you say is let the audience decide.
Because I would classify a socialist in America today as a complainer, right?
But you're able to have these very impactful conversations.
And yeah, they might make a point, but you're oftentimes going to make a way more valid point.
And then the audience can decide who really is the idiot in that conversation.
Do I have a point there?
No, you have a very good point there.
I agree with you that there are a lot of, like, listen, take Rogan.
Rogan will bring anybody and have a conversation with them, right?
And the audience has to decide what they have to say.
And AOC today, her argument today, is creating momentum because of what's going on.
I can't tell you how many parents I'm speaking to and they say the following.
Here's how many parents I'm speaking to.
And I'll say, so what's your biggest struggle right now with your kids?
Oh my gosh, my daughter thinks AOC is her hero.
My son is obsessed with AOC.
It's their hero.
So there's nobody like somebody, you know, this young person here that's coming up, it's their hero.
It's their hero, right?
And why?
They're right.
You know, and you talk to the kids.
So tell me, why are you such a big fan of AOC?
You don't think these rich people, and I always ask open-ended questions of these young people that are between, you know, 18, 17 to 28 years old.
I say, so what do you think my capitalists?
Con.
All they care about is money.
That's exactly why AOC is going to go after them.
That's why this, and you're sitting there saying, got it.
And they have wealthy parents.
And not necessarily wealthy parents, but parents who are upper class, who are making money, who are going to school, parents who tend to believe in capitalism.
They tend to believe in capitalism, but their kids are being convinced by this.
So again, this tool, social media, is allowing people to convert and complainers sometimes.
So I guess the challenge would be the following.
So your question poses, leads to a challenge.
The challenge would be for doers to be a little bit more louder.
Just like you are.
Yeah, you know how sometimes they say, you know, stop posting these pictures.
I'm not going to post anything.
Okay.
I don't even want to deal with it.
Yeah, so I don't even want to deal with it, right?
But you know what?
No, you have to keep posting.
You have to keep posting because we have to.
I want my kid to look up to a person to say, I want to go make an impact and I want to go build a good life.
And you realize the older you get, money matters more.
It just does.
Money matters more the older you get.
Raising kids, yesterday we have a couple with her that was on the, we're spending time with them the afternoon.
I sent a video to you yesterday when I'm talking to when I'm doing the FaceTime with you.
The guy was sitting next to me.
And, you know, the cost of raising kids today, the cost of having a family today, it ain't cheap today to have a family.
It's a lot of work to have a family.
It's very complicated to have families.
So I just think doers need to be a little bit louder.
Power to those who are doing it, who question everything.
Well, look at Elon Musk.
There's no bigger doer than him these days.
And that guy's got the bully Paul Pitt.
And he is so incredibly important and another guy that has to be constantly challenged and protected because they're going to keep going after this guy.
You know, respect to him for not backing down.
He posted a picture the other day.
He's got such a great sense of humor.
He posted a picture the other.
Go on his Twitter account.
He posted a very funny picture the other day.
I don't know if you saw it or not.
It was a picture of 1980s phone booth versus today.
Did you see that?
Go to that picture he posted.
Got to love this guy's sense of humor, right?
To click on that.
Phone booth in 1992.
Phone booth in 2022.
He's not wrong.
He is not wrong.
Not for sure.
Go ahead.
You were going to say that.
I'd like to do a shout out to another group of the fellowship of the doers.
Okay.
I'm in the trucking industry.
I work for this company called CDL 1000, owned by Andrew Sopko, Ukrainian immigrant, great American success story, like you.
Truckers and the truckers up in Canada, freedom fighters, these people are hardworking men and women, go to work every day.
They drive long, lonely roads, long hours, delivering the food we put on the table, clothes that we wear, the building materials for the houses we live in and the buildings we rent from.
And now they're trying together to have their voices heard in their capital, and they're facing the elitist ruling class in Canada.
And yet I do believe that their example, it's frustrating to see how they're being treated, but their example is a powerful example of doers, people who work hard, getting their voices heard.
You know, AOC and that group of young liberals and complainers, as you say, what did Churchill say about young people?
If you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're older, you don't have a brain.
I'm confident history will repeat itself and our kids, including my daughters, will have a little bit more common sense as they have more life experience.
And God bless her for what she's doing out there advocating for her views.
I'm not so sure she's living that socialist lifestyle they advocate.
Either is Bernie Sanders because he's worth millions, isn't he?
But regular everyday people, forgotten people, solid Americans are starting to rise up.
Parents at school boards, truck drivers in Canada.
It's great to see.
It is great to see.
And they're going to save our country.
And they're going to put pressure on their political leaders who are going to back down because most politicians are afraid of the people.
They don't trust the people.
And if the people rise up and recognize they're being lied to, those politicians will hear them and they'll adjust.
What do you think about the way Trudeau is handling Canada?
Terrible.
That guy's an elitist snob.
Somebody ought to kick his ass.
I shouldn't say that.
Somebody say I'm saying something.
But he's over there lying.
He's calling those truckers Nazis.
You might have some idiot out there with a swastika.
But those are hardworking men and women who love their country.
They're not Nazis, and he knows it.
They're doing talking points that come from political analysts and consultants.
And they put that stuff out there to mislead the public.
Just like Russian collusion, some of the other stuff, my own experience.
I can see it.
I know it.
So I don't like him at all.
I think he's terrible.
And he's a guy.
He's the son of a former prime minister.
He's never done any heavy lifting in his life.
He's a former son of a former prime minister.
Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, is his father.
Oh, no, no.
I thought you were saying he's the son of a former prime minister, Castro.
I thought that's where you were with him.
Trudeau.
I got you.
Trudeau and Canada.
Former prime minister of Canada.
So he grew up as an elitist and, you know, and living the good life, never did any real work.
And the idea that truck drivers who do real work, who bring us the food that we eat and all the other stuff that we need, that he'd be treating them that way offends me.
And he is a member of a political party in Canada that would be the member, would be the political party I was a member of here in America.
Did you see that video with the cops trampled over that old lady, the horse?
Did you see that video?
Can you play that video?
It's very disturbing, by the way.
Watch what happens here.
Come on through.
What is happening here, Jesus?
What is this lady doing?
Trampling.
Trampling horses.
Trampling.
Stop it.
Stop it.
and went over the lady.
Oh my God.
They just trampled that lady.
They just fully trampled that lady.
This is in Canada.
This is in that truck project.
You know, you saw this in Australia.
You never thought this would happen in Canada.
But the thing with when you see these videos with cops, I can't believe, I have a hard time believing that all these cops fully agree with Trudeau.
So you know what I'm saying?
Like, I have a very hard time believing that.
So imagine the job that you have to do, but you disagree with the way the guy's treating everybody.
It's the same as the SS in 1945.
It's just they're sitting back and they're quiet.
You look at the video.
There was from the same protest, there was a video of cops beating a woman with the butt of a rifle.
The woman got pulled over onto the side of the cops.
They were on top of her and they started beating her with the butt of this rifle.
And it's like they need to speak up and say something or else they're going to become a real problem.
And they're going to become the SS in the brown shirts.
It's because they're afraid to speak up and speak their mind.
They just do what they're told and obey the orders.
You know, it's like this, everybody believes in back the blue.
And I don't debate that, right?
But you can only do that so far.
At some point, the blue have to stand up and realize that they're more than just somebody who's given an order.
They have to speak up and stand up and say, no, this isn't what we signed up for.
This isn't what we took our oath for.
This isn't who we are.
Yeah, I mean, what are they going to do?
They're now towing trucks.
Now they're impounding them and they're hurting.
That's still going to backfire on them because you need those guys to keep driving these trucks.
Truck drivers don't have the most luxurious lifestyle.
You know, they're not around the most.
They're away from their kids.
They don't see their wives and kids for God knows weeks at a time, days at a time.
You need those guys to work.
Those are not people that you want to discourage them from working.
Everybody's affected by it.
What's that you're putting up up there?
We hear your concern for people on the ground after the horses dispersed a crowd.
Anyone who fell got up and walked away.
We are unaware of any injuries.
A bicycle was thrown at the horse further down the line and caused the horse to trip.
The horse was uninjured.
What are we supposed to do with that?
This is the statement from Ottawa police about trampling the woman.
That's how they responded to it.
Fascinating on what's going on over there, man.
How's the woman doing?
I'm glad to hear about the horse, but how's the woman doing?
That's really disillusioning.
Your friend that you're working with in logistics, he's from Ukraine, had a chance to stop.
Andrew Samson.
So what do you think is going to happen to Ukraine?
When you're seeing Biden saying, hey, if you don't attack Ukraine, I will attend the summit, but if you do, I will not.
The Ukraine prime minister saying, stop calling this and you're scaring the hell out of my people.
Just leave it alone.
We got this.
Putin's not going to do anything.
We're in communication.
Where are you at with that?
Consumer prices went up 7.5% in January.
Inflation is out of control.
People go to the store every day and they buy stuff.
They see higher prices.
Put gas in the car.
They see it.
They look to their leaders and they understandably blame them.
Biden's facing this now.
His approval ratings are really low.
His politics is very bad.
And nothing like a good war, okay, to help you in your domestic politics.
Now, do I think Biden is going to lead us into war over Ukraine?
I do not.
We will not go to war with Russia over Ukraine.
Do I think that there's a real risk that Russia might invade the eastern part of Ukraine?
Yes, they did it in Crimea.
It's very possible.
Do I think Biden is exaggerating the threat and his administration is exaggerating that so much so that when he calls Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and Zelensky tells him, stop scaring our people.
It's not as bad as you're saying it is.
Do I think that's cynical politics by Biden?
I do.
If you're asking me to predict an outcome, I don't know that I have one, but I think it's a combination of Putin wants to flex his muscles and he's fearful of NATO expanding further with Ukraine.
And I think there are a lot of ethnic issues in that part of Ukraine where historically, if you know anything about that part, Stalin had populated a lot of Russian nationals to that part of the Ukraine during the famine in the late 1930s with his failed collectivization, socialist policies that were starving the Ukrainian people because they weren't producing enough crops.
So these are real conversations.
You don't think nothing's going to happen.
You think he's just trying to, he's bluffing.
You think Putin is just bluffing?
It's hard for me to predict an outcome.
I don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Do I think it's possible he might do it?
He did it in Crimea.
He could do it.
Do I think he's, if I bet on it, would I say he's going to do it?
When he's facing the economic sanctions that he'd be facing from the United States and Western Europe, I would think he's not going to do it.
And then I think part of what he's doing, too, is he's cozing up to China, his relationship with China, to build a stronger relationship with China because I think Russia, Putin, and Russia feel they've been isolated in the power game.
So I think I'm hoping that it's more posturing and positioning than an actual invasion.
But if you're asking me to bet on it, I don't know.
I don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Tulsi Gabbard said, she warns the military-industrial complex wants a war in Ukraine.
This is a political insider story.
Former Congressman Tulsa Gabber echoed former President Eisenhower's famous warning on Saturday saying the neocons, warmongers, have spent years stoking the new Cold War with Russia and have now brought us to the brink in Ukraine.
This serves their own interests and lines the pocket of the military-industrial complex with trillions of dollars.
Let's not be sheep.
And then she told Tucker later on, what we have, unfortunately, is Democrats, Republicans, mainstream media, the Washington elite essentially in the pockets of the military-industrial complex.
Do you agree with that?
I think there's a lot of truth to what she's saying.
You know, again, it's easy to be anti-Russian in the United States.
We were raised to fear the Soviet Union.
for many rightful reasons.
My father fled communism after World War II and didn't go back to his native Yugoslavia because he wanted to come to a country that he perceived as being free and mostly was.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, promises were made to the new Russian country and their government, to Yeltsin, by NATO, about expansion, NATO expansion.
And while Poland I think rightfully should be in NATO, in some of the other countries, and maybe Ukraine at some point, that remains to be seen.
But a lot of these promises have been broken.
And when the United States and NATO decided to break up a sovereign country, Yugoslavia, where my father came from, over Kosovo, when they decided that they were going to force a sovereign country to give up a portion of its country because of the ethnic situations there,
they created a precedent and they basically told the Russians, you're of no consequence, because historically the Russians have always been allies of the Serbs in that part of the region with the complicated politics of the old Ottoman Empire.
Your people have been screwed by them, the Armenian genocide and all the rest.
And so when NATO and the United States decided to break up a sovereign country the way they did, that was a message to Putin and the Russians.
You can't trust these people.
We can't work with them.
And so a lot of what you're seeing is a manifestation of those relationships that go back 25 years.
So if you're asking me to predict an outcome, I don't really know.
What she is saying, do I believe that?
Absolutely.
I sat on the House Armed Services Committee and I voted.
I plead guilty to this.
I voted for that war in Iraq.
And I remember sitting there as a young congressman, listening, watching all these joint chiefs of staff generals under oath testify, classified hearings about the weapons of mass destruction that were there.
And I'm asking myself, I remember, could they be lying?
Because if they were there, that seems like we should get in there and go get those weapons of mass destruction and get them away from Saddam Hussein.
So if it's true, I have to vote for this war.
Hillary voted for the war.
And I remember looking at Hillary and I'm thinking to myself, could they be lying?
I don't have enough experience here, so I want to look to see what other senior members in the Congress are doing who would know better.
And what better person than her?
She was the former first lady and she was very close to her husband when it came to the governing side.
She wouldn't know whether or not these generals are lying or not.
Well, they lied, right?
She voted for the war.
I voted for the war.
Bernie Sanders didn't.
I remember thinking, man, that guy's something else.
He was right.
We were wrong.
But we were lied to.
So when Tulsi Gabbard says what she says about the political industrial complex and those neoconservatives who like to get us involved in foreign ventures and Halliburton, those contractors and all the rest, do I believe it?
I absolutely do.
Do you think those generals actually lied or the information that they received from the people higher up, you know, the military-industrial complex was feeding them misinformation?
Because it's not like these generals got rich off of this, right?
No, your point's well taken.
It's a lot more complicated than whether or not they just blatantly lie to you.
Somebody was lying along the way.
They may have gotten a lot of misinformation, faulty intelligence, maybe just fake intelligence.
Not sure.
All I know is there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and we voted for that war predicated on that.
Someone was wrong.
Let's do speed rounds.
So here's what I want to do.
This is the last thing, and then we'll wrap up.
We're coming to the end of it here, is I'll give you a name.
Give me one word that comes to your mind, okay?
Andrew Cuomo.
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor?
He did it.
Because if he didn't do it, he wouldn't acquit.
Okay, Mark Vargas.
I love Mark Vargas.
Mark Vargas was the mystery man who helped me come out of prison.
Trump.
I love Trump.
I love Trump.
I got to know him on celebrity apprentice, really liked him.
People don't realize he's a real kind man when you know him.
I saw him do things off camera that were very kind.
He was very kind to my little girls during a very difficult time.
I love Trump.
And by the way, what he did for me benefited him politically, not at all.
He didn't have to do that.
He gets no benefit, but he did it.
Saw something wrong and ended it.
A lot of people in politics are not like that.
Trump's very different.
Obama.
Very disappointed in Obama.
I'll answer that by saying one of my colleagues in prison, after Obama didn't cut me loose, asked me, what about your friend GovGov?
What about your friend Obama?
He didn't give you a clemency.
My answer was, I'm never voting for that guy again.
DeSantis.
Up-and-coming leader in the Republican Party.
He won't beat Trump.
Trump will beat him.
If he runs, he won't run.
Trump's the big dog right now in the Republican Party.
He won't run.
He will not run against Trump.
Dick Mel.
My father-in-law, who's been very good to me in many ways, very bad to me in many ways.
I love him.
I do.
He's my father-in-law.
He's got a lot of good qualities.
He's 83 years old, and I marvel at how well he's doing at 83, and I'm very happy about that.
Rahm Emmanuel.
I always liked Rah Emmanuel.
He's a tough guy.
He's a doer.
He's a member of the fellowship of the doers that you talked about, that Teddy Roosevelt talked about.
He's ruthless, though, very ruthless.
And the means justify the ends as far as that guy's concerned.
Steven Schwartzmann writes in his book, you know who Steven Schwartzman is?
I don't.
He's a billionaire.
And he says, you know, one time, you know, I got invited to a meeting with Rah Emmanuel and Obama.
And he said, we had the biggest shouting match, cursing at each other.
He says, I realized how strong Rahm Emmanuel was, but I knew I had to learn how to negotiate with this guy because he's not going away.
He's on Obama's.
There's something in that Emmanuel family blood.
His brother's like the biggest agent in Hollywood, and then there's another brother who's like a physicist or something.
No, there's three of them, as I understand it.
There's the agent, Hollywood agent, there's Rah, and there's the ethicist.
And I refer to the ethicist as the black sheep of the family.
How about Anderson Cooper?
He wasn't nice to me when I came home.
And so that was disappointing.
So low marks for him.
Okay.
Bob Menendez.
I knew Bob Menendez when we were in Congress together.
And Bob Menendez, had the law been applied to me, my case, the way it was applied to Menendez, my case would have been thrown out just like his.
His case was the judge threw it out for insufficient evidence.
I should have got the same treatment.
George Ryan.
George Ryan is an old school Illinois politician.
He was a Republican, but pretty much like Democrat machine type values.
He's an old man.
He's lost his wife.
He did his time.
I don't think that he was innocent.
Fitzgerald, Patrick.
Evil, wicked, a man who has abused his power to frame people, evil and wicked.
And I think he's done it to a lot of black people, too.
Interesting.
Mike Madigan.
Mike Madigan, all about politics and himself, as cynical as they come politically.
Great skill, hard worker, very smart, very disciplined.
I think a good dad.
But he squandered an opportunity to do a lot of good for people because it was all about his power.
And he's hurt Illinois.
We're the highest tax state in the nation because of him, little Caesar Madigan.
But he's gone now.
The Berlin Wall has finally fallen.
And maybe there's a new day in Illinois, though, with this Pritzker as governor.
It's not.
Okay.
So does future look bright for Illinois?
As of today, no.
Is there hope in this coming election?
Yes.
Prediction for presidency in 2024.
Who becomes a president?
Donald Trump.
You think so?
Very much so.
Really?
Yes.
What's your level of certainty?
68%.
68%.
65%.
What a number.
Do you think Biden runs again?
I don't think so.
What do you think?
I don't think he'll be there, and I don't think Kamala will be there.
No.
No, I don't think Biden runs again.
I think Trump wins.
There's a historical precedent to this.
In 1824, a strong leader like Trump, Andrew Jackson, ran for president.
And the election was thrown into the House of Representatives close.
There were four people in that race.
Jackson was the people's choice, really.
It had the same kind of constituency Trump has, working people who felt disgruntled by the elitists and the ruling class.
It was stolen from him at the Capitol because Henry Clay, the guy that ran forth, made a political deal supporting the son of the second president, John Quincy Adams, who was the son of John Adams.
In exchange for that, he became the Secretary of State.
It was called a corrupt bargain.
And that's what it was known.
Four years later, all those Jacksonians were energized and ready to go, and he came back and won overwhelmingly.
I think history is going to repeat itself with Trump.
A couple more names if we have time.
Being that year, the former governor of Illinois, Chicago, comes to mind, Michael Jordan.
I had dinner with Michael Jordan once when I was governor.
He's fantastic.
Of course, we love Michael Jordan.
I mean, Michael Jordan, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, you can't get any better than that.
Scotty Pippin.
Not so much.
Did you ever have the opportunity to hang out with Dennis Rodman?
No, but you know, Dennis Rodman and I have one thing in common.
You know what it is?
We both got fired from the apprentice.
Well said.
We both got fired by Donald Trump on your celebrity apprentice.
Rod, this has been great.
Folks, if you have not seen the documentary, we're going to put the link below for you guys to go see it.
And what's the best way to find you?
Are you active on Twitter?
I am.
I'm on Twitter, Rio Blugovich, I think, at Rio Blugovich.
I'm on Facebook.
Do you know what my Facebook stuff is?
We'd love you to be.
I'm going to put all of that stuff.
We've got all his links in the description to the Lightning Rod podcast.
