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Feb. 14, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
56:15
EXCLUSIVE Interview with Steve Bannon: 2020 Campaign, Ukraine, and Crooked Democrats
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to
the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought to us the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers, in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the gigantic Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all the people, not just to the educated upper class.
Because the desire for freedom is classless.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and in the human soul.
Today we face another time of turmoil, of anger, and very, very serious partisan division.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history, look at what we've done best in the past, and see if we can't use some of that to help us now.
We understand that they created the greatest country in the history of the world, the greatest democracy, a country that has taken more people out of poverty than any other country on earth.
They weren't perfect men and women, and neither were we.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason, we're able to talk, we're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
Today's episode, we're going to have a very, very interesting interview.
… with a man who probably knows more about contemporary American politics than anyone, Steve Bannon, who was the strategist, the chief strategist for the Trump victory in 2016.
He was the captain of the ship.
He brought it home.
OK.
We went back and forth a little on the sea.
I think we built the ship on the sea.
But you brought it home for us.
You were on the bridge.
Nobody really had the deck and the con.
But we got through it.
We got through it.
Kept off the shoals.
And he got elected.
And we all thought he'd be a good president.
But I'm just going to ask you this.
Do you share with me the sense that Even though we thought he'd be a good president, he's exceeded, he's kind of exceeded what we thought.
Yeah, I think, and I think particularly he's, you know, you and I used to talk about this a lot, because he came with no political experience, and his campaign was so revolutionary, the way he ran the campaign, and went through all those great Republicans in the primary, and then won the presidency in a great come from behind against the Clinton apparatus and machine.
He has grown.
He's got his sea legs now.
He's grown, I think, tremendously.
He is now, I think, understands the office of the president.
He understands the executive power of the president.
Right.
And he understands, I think, how to take a team and drive them in a certain direction.
So I think he's well overachieved where I thought he would be in his first term.
You picked up the rationale for his election.
But you had known that rationale for years.
You began seeing the disillusionment, the separation, what eventually became the deplorables, the condescending attitude of the elite.
You were talking about it, writing about it, long before Trump came along.
How did you figure out that Trump was the vehicle?
He seemed like he was somebody you were looking for.
Definitely.
But it was easy to do it because I come from a Democratic family.
I come from blue collar, Irish, Catholic, phone company, cops, firemen, down in the port cities.
We came into Baltimore, Boston, and Norfolk, Virginia is really our branch of the family.
And so we're Kennedy Democrats.
And I understood after having the opportunity after the Navy of going to places like Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs that even people who have been middle class, it's just a separation of kind of values and that the deplorables are really the working class people.
We're getting left behind.
And I kept saying, somebody will come along that can give that voice.
Because right now, not in a room, not in a deal.
And eventually Trump, I saw Trump early on, one of the first times I saw him was in the controversy around the mosque, around the downtown mosque, the mosque that was built on 9-11.
I actually went down and filmed it for a bunch of guys.
2003, 2004 or 5.
When was it?
That was early.
4 or 5.
Oh, 4 or 5.
It was right after 9-11.
Yeah, yeah.
And they turned the mosque, and Trump, I think, put the money up or had a big controversy.
There were a bunch of demonstrations down there.
A couple of guys—I was making films at the time.
Maybe it was 5 or 6, but— I went down for a couple of rallies, and on Saturday, and what I noticed is that union blue-collar folks had packed the place.
I said, hey, these people are working-class Democrats, but they have a common sense of value.
So this could be a really big political revolution if people don't start to answer, you know, start to really get to grips with where the country is.
And so Trump, you know, we were doing this populist nationalist thing, and then Trump, remember, Trump, people say he's from New York.
He's from Queens.
Yeah, that's right, absolutely.
That's a very good point.
He had his thing at WWE.
People say The Apprentice.
I said, well, hey, he was in WWE before The Apprentice.
Trump, and you know how important this is, he speaks in a non-political vernacular, and he hits people right in the solar plexus.
He can connect with average people, and that's a gift you can't coach.
Well, the thing that always amazed me is four years earlier, we had a guy with a lot less money than him, Romney, a millionaire, but a guy with a lot less money.
Who couldn't make connection with common people.
I mean, I took Mitt out to campaign the first time in the north end of Boston when he was running for governor.
And after it was over, we both made a speech with a big Italian audience.
I'm in the audience.
I'm hugging people.
My chief of staff, Tony Carbonetti, comes up.
He punched me.
He says, Rick, he's still back there.
He's still back there.
So I go up to him.
I said, Mitt, we're supposed to shake hands with the people.
And he came down and he did one of these.
It was obvious he didn't have— That plays in a North End Italian crowd.
Oh my God, by the time he was out of there, they said, you know, let's look for another candidate.
Exactly.
All of a sudden, this guy comes along who almost should be alienated from the poor and the middle class, right?
Rich.
One of the richest people in the world, one of the most powerful.
And he connects with them perfectly, seamlessly.
So how did— Because he gives a voice to the people that haven't had a voice.
Those working class people, when you go to those rallies, when you see him on the campaign trail, he speaks about a handful of things that are quite important.
Bringing manufacturing jobs back, you know, the border, stopping mass illegal immigration, looking after the poor with these endless foreign wars.
He's a strong national security president.
But there's so many veterans.
And remember, we focus in the upper Midwest on those counties that had the highest combat casualties.
A couple of professors at Boston University actually did the analysis later.
But Trump speaks to that, and it resonates.
And people realize he's not a phony.
And this is what the media never got about him.
They thought it was all show.
He deeply believes in this, and he connects with this audience.
And that's why I think his movement's actually grown.
He's taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a working class When you think of the State of the Union speech, it was so beautiful and it had so many themes.
I think people missed the fact that about a third of it was Clinton triangulation at its best, without knowing it.
You could feel when Clinton did it because it was so much phony about it.
Basically, he took away all the Democratic issues.
African-Americans, Hispanic women making more money now, more jobs, answers the question,
you know, take a chance on me, which he used to ask during the campaign.
I'm doing it a lot better than they are.
They really have no issues to run against him except personality and these fake charges.
Well, this gets to the impeachment.
If you go to his inaugural address, everybody focuses on the American carnage.
The whole speech is really a defense of the Westphalian system.
It's a defense of the nation-state.
The most important line, I think, because we built the speech up when President Trump wrote it, is that he does a bunch of things on how he got in the situation and then goes, now arrives the hour of action.
Trump's not a talker.
He's a man of action.
He's a businessman.
And if you look at all the actions taken, that's what I loved about the State of the Union speech.
State of the Union speech, instead of coming up like most of the presidents have, the very first line is, I'm here to report our union strong.
He had an antiphon that went for almost three minutes.
Beautiful speech.
And he talked about actions.
He talked about actions he had taken and the results.
Actions he had taken and the results.
And for the economy.
And then, about three minutes into the speech, he stops.
And now I'm here to report our union's never been stronger.
Very powerful.
And then in each element, as you said, he broke out segments to really triangulate.
It's a very sophisticated, as far as rhetoric goes, and the structure of it.
And getting better.
And getting better.
It was very powerful.
From the beginning to now, I mean, it was always good, but now it's, you know, it's...
He's owning these speeches and you can tell his hands becoming more, even the structure of them.
But here's the thing.
I think Nancy Pelosi did what a smart, savvy politician would do when they ran to take the House.
They've told these people, the first thing we're going to do is impeach him.
They don't have the personalities on the stage to beat him, right?
They don't have big personalities.
They also don't have a set of policy prescriptions, because you just mentioned, he triangulated them.
Tell me where the policies are!
So he's taken away the policies.
There's all these small personalities, not that can fill up a room like Trump, not like an Obama.
Right?
So what do you have to do?
I think there's strategy, and I think Nancy Pelosi understood early on, I've got to go destroy him.
I've got to use the apparatus of the House to go after this guy.
The Mueller investigation didn't work.
And they were hoping that one of these would hit paydirt, that they'd actually get a real crime or a real...
Yes.
Or just, as you know, being a prosecutor, just the war of attrition.
It starts to wear people down.
People start to make mistakes.
The staff gets smaller.
Their thing was to keep him totally engulfed in legal efforts and impeachments and all this, all these investigations, so he didn't have time to do the actions.
That's what's so powerful.
The week of the impeachment, He rolls out the Middle East peace plan.
He has Ivanka's, you know, the human trafficking, right?
Kellyanne does the opioid situation, which the deaths are dropping.
Peter Navarro does the counterfeit situation.
He signs USMCA, which is a geostrategic.
And Brexit gets done that night that if he hadn't have been president, Brexit would have never gotten done because he had the British back.
Oh, and by the way, on Friday afternoon, he rolls out the pandemic situation.
There's no one with that capacity.
Look at what he did to Hillary.
you know how many months in planning that takes to get to fruition, that's where you're
seeing the flower now of the actions that he's taken. And that's where the Democrats
understand they're jammed.
Right. There's no one with that capacity. Look at what he did to Hillary. He wore her
down to the point where she collapsed on 9-11 and had to push her in the car.
And she's tough as boot leather. You beat the Clinton apparatus. You know how tough
they are. And they don't play by the Marquis of Queensbury's rules.
And now this would be a perfect time to take a short break.
For those of you who know me, in addition to law and politics, I'm passionate about
the Yankees, baseball, football, all sports to watch, golf to play, history to read, opera,
classical music to listen to and watch.
And cigars to relax and socialize.
And I have definite opinions on the best cigars for the right time and the right place.
And you'll hear about that too.
But the revolution in cigars took place in the 1990s.
Most cigars then were machine made with foreign ingredients.
Now it's just the opposite.
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The revolution was led by one man, and one man alone, Marvin Shankin and Cigar Aficionado Magazine.
Marvin had been rating wines quite successfully for Wine Spectator Magazine, and he brought the rating system to cigars.
The first cigars rated in the 90s were gone in a flash.
Even now, the first thing I do when I get my magazine is, I go right to the ratings page.
There it is.
Hmm, 93.
91.
Oh yeah, I'll go for that one.
Then there'll be 94.
92.
Problem is, you gotta get there fast.
Of course, they go fast.
This revolutionized the cigar industry, and quality rose to the top.
Then there's the Cigar of the Year.
Try to get them as fast as possible, because they've gone pretty quick.
This magazine revolutionized the industry.
And I'll tell you what, this month is Cigar of the Year.
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You better get this magazine quick, because these cigars are gonna be gone very, very quickly.
Go to the link on our website and order it, and you'll be able to get down to your cigar store and get to smoke a few of these, and you'll let me know which ones you like better, because we can have a really good conversation about it.
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Also, along with rated cigars, there are articles on politics, sports, interesting profiles.
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If you like wine, if you like scotch, if you like bourbon, if you like rye, if you like vodka, if you like gin, they're the magazines for you.
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Subscribe to Cigar Aficionado right now through the link on our website.
Welcome back.
So what do you think is the deciding, let's look forward based on your extraordinary experience from the past.
So what should we be looking for?
What does he have to run on?
How do they run against him?
Here's what I think is extraordinary is that having gone through three years now of the president is a clear and present danger.
This is what the House and the Democrats say.
He's a clear and present danger and must be impeached before Christmas.
For the simple reason these Russian oligarchs, they're now going to turn, and this is where I'm going to turn the thing now and interview you, because he's now going to turn to an American oligarch to destroy Donald Trump, and that's Michael Bloomberg.
They're going to turn to Michael Bloomberg's billions and billions of dollars.
Mike is a friend of mine.
I endorsed Mike.
Donald Trump. They couldn't use that. They tried to use the official apparatus of the FBI, of special counsels, of the
Justice Department, and now, and then they use the impeachment process. They
failed there, and you saw every different angle of that.
And now I think they're now running to, they realize that Bernie and
Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, all these people are just not gonna be able to stand up to him. Mike is a friend of mine.
I endorsed Mike. There are people that would tell you that my endorsement... You endorsed, you endorsed, you endorsed
Bloomberg three times.
I endorsed Bloomberg three times, and I endorsed Trump once, but he only ran once.
And Trump endorsed me three times.
So we're all—we have a cross-endorsement policy going on.
I thought Bloomberg, the first—if you ran against him in 16, he'd have been a tougher candidate, because Trump wouldn't have his record, and Bloomberg had a record.
But now, I mean, I'm in a particularly unusually good position to assess both records, because I held his job.
He succeeded me.
And of course, I've watched the president very closely.
And you also ran—you rode shotgun on the campaign.
So Trump, in his first three years as president, was more like I was in my first three years as mayor.
He was an agent of reform.
I cut the city budget by 20 percent.
I laid off 27,000 people.
I had demonstrations every day.
Oh, do I remember.
I required welfare workers to work, if you want it.
Otherwise, you don't get your welfare.
I'd say you're going to have to put in a little tuition.
You have to work.
This is at City College?
Yeah, and I would go tell them I'm doing you a favor because I'm teaching you the work ethic.
I love you more.
Right.
I care about you more.
I got rid of the homeless people.
But you cleaned up, as I remember, you cleaned up the city and the crime.
The broken windows policy.
You came in... Broken windows policy, but it was real turmoil the first two years.
There was no way I was getting re-elected.
Then I got lucky.
It all worked.
That's not luck.
Well, you had the guts to stick with your... You had the guts to stick with you.
By 96, it all turned around.
Mike was a good mayor, but he was a caretaker mayor.
Mike did not... Mike did not do any reforms.
Anywhere near as significant as those.
Did he carry forward the reforms correctly?
Yes.
He did a good job carrying forward the reforms on crime in particular.
Now let me ask you, because he's blaming you.
He doesn't believe that.
He's blaming you now for Stop and Frisk.
I talked him into it?
He's blaming you for Stop and Frisk.
Well, he's blaming me?
Let's talk about Stop and Frisk, what the concept was when it was under Mayor Giuliani, when it became under Mike Bloomberg.
And Mike, unfortunately, Used it to excess.
I had the same challenge by the Justice Department when I was the mayor, that it was a violation of civil rights law.
And how many stops did you have?
100,000.
Bernie Kerrick was your last.
Bernie Kerrick was my last commissioner.
We went down to the Justice Department and I argued the case myself, not my corporation counsel, to Janet Reno and Eric Holder.
And I said, you don't have the basis for a civil rights case.
Eric Holder's head of the Civil Rights Division.
We stopped 100,000 people.
I can show you probable cause for each one of them.
It's $100,000 you have time for.
I can show you our success rate of about 55%.
Success rate being?
55% of the time we got a gun or a knife.
Half of the stops had a gun or a knife.
Now, the Eastern District of New York wanted to bring a civil rights case against us.
And Eric Holder overruled them.
He said, you don't have a case.
Giuliani's right.
It's not a civil rights violation.
Fast forward now.
He was pretty aggressive.
He ran the Civil Rights Division pretty aggressively.
Fast forward seven years later, the statistics change.
600 stop and fresh.
Six times more.
Hang on, Merrick.
How do you go from 100,000 to 600,000?
He had a pretty good commissioner, Ray Kelly, right?
Ray Kelly was a great commissioner, but it was the only way to really keep crime going down.
Crime had been squeezed down so much.
The concept, and Mike expresses it on a bootleg tape that I heard the other day, Bloomberg expresses it, basically says he wants everybody in those neighborhoods to be afraid to go out and carry a gun.
So if they think there's a really good chance they're going to get searched, they're not going to carry a gun.
And the only way there's a really good chance they're going to be searched is if you do a lot of searches.
So at least they keep the gun at home and you got the gun out of circulation.
At 100,000 holders, a pretty aggressive ran the Civil Rights Division, says it's not unconstitutional.
At 600,000... We also had better statistics because when you get up to 600,000 you make a lot of mistakes.
A lot of times they didn't have probable cause down.
A lot of times it wasn't described the right way, so the cop was just guessing.
If you keep it tighter and better disciplined, and we only used our more experienced cops for that.
Since they had to expand it out to 600,000, they started to use a lot of the rookies, who don't know how to really put together a good probable cause justification.
The second thing that we showed was, when you first look at it, it sounds terrible.
African-Americans make up only 23% of the city, and 70% of the people stopped are African-American.
Why is that?
That seems to be almost discriminatory on its face.
Well, African-Americans commit 76% of the murders in New York City.
And many of the other violent crimes.
But did the crime in the African-American neighborhoods, did it drop dramatically because of stop and frisk?
Yeah, but what happens is, we didn't select African-Americans, they selected themselves.
by committing the murder. So when the police have their lineup in the morning and the sergeant's got
the people to look for, he says, oh two murders last night.
One was an African-American, so you go look for an African-American. They're the ones who
created the statistics. It wasn't that we said, oh we're going to go after seven out of ten. They
created it by the crime that they were committing. And here's the most important thing. Almost 70
to 80 percent of the people they killed were African-Americans.
So when you take them off the street, whose lives are you saving?
Did you have the types of complaints from the neighborhoods where the crimes are going down?
No.
We got thank yous from the neighborhoods.
Thank you, you're getting Joey the drug dealer off the street finally.
Because in Bloomberg's, I think, second or third term, they did start getting a tremendous amount of complaints from the neighborhood.
Because if you do 600, our rate was 55 percent.
So we got 45% of the people angry.
But maybe if they saw that we were at 55%, they wouldn't be as angry.
Well, you're saying that 600,000 at 10% is still the same 55,000.
It's the same absolute number.
If they're only right on 60,000, that's 540,000 people.
Would you have reeled that in?
Did Ray Kelly and Bloomberg make a mistake, you think?
Ray Kelly, a great cop, and Bloomberg?
Everybody makes mistakes.
I've made them.
I defended the law.
I wrote an amicus brief, but I always felt that that was a vulnerability because all of a sudden if you have a success rate of only 10% and a failure rate of 90% and you're up in the numbers like 500,000 people stopped who didn't commit a crime, Even a not-so-liberal judge can get kind of concerned.
You know both men.
Is Bloomberg doing this as a vendetta?
Is there something about Trump that triggers him?
I was shocked, and I know you were because you and I talked about it, when he came and gave that kind of vicious speech.
Totally shocked.
So you know the guy.
He'd never done anything like that before.
So I was not shocked when Mike wanted to run for president.
When I ran for president, Mike explored running for president.
And in fact, I thought his little team was responsible for putting out some of the negative stuff about me because they felt there wouldn't be room for two New York mayors.
But I understood it.
And Mike, when I first met Mike and asked him why he was running for mayor, he said to me, there are only three things I want to be now.
One is mayor.
The other would be head of the World Bank.
And the third, of course, would be president.
So this has been on his mind for some time.
So I don't think— He said this back to you when?
Back in— Oh, gosh, that would have been in 1999, 2000.
OK, so this is 20 years.
That's a long time in his head.
Because he wasn't a very— Even in New York City, he was never one of those big, prominent business guys.
He had a business, very successful.
But he wasn't, like, a dominant— He was not a socialite.
He wasn't— He wasn't a dominant business figure.
He wasn't in the groups like the partnership.
He wasn't a big deal in that.
He wasn't people pushing a political agenda.
Didn't seem particularly involved in politics, like some other business people who have a great interest in politics.
But he decided to run.
He had the money.
He was determined to do it.
And I think that he's had it on his mind that this is a job that he wants.
So in 2006, 2007... Your endorsement, actually, people argue, was one of the things that made him mayor.
I think it was.
Given all the accolades you got after 9-11.
If you're going to get an endorsement from me, that's the best time to get it.
That was time.
We were at peak Rudy.
Right, that was it.
Never going to be that good.
Or bad.
But the fact is that this has been something on his mind.
I mean, he thought about running in 07, made some real serious efforts in 08.
But this guy's a moderate or liberal kind of Rockefeller Republican, Wall Street Republican.
What triggered him to go on the stage of the Democratic Convention and to really be very personal?
Because in his campaigns, he never went after his opponents.
He never went after his opponents personally.
When he was speaking at the convention, I think before, and I told the president, then Donald, And he's agreed.
He'll be OK.
We're friends.
The president felt they were friends.
If they weren't friends, they were not enemies.
They didn't have, like, big fights over anything.
I don't ever remember Donald Trump as a private citizen complaining about Mayor Koch.
They weren't close, like we were, but they weren't— So I was—and Mike, in his conversations to me— He never came to you and said anything about Bloomberg the entire time he was mayor?
No!
During the time he was mayor, he never said anything about Bloomberg.
And more importantly, the campaign was going on for some time then.
I must have saw him four or five times.
I was working on the campaign.
I would have thought he would have come to me and said, Rudy, I think you're making a mistake working with him.
He's a horrible person.
And all of a sudden we get a speech like he's the devil.
Yeah.
I don't know what that was.
I think it was contrived.
I don't think he believes it.
You don't think he believes it?
No, I don't think he believes it.
He's a rational man.
He doesn't believe that stuff.
But it plays well, and he played it out.
Did he change the makeup?
Listen, when you ran for mayor, there was a law, as you told me, a $10 million cap.
This guy that comes in to run for mayor is putting $200 and $300 million Oh, he did a lot of things that have been looked at, and I guess nothing's ever come of it.
But, I mean, all kinds of rules that you implicate when you spend $100 million.
I mean, it's remarkable.
He spent $100 million on the first campaign.
$100 million a second, and $100 million in the third.
In the third campaign, he only won by 3%.
And the other guy spent $9 million.
So, the spending of money— Ten times more than you spent.
Yeah, I mean— Look, Sheldon Adelson the other day, one that you know very well, one of the closest supporters of the president, announced he's putting in $100 million in various groups to support the president.
In any other time, that would be a number that would be unfathomable.
Bloomberg's committed $2 billion, and from the time I said a year and a half ago
that Bloomberg's going to be a major factor, if not run in this, and probably run,
his net worth's gone from $58 billion to $70 billion.
Forbes just marked the market at $71 billion.
He's had an increase of $12-13 billion in the 18 months.
He's committed $2 billion if he's not the candidate.
That type of capital applied to his data operation and his organization.
How do you fight back?
I mean, I think he has a lot of strong parts to his arsenal.
He's got the money.
He's got the staff.
He can buy whatever staff he needs.
He's got the major newspapers who will let him get away with anything.
You know, they criticized Trump for the Trump brand being increased.
The Bloomberg brand grew about eight or ten times while he was the mayor.
And Trump had a major— Nobody ever raised that.
Trump owned a major news operation.
And Trump had told him, you can't cover me and say anything negative about it.
NBC and CBS and the New York Times would melt down.
Here, Bloomberg does it, and it's not even as crickets.
Well, that gets me to something else that bothers the heck out of me, the double standard.
How is it that that can happen?
How is it that Joe Biden can get up and say, I pressured the president of Ukraine to fire the prosecutor, and they can allege With a whistleblower who turns out to be wrong that Donald Trump pressured the president of the Ukraine to investigate Biden.
One becomes 1,000 headlines of bribery.
It leads to a congressional investigation and an impeachment where he was finally acquitted.
Because we have a different hand.
Nobody's even investigating.
Aren't they the same thing?
Absolutely the same thing.
But here's what has to happen, I believe, because I think this is a crisis.
of American governance. I do too. And it's just like the CIA and the FBI in the 50s, 60s, and the 70s,
you had the Church Commission excesses, whether it's the overseas, the Kennedy assassination,
Vietnam, the Watergate, people decided it was time to actually hold this accountable.
They had open hearings. It led to many reforms. The whole Gang of Eight and everything that's done
today on the intelligence side, as you know, all came out of that. You've seen the FBI, you've seen
the CIA, you've got crossfire hurricane, you have all the issues you've brought up, you've got
evidence that you now have This is why I'm advocating.
It has to be a formal setting.
The New York Times, as strong as this podcast is, or the radio show that we do, or Fox News, or you're on Just The Atlantic.
And by the way, it is a great radio show.
I love being on it.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
It's my favorite radio.
Anytime you want me on, I'll get up.
I appreciate it.
Well, you're a great interviewer, so it's easy just to— I'd love to be on it, because you guys really get into it.
You really get into it.
We get to the nitty-gritty.
Yeah, you do.
Because, you know, Jason, as you know, we've got Jason Rahim.
I've got some real veterans.
But you need a formal setting.
The one thing that struck me in this entire impeachment process When the president's team finally got up there after literally all the Mueller investigation and all the beat down this, and they finally got up there and they were able for the first two hours on Saturday just to walk through a logical progression of what—the air kind of came out of CNN and MSNBC.
And I said for the first time—this is what I told Jesse the other night—Jesse did an eight-minute opening on a show and says, hey, I do it for a living.
By the way, in the war room we had a whole staff of people and we're sitting there going, we could see actually interlinking connections that we hadn't quite gotten.
That's why with what you've done and with what Devin Nunez did on the House Intelligence Committee, the 40 subpoenas, your investigations, to me it's time now that it can't be in the media because you need a formal setting.
I believe that the right venue for that is to start Lindsey Graham's Judiciary Committee in the Senate.
And you told me something long ago.
You said the power of English common law in our American system is the cross-examination.
That anybody can talk smack about somebody.
But when you get them under oath and you can cross them, there's where the truth comes out.
For three years, Donald Trump has had unmitigated people talk smack about him.
Nobody's ever been crossed.
This is why I think, and I tell people, I said, hey, Rudy will take three days up there.
He'll have his charts, he'll have his memo.
And cross-examine me!
And they'll cross-examine.
They'll get these tough guys, Goldman and these guys, and the mayor will be crossed.
I am very, very insulted and feel hurt by the fact that these people constantly say, The Russians gave me this information.
This is a Russian plot.
I keep thinking, how could they be so stupid?
Did the Russians tell Joe Biden to say, fire the prosecutor?
Did he go into his head and say, fire the prosecutor?
Did the Russians get the $8 million that was laundered to Hunter Biden?
Did a Russian get that?
Did the Russians get Zlochevsky, Case dropped, so Zelensky could come back and keep his five billion and his crooked company.
Let me ask you, I gotta ask this question.
These are things that were done by Americans and Ukrainians, not Russians.
People that are in Generations, you know what I mean, they know you as America's mayor.
9-11, you're political, you run for president, you're associated with President Trump, you support him.
They don't remember when I got here out of the Navy and Harvard, before you were mayor, you were really Eliot Ness.
You broke You actually, if you've seen the Godfather movies, you broke the five families, the mafia.
And then you turned, I was at Goldman, the corruption on Wall Street, you went right from that and you essentially broke the illegal mafia that Ivan Boesky and the insider trading ring and all that and sent these guys to jail.
It was really stunning and made you, obviously, an international figure.
With your expertise as a pro—I keep telling them, I said, this is probably the greatest prosecutor we've ever had.
When you look at the detail and the information you've seen, and you're saying, hey, I'm going to present it, or are you going to cross me?
Do you think that the information you have rates at the level of the five families in the insider trading on Wall Street, of the level of depth of evidence as a prosecutor that you have?
Yes.
I believe I have.
Certainly on the Ukraine, where I've been able to check everything out, There's a very clear two bribery, one money laundering
count.
The two bribes being, Slochevsky bribed Biden with Hunter's job to protect him if his company
was ever taken away from him.
Biden then did it.
Biden did it, protected the company by threatening, extorting or bribing Poroshenko.
And then the money comes back as money laundered money.
But my point is that this confuses it with 2020.
What about 2020?
You're saying...
You, as one of the greatest prosecutors I've ever had, U.S.
attorneys, you believe you have evidence that can show a sitting vice president.
Yeah, that's pretty serious.
In an administration that prided themselves on no crony capitalism and no corruption and never had a glove laid on them at the time.
You think you can show at least two bribery counts and one money laundering count?
Correct.
One of the bribery counts I don't have to show.
One of the bribery counts comes right out of his big mouth when he says the following, I pressured The president of the Ukraine to drop the case, to drop the prosecutor general, and fill in the fact that everyone in the world knew that the prosecutor general was investigating his son.
And if Joe didn't know it, it was in the newspapers.
Totally absurd that he didn't know it.
And there are witnesses, five of them, that can establish that Joe is lying about that and that he knew that his son, Zlochevsky, the son's boss, and the company were under investigation.
It's a tight little bribery case.
But then, for me, I would go bigger.
I would think about, but I haven't investigated these other two yet.
You would use RICO statutes?
I would.
I would make it— See, people don't understand.
You use RICO to take down the five families, and you use RICO to break Wall Street.
I use RICO against the Contra administration for public corruption.
I used it against the Reagan administration for WEDTEC, in which, unfortunately, I had to ask for a special counsel for my boss, Ed Meese, who I knew was innocent, but that stupid law didn't allow me to exonerate him.
So how would you do the Ricoh case?
Ricoh is very simple.
I mean, it's the business of crime.
So what's the Biden business of crime?
The Bidens learned way back in the 70s and 80s when he was a senator how to monetize his public office.
He's supposed to be clean as a house, too.
Supposed to be no corruption of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's not particularly bright.
Not particularly bright, but he's honest.
He's honest.
Day is long.
Day is long.
Middle class Joe.
You're shocking me, Mayor.
I have a file called The Biden Family.
Goes back to the 70s.
when they were getting insurance contracts, where the kid went to work for a bank,
and Joe all of a sudden started taking positions that were totally inconsistent
with Democratic positions, trying to make bankruptcy very, very hard.
We have the brother getting contracts for companies that Joe helped.
Joe Biden's brother.
There are articles all throughout criticizing Joe for having very loose lobbying practices.
And then there are things that are caught where they're putting together a private equity fund,
and the brother and the son say, Joe will help get us our customers with his influence.
and And that's in the newspapers.
Joe is asked, do you know about it?
Joe says no, but they never follow it up.
You've got about eight answers from Joe faced with serious ethical criminal problems on the part of his family saying, I don't know my family's business, which is like Kate Corleone in The Godfather.
I don't know my family's business.
By the time somebody comes to you the third time and says, your brother James just got one third of a $1.5 billion contract in Iraq, four days after you were named the point man in Iraq, And your answer to that is, gee, I don't know.
I don't know my brother's business.
All of a sudden, that becomes reckless disregard for the truth, and you can prove intent.
And you're saying, look, this proves the point.
It wasn't about the politics of 2020.
You're saying that this needs to be done because it was the office of the vice president, and even as a senator, that this type of crony capitalism, this type of corruption is the thing that's got to be vetted.
This is why people have lost faith in the system.
Absolutely.
This began very simply as The Ukrainians came to me.
They said we have a lot of evidence of collusion and corruption by Democrats.
Can you trust anything out of the Ukraine?
Pardon me?
Can you trust anything?
That's the new meme.
Can you trust anything out of the Ukraine?
No, but you've got to corroborate it.
So I didn't trust it.
They told me that.
I didn't believe it.
I said, I'm going to go talk to the witnesses myself.
So I went and talked to Shulkin.
I interviewed him.
I have the tape of that interview.
I went to talk to Lutsenko.
He misled me on some things.
I discarded them.
I went to talk to Kulyuk, who's probably the straightest of them all, because he's sort of the Inspector Javert, the guy who really knows the case.
They help me a lot by showing me documents.
I have a document that I've talked to you about on the radio that shows straight-up money laundering, 100 percent.
This is Latvia?
It doesn't come from Ukraine. It comes from Latvia.
I have documents that come from the United States that show money laundering.
And most of all, I have Joe Biden.
Are you afraid that if—it's a talk now that, you know, maybe Durham or maybe the Justice Department—are you afraid that if it gets caught up in there and there's things in the paper, they're, you know, having meetings with you or seeing that it's years from now that anything happens, but that if you have hearings in front of the nation on national TV, you're able to present this?
And then people can cross you and bring in other evidence, but that that's what's needed to bring it in front of the American people instead of going right into the legal system?
I guess with my prosecutorial background, I always favor prosecutions.
But this is something where the public has a right to know, because as the President says, it shouldn't happen again.
And every once in a while, we let things go so far in Washington, it really deteriorates, and it needs a reform period.
Do you think we need a reform period now?
John, right.
I mean, this is political, that was in religious.
I feel like we need a Protestant Reformation.
You're a law and order guy and you're a national security guy.
Does the FBI's activities, both individuals and maybe even the institutions, need to be fully vetted, reviewed, and reformed?
The FBI needs a Knapp Commission.
What was the Knapp Commission?
The Knapp Commission was a commission that Mayor Lindsay and Judge Whitman Knapp put together in the mid-'70s because there was rampant corruption in the police department.
And I prosecuted 70 of the police officers that came out of that.
You prosecuted, actually, NYPD cops.
NYPD.
It broke my heart.
For kickbacks, for corruption?
For taking drugs, selling drugs.
Four of my uncles were police officers.
Two of my cousins.
I grew up in a police officer family.
And those were the hardest cases for me to bring.
And some of them were my age, the cops were my age.
And they came out of the Knapp Commission?
They came out of the Knapp Commission.
They work for the Special Investigations Unit.
There are two good movies, if you want to see it.
Serpico and Prince of the City.
And I'm a character in Prince of the City.
I think that's where I learned a lot about corruption.
If you let a little bit of it happen, it's like the broken windows theory.
You let a little bit of it happen, it grows and it grows and it grows, and then you get beyond the pig factor, which is essentially what happened with Bloomberg, where at $100,000 you can defend it.
Not defensible.
Yeah, but a little bit easier than the Knapp Commission.
Just the upper echelon.
that the FBI, and you're a law and order guy, you work to the Justice Department,
U.S. Attorney, you kind of revere the institution of the FBI. You think right
now the FBI needs a Knapp Commission to review its practices? Yeah, but a little bit easier than
the Knapp Commission. Just the upper echelon. I spent two weeks ago with a group of
field agents. They're just the same as the field agents I work with.
Just as honest.
Just as disgusted with headquarters as you and I are.
Why?
Because it's become politicized?
The upper reaches have become politicized?
They see how Hillary, the case, was fixed.
That disgusted them.
The Hillary case was clearly fixed.
What do you mean by that?
Well, think about the way it was conducted.
So in the case of Donald Trump, every single one of the people around him that any thought they'd have evidence gets prosecuted.
They create cases against Flynn.
They go out and create the case against Manafort.
It had been declined two years earlier.
And they go make up a phony black book to get him indicted.
From the Ukraine.
Ridiculous.
The case against Roger Stone is a case about exaggerating.
We all know that Roger exaggerates!
The bullshit artist being prosecuted for bullshit.
That's ridiculous.
Meanwhile, all these people around Hillary, where she got rid of 33,000 emails, bleach bit, smashed up phones, none of those people were prosecuted.
Nobody tried to turn him.
I mean, they had Manafort in solitary confinement for seven months, torturing the guy to try to get him to say he was in connection to Russia.
And credit to him, he didn't say it, because it wasn't true.
They attempted the same thing with Jerome Corsi, which we caught them at.
They're trying to give him a script to read from.
Nobody tried that with Hillary.
General Flynn?
Everybody got it.
If it were a Hillary investigation, General Flynn would have gotten immunity.
What about the summer?
What about the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, the 40 subpoenas, crossfire hurricane, maybe potential other intelligence agencies?
Doesn't all that have to come out?
And the only way to do that is some formal setting?
My point is, You make a very good case, yes.
They're all fine.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm just doing it because I'm frustrated.
See, President Trump, I think, says something that's very powerful.
I'm just doing it because I'm frustrated.
Right. How? But the Republicans hold the Senate.
This must happen.
See, President Trump, I think, says something that's very powerful.
It's not even about him.
This is about the office of the president.
This can never allow to be— This can never happen to another president.
We've allowed it to happen to Trump.
Unless we go Lance DeBoyle.
If AOC is president in 10 or 12 years, her turn in the barrel is coming, right?
But does the Senate have it?
Can the Senate go after a former senator?
I've tried to get the Senate to get involved in this at a very early stage.
And if they did, I wouldn't be involved in this at all.
I investigated this.
That's part of the swap.
That's part of the swap.
This is how the Roman Republic fell.
The Roman Senate got that corrupt, that they wouldn't go after senators.
They're supposed to represent their states and their people.
To say they'll never go after another senator is how, in the Roman Republic, it got so corrupt.
Eventually, someone like Caesar came along, right?
A dictator came along that had to clear it out because it got so corrupt because they wouldn't go after each other and all the corruption.
That's where we are today.
When you make this statement, which is true, and Washington said they're never going to bring Biden up.
Because it's a club.
You know, it's the most exclusive club in the world.
Isn't that part of the problem?
Isn't it the core of draining the swamp?
It's the core of the double standard.
It's the core of draining the swamp.
If you just think about this, in January of 2018, all these geniuses on the Council of Foreign Relations were sitting there when Joe Biden got up and in two sentences said, basically he could have said, I violated the bribery statute.
I told that guy, if you don't fire the prosecutor, I told the president of Ukraine, you're not getting your money, and you've got six hours to do it.
Crime or bribery?
Offering something of value or threatening in exchange for official action.
And when the words like that were attributed to Trump, within minutes there are headlines all over the world, Trump commits bribery.
Quid pro quo.
Biden says the same thing.
Right.
Council on Foreign Relations asleep.
The press asleep.
No one saying it's inherently unusual.
For a vice president or president to have a prosecutor of another country fired.
That's a rather unusual fact.
And am I going to buy this corrupt—he was just corrupt.
There are a lot more corrupt people in Ukraine than Mr. Shokin.
I mean, his friend Poroshenko was taking billions.
Or Victor Pinchuk, who was giving Hillary more money than anyone else.
Those are people you might have taken a look at.
So maybe you would say, maybe there's another motive here.
Let me Google it.
And if you Googled it, the first thing that would come up is a 2015 article in the Times that raises the question of this terrible conflict that his son had in working for the most crooked company, and even a Times reporter would put that together.
But for some reason, we're in this dual standard, and the law, look, to try to get you and me They go squeeze 10 people alive.
Oh, big time. They tried that.
Whereas, they're trying it with me.
And it's not going to happen, but they're trying it with me.
Whereas, with these guys, there's been an outstanding case of bribery against him now
for two years, and everybody's afraid to investigate it.
But here's my point.
If they investigated it two years ago, there'd have been none of this presidential stuff.
We're in February, exactly, because you were done about his time as vice president.
We're in February of 2020.
We're eight months away.
We're 264 days and a wake up from election day.
It'll play into the 2020.
What advice would you give the president, what you think actions, legitimate actions should be taken to defend the office of the president from this ever happening again?
Well, I think the president is going to have to sit down with some of the loyal members in Congress and see if we can pass some laws to prevent something like this from happening, tightening it up, getting more approvals.
But the Democrats are never going to work with him on passing laws.
Just maybe, just maybe we'll get a Republican House.
What do you think?
And then if you got a Republican House, what would you do?
I think it could pass some laws that would restrict the way congressional investigations take place.
Also, Congress is gone.
I wrote this brief.
We never had to use it because we never had to fight their subpoenas because they were too cowardly to fight with us over subpoenas because we would have kicked their you-know-what.
But the congressional subpoena power has now been I thought the framers wanted investigations to be in the House.
You're saying that this has been abused or metastasized?
I thought the framers wanted investigations to be in the house.
You're saying that this has been abused or metastasized?
No, they want it in the house.
They want proper investigations in the house.
And they don't want them to take over for you as the judge.
What's improper about this subpoena power today?
You don't serve.
Is your problem with the Republicans under Paul Ryan, we didn't do it smartly?
The subpoenas that went to Rosenstein just sat there.
the same thing. That's inherently, it's inherently harassment.
Is your problem with that, is your problem is that the Republicans under Paul Ryan, we didn't do it, we didn't do
it smartly.
We didn't do anything.
The subpoenas that went to Rosenstein just sat there. There are 40 subpoenas that could have broken this thing wide
open.
Yes.
It would just sat there and people continue to talk the president out of it for a whole host of bogus reasons.
Correct.
Is it the fact that the Republicans don't use it well enough, and the Democrats do, or you think that overall it's out of balance?
How about somewhere in the middle?
Okay.
Republicans seem not to use it well.
Why is that?
The Senate doesn't use it at all.
But why is that?
Are they cowards?
The House was trying to use it well, and one man stopped them.
I have great—I think if you let those guys like Devin Nunes and Jordan and Meadows, you let them free, this thing wouldn't have happened if Ryan hasn't sat on them.
The Senate has this Senate thing.
Why did Paul Ryan sit on it?
You have to ask Paul Ryan that.
I don't know.
Maybe he didn't believe it.
Maybe he didn't believe it.
But he had smart people around him, like Devin Nunes, like Jim Jordan, like others, Mark Meadows.
He should have trusted them.
Well, we're getting near the end.
And I want you to tell me...
I think it's down—got to get your political handicapping—I think it's down to four candidates, four Democratic candidates.
What about you?
It's down to one candidate.
It's Bloomberg versus Trump.
You're going to be in the middle of this.
Bloomberg will either himself be candidate or he'll be the overlord.
Tell me what that means.
He's doing a leveraged buyout of the Democratic Party.
He's going to put two to five in eight months. Rudy, you've had to go around and shake
the hands to raise that kind of money. Sheldon Adelson commits $100 million. It's nothing.
The most he's ever been committed to a presidential election, I think, by an individual. It
gets an asterisk in Politico.
Here's my point.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
This is very dangerous because of Barack Obama's financial policies and what happened in flooding the zone with liquidity at the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis of 2008.
made Michael Bloomberg and others oligarchs.
We've had wealthy people in this country forever.
We've had the golden age.
And look, you've been mayor of New York City.
You've had to deal with bayonets and multi-bayonets.
This is something different.
Michael Bloomberg is an oligarch.
Like an oligarch, he's a moderate to slightly liberal Republican mayor of New York City.
Okay?
He is doing a, not a hostile takeover, he's doing a leveraged buyout of the Democratic Party.
He will either be the candidate, or in all likelihood, I think because of his lack of interpersonal skills, maybe not be the candidate, but he will have a candidate.
He'll be funding the candidate.
One of those will be an issue.
He's already said with Bernie, he'll take Bernie if he has to.
I happen to believe, and I've said this, that Hillary Clinton will ride in
after he drops a $250 million bomb on Super Tuesday.
Remember, as of today, he's going to get close to $400 million already.
He spent $100 million just over the impeachment process.
Is the money going to register in those primaries?
Is money the way to get elected?
It's just not money.
He has an organization.
He's got a field team.
He had that when he was mayor, too.
And he knows ground game.
He's very smart.
He's got every town in the USA.
There's no question he's very smart.
Remember, people have to remember something.
Donald Trump is impeached because of Michael Bloomberg.
Michael Bloomberg put up the $100 million to back those House candidates.
He takes that out now on CNN and says, I picked 23 House seats.
I won 21.
OK?
It's Michael Bloomberg.
Who literally took apart one of the most important institutions we have on the right, the NRA.
It was Michael Bloomberg, Everytown USA going after him, but also backing these attorney generals like Letitia James and others that she may bring criminal charges against the NRA.
Criminal charges.
He's backed these radical attorney generals across the country, not just here.
So he's gone after that.
It's Bloomberg's organization.
Remember, his data operation, the president, with Brad Parscale, is the most sophisticated in political history.
Bloomberg united the capital markets of the world with data.
His data operation may be even more sophisticated than the president's.
And you're talking about amount of capital.
This is not donation cash.
You know, $100 million is a rich guy writing a check for donations.
This is applying $2 billion.
Remember, right now he spent $100 million on negative ads just on the president on impeachment.
So, we're in a dangerous, dangerous time in American politics.
We've never had a situation where one individual, it's getting to be like Eastern Europe in these countries like Russia, where now we have an oligarch who will decide, in the hatred of Trump on the left, Right?
Not so much from some of the Bernie people, or the populists, but the hatred of Trump on the—we've seen every exit poll that said, by two orders of magnitude, they don't care what the ideology is, they don't care if the candidate agrees with them on policy, they want somebody that can beat Trump.
Bloomberg's going to offer an opportunity to say, it's not me, it's my money, and it'll be— So you would say 50% chance it's Bloomberg, 50% chance he gets to pick.
I think it's 50% chance he's actually the nominee, but it's 100% chance that his Capitol, you're going to have a populist-nationalist and Donald Trump, a fire-breathing populist versus a globalist, and somebody that's got billions of dollars.
And the Democratic Party, which I came from a family of Democrats, to me is going to have to do a gut check.
They're going to have to really think about who they are as a party, who they are as people.
To allow an oligarch to come in here and to try to not just buy an American election, but to try to change the arc of the country.
And I believe that—I believe in the salvation of Donald Trump in this campaign, because I got to tell folks, I tell folks, if you think 16 and you and I knew how nasty it was, you ain't seen nothing yet.
This is all about, this is going to be all about mobilization.
This is all about getting people out.
I happen to believe that Bernie will not be the nominee, that they'll have somebody else, and I think that the 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the Bernie followers who are populist, who see in President Trump, they don't like everything about President Trump, some of his policies, but they see that he gives voice to working class people.
It's those people either staying home or coming to support President Trump that could be the key to victory in 2020.
Well, that was terrific, Steve.
Well, Mayor, thank you for having me on.
And thank you for doing your show, too, because it's really explaining issues in ways that people don't get from the truncated way the biased media does it.
Well, you've got an open invite.
We always love having you on.
Thank you, Steve.
Thank you, Mayor.
It was a great pleasure working with you, too.
Thank you, sir.
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