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May 1, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
57:42
Biden China Timeline, 'The Chinese don't do anything with America unless part of larger strategy'
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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 us to 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 powerful 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 of the people.
A great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we are able to reason, we're able to talk to each other, we're able to listen to each other, and we're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani and I'm back with you with Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
And today, we have a very special guest.
I consider him to be one of the best journalists in America.
I think a lot of other people do, too.
He's an old-fashioned journalist.
He's what they used to teach in journalism school, a journalist should be and should do.
He's been with The Washington Post, The Washington Times.
He was editor-in-chief of The Washington Times.
on and off over the years, and I have to say, he's what they used to teach in journalism school a journalist should
be and should do.
He's been with The Washington Post, The Washington Times.
He was editor-in-chief of The Washington Times.
He's been with The Hill, vice president of The Hill.
And now he has his own podcast, and he has his own website, JustTheNews.com, and John Solomon Reports.
That's on Apple and iTunes.
And I...
I can't think of someone who breaks more stories and has better sources than John, so at the end we're going to ask him if he'll give us one little special tidbit.
But what I want to start with, John, first of all, welcome and thank you for being on.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, and congrats on the success of your podcast.
Everybody's talking about it, so that's really fantastic.
Thank you, John.
It seems like two things have kind of collided together in the last couple of weeks, maybe even longer than the last couple of weeks.
One of it is when the pandemic and the fact that it looks like China had some kind of deliberate involvement in spreading it, whether they created it as a weapon or not is in doubt.
But once it was loose, it looked like they sent people all around the world to spread this pandemic, either negligently or on purpose.
And then we've got the connection of American politicians with China, the most prominent being this whole situation with Hunter Biden, which people may forget.
So I wonder if you could take us through this, because you've written about this extensively, and I think it'd be really helpful if we could go through the timeline of Hunter Biden's involvement and the Biden family involvement with China.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's a great timeline.
And oftentimes, as you know, when you put facts into a timeline, the story becomes a little more clear.
And so let's take people back to November of 2013.
The Obama administration had just started its second term.
Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of a lot of policies.
The two most important foreign policies that he oversaw were the China relationship and the Ukraine relationship.
And as we now know very well, Hunter Biden appeared to flow in the jet stream of the vice president's jets and his policy responsibilities and collect some real money.
In Ukraine, as we know, he gets hired on the board of Burisma Holdings in the spring of 2014.
He's paid over $3 million, or his firm's paid over $3 million over two years to be a board member on a Ukraine gas company that was under criminal investigation in Ukraine at the time he was brought aboard, and at the time that his father, the vice president, was overseeing Ukraine policy.
Same sort of scenario occurs in China, and we know this thanks to the great work of Peter Schweitzer, the author, journalist.
Right, right.
He put this in a book a couple of years ago, right?
He did.
And somehow it was ignored.
It was, but the detail is extraordinary.
It's careful, it's well documented.
It's been, for the few people who have dug into it since then, it's been affirmed over and over again.
But let me give you the timeline because the Peter Schweitzer version of the story starts in December when Joe Biden goes to Beijing and who ends up on Air Force Two with him?
None other than Hunter Biden.
So he's going on his dad's official government trip to China aboard Air Force Two.
But a month before that, this is a fact that came into evidence after Peter's book, Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devin Archer, the same guy that works with him in Ukraine, they set up a new investment firm called BHR.
And they hire a guy in China or connected to China by the name of Jonathan Lee.
He has connections, at least according to the public reporting, we believe with the Bank of China.
And so they set up this investment firm about a month before Hunter Biden just gets the idea that he should jump on the plane with his dad and go to China.
And so he goes to China.
What we now know from Mr. Lee, who gave an interview last year that brought some new light to this, so the guy who's running this investment firm that Hunter Biden and his business partner set up, a guy named Lee, He gets a meeting with the vice president in the lobby of a Beijing hotel during this trip.
So Hunter Biden jumps on the plane.
He's got this new investment firm.
The guy that's going to run this investment firm just happens to get a meeting with the vice president while Hunter Biden's on the plane.
We don't believe in coincidences in Washington.
I doubt that was a coincidence.
And then about six months later, the Wall Street Journal, this is in July 2014, so now Hunter Biden's not only done this trip to China, he's gone to- So Hunter Biden flies on Air Force Two to China with Joe.
Right.
And Joe is supposedly negotiating as a point man for the United States to try to get China out of the islands they were militarizing.
Right.
There were many issues for that time.
There were trade issues with steel and other things.
So it was a very important issue.
A lot of U.S.
policy was discussed during that trip.
And what was Hunter doing during the trip?
It's unclear.
Other than we know for sure from Mr. Lee that Hunter set up this meeting with the vice president.
So Hunter Biden arranges for his dad to come down the hotel into the lobby and meet with this new official who's going to run this firm that he and his partner set up called BHR.
And then six months later, the Wall Street Journal has a story saying that BHR is trying to raise $1.5 billion, mostly from the Chinese.
So the fund gets set up.
The vice president meets with Hunter Biden's executive or the guy that's going to be the executive of this firm.
And then within six months, the calls put out that there's going to be a $1.5 billion raise By this firm.
Now, it's always been very difficult to understand how much of that money was actually raised.
Peter Schweitzer couldn't get to the bottom of it.
I have spent a lot of time looking through documents.
It's pretty clear it probably didn't get the full 1.5 billion, but it got several million dollars in what it appears to be is about 50% of whatever money it raised came from Chinese companies, some with ties to the Chinese government.
Did some of it come from the Bank of China?
It's unclear.
It looks like the Bank of China is involved in all of this, but it's unclear actually who puts the funds into this EHR.
There's a nebulous set of documents and there are some missing steps in the timeline.
It looks like the Bank of China is somehow involved, certainly in the raise of the money and in their contacts with Mr. Li, if the reporting is correct.
And then there are other companies that look to be in contact with him.
But what we do know now is that Hunter Biden's lawyer, belatedly because of all the spotlight that this has gotten, has now told some media that Hunter Biden actually set the firm up, but he didn't take a financial stake in it until October of 2017.
And at that point, he bought a 10% share of the firm he had created back in 13 with Mr. Lee and Devin Archer.
And he paid $430,000 for it.
So if you do the math, theoretically, the fund, at least in 2017, was worth at least $4 million.
Doesn't sound like it got to that $1.5 billion level that had been aspired to reach when they first announced the big number in July of 2014.
But whatever it is, we know about half of the money comes from China, from regulatory findings.
We know that Hunter Biden bought 10% of it suddenly in 2017.
And we don't know what else transpired.
It's a big, giant black hole.
It's basically a private fund, correct?
That's right.
That's right.
So we don't have that visibility.
Do we know who the partners are in the fund?
We do not.
The records are not clear.
Hunter Biden and Devin Archer appear to have a role in setting it up in 2013, the month before.
Mr. Lee, Jonathan Lee, appears to be the CEO or chief executive for the fund.
And it basically operates in a nebulous environment over the last four or five years.
And why is this important?
We know from investigations going all the way back to the 1990s in the Clinton White House, when we had the Asia money fundraising scandal, that the Chinese don't do anything with America unless it's part of their larger strategy.
They don't throw money easily and willy-nilly at people.
And oftentimes they don't even do it just because someone's famous.
They do it because they want something.
They have an investment need.
They have a strategy need.
In some cases, the Pentagon and CIA tell us it's an espionage need.
So when we look at this, we have more questions than we have answers, right?
What we need to know is who were all the investors that put the money in and what's the total amount of money that came from China.
What were those investors' interests?
Did they ask Hunter Biden, Devin Archer, or anyone associated with this firm to do them any favors or to do them any introductions, to intervene on any policies?
Did any of those policies or actions affect American national security?
We don't know an answer to that yet.
And have any of the companies that put money into this, have they ever been on the blacklist?
America has a blacklist managed by an agency called OFAC.
If you're an enemy of the United States, you're doing something bad, violating embargoes.
You get put on this list.
We don't even know if any of those investors were on that list.
Those are the sort of questions that Hunter and Joe Biden, I think, are going to have to answer before Election Day 2020.
Now, according to Schweikert in his book, Secret Empires, which interestingly, the subtitle is How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.
In the book, He says that he believes that Hunter Biden, Devin Archer, Chris Hines, the Bank of China, and James Bolger were all involved in the fund.
How does James Bolger, the nephew of Whitey Bolger, get involved in this?
There are different financial institutions that at various times touch this fund.
And one of them is one out of Boston that a Bulger apparently had an association with.
Again, there's almost there's very little visibility.
I mean, Peter has done a great job of putting all the data points that are public together.
But there's a lot of questions here that aren't answered.
And Mr. Lee, the chief executive, has done a few interviews.
You know, he's given up something we didn't know originally that Hunter Biden arranged the meeting between himself and the vice president.
So BHR Brand new in December 2013, gets a meeting with the vice president.
That's big juice.
But we really don't know much else about what the fund did over the last few years.
In the middle of this, Devin Archer gets prosecuted for a separate crime, correct?
So he kind of comes out of it, right?
Yes, he gets charged with some allegations related to conduct involving an American Indian firm.
And he's convicted and then he is, the conviction is reversed after the trial.
And it's still pending.
He's never been recharged.
I think it's still pending for decision as to whether to recharge him.
But and also there's some suggestion that Chris Hines at some point pulled out,
like he did out of the Ukraine, but there's really no evidence of that.
Yeah, because it's so private, there's so little information that we can really see from this.
And that's why, you know, whether Congress or the Senate or investigators take a look at this,
there are all these questions that need to be answered.
Now, we have one interesting visibility point.
If you remember last year when I did a lot of the Ukraine reporting, I was able to get a document that the FBI seized from Devin Archer, so Hunter Biden's business partner and good friend.
And it's a bank record.
a series of bank records from a Morgan Stanley account that they had in New York.
And that's the recipient account, it turned out I got lucky, where a lot of the Brisma money came
in, the $3 million plus that came in to their firm, Rosemont Seneca Bo High. Well, that's where the
But there are other transactions in there for which we do not have any explanation for.
Devin Archer, Hunter Biden, the Biden campaign have refused to give us answers.
One of them is very interesting because it's a few months after this December meeting in 2013.
Early 2014, there's about a two, I think it's about 2.2 or 2.4 million dollars that comes into Rosemont, Seneca, Bohai in a transfer.
The destination inbound.
Where it came from, we do not know, but it does occur in the short period of time right after this China meeting.
We just don't know if it's related to Ukraine, if it's related to China, related to a completely different investment.
But that's been a financial transaction that I've been trying to do a lot of reporting on.
And I think one of the things I'm doing right now is I have filed FOIAs across the government to find out, did Hunter Biden contact anyone about China or any China companies?
Was he at the State Department, the Commerce Department?
That's a place where we might be able to force some visibility and see if he was doing any work on behalf of Chinese investors or people that were interested in this BHR.
But right now, sadly, we have more questions than we have answers.
Well, I mean, and sadly, this has never been investigated.
Yeah.
By anyone.
Other than Peter Schweitzer, who did a lot of great stuff.
It is rather remarkable.
that this kind of allegation could be made about the vice president's son and the secretary of state's stepson
and it wouldn't be investigated. I think if it involved two relatives of Donald Trump and vice president Pence, it'd be
investigated immediately.
Oh, 100%.
Let's go back.
I mean, let's go back to an earlier time when I learned my journalism back in the 80s and 90s.
I remember when George Bush, George Bush Sr.' 's son, Neil, was involved in an SNL and the media was all over that.
Every aspect of that got covered inside and out.
But there doesn't seem to be any curiosity in the current American media to look deeper into this or to follow what Peter Schweitzer has done, and that's a disservice to the American public.
We should get answers.
It becomes an even greater disservice when you consider now how paramount the relationship with China has become.
Because of the pandemic and the possibility that China utilized that in some way to attack us in the West, and China's clear statements that they want to be the dominant power in the world, which means they want to push us aside, his relationships with China, any presidential candidates, are even more important.
Oh, 100%.
And, you know, I think whether by fate or luck or all of the above, Joe Biden and China are going to be, you know, China is going to be an issue in which this whole election turns over the next few months.
We're going to be talking about bringing supply lines back to the United States and manufacturing back to the free world.
In the meantime, there are two very different visions of China.
President Trump has one.
He ran on it in 2015 and 2016.
He's very clear about how he views China.
Vice President Biden has had a very different view, one that a lot of people call conciliatory or not appreciating the risks that China poses to America's future.
Even within the Obama administration, that was a problem.
You can go back to contemporary articles when the department moved from Hillary to Kerry.
that one of the points made was that things for China would be much better under Kerry than they were—
that China was much happier with Kerry than with Clinton.
And then during that meeting that took place in December of 2013, when Biden returned to the United States,
he was criticized for failing almost completely in his negotiations with China.
So in essence, what you have is he takes his son to China.
He's negotiating for the U.S.
He fails, and somehow The Sun comes back with this amorphous, very strange, conflicted business deal that they don't want to talk about.
That's for sure.
So how that can't be investigated, given the circumstances in the world right now, particularly when you consider that Joe Biden is probably the only American politician who has said that he doesn't think China's a threat.
He's had a very different view. He's at odds with even people in his own party.
I don't know anyone that, well Kerry, John Kerry agrees with him,
that China's not really a threat. And I saw Elliot Richardson the other day say,
we really shouldn't bother China because really they're more powerful than we are.
Yeah, that's a scary thought to even hear those words uttered.
I know.
It's going to be a very—it's going to be a very interesting election when we start focusing on it again.
So, John, you always have something up your sleeve.
So—oh, I heard that laugh.
I've heard that laugh often enough.
Yes, I guilty as charged on that one, yeah.
And I know, I know, I want to tell people this about you, because I've worked with a lot of investigators, journalists and with, you know, law enforcement.
John is probably one of the most careful people you're ever going to meet.
I mean, I know personally situations where other reporters would easily have printed it, and John needed a second source, or he needed a document, or I'm not going to do it until I get the document.
This is an extraordinarily careful guy.
Thank you.
So I found everything that you've printed has turned out to be 100% accurate, and some of the stuff you didn't print, other people would have gone with it, you know?
We try to be careful and I always try to post my documents so people don't have to take my word for it they can click through and look at the documents themselves and I hope more journalists ascribe to that in the future because I think it would bring some credibility back to my profession.
What the left wing has done to you just because you had the audacity to I think it's because Of course, of Biden, because you defended Trump, and you raised these issues about Biden, which, I mean, it's almost self-evident that you have to raise them.
I think they forget that you were the 208th Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award winner, the 2002 AP Reporting Award winner for— You're exposing what the FBI knew before 9-11, which leaves you with a few enemies in the FBI, by the way, John.
Just out of nature of things.
I mean, you were one of their darlings.
You know, it's true.
And you're the same man.
Yeah, it used to be reporting was appreciated regardless of who the beneficiary was.
And today, we seem to pick winners and losers.
Are we going to fix that double standard, John?
I hope so.
Listen, the most powerful people...
Yeah.
And the most powerful people are the American public.
If they want to punish the people who are transgressors, stop buying their media products, stop consuming it.
Send a message to those news organizations that were tired of the lies.
We go back, you know this, Mr. Mayor, because you've worked so hard on the Russia investigation.
You go back to 2017, you can find hundreds, if not thousands, of erroneous news stories about the Trump collusion conspiracy with Russia that, by the way, never existed.
Not a single one of those newspapers have corrected their record.
And I just, I look back at times and I wonder, what's happened to my profession?
There's an ethical, moral obligation to go back and say, we got those stories wrong.
And yet they don't do it.
Well, John, this is an odd kind of story, but it just, and the only reason I'm going to mention it is because it's so glaring.
But here you have these allegations about sexual assault by Biden.
I don't know if they're true or false, and I always go by the, you've got to presume the person to be innocent.
But they don't.
I mean, they completely crucified Kavanaugh on one woman.
who was uncorroborated.
And then every time they tried to corroborate her, they found out it wasn't true.
I mean, they went to her friend, her friend said, I don't believe it's true.
They went, no, not true, not true, not true, not true, not true.
This one, every one they've gone to now, four people corroborated, and they don't cover
it.
How can they get up in the morning and go to work?
Well, I thought the most insightful interview I saw, and this was a couple of weeks ago,
the New York Times editor himself just admitted flatly, they used a different standard for
for Cavanaugh than they did for.
for Biden. In fact, I think if I remember the words correctly, he said the Kavanaugh story was
a hot story. So they had a lower standard for facts and they were much more careful and reticent to go
with the Biden story. What could be more hot? What could be more important to the voters?
The President of the United States?
Yeah.
Or does the President of the United States have a conflict with what appears to be our biggest adversary, China, right?
Yeah.
It's willful blindness in my mind, and it's sad because we weren't this way that long ago, but we've become this way.
We have got to correct this, I believe.
If we're ever going to really come together in a way that's useful to public policy, we're going to have to overcome this glaring, dramatic double standard.
But tell me what's up your sleeve, John.
So later today, I'm going to be working on a document I got from London.
It's very interesting.
Christopher Steele had another round of testimony, this time in court in London, and it just hasn't gotten any attention in the United States.
But it has some very important revelations, and it goes back to another same theme, questions that the American media have not asked of Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice or Barack Obama.
So Christopher Steele, in sworn testimony, in a courtroom in London, in a defamation suit against him.
There's a bank in Russia that sued him for defaming them, or some of its officers sued him for defaming them.
He brings out some brand new information.
One of them is, he understood from the beginning, meaning in July when he approached the FBI with his first dossier, that the end recipient of his work was Hillary Clinton, and specifically that she was read into his work.
That's the first time we've heard that, the first time that we knew that.
So, again, begs a question that I've been asking for a couple of years and have tried to get Mrs. Clinton to answer.
What did you know and when did you know it?
We don't know anything about when she was briefed, what she knew about the Steele project, whether she knew he was going to the FBI.
Those are questions we need.
But she threw some other names out there.
In a later part of his deposition, He mentions that he gets to the State Department.
This is a story I actually broke about the Kathleen Kavala, Christine Steele meeting, October 2016, a month before the election.
Steele breaks rank with his FBI handlers and goes over to State and blabs everything he's working on, admits he's leaking to the media, admits he's got a political deadline of Election Day to get his dirt out on Trump.
And he says in the meeting who arranged the meeting, he says it's a guy named Jonathan Weiner, who was a State Department official at the time, and he just, Out of his own, just blurts out that he learned from Strobe Talbot, longtime friend of the Clintons, former Deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, that Strobe Talbot was aware of his work on steel back in July 2016, the same time he thinks Hillary Clinton knows he's working for her.
And he says that Strobe Talbot tells him or intimates that Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor for Barack Obama, is aware of what he's doing, and that John Kerry may be aware.
These are spontaneous, extraordinary admissions.
We're going to put the actual words out there today.
I'm going to put the transcript out there today.
But these are questions that Barack Obama and John Kerry and Susan Rice and Hillary could not answer.
What did you know about the Steele dossier, and when did you know it?
And of course, all of this was ignored by Mueller, right?
Absolutely.
In fact— No attempt even to try to—you're the one that had to go get this, right?
Right, absolutely.
But the only thing that Mueller did on this front was that one of Christopher Steele's big lies was the famous Alfa Bank conspiracy.
This was the idea that Donald Trump had a secret communications network with Vladimir Putin that went to his bank server.
And that was bunk.
I knocked that story down in late 16, early 17.
But the media kept, particularly CNN, kept flogging this one forever.
In an offhand moment during his testimony, he basically said, ah, that's one of the few things I'm sure is inaccurate.
It's one of the very few things that Robert Mueller did that strayed from his report, because he didn't even address the issue in his report.
But he questioned it.
But that's about all he ever addressed about Christopher Steele.
And thank God we're getting to classification.
We're going to look forward to following this.
And, John, I have to tell you, it's been an honor to work with you.
And I've learned a great deal.
And I've got great confidence that there's a lot more that you're going to reveal that will help our country.
And you're doing a great job.
Thank you, John.
Thank you very, very much.
I appreciate it.
Good to be on your show.
Proud to be on your show.
Great to have you.
And I look forward to being on yours.
Okay, that's a deal.
Thank you.
Well, that was a wonderful interview with John Solomon.
I don't mean to say that John is old.
He isn't that old, but he's like a throwback, right, to what journalism was all about, what it really was all about, which is you go after the bad guys.
You hold public officials accountable.
You don't check their party registration when you do it.
And if you're going to go after Kavanaugh for some kind of allegation of sexual misconduct when he was in college, and now you've got an allegation of sexual misconduct against a guy when he was a United States senator who wants to be president of the United States, one wants to be on the Supreme Court.
I mean, why do you cover one but not the other?
Because one is a Democrat, you don't cover it, and the other's a Republican, you cover it?
I mean, that isn't America.
That's called basically unfair.
And I find it hard to believe these people can live with themselves doing this.
I don't know what you say to yourself about your honesty and integrity, and I could illustrate this double standard with, you know, We'll do a special just on the double standard, and it might take a couple of episodes to go through it.
But I'm committed to ending it.
This has to go.
We've got to get rid of it.
America can't tolerate something like this.
But thank you, John Solomon, for your great work, and we're going to take a pause right now, and we'll be back with Common Sense.
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm back with you with Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense, and today we have a very distinguished guest, Dinesh D'Souza, who is a prolific author, 21 books, some really, really big bestsellers, including one that's coming out soon, we're going to be talking about.
The United States of Socialism, which is a very, very provocative and very good book.
I believe it's five documentaries, one of which just about the highest-grossing documentary ever.
The other's almost as prolific.
The most recent, Death of a Nation, which I highly recommend.
It's a comparison of what the Democratic Party did to Lincoln and what the Democratic Party is now trying to do to Trump.
It's certainly thought-provoking.
And Dinesh, thank you very, very much for being with us so we can talk about this because I think this book, which isn't quite published yet, is coming out at a very, very auspicious moment because I think we're seeing some of the things you predict here kind of work out the idea that, in the book, you make it very clear, as any educated person knows, that socialism has failed every time it's contrived 20-something times, 24 or 25 times.
But that almost always, it morphs, if it doesn't start that way, it morphs into authoritarianism, sometimes to the point of homicidal.
Authoritarianism, but always authoritarianism.
And I just have this feeling that there's something like that going on with this pandemic and the failure of a lot of the Democratic governors to give up the control that they've gotten.
I started the book long before the coronavirus epidemic.
what kind of medicine I can use at home or in the hospital.
So maybe you can explain this better to people because this really is a fabulous explanation.
I want people to make sure they read it.
I started the book long before the coronavirus epidemic.
I did so because it struck me that socialism, this idea that had been discredited in the
20th century, when I came to America in the late 70s, about half the world lived under
socialism.
This was actually a very powerful movement.
And then it collapsed, and it collapsed not because it was tyrannical so much as it collapsed because it was an economic failure.
That's why the Soviet Union gave it up.
That's why China moved from socialism to a kind of state-run capitalism.
But I saw this socialist virus, if I can call it that, making its way into America, not just on the fringe with the Squad and even Bernie, but penetrating the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
And it was presented as democratic socialism.
And it's also a weird type of socialism we have because it's married to identity politics.
It's married to the politics of race and gender.
And sexual orientation, which makes it a lot different than the socialism of Europe.
So, I wanted to take a hard look at it, and little did I know that we'd be in this new situation where, in some ways, through the control imposed by coronavirus, we're getting a taste of both economic socialism in the form of bread lines and ration products and limits on what you can buy and shelves that are empty, and also in the sense of the suppression of civil liberties.
That's been very chilling to see a country Built on civil liberty, jettisoning and giving it up without so much as a thought.
And people, mayors, governors saying things like, well, I wasn't thinking about the Constitution as if that's just some sort of optional document.
Yeah.
I think it was the governor, the governor of New Jersey, Murphy, said almost as an afterthought when he was asked, About the constitutional rights that were impaired by not going to church and not being able to go out and not be able to go to work.
He said, that's above my pay grade.
Right.
He takes an oath, like I did when I became mayor.
One of the things you take an oath to enforce the constitution of the United States, it's part of your job.
And he said it was above his pay grade.
I think part of it is that when people use the phrase democratic socialism, they seem to think that if you can get a political majority to agree to something, then it has automatic moral sanction.
But that's actually not true.
If you have a gang of 10 people, 9 people cannot gang up and take away the property of the 10th guy, nor can 9 people go to the 10th guy and say, listen, you don't have a right to speak, you don't have a right to vote, you don't have a right to assemble, you don't have a right to religious freedom.
The key thing, the key insight of the Bill of Rights is that it is not subject to democratic mandate.
It doesn't matter if 9 people or 90% of people disagree, I still retain those fundamental rights.
Why?
Because I never gave them up to government in the first place.
Well, you know, I think part of this is the failure to understand history among a large part of our young population.
I mean, after all, Hitler was elected.
And Stalin was elected.
And Khrushchev was elected.
And probably they would have been elected.
Well, Hitler was elected in a free election.
They selected Hitler.
And you know if they had a chance to do free vote, they would have selected Stalin.
And right now Russia, Putin, is a democratic choice of Russia.
It doesn't mean he isn't an authoritarian, but he's a democratic choice.
But the Constitution basically says that certain rights are beyond democracy.
Certain rights are so important, God-given, and if people that don't believe in God, I guess naturally derived, Well, this is a critical point because I've seen people on social media saying, well, you know, we're closing the bars and we're closing the restaurants so we can close the churches also.
and et cetera.
Well, this is a critical point because I've seen people on social media saying, well,
you know, we're closing the bars and we're closing the restaurants so we can close the
churches also.
But no, there's a big difference.
There is no constitutional right to operate a bar, but there is a constitutional right to freedom of religion.
It is specifically protected in the Constitution, so it doesn't have the same status as doing something else.
So you're right.
There's a failure here of education.
I think it's also the case that the progressives I have done a lot to camouflage history, to tell a fake narrative, if you will.
A lot of my work has been aimed at deconstructing these fake narratives that have been used to cover up, in many cases, the crimes of the left and of the Democratic Party, to camouflage, for example, the fact that Hitler and the Nazis were on the left.
Most of those guys were professed socialists, all the founders of early fascism in England, in Belgium, in France, in Germany, in Italy.
All of them were men of the left.
This is not taught.
You won't see it on Wikipedia.
And so this distortion of facts and of history is very concerning to me.
Or well predicted, by the way.
Or well knew.
That socialist countries erase history and rewrite history to make it convenient for their ideology.
Actually, when you say that, in Wikipedia, where they talk about you, they say that the idea that the Nazis derived from the left has been disputed by numerous sources.
But then they don't list any sources.
They don't list any sources.
Yeah, I mean, I list those sources in my book because I know that the left does dispute that.
But you have to realize that prior to World War II, socialism was widely recognized as, I'm sorry, national socialism, fascism, was recognized as on the left.
That was the name of the party.
That was the name of the party.
FDR, in the 1930s, sent members of his brain trust to fascist Italy because he saw Italian fascism as more progressive than the New Deal.
Mussolini reviewed FDR's book about the New Deal, says it's a great book.
He goes, this is kind of what we're trying to do in Italy.
So all of this stuff that's there in the historical record is not in our textbooks.
Our young people aren't taught about it.
And this is partly why they become such suckers for the new types of ideologies, because they are not anchored in history.
Right.
It's as if this is a new philosophy that they've invented and hasn't been tried before.
In fact, in some of their rhetoric, you'll hear that.
Like, we've never really tried it in America.
Well, of course, it's been tried every place else and failed.
Interestingly now, the only place where there is a kind of socialism that does work is Scandinavia.
And so, of course, the left is fleeing to Scandinavia.
They're like, we want to be like Norway.
We want to be like Sweden.
We want to adopt the Scandinavian model.
And yet the Scandinavian model is very different than anything that the left is trying to propose here.
First of all, the Scandinavians do not In other words, they may be socialist in economic distribution, but they are not socialist in wealth creation.
Their policies are pro-capitalist.
Their business tax rate is about the same as the United States.
They don't have any minimum wage.
You can hire and fire people for any reason.
The level of regulation is low.
There's no wealth tax.
There's no inheritance tax.
They tried universal basic income in, I believe, Norway.
They got rid of it.
So the kind of financial transaction taxes that Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have talked about, you won't find those in a single Scandinavian country.
So the bottom line of it is, the left is touting a model that they themselves have no genuine interest in.
They don't want to do what the Scandinavians do, because the Scandinavians want to create turbocharged wealth first, then talk about distribution.
So then how would it describe itself as socialist, so we can understand it?
Yeah, so their socialism is in the wealth distribution side, but it's very important to realize that the Scandinavian model is that we are a single tribe.
In other words, we're sort of like the old Vikings.
When we get some booty, we get some kill, it has to be shared among the tribe.
But here's the key point.
Of course, they're very small countries as well.
They're small countries and they impose the burden on everybody.
So in other words, let's take, for example, these high Scandinavian taxes that the left loves, you know, taxes of 60 and 70 percent.
Here's the point.
In Scandinavia, if you make 60 grand a year in most Scandinavian countries, you will pay that top rate.
So the top rate is imposed on the middle class.
It's not confined to the super rich.
There's no demonization of the millionaires or billionaires.
The Scandinavians basically say, we've got to not soak the rich, but soak everybody.
And in fact, as you know, in Scandinavia, as in most of Europe, you have a VAT tax, the value added tax, 25% by the way.
And the VAT tax, which is on consumption, is notoriously regressive.
Regressive means disproportionately the poor pay more.
It's a sales tax.
It's a sales tax.
And so the Scandinavians, in other words, impose the burden on the whole society.
They don't rob Peter to pay Paul.
Whereas the left here is promising people, I'll give you free stuff.
You'll get free college, free education, free this, free that.
Why free?
Because we're gonna get some other dude to pay.
You don't have to worry about it.
That is not the Scandinavian model.
The Scandinavian model is everybody has to pay.
And that's kind of what the pandemic has gotten us into right now.
People have been out of work now for five, six weeks, and many of them are being paid.
They're being paid by the government through welfare.
And this, I think, is very comfortable.
For example, my mayor, de Blasio, who took his honeymoon in Cuba.
He's very comfortable with this.
Everybody's home.
We're totally non-productive.
We haven't produced anything in five weeks, six weeks.
And people are being paid who want to be paid and want to get welfare.
Meanwhile, the small entrepreneur is getting ruined.
The small businessman, the people that have relatively small businesses, they're getting completely ruined.
And they don't seem to care about that.
Yeah, if you look at this model of essentially having no lasting employment, sitting at home pontificating all day, this was basically Bernie Sanders' lifetime model until he was about 50.
In other words, from the age of about 20, when he finished college, till he entered politics, he had no means of support.
He was writing articles and socialist weeklies and hippie monthlies.
He was getting $25 or $50 here and there.
He was sleeping on his neighbor's couch.
He was tapping his next-door neighbor to get electric utilities.
I mean, it was the lifestyle of a sort of lifelong bum.
I believe he even joined a commune in the 70s that was based upon growing your own food, and they threw him out because he didn't want to grow his own food.
He just wanted to pontificate about politics.
So he wouldn't even carry his weight in a hippie commune.
That's Bernie.
And he was a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination.
In fact, had the establishment not sort of rallied around Biden and sort of rigged it a little bit, Bernie would probably be there.
That's where their heart is.
And possibly even in 16.
Possibly.
I mean, if there was a real primary in 16 without all the That's where the—that's where the emotion—there was really very little emotion for Hillary, and I don't—I think Biden is just—they believe he's the only one who can beat Trump, even though he looks like he's falling apart.
Yes, I mean, essentially they've gone for the guy in the rocking chair, I think, with Biden.
And maybe they're hoping that this will convey a sort of non-threatening, harmless type of image.
I think the Democrats probably think we can manipulate Biden like a puppet so he won't really be doing anything.
But interestingly, all the Democrats have, if you think of free markets on one end of the spectrum and socialism on the other, and ask yourself just this question, Is there a single Democrat that's pulling the tug of war in the free market direction?
No.
They're all pulling in the socialist direction to one degree or another.
It's creeping socialism with Biden.
It's explicit socialism with AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders, but they're all tugging in the same way.
And to me, it's quite striking to see how the kind of socialism that was almost taboo in the Democratic Party 10 years ago, 15 years ago, is now completely mainstream. You look at Biden's set of
policies, that they are by and large the mainstream of the Democratic
Party with just a few exceptions.
Well, I think they also intimidate. It seems that the few Democrats that would want to oppose,
in the House, for example, are afraid they're going to be challenged in a primary.
They're afraid that they're going to be taken out.
To some extent, I think it's even affected Nancy Pelosi, because she's desperate to remain the leader, even though it's kind of pathetic.
And she seems to have gone much further left than she ever was before.
Well, I think they realize that the mainstream media is on the far left.
They're to the left end of the Democratic Party.
So the way that you get the full protection of the media and the full support of Hollywood is by pivoting further left.
If you're a kind of centrist Democrat, they're going to try to get rid of you, root you out.
And so Democrats have realized it pays to be on the left because not only do we have the Democratic Party, but we have this kind of protection racket called the New York Times, CNN, and so on.
And it gives us a sort of immunity, no matter what.
Look, even Biden's getting it now, no matter what Biden does.
Even if Biden came out and said, oh yes, you know, I molested Tara Reade.
You know, I think the media would do their best to minimize it and say, oh, you know what?
He's just saying that.
And this just shows his unbelievable honesty.
And this is what distinguishes him from Trump.
He's willing to admit his failings.
I can just see it.
So there's a sense in here that he can do... The Clintons, look at Bill Clinton.
He could do no wrong.
And he remains a sort of totemic figure to this day in the era of the Me Too movement.
How do we?
I don't think we can exist permanently with this double standard.
There is no way.
You know, I remember maybe it isn't quite at the level of, you know, Lincoln's statement that we can't exist half slave and half free.
But I don't think we can exist as a fair, decent country when Biden's son can go get a no-show job from the crookedest man in Ukraine while Biden is negotiating as vice president for the United States.
Clearly, it was a bribe, and it's completely ignored.
And if Trump did anything like that, or me, or a Republican, we would be on the front page of The Times forever and ever.
And then we have the clear Kavanaugh example that is staring you right in the face.
I mean, the allegation against Kavanaugh was less substantiated than the one against Biden.
They both were seeking a very high position, Supreme Court Justice, President of the United States.
Kavanaugh was telling, was lying.
She was telling the truth.
You can't dispute a woman.
You can't embarrass her by disputing her.
Men should keep their mouths shut.
Meanwhile, same allegation, except more serious and more corroborated, completely ignored.
As if it's not relevant, the woman in that case should be totally disrespected.
How do they—maybe this is a stupid question, but how do they go to work every day?
Here's how.
I think this is a profoundly important point.
Years ago, when I was in college, I was complaining to a professor of mine about a double standard.
And I kept saying, here is this gaping double standard.
And my professor said to me, he said, Dinesh, there's no such thing as a genuine double standard.
It's a double standard on the surface.
When you look underneath a double standard, you will always find a single standard.
So let's take, for example, the free speech movement in the 60s.
They were like, we were for free speech.
But the moment they got into power, they were happy to impose regulations because they never were for free speech.
They were for free speech for us, but not for you.
No tolerance of the intolerant.
That was their philosophy.
So similarly here, There's no real double standard.
The press, the mainstream media, you know, and Trump, of course, says that the Democratic Party is the political arm of the media.
I almost think it's the reverse.
That the media is running the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is the political wing of the media.
And their single standard is, if it harms Trump, it's news.
If it harms Biden, our job is to cover it up.
And it doesn't matter what the it is.
Now, interestingly, when you talked about Biden running the racket in Ukraine, this is another feature of, you may say, American socialism that resembles Venezuelan socialism and not Scandinavian socialism.
You could not name a single politician in Scandinavia who has gone from zero to 40 million
dollars like Obama or zero to 100 million dollars like the Bidens or zero to 200 million dollars
like the Clintons. Nobody is able to make cash out of politics that way in any Scandinavian country.
But if you go to Venezuela or a lot of third world socialist countries, you've got these kleptocratic dictators and they are looting the country, looting its oil wealth.
And so they become millionaires and billionaires off of politics.
And that's what we're beginning troublingly to see in this country.
I think that's very, very interesting because if you think about it, the vast majority of socialist countries Particularly the ones who were part of the Soviet bloc were riddled with corruption.
And to some extent, they still are, even as they've come out of communism, because it was so much a part of the culture.
And you look at the Democratic Party, certainly under Biden and Obama, the deal—Biden made those deals in every country that he operated in.
He walked away from Iraq with a big contract for his brother James, about a half a billion dollar housing contract to build housing in Iraq.
James was not a builder, he was a lobbyist.
He walked out of the Ukraine, we don't know how much, a bare minimum 12 million, could be more.
And then in China, he got China to invest in this ridiculous private equity fund, in which they won't tell us how much money he made, but they committed up to 1.5 billion.
So his son, outrageously, was a partner with an entity of the Bank of China while he was negotiating against China.
My goodness, I mean, that's a conflict that just smashes you in the face.
Your failure to cover that has to mean that something seriously has gone wrong with your ability to be fair.
Absolutely.
I think, to be honest, you're describing the gangsterization of American politics, the fact that American politics is a kind of crime family element that's come into it.
Now, I think if we look back historically, it wasn't there before.
I mean, we wouldn't see Truman or JFK.
JFK had plenty of his own money, of course, or even Jimmy Carter.
They weren't doing this.
So we'd have to say that it began, I think, in the Clinton era in the 90s.
It reached a kind of apogee or summit in the Obama era.
Completely.
And Biden is now, you know, continuing, you may say, the crime family tradition.
So as Republicans, we're dealing with a new type of challenge, a Democratic Party that's not the same as it was before.
The reason I mentioned the Lincoln analogy in Death of a Nation, the movie, is because when Lincoln came to Washington in 1861, he realized that politics had changed.
The Democratic Party had become gangsterized then.
They became more violent, more extremist.
They were not the same party that they had been 10 years earlier.
And so Lincoln realized, I have to be a lot tougher.
Even though I came from the moderate wing of the party, I've got to be a lot tougher now because I'm dealing with an adversary that has become more barbarian and more savage.
Well, I think that's very, very true.
You know, I remember as a prosecutor in the 80s, and I did a lot of public corruption, a lot of corruption investigation of congressmen.
Republican and Democrat.
And I was a Republican, but I never had a feeling that there was too much difference.
I thought the big city Democratic parties were much more corrupt.
And there were no Republican big city parties to compare to them.
But except for that, except for the big city corruption that was exclusively Democratic, the rest of the corruption, counties, were pretty much both parties.
I used to have a saying, saying, neither party has a monopoly on virtue or vice.
With Clinton, that changed.
I wasn't a prosecutor in that era.
I was a mayor.
In fact, I served with Clinton for seven years.
We overlapped.
And basically, the Clintons were small-time grifters who moved up to middle-level con men, and then they became world-class con men with the Clinton Foundation, which is a screaming outrage of corruption.
And one of the things that Peter Schweiker did in his book that brought this out is point out that we've adopted a Chinese method of corruption in which you don't get the money directly, Absolutely.
goes to your son or your brother or your best friend and then they take care of you.
Well, that's clearly what the, I mean, that's clearly what the Bidens have been doing for 30
years. Clearly what the Clintons were doing. I think, absolutely. I mean, in my case, I came
of age politically in the Reagan era and I looked at American politics as an honest debate between
two camps that had rival ideals that they were passionately committed to.
So Republicans might prefer equality of opportunity.
Democrats may prefer equality of result.
But both sides believed in it.
And so politics was a kind of national debate or referendum on which side the public preferred.
It's only later, once I had my campaign finance case, once I dealt close up With the apparatchiks of the Obama administration, I realized, no, there's a gangster element in politics that goes way beyond these kind of... This is not a debating society.
These are ruthless people, and they will use any means necessary And they didn't view me as a critic or a dissenter or somebody who's on the other side politically.
They viewed me as an enemy.
We've got to take this guy out.
And if we can use the power of the state, it doesn't matter if we've never prosecuted anyone in American history or locked them up for doing what Dinesh did.
If we can lock Dinesh up on this pretext, let's do it.
Well, that's a dangerous—another dangerous aspect of what happened with the Clintons and with the Democratic Party, where the criminal justice system is being used as a political weapon by one side.
Only the Democratic side uses it as a political weapon.
Democrats don't get prosecuted for the same thing that Republicans get prosecuted for.
And that's completely alien to what I knew of the Department of Justice.
And I have to tell you, it probably breaks my heart more than anything else to see that happen.
And I just don't think we can have the America that we want until we find a way to balance this and get this sickness out of our system.
But nobody has done more to help do that than you, Dinesh.
And I'm really appreciative of the time you've given us.
This book, I recommend it to everyone.
This is going to be a really, really, a very valuable book, particularly since what we've gone through and then the election that's coming up.
So congratulations.
Thank you very much.
You're a great American.
Thank you.
So I think that was a really, really good interview with Dinesh.
You can see why he has had so many very successful books and documentaries, and he's one of the most wanted speakers in America.
A great deal of wisdom, but also explained in a way that, you know, is accessible to all of us.
So thank you very much, Dinesh.
You did a great job, and we'll be back with you in a short while.
Thank you.
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