June 6, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| What really is a problem, and I think it's a developing problem, we're no longer at the point, Dave, where it's Republican versus Democrat. | ||
| This is now Washington versus the rest of America. | ||
|
unidentified
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[music] | |
| This is the Rubin Report and I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| Reminder everybody to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that fancy notification bell. | ||
| Joining me today is the former American ambassador to Germany, as well as the former acting director of U.S. | ||
| National Intelligence, Rick Grenell. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| I appreciate you doing this, my friend. | ||
| This is your first interview since stepping aside as acting intelligence director, so I normally don't do an interview this way. | ||
| You know how I like to do it. | ||
| I like to just sit down and go, but I actually have some bullet points, and I just want to just plow through a whole bunch of stuff with you, but I think the first most important thing is you talk a lot about the deep state. | ||
| Trump talks a lot about the deep state. | ||
| And yet when a lot of us talk about the deep state, people say, oh, this is a conspiracy theory. | ||
| This is made up. | ||
| It's not really a thing. | ||
| There's no way to define it. | ||
| So when I say deep state to you, what does that actually mean? | ||
| I think to me, what it means is that there's this system in Washington, D.C., the federal government system, That basically takes care of its own. | ||
| You have to be living in Washington DC to work for the federal government largely. | ||
| I know there are people that will say that's not true. | ||
| There's different offices around the country. | ||
| I certainly wish that there were more because what what really is a problem and I think it's a developing problem. | ||
| We're no longer at the point Dave where it's Republican versus Democrat. | ||
| This is now Washington versus the rest of America. | ||
| And what I would say that the deep state is, is the system in Washington that protects its own, everybody who gets a job in the federal government, Uh, has to live in that area largely. | ||
| And that means that they, uh, float from one agency to another. | ||
| Um, they're dependent upon the federal government. | ||
| The media that lives there is dependent upon Washington DC being large and big and powerful. | ||
| And when Republicans or outsiders like Donald Trump come in and say, you know what? | ||
| Let's shrink this. | ||
| Let's cut this. | ||
| Let's change this. | ||
| There is this rise up. | ||
| of people protecting their city, protecting the state that they have built up. | ||
| And when we have economic crashes, Washington D.C. | ||
| has never hit because the federal government has a bunch of workers that continue getting paychecks. | ||
| When we had COVID and people were cut, why is it that all of the people that were standing up saying, stay at home, don't work, put on a face mask, Don't go out and participate in the commerce. | ||
| All of the people warning us and telling us that were people who had jobs. | ||
| All of Washington, D.C. | ||
| kept getting paid. | ||
| All of Washington, D.C. | ||
| workers were staying at home. | ||
| They didn't have a care in the world because they weren't working, but they were collecting the same paycheck. | ||
| They are unaffected largely when there is a crisis. | ||
| And so it's the system Let me also just say quickly, when a job is opened up, let's say at the Director of National Intelligence Office, the ODNI, where I worked, we post the job on these websites that are only known by Washington, D.C. | ||
| types, or largely known by Washington, D.C. | ||
| types. | ||
| They know the lingo. | ||
| They know how to go to the office because it's a local office. | ||
| They have been the deputy assistant secretary of this and that and then they get to be the assistant secretary of this and that and it builds on this. | ||
| Oh, well, you you have to have the federal government lingo access and job title. | ||
| In a consecutive order in order to get the bigger jobs. | ||
| So it's a system that takes care of its own, and when an outsider comes in, threatens the whole system like Donald Trump. | ||
| So I actually wanted to get to this a little later, but I think it's the right segue. | ||
| Can you talk about how that system then is linked to the mainstream media? | ||
| How every article that comes out in the New York Times that is supposedly in a classified meeting suddenly gets to the New York Times first and then CNN and the rest of it. | ||
| How they're actually working in Kahoot. | ||
| Yeah, look, it's... | ||
| It's not that different than, say, you know, we're in Los Angeles and so the Hollywood crowd and the Hollywood media go to the same parties, they go to the same church, they live on the same block, they see each other at the post office. | ||
| So there's this institutional system, right? | ||
| If you're working at, say, Disney, and suddenly you're switching jobs and you're working at | ||
| NBC and you get a bigger job, you're still talking to the same people in your neighborhood | ||
| and you're still talking to the same media. | ||
| The relationships begin to be incestuous and you take care of each other because you're | ||
| fighting for Los Angeles. | ||
| The same things happens in Washington. | ||
| So when the media go to Washington, you know, the Jeffersonian principle is that politicians and people are supposed to go to Washington on a temporary basis. | ||
| Washington is supposed to be this temporary place. | ||
| It's now got sports teams. | ||
| It's now got huge infrastructure. | ||
| It's got systems like a city and now they're saying we should be a state because we have so many people. | ||
| That's not the design of Washington, D.C. | ||
| Washington, D.C. | ||
| is supposed to be the place where you go temporarily to make laws and then you leave that place and you go home and live under those laws. | ||
| We have a system right now where the media control it because they live there and they switch from the New York Times to Politico to the Washington Post to CNN. | ||
| And all around, they just stay in that system and they protect their own. | ||
| And so I think it's a real problem. | ||
| And by the way, term limits is not going to solve it. | ||
| It's one aspect of it. | ||
| But if you limit the politician's terms to six years or whatever, You're giving more power to the bureaucracy and to the deep state because they're there, and the person who just cycles out is the politician that's the name on the door, and the power becomes those staffers. | ||
| Now, one solution, because I want to always talk about solutions, is that we need to move some of this bureaucracy out into the Midwest, into the rest of the country. | ||
| Why is it, and I think COVID is the perfect example to show, when there's a problem, when there's a crisis, we shouldn't have everything based in Washington, D.C. | ||
| that's not healthy. | ||
| And so, is there a way to start moving parts of the bureaucracy to Kansas? | ||
| The Missouri to Colorado to some of the other places where then the people who are making these decisions and living in the neighborhoods have more American values than Washington D. C. values. | ||
| How do you think Trump saw this thing? | ||
| Like, this is basically what he ran on, drain the swamp, and I don't think people really knew exactly that meant the deep state as you're discussing it. | ||
| I think they meant, I think most people thought he meant, oh, drain the swamp, like, ah, just sort of career politicians, but not like a structure, just like people who we vote in, just the politicians, sort of. | ||
| Have you ever talked to him about that? | ||
| Like, how did this New York businessman see that thing that most of us didn't see? | ||
| Yeah, I've talked to him a little bit about it. | ||
| One of the things that's really interesting about President Trump is he's always been an outsider. | ||
| Even as a billionaire in New York and a big developer, he's always been an outsider. | ||
| He's always been somebody who the system has looked at with suspect. | ||
| He has the innate quality to kind of take on the system, take the criticism, be tough through the criticism, not let the criticism affect him. | ||
| And that's a powerful combination. | ||
| I also think it's why there's a lot of gay conservatives and black conservatives who Who are tough enough because they've grown up against the system of, you know, you and I know this, is that the gay leadership in Washington, D.C. | ||
| says that you have to think like this, otherwise you're not gay enough. | ||
| Our friend Peter Thiel was called not gay enough. | ||
| And so there's this, you know, ideology now about being gay. | ||
| What's interesting about President Trump, he recently told me that When he came to Washington, D.C. | ||
| for the inauguration to be sworn in as the 45th president, he had never spent the night in Washington, D.C. | ||
| He had been there. | ||
| He had been there for the day, but he had never spent the night. | ||
| Imagine spending the night in Washington, D.C. | ||
| for the first time, and you're spending it in the White House. | ||
| That's pretty amazing. | ||
| Wow, that is incredible. | ||
| You know, I was gonna do a whole interview with you and not mention the gay thing, but since you threw it out there, in the last couple days, now that you're stepping away... I can't help myself. | ||
| That's a part of me. | ||
| The gay thing! | ||
| Let's just do it for a second, because in the last couple days, you've posted a couple pictures of you in the Oval Office. | ||
| And, you know, I've talked about, you know, David and I going to Mar-a-Lago and meeting Trump and how he was so happy that a gay couple was there and couldn't have cared less. | ||
| People have heard that story, and they've heard you talk about that. | ||
| But you posted a picture of you, Matt, your partner, Matt, and Vice President Pence. | ||
| And a lot of people will say, all right, fine, maybe Trump doesn't care about the gays, but Pence really hates them. | ||
| And, you know, da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| And yet you describe him as a friend and a good man and the rest of it. | ||
| Could you do that in like a minute, and then let's get back into the intelligence stuff? | ||
| Yeah, he's, Mike Pence is an amazing person. | ||
| He's a committed Christian. | ||
| He's a realist. | ||
| He's somebody who's just so nice and thoughtful. | ||
| We talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer a lot. | ||
| He's a Christian philosopher that we really both believe in and enjoy. | ||
| I feel like, you know, I grew up Evangelical Christian, as you know. | ||
| I feel like Mike Pence is like my uncle, my dad, my, you know, many people in the church. | ||
| He is just a good guy. | ||
| He doesn't hate anybody. | ||
| He is so nice and he's just religious. | ||
| And so we can have some sort of different religious beliefs or beliefs on social issues and still be really good friends. | ||
| And I think that's where we are. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He always reaches out to Matt and me and he's just an amazing guy. | ||
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All right, now let's jump back. | |
| We'll leave the gay thing. | ||
| Was that enough? | ||
| Was that enough of the gay? | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Okay, so when you left the ambassadorship in Germany, suddenly all these diplomats were, you know, publicly saying all these bad things about you and how you've abandoned them and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And basically, I think why Trump hired you is you called out everybody on Twitter. | ||
| You were basically like, oh, you know, that's not what you said behind closed doors, or, you know, we actually want you to pay for things. | ||
| Yes, that's what we're trying to do. | ||
| It seems pretty obvious to me that in your short stint as acting intelligence secretary, Director, that you brought that in. | ||
| Can you talk about just bringing that attitude in and like the type of stuff that you pissed people off about in the intelligence community? | ||
| First of all, I hope, you know me, and I hope that everybody that knows me knows that I am actually a very nice person and cordial and never rude. | ||
| You laid in bed with Emma when she had only like three days left of life last time you were at my house. | ||
| So, yeah, I can vouch for you. | ||
| Look, I'm a cancer survivor and I talk about that a lot because it really has changed me. | ||
| I think I'm a better person because of cancer, because of this terrible non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. | ||
| But I hope that I'm always bringing humanity and a heart to even tough conversations. | ||
| And so I'm having these tough conversations at a time when it's really important to be blunt, right? | ||
| To be direct. | ||
| Can you hear that phone? | ||
| Do you want me to? | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| It's the Deep State calling, man. | ||
| You're in trouble. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so what I believe is that we shouldn't have these conversations behind closed doors. | ||
| We shouldn't have them in secret. | ||
| When diplomats were first pushed to their country from the United States, you had Diplomats that would get on a boat and take a letter and they would deliver a letter of what the US policy is to the foreign minister of another country and there would be about three people that would know what that policy is. | ||
| We now have changed with technology. | ||
| You get to do diplomacy through what we call public diplomacy, reaching the public and garnering the public support. | ||
| There are a whole bunch of people in this world of diplomacy who still want that conversation in the back room of the foreign ministry where four people get to decide what to do and the public will get spoon-fed when they are told that they are ready to get spoon-fed. | ||
| And I don't like that. | ||
| I'm just a different person. | ||
| I want access. | ||
| I think, you know, when you look at how technology has changed banking, we don't We no longer go to the bank and have a teller. | ||
| We get to go to the ATM or I get to transfer money from my home. | ||
| It's upset a whole bunch of industries, including journalism. | ||
| And so I think it's upset diplomacy and the last people that are comfortable with it are the diplomats. | ||
| So they want me to quietly come to the foreign ministry and just talk about the foreign policy that we want. | ||
| To them in the back room in a quiet way, and I was tweeting and I was talking about how we're developing policy. | ||
| I think that that's better. | ||
| I think it's a better system. | ||
| Arguably somebody can come back and say, no, it's not a good system. | ||
| I get a lot of people on Twitter who say that's unprofessional or you're no diplomat and. | ||
| Look, I can take all that criticism. | ||
| It's silly criticism. | ||
| I think that the people want to participate, and I am somebody who largely believes that the people are smart enough. | ||
| A whole bunch of people think that people aren't smart enough and that we need to tell them what to do, and I think that we have a better policy and a better system when we can include the public and listen to the public and respond to what they want. | ||
| So then speaking about what the people know and can know and can't know and the rest of it, I've heard you talk about how too many things are classified that then we can't figure out what's going on. | ||
| How do they decide, they? | ||
| How do they decide what is actually classified, what gets unclassified, who gets masked and unmasked and the rest of it? | ||
| This will probably get us to the Flynn stuff too. | ||
| It's such an interesting question. | ||
| And again, I don't think I can answer this question without giving a little bit of context that the system, the intelligence community system and Adam Schiff and Senator Mark Warner, all came at me and said, this guy doesn't have Experience. | ||
| He is inexperienced and he is somebody that we should reject because he doesn't have experience. | ||
| Now, the fact of the matter is, my first intelligence briefing was in 2001. | ||
| I understand what this system is all about. | ||
| I have been a receiver of intelligence briefings, a consumer of intelligence. | ||
| I've utilized it inside the UN Security Council. | ||
| I've utilized it in Europe. | ||
| to move Germany towards banning Hezbollah, for instance. | ||
| With Iran sanctions, I've used intelligence. | ||
| So the idea that I don't have experience was silly. | ||
| I've had intelligence briefings before Adam Schiff and before Mark Warner, both of them criticizing me. | ||
| I just have a different perspective, right? | ||
| I come at it from a consumer of it, not somebody who wrote the intelligence or the assessments or been the analyzer of it. | ||
| So when you look at this from the outside with fresh eyes, you look at intelligence and you say largely, why is this classified? | ||
| I read this in the paper. | ||
| Or this is shouldn't be classified just because it protects the reputation of the CIA or the FBI or the NSA. | ||
| There are times after certain years when we know something was going on, like the Russian investigation. | ||
| And now we know that it was a big hoax. | ||
| I think that it's really important to have the public see from the beginning what was decided, what intelligence officers and others believed to be suspect information, what kind of pressure they were getting from politicians at the time. | ||
| I want to open this up largely because we made a huge mistake like with the WMD issue. | ||
| The Russian hoax falls right into that category. | ||
| Intelligence is an estimate. | ||
| I think there are good people in the intelligence community that are working really hard. | ||
| We have some bad apples, just like we have bad apples in journalism and in the police force. | ||
| We have bad apples, but that doesn't mean that we condemn everybody in the intelligence community. | ||
| It means we got to get out the ones that are trying to be partisan with it. | ||
| And so I was pretty good about having fresh eyes and I was pretty comfortable, I should say, about having fresh eyes on the process and saying this shouldn't be classified. | ||
| And I don't know why somebody did, so I would declassify it. | ||
| Or I decided that this period of time between the election of Donald Trump in 2016, in November, and the inauguration of Donald Trump, This is the transition period where the Trump team, the national security team, and Flynn are starting to get acclimated to the issues because they are now anointed by the American people as the incoming national security team. | ||
| If you look at some of the transcripts that I declassified from Susan Rice and from Samantha Power, they will both tell you in those transcripts, which they were under oath in the House Committee, they said, sure, we talked to foreigners when we were transitioning from Bush to Obama. | ||
| During our transition, we were talking to foreign governments. | ||
| They said that the difference was that they had a State Department person You know, in the meeting somehow that that was going to make a difference. | ||
| I think what we saw with the Flynn-Trump transition is that people were interested in learning issues. | ||
| They were talking like they were diplomats. | ||
| I think when you see that transcript of Michael Flynn, you think, wow, he's a good diplomat. | ||
| He's trying to calm the situation down with the Russians. | ||
| He's not trying to inflame it. | ||
| He's not trying to say screw them or screw us. | ||
| He's trying to say, You know, let's think strategically about this and have reciprocity. | ||
| So if we do something and you can come back and do it, but let's not go crazy here with coming at each other's throats. | ||
| All right, so then for people that can't get too in the weeds on all of this, then what is the problem with the unmasking? | ||
| And really, how high up does it go? | ||
| And also, just relative to everything going on in the world right now, do you think it's worth spending a lot of time trying to actually figure out what happened when we're in the midst of, well, corona, it's hard to tell what's real anymore, but we are in the midst of riots and everything else? | ||
| All good questions, kind of difficult questions. | ||
| What I would say first is that unmasking a name is not in and of itself a bad thing. | ||
| I do think, and the reason why I released the list of unmaskers between election day and inauguration day is that's a higher bar for me. | ||
| To want to dig down and to know who's talking to whom when we already know who is coming in as the national security team, you shouldn't be concerned about that. | ||
| Unless you're looking to play politics. | ||
| And so the idea that you would unmask before we know who the president is before election day, I didn't release that information because I see where you could make an argument of how you need to know what's going on in order to blunt some sort of, you know, actions from a foreign government. | ||
| But it's different, Dave, when we know who's incoming, and you have the Obama team, in the way that they were doing it, at very high levels and in the frequency, during the transition, they know who's coming in, and yet they can't help themselves. | ||
| They're digging deep. | ||
| And then what we know is that the FBI said, very clearly, there's not enough information here, let's drop the case on Flynn, and the very next day, There's an Oval Office meeting with Comey. | ||
| Now, this is clear. | ||
| The Obama administration weaponized the intelligence agencies to go after their political enemies. | ||
| I don't care what anyone tries to spin and say, that's exactly what happened. | ||
| And you look at the evidence from Election Day to Inauguration Day, that is the time period that they should have said, okay, we're out. | ||
| We're, we're in transition out. | ||
| They are now going to be out and they need to be passing the torch for the American people to the next people that were just elected by the American people. | ||
| Instead, they were so shocked that they developed this Russian narrative. | ||
| And I want to make one thing clear. | ||
| The Russians interfered in our election debate, largely on social media, And they utilize propaganda. | ||
| I have written extensively on this issue about what the Russians have done in Eastern Europe. | ||
| They constantly go after countries when there's an election. | ||
| They use propaganda, a tiny sliver of truth, and they blow it out to make it completely an erroneous story. | ||
| This is what the Russians do. | ||
| I am very clear-eyed on it. | ||
| I have condemned them. | ||
| I have written. | ||
| I was one of the first people to write on what the Russians did against Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Eastern Europe. | ||
| And so I'm very clear on how they do this in elections. | ||
| They did it to us, but that's no surprise. | ||
| They always try to use propaganda in our elections to sow chaos. | ||
| The difference is that the media developed and blurred this Russian election debate propaganda into manipulating the American election. | ||
| Most people will hear that the Russians interfered in our election. | ||
| That's a big jump to say. | ||
| When they've clearly used propaganda, largely on social media, to jump in and inflame our debate so that we'd fight against each other. | ||
| And so I think that the media did the Russians a real service. | ||
| They inflamed the debate even more, and they utilized the very small investment that the Russians put in, and they got a whole bunch of earned media from our American media. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so if we were to whittle this down to its simplest terms, the intelligence community said there's nothing there, then there's this meeting with Comey at the White House, and now we know, then this becomes like a two-year run, basically, to try to prove some kind of collusion. | ||
| So if that is in fact true, so I'm taking your word for that being true, so if that is true, then in effect you're saying we have to investigate this all the way, and that could really take out I mean, pretty much everybody, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, everybody in the previous administration. | |
| What I think, Dave, is important, and what I learned through eight years at the UN, is that kind of this transparency and truth and reconciliation is really important. | ||
| When you have a crisis and you have a problem, let's come clean. | ||
| And I fundamentally believe in what I think that the intelligence community, the current intelligence community, Not the former intelligence community that the New York Times and the Washington Post constantly quote. | ||
| You'll notice they always say a former intelligence official. | ||
| That's clearly a former person who was a political appointee. | ||
| It's also a source on Capitol Hill who could be a janitor. | ||
| You just don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The current intelligence community Was clamoring for reform, which I delivered. | ||
| It wasn't truly. | ||
| It wasn't most of these ideas were not my ideas. | ||
| I just said yes to him because the system was saying we need to reform and the current intelligence community believes there are a couple of bad apples that they've got to get out there and that they were manipulated. | ||
| And I will say this. | ||
| There were red flags early on in the Russian investigation from a variety of agencies. | ||
| And some people made those red flags and those, those comments from people coming forward and saying this Russian stuff is not true. | ||
| They classified that information and pushed it away. | ||
| I've seen that information and I've called for it to be declassified. | ||
| It's a process that's ongoing. | ||
| It takes time. | ||
| I wasn't there long enough to do it, but there are instances where red flags were raised very early on in certain agencies. | ||
| And I've requested that information to come out, and I hope that it will. | ||
| All right, so just two more quick for you, because I know you're tight on time. | ||
| So the first one is sort of simple, which is, why not stay there? | ||
| Did President Trump not want you to stay, or did you not want to stay? | ||
| I mean, it seems like you're clearly the guy for the job, but it was only, you know, it was a couple months, really. | ||
| So, you know, I've been in Germany for two years, and I really decided when we went there that we weren't just gonna have parties at night. | ||
| I wasn't going to do a travel log of how great Germany was, but I was the U.S. | ||
| ambassador, and I was going to work really hard to push on U.S. | ||
| policy, and we did. | ||
| We worked really hard, and I had an amazing embassy, foreign service officers who are truly great people who want to do good work, and they were hungry to do good work, and it's exhausting. | ||
| I'm totally healthy. | ||
| I feel great. | ||
| But I'm also very sensitive about not taking it too far. | ||
| I had a cancer scare and it was a pretty serious one that came up fast. | ||
| I'm still getting checked every three months. | ||
| In all honesty, I think that has a little bit to do with it. | ||
| I was tired. | ||
| I had in my mind thought that we'd only do about two and a half years. | ||
| And then when the president called and asked me to Temporarily do D&I, I said 90 days. | ||
| And it turned out to be more than 90 days because of COVID. | ||
| But I'm just somebody that when I have the job, I don't want to sit there and just collect the paycheck. | ||
| I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. | ||
| And when I got in, I decided to go and reform it because people were clamoring for it. | ||
| And a lot of politicians on Capitol Hill got angry because they wanted me to just sit there. | ||
| You're the acting, you're not supposed to do anything. | ||
| And I said, you know, only in Washington D.C. | ||
| are you supposed to take a job and just sit there and not do anything. | ||
| In the rest of the world, when you take a job, you actually do the job. | ||
| Yeah, I saw you had a couple of tweets about that. | ||
| People were angry that you were doing the job, which is sort of DC 101. | ||
| Okay, so just one more for you that sort of is about everything going on right now. | ||
| As we watch the protests and the riots and everything else, I think a lot of people are wondering something like that this doesn't feel organic, that Antifa, which now it sounds like, did the president actually classify them a terrorist organization or that's in motion or? | ||
| I think it's a notion. | ||
| It happened when I was on my way out, so I think what has happened is that the Attorney General has classified them, and they're now making the appropriate steps, which means you can go after their finances, you can freeze their finances, and everybody involved. | ||
| So with that in mind... So accountants, you know, let's just put people on warning here. | ||
| The accountants for these people, The banks that fund the money, the workers that work in these businesses, if the person is a CEO or affiliated or an owner of some sort. | ||
| So there's a whole bunch and I think the family members, if you've got joint bank accounts, are also going to be affected. | ||
| Yeah, you probably saw this, but Andy Ngo is now suing Rose City Antifa, and I have a feeling once they get into discovery, it's gonna take out blue check journalists, and New York Times people, and progressive non-profits, and the whole thing. | ||
| But my specific question on that is, it feels like as we watch the riots everywhere, and you know, unfortunately, well you know I'm here in LA, in New York City, like most of the progressive cities are the ones that are burning. | ||
| Do you guys have any evidence of how much of this was actually coordinated beforehand? | ||
| And did you sense that this was coming at some point? | ||
| Because if not, that does seem like some sort of intelligence failure, right? | ||
| Because this thing is still ongoing. | ||
| What I can say is, is I know that they're looking into it. | ||
| I was on my way out by the time that this was developing. | ||
| And so I know that there are teams of people looking at it. | ||
| We've got an amazing counterterrorism center. | ||
| We've got counterintelligence people who are experts and looking into these issues. | ||
| Uh, I know specifically through the intelligence community and people who work at ODNI that they are completely focused on this. | ||
| And there's one thing that I can say is, is that Bill Barr is a great American who wants to be thorough. | ||
| He wants to be fair. | ||
| He looks at the details and we're really lucky to have him. | ||
| All right, Rick, I know I gotta let you go, but I am doing one bonus question, which is, now that you're back in California, I know you wanna relax a little bit, you guys are gonna take some time, but this is my public plea, which will be put on YouTube and Twitter and everywhere else, for Rick Grinnell for governor of California. | ||
| Will you make that commitment? | ||
| Or mayor of Los Angeles, give me something, man! | ||
| We need you, come on! | ||
| Okay, so what I will say is this, is that my immediate plans are to have a gin and tonic at four o'clock. | ||
| And that's really how far I'm focused on my life. | ||
| So you're gonna be far more productive than Gavin Newsom. | ||
| I think that's what you're saying. | ||
|
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All right, well, it's great to see you, my friend. | |
| People say this that California desperately needs a new direction. | ||
| My fear is that everybody is angry right now at Gavin Newsom. | ||
| For locking us down and shutting beaches down when clearly science evidence shows you should probably be on a beach where it's hot, where you can spread out. | ||
| The overreaction from the control freaks in Sacramento was frightening. | ||
| I know countless people who voted for Gavin Newsom who say, "Never again. | ||
| What was I thinking?" | ||
| And so I think he's ripe to be defeated. | ||
| The problem is that it's years away, and so that intensity is going to calm down. | ||
| If he was up in November, it would be a different story. | ||
| But he's gonna have to work hard to come back. | ||
| And, you know, he's also been the leading assault on our Second Amendment rights. | ||
| And he's got some crazy ideas when it comes to, you know, trying to take ammunition And he basically chased out Olympians who were shooters who couldn't even practice in California any longer because they couldn't get their ammo. | ||
| That's how radical he was when it came to our Second Amendment rights. | ||
| So there are a whole bunch of issues that I think that you could take on Gavin Newsom on and somebody is going to. | ||
| All right, Rick. | ||
| Enjoy the gin and tonic. | ||
| Enjoy a little rest. | ||
| And I'm going to keep the pressure on you because I don't think it's not in your future. | ||
| I'll leave it at that. | ||
| And everyone can follow you on Twitter if you want to see Rick smack down some foreign diplomats and lay out the truth. | ||
| It's at Richard Grinnell. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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