All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 11, 2023 - Sean Hannity Show
37:08
Trial of the Century - January 10th, Hour 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is an iHeart podcast.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markowitz and I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down with Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, hour two Sean Hannity show.
We are in the swamp.
We are in the sewer.
We are in your nation's capital, Washington, D.C.
We have a town hall tonight with the new speaker of the house, Kevin McCarthy, some of his top investigators, deputies.
We'll go over the full agenda.
That's all coming up 9 Eastern on Hannity on Fox.
Let me play.
So Biden in Mexico yesterday, he's been to Mexico more than he's been to our southern border.
And of course, that was a photo op as they cleaned up all of El Paso just for the day, just for Joe, just as a favor.
You know, God forbid that Joe actually sees the reality of the policies and the damage and the wreckage that he's causing.
Anyway, so he ignores these questions on why classified documents were found at his think tank.
I didn't know Joe thought, but apparently somebody there thinks located at UPenn.
Listen to him dodge, duck, and not answer.
Years, but I never...
All right, pretty amazing.
Now, we raises a lot of questions that we have been bringing up.
Not many others have the courage or the guts or the willingness to actually deal with the truth of, you know, how bad this can be.
I would tell you that if you look at, you know, do we have a two-tiered justice system?
That's question number one.
Bar-a-lago, Donald Trump versus Hillary versus Biden.
Remember, it was Biden that blasted Trump on 60 Minutes.
Wondering, how could anyone be that irresponsible?
Joe, I ask you the same question.
How could you have been that irresponsible based on your standards?
Then you have the propagandist, Biden's allies, the mob, the media.
You know, they're trying to spin all the bad news.
Oh, no, it's fine.
Hillary does it.
It's fine.
Joe does it.
It's fine.
Anyway, they have now faced controversy at this library or think tank before due to UPenn's financial ties to China, which I went through earlier in the last hour in great specificity and great details.
But this really revolves around this new development about Joe Biden, these multiple reports, classified documents from Biden's time as VP, discovered at Biden's private unsecured office last year.
Top secret material collected by Intel sources, designated as sensitive compartmented information.
The National Archives has already referred the matter to the DOJ.
U.S. Attorney now has been assigned to the case.
And remember, a few months ago, there was a similar referral surrounding documents in the former President Trump possession.
Then the raid, of course, approved by Christopher Wray, approved by the AG, all part of the executive branch of Joe Biden of Mar-a-Lago and, you know, top Democrats, the mob, the media, you know, saying that, you know, this Trump is going to wind up behind bars as a result of this.
You know, they're calling on Merrick Garland to quickly indict the former president.
The hysteria couldn't have been more shrill, more wrong, more insane.
Don't expect the same thing to happen here.
But then even far worse than Joe Biden, then there's Hillary Clinton storing a mountain of top secret, classified information, privileged documents on her unsecured private servers, 110 pieces of classified information among 30,000 State Department emails.
Remember, that was the July 2016 press conference where we all thought, oh my gosh, Comey's going to do it.
He's going to indict her.
And he said, no, no reasonable prosecutor would ever charge Clinton with a crime.
And it was not a big deal, we were told.
Now, the new developments that we have today on top of all of this, you know, Biden doesn't want to answer any of the questions here, is, you know, how is it that we have such a double standard?
Now, this is the main crux of what we know that Jim Jordan is going to be investigating.
Is the FBI now politicized?
Is the DOJ been weaponized?
Because I would argue, in fact, that they did.
Now, McCarthy is actually saying, reacting to this and saying the Democrats overplayed their hand with Trump.
Congressman Comer, who's going to be investigating the Biden family syndicate, chairman of the Oversight Committee, told reporters that the handling of the discovery of classified documents that were taken from the White House six years ago is a display of a two-tier justice system.
This is something every American should be concerned about, and rightly so.
And then we got to give you a Hannity flashback, and that is $54 million in Chinese gifts were donated to UPenn, and that's the home of the Biden Center.
Government watchdog group demanding the U.S. attorney probing Hunter Biden in Delaware investigate how did tens of millions of dollars in anonymous donations from China end up at the University of Pennsylvania, where an academic center is named for his father, President Biden.
Anyway, here to sort through all of this, John Solomon, editor-in-chief, justthenews.com, investigative reporter.
Greg Jarrett is also with us.
He's got his third book coming out, The Trial of the Century, now available for pre-sale.
If you go to Amazon.com, we'll put it up on Hannity.com.
John, let's start with you on the news side of this.
We'll get the legal analysis from Greg.
It seems to me like, uh-oh, Merrick Garland now has a big problem on his hands.
Listen, when he stood up there on November 18th and announced the special prosecutor for Donald Trump, his department already knew that Joe Biden had a similar problem, that the documents had been disclosed to the government as of November 2nd.
So he kept this from the American public for three months.
A lot of people are asking questions about that, including in the mainstream media.
Secondly, so in other words, they knew before the election, but they didn't tell us before the election.
Is that what you're saying?
They knew when they appointed the special prosecutor, and they didn't tell us then either.
A remarkable omission, much like we've seen so many often times in the past where bureaucrats are protecting one party over the other.
The right time to divulge this would have been when it happened, or certainly when a special prosecutor is announced to look at issues like this with President Trump.
We could have all known it then.
Instead, it was delayed from us for two or three months until Republicans get in control and it was going to become inevitably disclosed.
Not good for transparency.
Not good for a president who said he was going to be a transparent president.
Let me get your take, Greg Jarrett, on the legal side of this.
Already know we don't have equal justice or application of our laws, something we talk about often.
This now would seem to me to be a case where Merrick Garland's going to have his hands tied because we have two cases here.
I think the bigger case was the Hillary case, but no prosecutor would ever prosecute.
They would have to overcome the double standard on that matter.
And then, secondly, you know, we got this other little problem with Joe Biden that just popped up.
What does it mean as it relates to the investigation into Mar-a-Lago and the special prosecutor?
Well, it means you can scratch another undoable item off of Merritt Garland's bucket list.
He can forget prosecuting Donald Trump.
It turns out, you know, his own boss, Joe Biden, did the same thing when he left the Obama administration.
So it would be difficult to justify criminally charging one president and turning a blind eye to the other.
It would legally be noxious and politically poisonous.
The fact is, you know, I don't underestimate Merrick Garland.
If he is foolish enough to proceed, then Trump could assert selective prosecution as an affirmative defense.
Nobody else had his home raided by the FBI or face criminal indictment, only Trump.
More broadly, his lawyers would simply argue that, you know, the wayward documents is a common occurrence during hasty presidential transitions.
Outgoing presidents don't pack up their own boxes, others do it for them.
And as I pointed out in a column last summer, during the height of a hysteria, nearly every chief executive in modern history is taking with him records that arguably should be placed eventually in the National Archives.
You know, so much of Garland's case against Trump is predicated on the classified nature of the documents found, but that hasn't been litigated.
I mean, Trump insists he declassified them.
But more importantly, you know, Trump was simply adhering to the Bill Clinton standard established by Merritt Garland's own Department of Justice in a case that was brought a decade ago at the time.
The DOJ took the position and it was adopted by the federal court in D.C. that a former president can keep whatever presidential records he wants and the government has no authority to seize them.
So you put all of that together, Sean.
It's impossible for Merritt Garland to bring a credible case against Trump.
It's finished.
Let me ask you this because the media, it was an interview with me and President Trump.
In that interview, he said, there's not a process.
I could just say they're classified and that job is done.
Now, we've gone and we've searched and we looked.
Is there any specific things that any president needs to do to classify declassify documents?
I didn't find any.
Is there anything very specifically that a president has to do to say, no, I declassified them?
None at all.
And you're absolutely 100% correct.
In fact, I wrote an entire column explaining the law, or actually the absence of the law.
It's well established that a president has unfettered authority to declassify documents.
He doesn't have to sign any papers saying I'm declassifying this.
He can simply do it.
And in fact, he can do it by disclosing to the public or to other individuals who don't have clearance of classified information.
As I say, he has complete, unfettered authority to do it.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back more with Greg Jarrett and John Solomon on the other side.
We are in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Kevin McCarthy and a Republican town hall tonight.
What is their agenda?
How committed are they to it?
And what can you expect in the days, weeks, months, and the next two years ahead?
Straight ahead as we continue from D.C. America's top defender of freedom, liberty, and American values.
This is the Ennity Show.
You know, tragically, last year had a record number of school shooting victims.
Now, in active shooter incidents, schools go on lockdown and locked doors impede law enforcement's access.
Now, with Knox, both school officials and law enforcement have access to key cards, keys, floor plans, and getting them into those locked doors.
Get Knox.
Just go to schoolentry.com.
That's their website, schoolentryoneword.com.
Schoolentry.com.
We continue our discussion.
John Solomon, editor-in-chief, investigative reporter, just thenews.com.
Greg Jarrett, Fox News, of course, legal analyst.
As we continue.
You know, another issue, John Solomon, is, well, they say, well, Biden volunteered them.
I would argue, did he really volunteer them or did somebody know about it and maybe somebody was about to tell on them or did tell or expose the fact that they existed?
You know what?
Sorry, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me.
And then Donald Trump took the unprecedented steps of hiring an outside firm to go through all of his properties.
He was told by his own attorneys, nope, we don't have anything classified here.
Okay.
I think all three of us know Donald Trump well enough to know this.
He didn't pack a single box.
And I doubt since he's been president that he ever went and looked at a single document relating to anything regarding his presidency.
He's not even writing an autobiography at this point.
Yeah, it's remarkable.
Remember, Democrats, I thought Kevin McCarthy said something very brilliant this morning.
Democrats overplayed their hand, and now they're going to get hit by the boomerang of how they overplayed their hand.
The president always had the authority to declassify.
The president always had the right under the district court ruling to keep documents from his presidency that he deemed to be personal.
These things have not been in dispute, but for the last seven, six, seven months, they've been hijacked by the media and by Joe Biden.
And now all these things are going to flip around on Joe Biden.
And it's going to have to, his defenses are going to look just like President Trump's defenses.
And saying, oh, well, we volunteered them.
Now it doesn't matter if you had classified documents in your possession and you criticize another guy for having that.
You got to be held to the same standard.
I think most Americans are going to say, hey, Joe Biden did, Donald Trump did it.
Let's move on and talk about something far more important to our country, the border, getting the economy set of getting inflation down.
There's so many things far more important.
I think Democrats are going to have a great regret that they overplayed this situation for a long time.
And now it's coming back to Russia.
So they just walk it back and say, never mind, it didn't really matter with Trump.
Well, it's going to be hard to do that now, right?
They have a special prosecutor, but that special prosecutor, as Greg so eloquently just noted, he is so boxed in now by what has been revealed in the last 24 hours.
It would be really hard for him to find a way to charge President Trump without treating President Biden the same way.
I think they're going to avert that part of the debate.
There could be other things they look at.
I don't think the classified documents is going to be the thing that results in criminal charges against either man at this point.
Do you see any legal charges anywhere?
This special special grand jury, as we call it, one that didn't indict.
They finished their work in Georgia.
Is that a problem for Donald Trump?
Is the January 6th committee referrals a problem for Donald Trump?
Is this prosecutor a problem for Trump?
Any of the dealings in New York?
Is that an issue for Trump?
What do you see, Greg Jarrett, legally?
Well, you know, he's going to have to spend a lot of money defending himself in the end.
I don't see any indictments.
January 6th, for example, those referrals by Congress, which is an abuse of their authority, they have no right to do that, will be largely ignored by the DOJ.
I think they already came to the conclusion that, you know, if you look at Trump's speech, if you look at his actions, he didn't incite violence, seditious conspiracy, non-existent, even those who were accused of sedition, none of them were tied to Trump.
So, you know, that's a no-go.
As I've explained here, I think this raid on Mar-a-Lago will now go away given the Biden revelations and the previous Clinton case that was nearly identical.
So, you know, he's going to continue to get pursued by, you know, rogue attorney generals in states like New York.
And, you know, he's just going to have to deal with that.
All right.
We appreciate both of you.
Investigative reporter, editor-in-chief of justthenews.com, John Solomon, and Greg Jarrett, who, by the way, not only a Fox News colleague and friend, his upcoming book, Trial of the Century, is now available on Amazon.com for pre-sale.
We'll link it to Hannity.com to make it easier for you as well.
Thank you both.
We appreciate it.
When we come back, we'll hit the phones 800-941 Sean if you want to be a part of the program.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So download Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So download Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, 25 now to the top of the hour.
Toll-free.
Our numbers, 800-941-Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program, this reminder, our friends at MyPillow, you have built this company into what it is today, and you have trusted my pillow.
It'll give you a great night's sleep.
Now, one of their incredible deals is on their Giza Dream Sheets.
You've heard me raving about them.
The softest sheet you'll ever sleep on, and you're going to love it.
And now they're at the lowest price ever, coming in as low as $29.98.
When you go to mypillow.com and click on the Sean Hannity Square, it's that simple.
And when you do that, you'll find great discounts on other great products that'll help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer.
Now, the Giza Dream Sheets come in multiple colors, styles, sizes.
And now's the time to upgrade your bedding and enhance your sleep.
And by the way, they have a 10-year warranty and a 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee.
You go to mypillow.com, click on the Sean Hannity Square, or call 800-919-6090.
Mention my name for this great discount on Giza Dream Sheets and other deep discounts on other great products.
You're going to love it.
All right, let's get to our phones.
A lot of you have been very, very, very patient here.
Dean is in Rochester, New York.
Dean, hi, how are you?
Glad you called, sir.
I'm great.
Thanks for having me on the show, and it's a great honor to speak with you, Sean.
Thank you.
The honor is mine.
My honor.
I have a question about classified documents.
I know that presidents can declassify documents.
Can vice presidents declassify documents?
And the reason I ask, if Joe Biden left office as a vice president and took classified documents with him, then he wouldn't have been able to declassify them.
Is that right or not?
I didn't.
You've got to say that a little slowly.
I think I lost track with you.
Say it again.
I'm so sorry.
I know that presidents can declassify documents.
Can vice presidents is not a specific process.
The vice president, that's a great question.
I don't think so.
I think that is only a power of the president.
I don't know, but you know what?
You raised a question I haven't even thought of.
That's a great question.
But they're not claiming that they were declassified.
You know, they found them or somebody found them and was going to report them.
I'd like to know the real truth.
You know, you got to understand something here.
Why did this just pop up out of nowhere?
To me, to think, oh, we found these.
Let us give them back to you now, however many years later, that makes me a little suspicious.
I suspect that somebody saw them or knew about them and said, I'm going to report this if you don't hand it back in, or something to that effect.
I could see that easily happening.
Maybe a guess on my part.
Do I know for sure?
No, it seems suspicious on the surface.
Been there for all these years, however many years this goes back.
But you're raising a great question.
I don't think they can.
I should have asked Greg Jarrett when I had the opportunity.
I will get an answer to that question and report back, though.
Great question.
Okay, thank you.
All right.
Thank you, my friend.
God bless you.
Andrew is in the great state of Texas.
Andrew, how are you?
Glad you called.
Thanks for being with us.
Hey, I appreciate it, Sean.
I've been a long time listening.
I've been an honor to talk to you.
I love listening to guys like you and Rush Limbaugh.
You know, God bless us all.
Thank you, buddy.
So my biggest problem that I've been having is losing faith in the nation.
You know, I almost feel like we're in this time where we're being purposely divided in the right and left-wing media.
I don't believe that there's anyone at this point that's innocent of doing just that.
Some may be doing it, you know, not knowing that they're dividing the country even more.
But my question to you, do you ever think that we, the people, will ever become united again?
Because as of right now, the way I see it, it's almost 50-50 down the line.
And as long as it stays that way, it's going to make it that much harder for people in Congress and in the House to ever come to an agreement and actually get things done when they're too busy bickering and fighting.
Well, the bottom line is the answer to that is you actually have to win the election.
And this goes to the heart of my argument.
Republicans, you know, they've got an election playbook that's like an Apple 1.0.
Democrats have the 15th version of it, and they don't kiss babies.
They don't go to fairs.
They don't do press avails.
They don't do selfies.
They don't do rallies.
They don't do any of that.
They run negative ads and they do ballot harvesting, which in many states is legal.
And that's how they're running elections.
And they're avoiding debates and they're hiding in their basement and they're running these stealth campaigns and it's being successful.
So now, as far as the nation coming together, I don't have an answer to that.
You know, it could be a moment.
It could be an event.
You know, look at America post-9-11.
I mean, there was a pretty big long period of time there where, you know what, it didn't matter if you were a Republican or a Democrat and you were in the towers the day those towers came down or in the Pentagon that day.
You know, at that point, we were all Americans.
Do I wish?
Do I hope?
Yeah.
However, I'm not pollyannish.
I recognize the reality that this is a radical socialist party that wants to inflict their agenda on us.
I believe for many it's about power.
For some, I think they're naive and they really believe it.
You know, it's funny because some people were critical that I was mad at some of the Republicans because I had been talking to many of them in the lead up to January 3rd.
And I'm like, get your ass in a room, throw away your ego, throw away your phone, hammer out a deal and show America you can lead.
Now, many in the base of the Republican Party, they loved it.
And I understand completely why they loved it.
However, base elections are very hard to win.
You also have to win over independence.
You have to win over people in the middle.
And you have to be able to appeal to it.
And I did not, and I said this to people.
I was saying, look, it's going to look to people like you're not ready to lead.
And you need to remember you will all succeed or fail together.
There won't be any exceptions.
Now, it ended up only being four days.
It wasn't really that big a deal.
At no point was I generally alarmed.
I was just, you know, having all these sources I have and having talked to all of them in the weeks leading up to this, knowing what was agreed to already, that they didn't need to make this public spectacle.
You know, sometimes if you have a family, do you ever have a family issue come up that you just keep within your family?
Do you ever have that?
Well, I believe all of us have those type of issues.
Exactly.
That's the point.
And I would have rather they kept it in-house.
And I was talking to all sides of this.
And I said, you need to hammer this out.
I don't care if you scream, yell.
That sort of thing was like an average day growing up for me where I was.
We'd play sports.
We'd be playing hockey.
We'd drop our gloves.
We'd all fight.
Then we'd, you know, dust ourselves off, pick up our gloves and start playing again.
Same with basketball.
Same when we played football.
Same when we played any sport, to be honest.
But this is the work of the people.
They're here to serve us.
And my big concern, they had a window of opportunity.
I was warning everybody.
I was asking people, what do you need?
What do you want?
What is your list?
Show me your list.
Let me see.
You know, I was just being myself and being nosy and working my sources.
And, you know what?
It was easily doable.
And that was the part that people misunderstood.
Some people didn't like the fact that Lauren Bobert and I had a shootout.
She was on the show yesterday.
I don't dislike Lauren Bobert at all.
I think in the end, these changes are actually good for the country.
They should have done it earlier.
But here's the problem, right?
So the whole point of being able to have a conversation and not agreeing on everything, right?
We live in a society right now where everybody has to think the same and everybody wants to be so different about their desire to be the same.
Like you have to think the same.
It's ridiculous.
I was like, this is about strategy.
It's not about what the Republican base is going to think about the Republicans.
I'm more interested in the people in the middle.
I wanted Republicans to come off prepared to lead on day one.
That was, and I expressed that numerous times to many, many people whose names you'd recognize.
And they didn't, there was no urgency, and that pissed me off.
You were a person of compromise.
So you and I had.
Really?
Oh, you were?
Because you said, listen, you might not like Kevin McCarthy personally, but it's not about your personal feelings.
That part is true.
You made that very clear.
And by the way, they had days before January 3rd, the motion to vacate was agreed to.
Right.
But I also think, and this is just my humble opinion, that people get a little greedy once they see, like you were saying, the terms changed.
The bar shifted every single day, and that frustrated the hell out of me.
Yep.
And then that's to me, that's not good faith negotiation.
It's not.
It's not, but that is today's negotiation.
I negotiate deals all the time.
When I negotiate a deal, if I give my word, if you shake my hand.
The word is your bond.
The word is your bond.
Anyway, we'll give you the last word.
Go ahead, Andrew.
Don't let your heart be troubled.
Look, the country can come together.
I would suspect it's less likely than not.
And the only then it becomes a choice.
And if it's a choice between socialism and capitalism and liberty and freedom and our Constitution versus big government socialism, we've got to win for the sake of the country or else we won't have a country.
Everything that's happened in every socialized country will then happen to us.
Here's your opportunity.
You get the last word.
I agree with you.
And I feel that our government does work first, but we need to look at it as a marriage and that they're married to the people and they need to learn to start listening and being able to have a conversation.
And like she said, we need to have compromise because that's the only way a marriage works.
And until we do that, we're just going to wind up being separated.
I mean, in the end, that's what happens in a bad marriage when there's no communication and no compromise.
Yeah.
Anyway, my friend, let's hang in there and let's see what the Republicans do.
That's why I'm in D.C. today to do this town hall tonight.
And I'm hopeful now that everyone's pulling in the same direction.
It certainly looks like it.
The initial signs are, I had every confidence that everybody agreed on the agenda.
That was the other frustrating part.
The agenda was in cement.
And I don't think anybody's going to deviate from that.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back.
More of your calls coming up straight ahead.
Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida will join us.
We're in D.C. Kevin McCarthy and a group of top Republicans will join us for a town hall, 9 Eastern.
Set your DVR for Fox.
Cornpop, stand up, Chuck, and dogface pony soldier.
That's just a few of the fighter moments you recall when you walk down Joe's memory lane.
You can't make this up.
And with Biden in office, you don't have to.
This is the Sean Annity Show.
All right, let's get back to our busy phones.
Let's say hi to Rick in North Carolina.
Rick, how are you?
Glad you called.
Thank you, sir.
How you doing?
I'm good, sir.
What's going on?
Yeah, I called because I think there's a couple points that are being missed on this discussion about elections and so forth.
To start with, I think we've been hurt in a couple critical races by third-party voters that are anti-Democrat Party, but we can't get these voters to force one candidate to win the seat.
Well, I mean, look, we have to worry about third parties.
I mean, some of the elections I was concerned about.
And if you remember, if everybody remembers, I kept warning people about this exuberance that existed prior to this midterm.
And I'm like, I'm not where you people are.
I'm nowhere near where you people are.
Meaning those people that were exuberant.
I said, these are very difficult races to win.
And you should assume that your vote is going to be the final vote that would tip your candidate over the finish line.
But there was so much phony optimism out there.
And I'm like, well, what has happened to everybody?
What are they forgetting here?
And then I started to worry about some candidates that I thought were a drag on the entire ticket.
Like, I like Doug Mastriano, but no exceptions for abortion.
I'm not talking morally.
I'm talking about politically in Pennsylvania is not going to fly.
Zero exceptions for rape, incest, mother's life.
That's not going to win.
And there are some political truths or undeniable truths that you have to understand about politics and that ended up impacting the entire Republican ticket in Pennsylvania.
Oz would have easily won.
He had double-digit ticket switching, which is almost impossible to achieve.
And it just wasn't enough to overcome the 15-point loss that Mostriano had.
You get the last word.
Okay, well, I've got a couple stats kind of show my point here.
Back in 2020, Trump lost three states by itself, like 110,000 votes.
And those 110,000 votes were the ones who went to the Libertarian Party.
All three of those states would have carried.
Now, the House would have still voted them out.
I think that's how it works in a tie.
It would have been 269 to 269.
But they even, this last election with Walker, it's Libertarians that, hey, our candidate does not have a chance to win.
Let's go ahead and at least get the Democrat out of here so we can maybe get something done, anything done.
We had the 50th seat, and two years ago, we'd have had 51.
We would have avoided his omnibus vote to begin with.
Listen, that was a very frustrating race for me for a lot of different reasons.
And, you know, then you had, you know, these people in Washington, the elite, you know, picking winners and losers.
No, we're not going to support Blake Masters.
Yeah, we're not going to put that much money into Herschel's race.
And Democrats don't do that.
They competed everywhere.
And they threw whatever amount of money they needed to throw into a race.
They got it.
Where their money's coming from, I think we need an investigation into that too, because I have great suspicion about the amount of money because they so outspend Republicans in these races that it is mind-numbing.
Tens and tens of millions of dollars they're outspending Republicans and ads absolutely work.
But I'll add one thing.
Republicans better get their act together and they need to up their election game.
They are playing with an old election model.
Democrats have moved way beyond it at this point.
Republicans have got to match their effort.
Any reluctance or resistance as it relates to early voting or voting by mail or doing what the Democrats do.
I'm talking about legally.
If your state allows ballot harvesting and Democrats are doing it, Republicans need to do it better, following the law, of course.
I appreciate the call, my friend.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, Congressman Byron Donalds will join us from Florida coming up next.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markowitz, and I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media, and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down with Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
▲
Export Selection