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Feb. 29, 2024 - Sean Hannity Show
29:59
Senator Rand Paul - February 28th, Hour 3
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If you haven't heard, Mitch McConnell announcing that he is stepping down as the Republican leader in the Senate in November after the elections.
Here's part of his announcement.
One of life's most underappreciated talents is to know when it's time to move on to life's next chapter.
So I stand before you today, Mr. President and my colleagues, to say this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.
I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.
However, I'll complete my job.
My colleagues have given me until we select a new leader in November and they take the helm next January.
I'll finish the job the people of Kentucky hired me to do as well, albeit from a different seat.
And I'm actually looking forward to that.
All right, joining us now to discuss this and many other issues, his fellow Kentucky senator, and that is Rand Paul's back with us.
Senator, doctor, medical doctor, Rand Paul, sir, glad you're with us.
How are you?
Very good, Sean.
Thanks for having me.
Look, I've always observed that I think you're two very, very different people.
I think you have a very different set of very different political ideology.
Yet in the years that you've been in the Senate and Mitch McConnell's been the leader, you've been able to have a, I think, healthy and strong relationship with him and disagree with him, frankly, often, and there seems to be no hostility.
Maybe I'm wrong, but what's your reaction to this?
You know, I think it's the safe, it's quite safe to say that we've had our differences over the years from the very beginning.
You know, when I ran, he supported my opponent in the primary.
And so we've come from different wings of the party.
But yeah, we've had a sort of a détente, I guess is the best way to put it over the years.
And, you know, my comment today has been that I compliment him for his longevity and his tenure.
And there are still battles that are ongoing between his part of the party and my part of the party.
I think we don't have the money to be sending money overseas, particularly to Ukraine at this point.
I think that our debt is actually the greatest threat to our national security, and we can't be just, you know, printing up money like it's going out of style.
So I've disagreed with him on that and will continue to push within our caucus for people who are wanting to take care of our border first and frankly would secure our border before we start sending money overseas.
I tend to agree with you completely.
There was a meeting yesterday at the White House.
The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was in this meeting with Biden and Schumer and McConnell.
And according to reports, all three of them ganged up on him and basically said to him, you've got to abandon your conservative base in the House.
And we can't have a government shutdown, which is always the, quote, fear.
And he felt from reports, it sounds like he got beaten up pretty bad in there.
I'm kind of disappointed that McConnell joined in with Schumer and Biden.
Yeah, on this issue, you would hope that the Senate Republican leader would side with the Senate or with the House Republican Speaker.
And instead, it is really that, unfortunately, Senator McConnell is more aligned with Biden and with Schumer on the issue of getting more money out the door as fast as they can.
The more money we give them, the longer the war lasts.
Actually, the worse Ukraine looks over time, the longer this war goes on.
And so I think there is going to have to be some kind of negotiated settlement.
Zelensky got rid of their commander-in-chief a week or two ago because he said the same thing, that the war was at a stalemate.
Well, the war has been at a stalemate.
In part, I would argue, because Joe Biden has put handcuffs on Zelensky from the beginning.
One emerging, I guess, narrative or solution, if you will, has been the idea of lending money to Ukraine and Israel as opposed to giving them money.
Do you have any faith, if that happened, that the money would ever be paid back?
No, I don't think Ukraine is going to have assets to pay back anything for the near future.
So it might be giving it away under a different name.
But the bottom line is this, is that one of the answers to so many of the problems of so many countries where they have differing parties.
So part of eastern Ukraine has ethnically Russian people.
And some of the cities are ruled probably by a majority of people who actually want Russian ethnic rulers as mayors of their towns.
And so I think when you have that, the more autonomy you give to local towns, same as you have in Iraq, where you have the Kurdish population that is an uneasy part of the coalition with the Shia government of Iraq, allowing the Kurds autonomy, allows them to control some of the oil revenues and things, has allowed there to be somewhat of a peace in Iraq.
It's the same way in Ukraine or any of these countries that have disparate people, ethnically disparate people, that one way of allowing them to get along is not to force them to all be part of one massive big central government.
Have a small central government, allow regional government that has its ethnic sort of origins to take place.
And people feel more at home if they're ruled by mayor that they've chosen rather than a president who's from the opposite ethnic group.
What did you think of Macron's proposal that Europe and European nations, which I would also backtrack and argue have not stepped up and paid their fair share?
As usual, the United States bears the bulk of the financing of these conflicts, which always irritates me.
I mean, it's their continent.
It's their backyard.
They should have been leading the effort from day one.
That was never the case.
Maybe they see now that money coming from the U.S. may not be as easy as it had been.
But he talked about actually sending troops into Ukraine and from other European countries.
What would your reaction to that be?
Well, if I were a European, I'd be concerned about having European troops in there because I think the war could spread.
Many of people have made this argument, oh, if we don't check him in Ukraine, the dominoes will fall and he'll be invading into Poland next.
I think the opposite is true, actually.
I think Putin has, from most military viewpoints, has strategically been a failure, the war.
The whole world's united against him.
He's stuck in a part of Ukraine.
He can't seem to move.
I don't see him going into any other country.
But I do see if Europe were to come in, that he might look for a weakness in another small country, perhaps the Baltics, to invade.
And so I think the war could very quickly spread and become more.
I think ultimately the answer is that someone's got a broker negotiations.
And there are negotiations that end up occurring between warring parties where they never come to an agreement, but they do come to a peace.
Korea is probably the best example of that, where they're still bitterly opposed.
It's a bitterly divided country.
And both countries claim the whole country.
North Korea claims they have the whole peninsula.
South Korea claims ownership to the whole peninsula.
And they sit at this uneasy peace, but it's an uneasy peace that's lasted 70 years now.
And, you know, if you do, you can live to fight another day, or you live like Germany did to hope that in the end socialism collapsed.
And when it did, Germany reunified and became incredibly strong in Europe.
The hope would be that one day the sort of cronyism of Putin will fail and Ukraine will reunite again.
But I don't think it's going to happen militarily.
The number one state sponsor of terror is Iran.
According to the U.N.'s, quote, nuclear watchdog group, the IAEA, they have now concluded that Iran has the capacity to build, quote, several atomic bombs.
And why does that cause great consternation, concern in my mind?
I think if you marry the sick, ugly, twisted ideology of the mullahs in Iran with weapons of mass destruction, why do I believe them when they say they want to wipe Israel and the U.S. off the map?
Yeah, I think without question, all that's true.
Without question, any sane-minded person doesn't want them to have nuclear weapons.
But it's also true that once they have enriched uranium, say to 95, 98% what it takes to have weapons, that there is no military solution at that point.
Because to make an atomic weapon may take like a cup full of uranium.
It may be even smaller than that to make a bomb.
It's a very small amount once it's almost 100% enriched.
And so you can hide that in dozens and dozens of places.
So it becomes almost impossible to bomb away someone's nuclear program once they have the technology, the skill, the centrifuges.
And this is the disappointing thing that has happened is that, you know, as bad as the Iran agreement, you know, gave away too much without asking for verification, they were enriching less uranium under the agreement.
Once the agreement was breached by the U.S., Trump put on the maximum pressure campaign.
As much as people wanted it to work and were sympathetic to it, it actually led to Iran getting closer and closer to the enrichment necessary for Obama, and that's where we are now.
We continue now with Kentucky Senator Ram Paul who is with us.
Let's get your assessment of the 2024 presidential race.
Obviously, Joe Biden has a lot of issues.
I don't think he can run on his record or are you better off than you were four years ago and successfully convince anybody that we are.
His cognitive state has declined dramatically, in my view, especially in the last year.
I think it's obvious for anybody with eyes to see.
And you've got Donald Trump now.
It looks like he will wrap up this nomination probably a week from yesterday on Super Tuesday.
How do you see this race going forward, and especially with all of the potential trials that the left would like to dump on Donald Trump during the election season?
How do you see that unfolding?
I think the left miscalculated sort of their anger and hatred for Trump, their Trump derangement syndrome, caused them to think that we'll just sick all of these local Democrat strongholds, sick the law people on the lawfare.
We'll sue him everywhere.
But I think the lawsuits have looked so partisan and so beyond the pale of justice that it's embittering people even in the middle who are saying, you know, even as Trump said, people who have sometimes been abused by the legal system themselves or been involved with it see a kinship now with Trump, who's being abused by the system the same way some poor people have been.
Well, he said that about African Americans, and we've heard for years about disparate sentencing in our court system and longer prison sentences for minorities in this country.
And he made the analogy, and boy, our word came flying out of pretty much everybody's mouth, including the head of ABC News.
I think the reason they did is because it struck a nerve, because he talked about something.
Look, I've been active in the criminal justice movement.
I was active in lobbying Trump to get the First Step Act.
I do think that particularly for drug crimes, there's been a disproportionate amount of African Americans affected by the drug war.
And I've done everything I can to try to get nonviolent drug people who have had 30 and 40 year sentences out.
I've celebrated, like Trump, some of the successes of pardoning some of these people who are in jail for 40 years.
Some of the disparate sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
They're both bad.
They're both awful.
But more African Americans were using crack cocaine at one point in time, and they got a lot longer sentences.
So I've tried hard to fix that.
And I think Trump making a point, having been one of the reformers, making the point that, you know, he's being treated unfairly and he is sympathetic to the plight of blacks who have been treated unfairly.
I think it resonated.
That's why when anything resonates, or you mention anything about race, if you're a Republican, you're just called a racist.
But we have to be brave enough to stand up for it.
And like I say, I've got a 10-year history of standing up for people who I think were unfairly treated, nonviolent criminals who are unfairly treated by the court system.
But I think he's got a real point.
But the other point I've been making in speeches, and I think this is without question true, is that one of the worst times in our country, which almost led and did lead to some civil strife, was when people weren't treated equally under the law, when people who are black in the 40s, 50s, 30s, 20s, all back the last 70 or 80 years ago, were not treated fairly because of the color of their skin.
We've now transformed, though, to a new culture where people are not being treated fairly because of the shade of their ideology.
If you're a homeschooler, if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, if you're a Christian, if you're pro-life, if you're a Republican, if you're pro-Trump, you're being treated with a different standard of justice.
And they see Trump being treated with a different standard of justice.
And people don't like unfairness, but it leads to strife.
If people who support Donald Trump don't believe they're going to get a fair shake in court, it's going to lead to real problems in our country.
And so I'm doing everything possible to make sure that everybody talks about that equal justice under the law means equal justice, whether you're Republican, Democrat, Christian, non-Christian, conservative, liberal.
We need to be treated the same by the law.
Oh, I tend to agree with you.
Do you think, if you had to look into your crystal ball, how do you see this election year playing out?
So far, all the winds seem to be blowing in favor of Trump, in favor of a Republican Senate, in favor of keeping a Republican House.
You can't predict how things turn out in the end.
It's a very closely divided country, but you have polling from like Michigan that we've lost the last couple of times.
But when we win Michigan to a presidential race, we tend to win.
And you have Trump polling ahead, eight points in Michigan.
So I think that the winds are blowing our direction.
But the thing is, is that we do need to expand the party.
I've been as harsh as any saying that we've got to stop the flow of illegals coming across.
I would say zero illegals coming across.
But I also say at the same time that I'm all for legal and lawful immigration.
Some of my best friends are first-generation Americans.
And I always say, and I believe this, some of the best Americans just got here.
And if we don't acknowledge that, we're never getting them to consider.
I say exactly the same thing.
I don't think you could be any more correct.
Senator Ram Paul, by the way, if you've not read his book, Deception, The Great COVID Cover-Up, you really need to get a copy of it.
It is probably the most detailed book on COVID and the absolute fraud that was perpetrated on the country in so many different ways.
Exhaustively researched by Senator Paul.
We appreciate you being with us, Senator.
Thank you for your good work, and thanks for being with us.
Thanks, Sean.
All right, let's get to our busy phones.
Let us say hi to Michelle who's in Texas next on the Sean Hannity Show.
Hey, Michelle, how are you?
I'm fine, Sean.
Thank you for taking my call.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah, I'm a longtime fan.
I actually had an opportunity to meet you one time several years ago here in Texas with Uncle Ted.
Oh, is that right?
Well, I'm going to be down in Texas come Thursday.
That would be tomorrow.
I'm going to be down there with President Trump.
Joe Biden, we've invited.
He's not going to join us.
I don't know why.
I've really tried.
I gave him a nice invitation and everything.
Maybe if I send an engraved one with gold from Russia, maybe then he'd come.
Maybe, maybe so.
So, no, the reason for my call is that with the Biden inflation and Bidenomics and all that jazz and everybody, you know, it's such a joke because we all know going to the grocery store, we're having to pay three times the amount we had to pay three years ago to even get out the door.
It's the highest we're paying since 1991 food as a percentage of people's income.
Unbelievable.
People can't afford it.
My husband was 21 years military, and we were, I remember the late 80s, early 90s, four children, and we were, it feels like I'm back in that time.
And, you know, I'm 61 now, but it's like I'm right back in that time scraping to make ends meet.
And yet I keep seeing, oh, well, everything's fine.
Everything's good.
And you can't see this and that, yada, yada.
But every night on the news, I talk about these food banks and people having to wait in line to get food.
And, you know, we've just, you know, Tarrant County just opened up a new facility, a larger facility, so that they can bring in fresh fruits and vegetables and other things to add to their food bank for people who need to stand in line to get food.
I got to tell you, and I don't say this to pat myself on the back, and I believe that any generosity, any charity, you should do privately.
I don't think you should seek credit for it.
But the only reason I mention it is when I lived in New York, you might have heard I moved.
But when I lived there, I lived in a town where I would say it's maybe middle class to upper middle class.
And I had friends of mine that were part of the food bank in town.
And it would open one day a week, and the line of cars was massive.
And I said to them often, I said, well, if you ever run into trouble, you're running out, just call me when you're stuck, and I'll always be there.
And there were a number of times they called.
They were stuck.
They needed money to fulfill a need that had not existed before Joe Biden became president.
And then there were people that would show up.
I went down there once.
I didn't actually go in and hand out the food.
I don't like to make a spectacle of myself.
I live a pretty private, quiet life.
And I went down there, and a lot of the people are nice cars.
You might think, well, that's outrageous.
Look at this guy's driving a really nice car.
Why is he going there?
Because, well, people have mortgage payments, rent payments.
They have college tuition payments.
They've got all these bills, and it's not so easy to even sell a car.
And the car probably for most people is their mode of transportation so they can work.
And yet they didn't want to go to a food bank for their food.
They didn't have a choice.
They went there.
Thing we're seeing here in the DFW.
I mean, through the holidays almost nightly on the news, the line of cars and nice cars at that, over in Dallas picking up turkeys and a box for their Thanksgiving dinner or for their Christmas meal.
And I'm like, this is outrageous because Bidenomics is a joke.
This shrink-flation is a joke.
I bought the...
He caused shrink-flation.
He caused that.
Biden inflation caused shrinkflation.
You notice they want to blame everybody but themselves.
Big oil, big corporations, big this, big that, you know, greedy corporations.
I'm tired of all of it.
No, it's your economic policies that have caused all of this.
Your energy policies caused the price of energy to rocket through the roof.
And everything we pay for in every store we go to was impacted by Joe inflation.
Now, quietly, they have been, I guess, maybe trying to keep it from the climate alarmist religious cult.
All of a sudden, now they're realizing an election is coming up.
And in 22, they just started releasing, you know, half plus more than half of our strategic petroleum reserves to drive down the cost of energy in the lead up to an election.
Now they're just, now they're actually producing more.
And it's frustrating because it's all a mirage.
Because the minute the election is over, if they win, they're going right back to their climate alarmist religious cult policies and they'll give in to the radicals in their party.
We all know that's what's going to happen.
And it's frustrating that they're not responsible for the border, really?
The border that they said was closed and secure for three years.
Now they're saying it's the Republicans' fault.
I'll show you differently.
But you know, Joe does get more done in an hour than most Americans do in a day.
You know that, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I'm like, yes, I'm sure you do.
He's sitting in your rock and chair eating ice cream.
By the way, I would love to let Joe Biden, if he doesn't want to come on with me, I'm offering Joe Biden an opportunity to fill in on this radio show.
Do you think he'd be capable of doing a three-hour radio show?
I don't think so.
No, sir.
Not a clue.
No, he would not.
He would not.
Do you ever go to Walmart and Target?
I love this example I use.
And you ever meet those very nice people, the greeters, when you walk in the door?
All right.
And usually they're older people that either want extra income or they're kind of bored and they like helping people.
Nicest people in the world.
And I'm the kind of shopper that walks in.
I'm like, all right, where is the electronics department?
Where is the shoe department?
Where's this?
And they always, I say, they'll say, can I help you?
And I said, yeah, please.
Can you show me where the whatchamacallit department is?
And they say, yeah, that's right over there.
Go down that aisle, make a left, and you'll be right there.
I'm like, thank you, sir.
Thank you, ma'am.
I appreciate it.
They're very helpful.
I don't think Joe could be a greeter because he'd never remember where all the different departments are.
Those stores are pretty big.
I can tell you that I've seen it since when he started running because I worked for a home care agency.
I managed a home care agency for a few years.
And I could see it in 2015 that he was headed toward the dementia state.
And that's where he's at.
He now lives in the state of dementia.
And people refuse to see it or even acknowledge it.
Well, I'm going to tell you something.
A lot of people, I don't think they're even in denial.
I think they know darn well, darn well, what is going on here.
And I think that they have been, you know, they do their typical dance and they just try to cover, like they covered for Hillary.
You know, she gets special treatment, no reasonable prosecutor or prosecute.
Joe Biden, you know, four different locations, top secret classified documents, but we only raid Mar-a-Lago.
That doesn't sound like equal justice under the law to me.
Sounds like corruption.
Anyway, Michelle, I wish you the best.
We love our friends in the free state of Texas.
Thank you for checking in with us.
Thank you, Sean.
I appreciate it.
You too.
Have a great day.
All right.
John in Kentucky wants to talk about Mitch McConnell.
What's up, John?
How are you?
It's an honor, sir.
Honor's all mine.
What's on your mind today?
Well, as a Kentuckian, our motto is United, We Stand, Divided, We Fall.
And, well, I understand one of our Kentuckians, Mitch McConnell, is leaving, and I am bidding him farewell and hope he does well from here on out to the finish line.
But I can't imagine walking the tightrope that man has walked for so long.
And I have a tendency to agree with Senator Paul about him in certain cases, but to say I hope he does well.
Well, just look, I've been disappointed in Mitch McConnell a lot.
I think the time has long since come and gone, and I'm not sure why he's waiting until November.
It is what it is.
I'm not sure.
I mean, we do have different factions within the Republican Party.
You have a party institutionalist of which or establishment members of the party like Mitch and others.
And then you have people that want the Republican Party to fight and stand for principles.
And I don't think there's been too many times over the years that that has not happened under his leadership.
And I found that part disappointing.
And if the story that we heard from yesterday is true, that Mitch joined with Schumer and Biden and tried to beat up Mike Johnson on the issue of, oh, the ever-so dangerous government shutdown, a government shutdown is not as dangerous as they portray it.
Essential services continue.
You know, older people get their social security checks.
Medicare continues.
We pay our veterans.
We pay our active military.
And then usually the people that end up getting furloughed end up getting paid, get a paid vacation at the end because they get back pay.
That's what usually ends up happening.
But we better get a hold of fiscal responsibility.
We better do it in short order because it's now running away to the point where we're spending more on interest than we are on national defense.
And they have both parties, you know, they have done this to us and we've allowed it to happen.
We need to be better than that.
Anyway, appreciate the call.
Love our friends in Kentucky.
Let us say hi to Mike in New Joise.
What's up, Mike?
How you doing?
What's going on in Joisey?
Sean, how you doing, Mike?
Nice to speak to you finally.
Nice to talk to you.
What's going on?
Somebody mentioned the Pfizer court.
Why wouldn't the Pfizer court go after anybody for being lied to?
Good question.
There's no answer for that.
And if I was a FISA court judge and they put out information that turned out to be false because the bulk of information was based on, quote, that other trusted FBI source named Christopher Steele, and it turned out to be garbage.
And it was exactly what Bruce Orr warned about in August of 2016.
It was a political document bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton, and she hired, used a law firm to funnel money to an op research firm that hired Christopher Steele, and it's been a debunked dossier, but that was the foundation of four separate FISA applications.
And only, you know, three years after the fact did we get the people that signed off on those warrants to say, well, knowing what we know now, we never would have done it.
But this was another trusted FBI informant.
You know, Charles Grassley actually said, as it relates to the FBI in the 1023 form, which is only a small part of the Biden family syndicate story, it doesn't negate most of the other facts that we know in the case.
But he said the FBI has consistently and publicly vouch for their source.
He said then the other week, the Biden Justice Department made their source's name public for the world to see.
This is with the 1023 form, but it actually was the FBI director.
Oh, yeah, no, this is a long-term trusted, well-trusted FBI source.
Well, how do they keep getting it wrong?
Because it's impacting our presidential politics.
They can't make mistakes like that.
We can't have people that are not credible that the FBI is using his informants and paying his informants.
We can't have that.
I have one other question for you.
Yeah.
We all had free vaccination and free testing and everything else was free.
But somehow or another, big farmers got their profits are thousands percentage instead of 100%.
And people actually fall for it, that this is a free.
It wasn't free.
The government paid for it.
The government told you that if you got the shot, the jab, that you would never get COVID.
That turned out not to be true.
If you got the shot, you would not infect other people.
That was not true.
So much of what they said, the largest COVID study ever done post as it relates to the vaccine, it shows that, yeah, there are significant side effects for many people.
And I can tell you anecdotally, I've seen it myself.
And yet they didn't warn anybody.
This was all emergency authorization stuff.
Even the founder of the MRNA Technology said he would never have given it to the vast majority of the population.
The only people he might have allowed the technology to be used on because it wasn't perfected would be the elderly population that were disproportionately really impacted by COVID.
Why were we vaccinating young kids going to school?
It was insane.
Why do we shut down society?
That was insane, too.
They didn't do it in Florida.
Kids were back in in-person learning in August of 2020.
Appreciate the call, my friend.
Micah, New Jersey, 800-941-Sean is our number.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
Hannity, tonight, 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
We have committee chairmans James Comer, Jim Jordan, Jason Smith on Hunter's appearance on Capitol Hill.
We have Speaker of the House, Ron Johnson, will join us.
Also, Sarah Carter, Lindsey Graham, Tommy Laron, Ronnie Jackson.
State DVR, 9 Eastern tonight, Hannity on Fox.
News you'll never get from the mob and the media.
9 Eastern.
See you tonight.
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