Hey everybody, I'm Greg Jarrett, filling in for Sean Hannity on the Sean Hannity Show.
Happy to be here for the second day in a row.
Sean's taking off a few well-deserved days of rest during the holidays.
I've been at Fox.
I'm a legal analyst there for going on 24 years.
I've written several books, beginning with the Russia hoax, the sequel Witch Hunt.
I wrote The Trial of the Century, and the latest book is the U.S. Constitution and other patriotic documents.
Please check them out.
But I want to begin today with the burr in my saddle over fraud.
Have you ever wondered where a lot of your hard-earned tax dollars go?
Well, look no further than the screwed-up state of Minnesota.
It is a blue state, to be sure, run by idiots and morons that are so utterly incompetent that they failed to refuse to recognize one of the greatest ripoffs in American history.
Minnesota is now the epicenter of fraud.
We're talking about roughly $2 billion with a capital B stolen by scammers from social service programs.
In fact, there were so many swindles going on at the same time you'd need a flowchart just to keep track of them all.
And of course, at the top of the flowchart should be a big fat picture of Governor Tim Walz and his sidekick Keith Ellison, the state's scandal-plagued Attorney General.
Together, those two are the dumb and dumber of politics.
And both are to blame because they were repeatedly warned of all the hustles and flim flams going on in their precious Somali community, but they didn't care.
No, they thought it would be racist to prosecute Somali constituents, so they happily allowed the fraud to continue and indeed to escalate.
You see, in uber liberal Minnesota, it is politically incorrect to enforce the law against Somalis.
God forbid, putting criminals behind bars might lose some votes.
Not only did Waltz turn a blind eye to all the con jobs going on under his bulbous nose, he actually helped them flourish.
Evidence shows he was told repeatedly of the ginormous COVID fraud scandal early on.
But instead of fixing it, he worked to protect it and to cover it up.
He allegedly aided and abetted all of the schemes by retaliating against whistleblowers who had come forward with courage to try to expose the fraud.
Waltz tried his level best to discredit the fraud reports themselves.
So, you know, that's not merely rank incompetence.
It's intentional malfeasance.
No wonder Waltz admitted during the vice presidential debate that he's a knucklehead.
Really?
He actually said that.
And by the way, nobody has ever disagreed with that assessment.
The guy is a total buffoon.
I wouldn't trust him to run a hot dog stand.
And yet, he has the audacity to run for reelection.
So, you know, he can ruin Minnesota further with even more corruption.
Tim Waltz is so clueless that his own state workers at the Department of Human Services denounced his epic incompetence.
They issued an official statement saying Waltz is 100% responsible for fleecing more than a billion dollars from taxpayers.
Look, is anybody really surprised?
I mean, this is what happens when the government begins handing out free money while relying on states like Minnesota for oversight.
I mean, the scammers and the grifters are having a field day.
The pandemic relief was supposed to be administered by Waltz's education department, but they were so inept under his leadership or lack thereof that it became a piece of cake to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in phony claims.
Money that was supposed to go to feed needy children was stolen by scammers who splashed their cash on luxury homes, fancy cars, elaborate vacations, lavish lifestyles.
They were yucking it up.
In one case alone, they claimed to have served 91 million meals that were never served, for which they fraudulently received $250 million in federal funds.
Those are your tax dollars going into the pockets of Minnesota crooks.
I can't think of anything lower than stealing money from hungry children or taking money away from kids who were supposed to be receiving autistic services that never happened.
But that's not all.
Housing programs were also ripped off in Minnesota.
In fact, the list is so long that one former U.S. attorney estimates that the total figure will likely surpass $2 billion in fraud.
Trump has vowed to prosecute and then deport the Somali criminals responsible for all that fraud, but Timmy Waltz calls that petty vindictiveness.
I'm not kidding.
In the twisted world of Waltz, the law should be selective because, you know, equal enforcement of the law is racist.
It's not just the wicked world of Waltz, but mega thefts are now being discovered in Ohio, where, you guessed it, Somalis reportedly perpetrated a massive Medicaid theft involving healthcare payouts based on fake medical conditions.
All right, that's appalling.
But is anybody surprised?
Since Obamacare, one of the greatest deceptions of all time, opened the door to a wholesale plundering of our nation's treasury.
The General Accounting Office says that Obamacare subsidies are costing you, the taxpayers, some $27 billion a year.
$27 billion in fake identities, dead people, and improper use of Social Security numbers.
And then there's food stamps, or we're not supposed to call them food stamps anymore because that's what they are.
We call them SNAP payments.
Well, those are rife with fraud.
Hundreds of thousands of people are getting government money, except they're dead.
So, you know, they're not eating a lot.
Don't get me started on my home state of California.
Massive unemployment fraud has recently been uncovered that resulted in billions of stolen dollars.
Get this.
Up to $31 billion that was paid to criminals, including people behind bars.
Education fraud, health care fraud, Medicare fraud in California has been uncovered.
Again, that's your money down the drain.
And Gavin Newsom doesn't care, except to the extent that his former chief of staff was caught and charged in one of those schemes.
Here's the bottom line.
Democrats say they care about the needy, except they don't.
That's just a ruse.
It's a pretense for something else.
They use the needy.
They exploit the needy to strong-arm the government into handing out benefits so that the cash can then be stolen by their constituents.
And people like Tim Waltz look the other way.
And always, liberal Democrats want more.
They will ruthlessly and persistently dig deep into your pockets until they're empty.
And then they demand more of your income with higher taxes.
It's the old socialist stratagem that seems appealing to some until as Margaret Thatcher famously observed, you eventually run out of other people's money.
That's the history of socialism.
It's a well-worn story of failure and collapse.
Later on in our program, I'm going to be talking with Peter Schweitzer about this.
He's president of the Government Accountability Institute, and he is certainly an expert on the subject of fraud.
Peter also wrote the book called Clinton Cash.
So he's going to tell us about the recent news of how the FBI's corruption probe into Hillary Clinton's suspected pay-to-play schemes was killed by her protectors in Barack Obama's administration.
We're going to take a quick break right now.
Coming up, we have, in addition to Peter Schweitzer, I'll be talking to Mike Davis about whether any of the people involved in the lawfare crusade against Donald Trump will ever be held accountable with indictments.
I think there'll be indictments in the beginning of the new year.
We'll also talk to Brian Finch about Trump's attacks on Caribbean drug boats tied to Venezuela.
Are they legal?
They are.
We'll be right back.
I'm Greg Jarrett filling in for Sean Hannity.
Well, you've come to the right place.
This is The Sean Hannity Show.
Welcome back to The Sean Hannity Show.
I'm Greg Jarrett, filling in for Sean a few minutes ago.
I mentioned in the context of all the fraud going under the nose of Tim Waltz in Minnesota, how he's incompetent.
And in fact, he admitted in the vice presidential debate when he was running with Kamala that he's a knucklehead.
And so I want to play, you know, some people have said, and I've mentioned it before, have said, oh, did he?
No, he didn't really.
He didn't call himself a knucklehead.
Yeah, he did.
And I'm going to play the clip for you right now.
Here's the context.
Waltz is a known liar, and he got caught many times in lies.
The number of times he was in China, he claimed he was there at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Records show he wasn't there.
He was in the United States.
So a moderator asked him during the debate, and here's what Timmy Waltz had to say.
Governor Waltz, you said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989.
But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year.
Can you explain that discrepancy?
Yeah, well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small rural Nebraska, town of 400, town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service.
Now, look, my community knows who I am.
They saw where I was at.
They, look, I will be the first to tell you, I have poured my heart into my community.
I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect.
And I'm a knucklehead at times.
I will say more than anything.
Many times I will talk a lot.
I will get caught up in the rhetoric.
But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life, I learned a lot about China.
Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?
All I said on this was, is I got there that summer and misspoke on this.
So I will just, that's what I've said.
What a sleazeball.
But there it is.
He called himself a knucklehead, and no truer words were ever spoken.
The guy's a buffoon.
He's an incompetent governor of Minnesota, and he's running for reelection amid all of the fraud, which may roughly be $2 billion of your taxpayer money.
Coming up later, I'll talk to Peter Schweitzer about it.
He knows all about the fraud in Minnesota.
But I also want to talk to Peter about how the Department of Justice under Barack Obama, probably under the president's orders, decided to kill and bury the growing corruption investigation into Hillary Clinton's foreign pay-to-play schemes,
which enriched the Clinton Foundation.
And of course, they used that foundation as their personal piggy bank.
There's considerable evidence that Bill and Hillary got rich from foreign donations made to their Clinton Foundation, which, as I say, was really, you know, their own bank account.
We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
And as I wrote in my book, The Russia Hoax, back in 2018, many of the largest contributions were made by people and shell companies.
There's a red alert.
connected to a Russian-controlled business called Uranium-1, which managed through a series of clever maneuvers to seize control of a sizable percentage of America's prized uranium assets.
I'm reading directly out of my book.
All of this happened as Hillary was serving as Secretary of State.
And of course, the inevitable allegations of corruption followed and the FBI became so concerned that it opened a criminal investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving Hillary and her foundation.
The Bureau gathered evidence that the foreign cash may have illegally influenced U.S. foreign policy under Hillary Clinton.
Peter wrote about it.
I wrote about it.
We'll be talking with him coming up on The Sean Hannity Show.
Solid as a rock.
Honest.
Truthful.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
Hey, welcome back to the Sean Hannity Show.
I'm Greg Jarrett.
Of course, Donald Trump and his administration has been going after drug cartels, smuggling deadly fentanyl, cocaine, synthetic opioids into the United States that have killed more than 300,000 young people since 2021.
So, you know, they've carried out strikes against suspected drug vessels in the region, in the Caribbean.
They've seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, declared a blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela.
And Trump has said on more than one occasion that strikes on land in Venezuela could be coming sometime soon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had this to say on that subject today.
At the core of foreign policy needs to be the national interest of the United States.
So you have to, first of all, define what is the national interest and then you have to apply it.
We defined it as we are in favor of foreign policies that make America safer or stronger or more prosperous.
Hopefully all three, but at least one of those three.
And then it requires you to prioritize.
Even the richest, most powerful, and influential country on earth has limited resources, has limited time.
And it has to be able to dedicate those resources and time through a process of prioritization.
That includes geographic prioritization.
It also includes issue prioritization.
When it comes to the Western Hemisphere, the single most serious threat to the United States from the Western Hemisphere is from transnational terrorist criminal groups, primarily focused on narco-trafficking, but they're in all-sides businesses as well.
So the good news is we have a lot of countries in the region that openly cooperate and work with us to confront these challenges.
All right, that was Marco Rubio.
Let's bring into the conversation now our guest today, Brian Finch, who is a top-notch lawyer.
He's a partner with Pillsbury Winthrop.
He co-chairs the firm's global security practice.
And Brian has been covering the ongoing Venezuelan narco-terrorism and the dictatorship under Maduro.
As I say, the president and secretary of war have been doing everything they can to prevent these boats from onboarding their drugs to American shores.
Brian, thanks so much for being with us.
You and I have talked about this before, but in your legal opinion, does this administration have every legal right to defend its citizens from the lethal poison by using lethal military force?
Of course.
It's a basic constitutional tenet that the president has the authority to do that.
I mean, that's he's the commander-in-chief of the military.
dozens upon dozens of examples throughout American history where the president has acted unilaterally to defend the nation from any type of threat.
And this falls squarely into that category once again.
And folks who are protesting this, you know, this is about being anti-Trump.
It's not about the president actually exceeding his authority.
So it's a policy complaint.
It's not a legal complaint.
Is there any doubt in your mind that Maduro himself and his murderous regime in Venezuela are behind the smuggling?
No, I mean, it's like any other narco-state kleptocracy where, of course, he exerts control with an iron fist.
This is why you've had people trying to flee the country by millions over the past decade or so.
He runs it.
Anything that happens in the country happens at his direction, or at least with his awareness, and whether explicitly or implicitly, this is all happening at his direction and more than likely at his profit as well.
You can easily imagine that.
So, of course, this is all happening with his understanding, with his knowledge, if not his direction at this point.
So it's his responsibility and the president is right to direct actions against him personally and against his regime to protect Americans.
Back to the legality of it all.
The cartels are officially designated by our government as armed terror organizations.
And as such, they are, are they not, enemy combatants and can be legally targeted by Trump under the president's constitutional war powers?
And no, you do not need consent from Congress.
Wasn't it long ago given by Congress when they approved the authorization for use of military force?
It absolutely was.
And even if people will point to the War Powers Act, for example, to say that the president has to go to Congress to explain what he's doing and seek their consent, very good argument that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional.
Yes.
And so the president, he can certainly consult with Congress if Congress wants to weigh in.
They can do so.
They have, in fact, been doing so.
The chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers from Alabama, he looked into the questionable, you know, the questionable complaints about the one strike and whether that was a violation of the law of war.
And the chairman walked away saying, I'm perfectly satisfied the president's been doing everything by the book, by the law.
And so he's acting fully within his constitutional authority.
And oh, by the way, enemy combatants, there's also a good argument that these are illegal combatants, much like we've said with al-Qaeda and ISIS and the Taliban back in the early 2000s.
And they don't necessarily get the protections of law war in those cases.
Yeah, and I think you're right that legal scholars, many of them, have said that the War Powers Act passed by Congress, it was a resolution, is unconstitutional.
And in fact, past presidents have ignored it, including Barack Obama.
And of course, he used the so-called war-run terrorism statutes to take similar actions as President Trump, didn't he?
Oh, President Obama actually went further than anything that President Trump is doing.
President Obama issued a very length or had a very lengthy memorandum written that justified him killing American citizens. overseas without any sort of due process.
As long as they were suspected of being associated with terrorists or presenting a potentially imminent threat to the United States, President Obama's legal team, and he agreed, said that he could order lethal drone strikes against American citizens anywhere in the world, as long as it met those conditions.
And he did so.
He did so hundreds of times.
So you look at the complaints that are being lodged against the president and his team about violations of the law of the war.
It's silly.
And I've been thinking a lot about this, Greg, and it just, it's remarkable, but also predictably pathetic that you see such unanimity about violations of the president with law of war, those alleged violations of the law of war.
You couldn't get that same unanimity about Hamas going out and killing women, children, babies on October 7th.
Clearly in violation of every law in the world.
But in those cases, they said, well, there were some justifications there.
So we can call that any sort of illegal act, et cetera.
The Israelis are so evil.
So it just goes to show the hypocrisy and the lengths that the president's opponents will go to in order to claim that he is just the worst man in the history of the United States.
And you and I and the listeners know it's just not true.
It's just sad rhetoric that is cloaked in illegal vernacular when all in reality is Trump derangement syndrome.
Yeah, it really is.
And, you know, Democrats and their media handmaidens are, you know, raging still against Trump.
But again, they didn't seem to care when Barack Obama went after terrorism targets with deadly drone strikes.
In fact, he approved 540-plus strikes, killing roughly 3,400 people.
Joe Biden did pretty much the same thing in Yemen and Syria and Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
But, you know, when Obama and Biden do it, it's perfectly lawful, according to Democrats and the media.
When Trump does it, it's somehow war crimes.
That's legally absurd, isn't it?
It absolutely is.
And by the way, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, if we find somebody we want to shoot, shoot them.
And I think that's the case here.
If we find terrorists, whether they're in the Middle East or they're in Latin America, South America, or wherever they are, and they are threatening American lives, they are actively participating in killing Americans.
Yeah, they need to be subject to military force.
And again, it's the hypocrisy and the irony.
There was incredible glee going after the manufacturer of opioids and Oscar-winning movies about the crusades against them.
But then you go after the makers of cocaine and fentanyl and all these other drugs.
And oh my goodness, we violated the Geneva Convention.
It's just a sad playbook that shows the desperation of striking out against someone who doesn't fit into this politically correct mold, doesn't use the language they like and isn't pursuing the priorities they want.
And so again, it's just sad, honestly, at the end of the day.
And the legal arguments are just smoke and mirrors to make it sound legitimate, but in reality, there's nothing to it.
Yeah, you know, and I keep reading and hearing from so-called experts.
Oh, this is a violation of the law of armed conflict embedded in international law and established by the Geneva Conventions in 1949.
Wait a minute.
Did you guys read that?
Because enemy combatants under international law can be lawfully targeted with deadly force in any hostilities.
Those who are protected by that law are civilians and medical workers and religious personnel and wounded and sick soldiers and prisoners of war.
But that's not happening here, is it?
No, no, not at all.
It's funny.
I'm a bit of a history buff, and I was reading up on some World War II battles where the exact type of orders that people are, you know, alleged orders with no quarter, et cetera, that supposedly are a violation of all this.
Americans were pursuing it and getting medals for it in World War II, showing no quarter to Japanese soldiers who were on convoys.
And again, there are certain rules when it comes to the law of war, but anytime someone declares that especially President Trump has committed an open and shut violation of something particularly something as nebulous and in some ways complicated as the law of war, and they say, oh, it's clear violation.
You know, it's not.
It is cherry-picking facts, cherry-picking scenarios, and creating a fantasy situation and a fantasy case to convict him right away.
But once you pull it apart, as you recognized, and our listeners have recognized, this is not a violation.
This is a president authorizing and executing exactly what he's been granted under the Constitution by the founders, and good for him for doing it.
All right.
Brian Finch, many thanks.
You're a terrific lawyer.
You certainly know the subject matter quite well.
And thank you for taking the time to join us.
Brian Finch again, partner at Pillsbury Winthrop.
He's the co-chair of the firm's Global Security Practice.
So thanks again for being with us.
Always a pleasure, Greg.
All right.
When we come back, we're going to take a couple of phone calls.
Our number is 1-800-941-7326.
Give me a call.
Love to hear from you, your comments or questions.
Again, that number is 1-800-941-Sean.
I'm Greg Jarrett.
We'll be right back on The Sean Hannity Show.
Now it's time to take back America.
This is the Hannity Show.
Back with the Sean Hannity Show.
I'm Greg Jarrett, right to our phone lines.
Corbin joins us now from Springfield, Missouri, or as my mother, who lived in Springfield, used to call it, Missouri.
Hey, Corbin, how are you?
Good.
Call it whatever you want to, Greg.
Hey, I just want to talk to you about Yesterday and today, you've laid out the law to where, you know what, an elementary kid could understand this thing.
And to me, that's the way that it should be.
And I'm kind of looking at, okay, here's what Letitia James has done.
Here's what Folly Willis has done.
We went through what Comey did here yesterday.
And I'm just, you know, I want a head on a stick.
I'm sorry.
I want a head on a stick.
I don't know what Pam Bondi's doing, but I don't know if she's doing her job or not.
You know what?
We runned people's lives that were there at January 6th.
We have somebody that actually lives here in the area that was there.
And I mean, the Biden Justice Department went after this guy.
You know, there was no mercy.
Right.
No mercy.
And these people are still walking around free, having a good time.
I mean, Comey puts 8647 on the beach.
And I don't know what that means.
Well, hell, I know what that means.
You do.
All of America does.
Yeah, Corbin, you're preaching to the choir.
I agree with you 100%, 1,000%.
And I've laid it out.
I laid it out yesterday.
I'm going to talk more about it today with Mike Davis in just a few minutes, actually.
But, you know, I think in the new year, we may well see criminal charges against a whole host of people who misused the law to destroy Donald Trump, to try to drive him from office.
And then when he ran for reelection in 2024, in the run-up to that contest, they did the lawfare crusade all over again, bringing specious charges, phony cases, invented facts against him.
And I think they need to be held accountable.
And there's a grand jury that will be convened in Florida.
And guess what?
In your neck of the woods, Corbin, in Missouri, a grand jury.