All Episodes
Aug. 25, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:51
3391 Hillary Clinton's Crisis of Character | Gary J. Byrne and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well.
I have on the line Gary J. Byrne.
Now, he served in federal law enforcement for nearly 30 years.
He is a former Secret Service agent and author of...
The number one New York Times bestseller, Crisis of Character.
A White House Secret Service officer discloses his first-hand experience with Hillary, Bill, and how they operate.
The links will be below if you would like to take it for a spin.
And it is a very, very gripping and well-written book.
Gary, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you.
I'm grateful to be here.
Gary, let's start right at the beginning because it seems to me that one of the central arguments in your book, which is tragically absent from the modern world in many ways, is the idea that character matters.
The moral decisions that you make right at the base of your ethical spine really matter.
You talk in the book quite a bit about your father.
I wonder if you could help people to understand what values your father transmitted to you and how that happened.
Yeah.
My dad, he had kind of a rough upbringing.
You know, his parents had some issues with alcohol.
As he got older and he went in the Air Force, I think the one thing that really made my dad the man that he was and then made us, myself and my siblings, the adults we are today, is my dad went in the Air Force.
He went in the U.S. Air Force.
And he learned a lot about discipline.
And he became an aircraft mechanic.
And he learned, you know...
One of the things he learned from being an aircraft mechanic is that you have to do things in a certain way.
And you have to have the character and the honesty to tell somebody if you make a mistake.
You know, when you're working on an airplane or an automobile and you make a mistake, if you don't tell somebody and something's wrong, people could die.
And that stuck with my father, and that's the way he raised us.
He wasn't grim or anything, don't get me wrong, but he was very careful about, you know, when you did something, you did it to the best of your abilities, you did it...
As economically as you can, and if there was a problem, you always told somebody.
You had to tell somebody when there was a problem, and you had to be honest about things.
And, of course, you have to stand up for what is right and safe, even in the face of authority telling you otherwise, because, of course, wishful thinking never changed one single atom in the world.
You're exactly right.
That is the most important thing I want people to get from my book, is You know, I never thought I would talk about these things, but somewhere not too long ago, approximately two years ago, it became clear that I had to.
It became clear for me to stay Gary Byrne and to be the honest person that I am, that I wanted people to know the truth.
And, you know, in politics and in business, and especially in finances and politics, you always hear the word, you know, people talk about being clear and transparency.
And you're never going to have transparency when it comes to the Clintons if somebody like me doesn't come forward.
I always felt that it wasn't right for me to talk outside of school, but when I realized, you have to remember how I got where I am.
I got this information, this stuff happened to me because of President Bill Clinton's bad behavior.
I was, unfortunately, the first person in the history of the Secret Service to ever be compelled to testify against a sitting president in a criminal case.
And, of course, that was the Monica Lewinsky case.
And I was actually subpoenaed six times.
So I wanted my chance to tell my side of the story.
And it does go back to my father and my wife always telling me to do the right thing.
And that's the way they lived, especially my father, who lived his life.
Well...
Don't you wish, Gary, and you go into this in very compelling detail in the book, don't you wish that in life doing the right thing was just a little bit simpler?
Because, of course, and we'll get to that in a sec, but you had all of these balancing requirements of, you know, wanting to protect the president's information, wanting to protect Secret Service schedules and practices, but at the same time being compelled to tell the truth.
So let's start with Monica Lewinsky.
This was a view in your book that I'd never seen before before.
Which was the degree to which Monica Lewinsky, I guess originally an unpaid intern at the White House, seemed to be in fairly compulsive hot pursuit of the president.
And, you know, recognizing that she was a very young woman in experience, and he of course was a mature man, the most powerful man in the world, a huge disparity in their authority and power.
But she really did seem to be trying to gravitate towards him and find sort of any ingress she could to get into his company.
Yeah, she definitely tried to manipulate the system, as I described.
And, you know, I described in my testimony that I described her as a cross between a rock star groupie and a stalker.
And she certainly went out of her way.
And that became, it was very obvious to me.
And I remember pointing it out to other co-workers and some staff members.
And they just didn't think it was a big deal.
But I kind of saw through it.
And I was concerned it would become a problem.
And obviously it did.
Right.
So, I wonder if you can help people understand how it was that you ended up testifying some of the challenges that you faced and how it ended up on television.
Yeah, so, yeah.
I have to laugh when I think about it.
So, basically, there was an investigation going on about Bill Clinton's behavior when he was governor down in Arkansas.
And through that investigation, Judge Ken Starr Who was investigating the Clintons for a land deal in Arkansas called the Whitewater Land Deal.
They were doing an investigation.
They got word that there was a court case involving President Clinton and a woman, a former employee of the state of Arkansas.
So...
They started investigating, getting information from that investigation.
And basically what they found out was that it's quite possible that Bill Clinton was having an affair with an intern at the White House while they were doing these other investigations.
Where they got the information from originally, I'm not sure.
So they started investigating it.
And sure enough, the story broke in the U.S. by a reporter named Matt Drudge.
And the Drudge report broke it.
I heard it on Howard Stern.
A year and a half had gone by since I had seen all these things happen with Monica Lewinsky, and I knew she was having this affair with the President, or I believe she was.
And then the story broke, so it made me sick to my stomach, literally.
And I knew we were going to be in trouble.
And myself and these other officers.
So, we eventually, Judge Starr subpoenaed us multiple times.
I was subpoenaed six times, and then eventually...
I didn't want to testify about Bill Clinton's behavior.
I wanted to keep it private.
Not because of any reason other than I didn't think it was my job.
If President Clinton had done something wrong, it wasn't the Secret Service's job to tell the American people.
It was his job.
But the problem was that he wouldn't come forward and do the right thing.
So they subpoenaed us.
And then eventually, I wanted to do what the Secret Service wanted.
I wanted to keep my job.
But I also wanted to do the right thing, which was to tell the truth.
So eventually I was ordered by Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist to testify.
And I did.
And showed it to other people.
And it was tough to talk about.
It was bizarre.
You're talking about somebody's personal, bizarre life.
And it put a lot of pressure on myself and my family.
Yeah, and I mean, a very stressful time.
You've got people yelling Miranda rights at you, threatening to arrest you, and it seems to me that without that wonderful lawyer, it would have been a very tough road for you.
Yes.
Yeah, Mark was my secret lawyer.
Here's another kind of interesting law thing that happened when it comes to law.
There's no requirement.
There was no requirement for me to tell the Justice Department or the Secret Service that I had gotten another attorney to look over my shoulder and help me.
And this was my friend Mark.
And I refer to him as Mark H. in the book.
And he did a great service to me.
And he's actually helping me today.
As you well know, a lot of people, since my book has come out, have slandered me and defamed me.
And Mark is actually helping me with a lawsuit going after these people that are telling lies about me.
So once again, he's coming to my rescue.
And so it's just kind of a funny full circle.
One of the things that I found very interesting, it was a detail in the book that, to me, speaks to a lot of character issues.
And that is the degree to which the Clintons would order things in the White House, upgrade of the telecommunications systems and so on, and then be genuinely surprised when they found that somehow these things had to be paid for.
It seems more like the attitude of a king than an elected representative.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
And at the time, I thought of it like that.
Either somebody who thinks they're a dictator or a king, or somebody who is so childish.
I mean, how do you not know that if you're going to replace the phone system at the White House?
Now, I don't know how many phones are at the White House, and it's hard for me to describe to you how big this complex is.
The White House complex sits on about 18 and a half acres, and it's actually four different buildings.
It's the Treasury Department, the White House with its east and west wings, and then the old executive office building, also known as the Eisenhower Building, and then a building across the street called the new executive office building.
And there are thousands of phones in there.
And they thought they could just replace them in a giant computer system that runs them.
And there was some magic pot of money, and there wasn't.
Right.
And not even again, that's where some people on the left seem to have their spending priorities.
One of the things that I really found frustrating, not in the book, but in sort of the things that you describe, Is I sort of got in my mind, Gary, this kind of like a pyramid.
And the people at the bottom have the widest responsibilities and seem to have the most negative repercussions if they do something that screws up or causes damage or causes harm or breaks protocol or breaks standards.
Now, the way that I was always taught was that, you know, heavy is the head that wears the crown.
There's so much responsibility at the top and so on.
But at least in the book that you describe the situation, it seems like a pyramid.
The people at the bottom have a huge amount of responsibility and a huge amount of negative responsibility.
Repercussions, if they mess up.
And that seems to scale down, rather than the opposite.
It seems to scale down as you go up and up in the hierarchy of power.
Was that a fair way to characterize your experience working in that White House?
You're exactly right.
That's one of the themes in my book.
That's one of the things that, as I started writing it, compelled me to keep writing, was that I want the American people to know, or really anybody to know, there's two standards.
There's a standard for the Clintons, And the standard for everybody else.
And the standard for everybody else is what the laws and rules are.
And you're exactly right.
You know, myself and the other Secret Service employees that were subpoenaed because of Bill Clinton's bad behavior did nothing wrong.
But they were the ones that were treated badly.
We were called names.
You know, they tried to demean us.
The same kind of demeaning that you see now that I've written this book.
And, you know, here's the thing.
The people in the Secret Service, and I hope everybody that reads my book understands, I love the Secret Service.
I don't agree with the way they manage their people sometimes.
They treat their people like the Clintons treated us.
It's harsh.
There's these two standards, and the Clintons walk around like they're dictators, and they don't want to follow any of the rules for these big government programs that they want, but they want us to follow all these rules.
And there's, you know, when you read my, if your listeners are nice enough to read my book, when you read it, you'll see the theme that basically what you said is there's two sets of rules.
They treat themselves like they're royalty or in some cases almost like that they're some kind of criminal element.
And they're the hierarchy.
They're the top of the mafia, so to speak.
And then everybody else is treated poorly.
And the employees in the Secret Service and employees like myself that work for them You know, we did the hard work, we protected them at night, and then they exposed us to this, and then acted like it was nothing.
And that's one of the themes, another theme of the book is, they do all these scandals, there's one scandal to the next, and they leave all these people in their wake, and they never are held responsible for it.
I mean, President Clinton wasn't removed from office, he was impeached, but he really was held responsible for what he did, he got to stay president.
Is Mrs.
Clinton held responsible for having 110 Well, that, of course, is a whole big topic.
It seems that the law is like a spider web, and it catches the small flies, but the big birds just crash right through it like it's not even there.
And that's something that I think is really coming out during this election cycle in ways that's pretty hard to ignore.
Now, another thing that struck me in the book, Gary, was the degree to which Hillary Clinton's temper and the fear that it seemed to instill in her staff, you know, a lot of people think that sort of aggression is something to do with being dominant.
And basically what it does, though, is it removes the necessary feedback that leaders need to have in order to make good decisions.
You know, you get your consultations and then you make your decisions, but you need people to push back and to make sure that the decision that you're making is the best one.
I wonder how much Hillary Clinton's aggression towards her staff may have continued into some of the wholly disastrous, in my opinion, decisions she made as Secretary of State, that she may have people around her who may be just too nervous to tell her or push back when they think she's doing something that's not optimal.
No, you're exactly right.
And actually, that parallel is pretty much one of the things I push forward in my book.
Because of the way she behaves, because of the way she berates her employees, I tell a story in the book where these three women, one of them actually worked in Arkansas at the Rose Law Firm, were so afraid to tell her about a mistake that they made, ordering some stationery, they weren't worried about the tens of thousands of dollars of U.S. tax dollars that were wasted.
They were worried about who was going to tell Hillary Clinton because they knew they were going to get berated and then she would threaten to fire them.
This is the way she always behaves.
I show you many examples of this in my book.
So if you fast forward to when she becomes Secretary of the State, And she wants to set up this server, and some GS-11 tells her, Mrs.
Clinton, you can't have your own private server.
I can guarantee you if that discussion took place, she berated them, or she berated her staff member who had to tell her what he said, and then they did whatever they wanted to do.
She set up that server so she could keep those emails away from the American people, the federal government, which is not the way it's supposed to work.
That's government material.
When you're the When you're the head of the State Department, everything you do for that job back and forth in your life is government property then.
And she hid those emails.
There's over 33,000 emails missing.
She knew what she was doing, but she berates people.
People know that they don't give her what she wants.
They'll get ripped apart, and they're afraid for their jobs.
And in some cases, people believe that they should be afraid for their lives.
Nice.
Let me portray a nightmare scenario to you, Gary, and see if it fits with your experience.
One of the things that you point out in the book, which is really important for people to understand, you know, when people look back at the 90s and all of these scandals, it seems sort of compressed in time.
But for those of us who are around, and of course, you were right in the thick of things, I mean, it just went on and on and on and on.
It was a very slow, grinding, wear you down kind of process.
And of course, it was really hard, we can imagine, to get any proper governing done during a time when these scandals were embroiling the American presidency, of course, all the way up to the top.
I guess one of the things that struck me, and tell me what you think, is if Hillary Clinton becomes president, let's say something with the Clinton Foundation blows up.
Or maybe something else is released.
The WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have talked about releasing more.
Or maybe something else comes up about the emails end up showing up on some foreign server.
Who knows?
You could come up with any number of scandals.
The first Clinton presidency was somewhat paralyzed.
With all of these scandals and may have dropped the ball, as you point out, with Osama bin Laden with the disastrous results on 9-11, I worry or wonder about the degree to which a second Clinton presidency with Hillary Clinton might go down the same road where scandals erupt from the past that then take down the effectiveness of leadership in the present.
No, I agree 100%.
Here's my fear.
My fear isn't that it might happen.
My fear is that it will happen.
One thing that you can understand if you get a chance to read my book, and if people go back and research a little bit about the Clintons, Mrs.
Clinton was a complete failure from the very beginning.
One of the first jobs she ever had was in the early 1970s.
She was hired as an investigator attorney to look into the allegations that President Richard Nixon had broken some walls.
She was hired by a Democrat, and she was fired from that job.
Because he said she was dishonest.
Now think about that.
In her early 20s, as a new lawyer, she gets fired from being a lawyer on an investigation against a Republican president because she's dishonest.
Now you fast forward to what we're talking about now today and all these other scandals.
There's no way she can become president and not be jumping from scandal to scandal like her husband did.
We will be crippled again.
Everything that these people touched turned into a scandal.
I mean, even her friend, Vince Foster, when he committed suicide, it ended up being a scandal.
I mean, it's terrible that he was so depressed and then this happened to him, but the poor guy couldn't even die in peace and it ended up being a scandal.
Everything they touch turns to manure, and they have some way, some ability to spin it back into gold, and it does affect the way people govern.
You can imagine, right now, if she was still, if she had been still Secretary of State, When these scandals happen, you know, how bad her leadership would have been.
And it also brings me to another point I'd like to make.
If Mrs.
Clinton was a leader, when Benghazi happened, when the U.S. government facility in Benghazi was attacked, Benghazi, Libya, if she was a leader, now set aside what happened.
Now, you know, they ignored all those emails.
They ignored the emails.
They refused them the extra security.
But after it happened, If she was a leader, she would have stayed there, and she would have stayed at the State Department and fixed those problems.
She would have said, I've made agreements with the U.S. military, the Army, the Marine Corps.
From now on, anytime there's a problem in the embassy, they will come and rescue them.
I mean, it's hard to understand how that the night that those men were attacked, that a handful of men with about $200,000, maybe $100,000 worth of small arms fought for 13 hours, while there were hundreds of millions of dollars You
also had touched on the Black Hawk Down movie scenario or the events that inspired the book and the movie.
And of course, that occurred under Clinton's leadership as well, original leadership.
What were the situations that led up to that, and how did it turn out so disastrously?
Right.
There's some similarities between Bill Clinton as president with Somalia and the Black Hawk Down incident with similarities of what happened to Benghazi.
Here's the similarities.
The Black Hawk Down The President wanted to go and stop this civil war in Somalia.
It's an honorable thing to do.
But the way it should be done, the way leaders do it, is you tell your military, your chiefs of staff, what you want, and then you give them the money they need, and they go and do it.
What Bill Clinton did was he told them what he wanted to do, and then his administration intervened, and they refused them some equipment.
And the equipment that they needed in Somalia that they were refused were armored personnel carriers Which are like tanks with wheels and sometimes tracks.
And then there's AC-130 gunships, large gunships that circle overhead.
And they told them they couldn't have that equipment, but they made them take the mission.
Now, I know this for a fact because after they had planned the mission, before they executed the mission, President Clinton's Chief of the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, was standing right outside my post after a meeting, and he was talking to Rahm Emanuel and George Stephanopoulos, and they were actually talking about, oh, yeah, we don't need that equipment.
It's too militant.
It's too military.
They don't need tracked vehicles, tanked vehicles.
And I didn't know what they were talking about at the time, but it struck me as bizarre.
What's too military?
If you're sending soldiers on a mission, you give them what they ask for.
So they refused them that equipment, and then Black Hawk Down happened.
And the truth of the matter is, that mission those guys did, it was successful.
They picked up the Adidas men that they were supposed to.
They got them.
The problem was that most of them got killed because they were riding around in vehicles that weren't armored, and they didn't have the air cover.
And, you know, we lost 19 American soldiers, not to mention, according to the soldiers that I've read about, they killed over 1,000 Somalians.
It's incredible.
If the Clintons had just left, you know, had let them have the equipment that they were supposed to have, it might have been a different scenario.
And that's where I see the similarities between Benghazi and Somalia is, you know, they stick their nose in where it doesn't belong.
Mrs.
Clinton refused them equipment.
Now, this is a woman who every night was sleeping behind iron gates and protection, but her employees that were in a very dangerous place Well, it takes a special kind of hubris to say to military experts, you don't need the equipment that you're asking for.
I mean, if I just wake up tomorrow and I'm standing in some operating room theater and there's a surgeon who says I need scalpel number seven, I'm not going to argue with him and hand him a pipe wrench.
I mean, he's the surgeon.
Just give him what he needs to do the job.
That's right.
And you hit the nail on the head.
And that's one of the things.
Our military in the U.S. is good at what they do.
Listen, nobody's perfect, but these guys are good at what they do.
Their job is to bring war and to kill our enemies.
And if you let them do it, they can do it well.
Stop hammering, stop hamstringing them with these stupid things that you don't understand.
You know, they shouldn't have this, they shouldn't have that, or, you know, Rules of engagement that actually endanger their lives.
You know, I'd like your listeners to consider this.
When you think about Benghazi, if the ambassador that was there, his name was Chris Stevens, if his last name had been Kennedy or Clinton or Pelosi, do you think there would have been the same security there?
That place would have been a fortress.
Right.
So, since the book has come out, Gary, what has been your experience of being back in the public eye?
Of course, the first time was unwillingly.
The second time was, I guess, out of a sense of duty or a desire to tell the truth about your experiences in order to help people make better decisions in the democracy of America.
What has your experience been of being back in the public eye in this kind of way?
It's been great.
You know, it's been good and bad.
The mainstream media in the U.S. has pretty much kind of blacklisted me.
The Clinton campaign has asked them not to interview me.
Now, they have plenty of time to go and trash me and call me a liar, but they won't have the 10 minutes for me to come on and defend myself and tell the truth.
If it wasn't for radio shows like The Shelf, Fox News, and hundreds of radio stations around the world that have allowed me to come on and talk about my book and tell the truth, I probably wouldn't have ever gotten my message out.
And I greatly appreciate the time with you and with everybody else.
It's It's been inspiring.
And other than the negative that I talked about earlier, the whole project has been incredible.
And I've met some great people.
And I appreciate everybody giving me my chance to tell the truth and to speak out about what happened and how they function and my fear if Mrs.
Clinton gets elected.
Well, of course, it's fantastic.
And of course, it was just starting in the 90s with the Drudge Report.
But it's fantastic that we have this avenue to get your work out to millions of people that otherwise wouldn't exist.
With this end run, this bypass of the mainstream media, I think, is helping to tilt the playing field to the point where what's now called the alternative media, I think, is going to become more and more mainstream for most people.
Now, one of the stories that you talk about is, I guess, a little sordid.
But as you point out, you know, the most dangerous circumstances for people in uniform is a domestic dispute or domestic violence dispute.
And you witnessed what you believe to be some of that even within the White House.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, when the Clintons were in Arkansas and Bill Clinton was governor, we heard all these stories when he started running for president of all this violent behavior between him and Mrs.
Clinton.
And all his philandering with women.
And we were told it was just, you know, right-wing politics and Arkansas politics.
It was all made up.
And it turned out to be all true.
And one of the examples of that is about her temper and her violent behavior towards other people, and especially President Clinton, her husband.
And one of the stories I tell in the book is, one morning I come into work, and I understand from some of my coworkers and some of the people that work in the mansion that there's been a bad argument upstairs.
And I don't want your listeners to get the impression we stand around and we're listening, you know, we're voyeurs, but it's an old building.
It's made of granite.
The structure is steel internally.
It echoes.
You know, they were up there yelling so loud that the sound was traveling down the elevator shafts and the stairwell.
And it got so loud at one point and so intense, and there was a crashing sound.
And later on, when the crashing sound was investigated, they found the broken blue base.
Now, I saw this vase because as soon as I heard the story, I walked down to the curator's office, and those were the people in the White House that maintained the artwork of the White House.
And sure enough, in the curator's office, there was a cardboard box with a broken, mostly blue, with some white on it, vase.
Then later on, when I went back over to my post outside the Oval Office, when the president showed up, he had a black eye under his one eye.
And he was clearly concealing a black eye under makeup, or trying to.
So the facts are that there was a loud fight.
There was a crashing sound.
There was a broken base.
I saw it.
And then later on, Bill Clinton was trying to conceal a black eye and her makeup.
Now, I don't know how he got the black eye.
I can tell you, nobody in the Secret Service hit him, and the Gardner didn't hit him.
So, you know, you have to make your own conclusions with that.
Right, and just so people understand, because you point this out in the book as well, you can't just sweep it up and toss it out in the newspaper because everything in the White House has to be logged and needs to be managed and so on.
Yeah, the White House is a fabulous place to work.
People sort of ask, you know, because I haven't done a lot of politics throughout this show in the past.
And one of the things that I enjoy talking about with you, Gary, is, you know, the media is, I think, it's fair to say the mainstream media has thrown away even the pretense of impartiality when it comes to Donald Trump.
And, you know, the fact that, what is it now, Hillary Clinton has been 261 days and counting since her last press conference, where it seems to me that Donald Trump basically wakes up and talks to the press all day and then goes and does rallies at night.
But I'm trying to sort of get a sense of balance because the mainstream media is broadcasting every negative piece of dirt they can find out about Donald Trump.
And so I like to sort of point out the opposite of that and they're trying to, it seems, to protect a lot of Hillary Clinton's skeletons in their closet, particularly for the younger generation that don't really, wasn't really around for the 90s and doesn't have as vivid an experience as we do.
But I think trying to get that sense of balance is really, really important because, you know, the more information people have, the better decisions they can make.
And it just seems the media is only giving one side of the story, and that's why I think it's very important to get this kind of information out to people.
Right.
And not only are they giving one side of the story, they're giving this side of the story that's completely fictitious.
And again, it's one of the reasons that I wrote my book, Questions of Character.
I want the American people to know what the real Hillary Clinton's like.
The mainstream media is talking about, you know, Donald Trump who owns 500 companies where there was issues with some of the companies.
Let's talk about all the jobs that this man has generated in this country and other countries.
How many jobs has Mrs.
Clinton ever generated?
None.
Zero.
Because she's a politician.
And she's a politician that does nothing but crave power.
You know, She hasn't created any jobs.
She's trying to expand government programs that are failing already.
And the fact that the scandals...
You know, when her husband was president, there were 19 scandals, at least, about women and about property and all these investigations.
Here's something else that's important to know, in addition to what you just said.
You know, her and her husband have been...
Ask questions under oath have been deposed many times.
And one of the investigations that Mrs.
Clinton had to testify or be deposed in Whitewater, she said over 60 times that she didn't remember or didn't recall something.
Well, how is it that you're so forgetful when it comes to investigating you, but when it comes to running for office, and basically she wants a promotion from failed Secretary of State to President of the United States.
How is it now that you're fit for doing it, that you have the wherewithal, and you can't remember what these questions were about the scandal, but you're this great politician, which she's not.
And I actually have questions about her health right now with some of the things I've seen her do on TV, and I'm greatly concerned about that, too.
Well, I hate to correct the guest, Gary, but when you talk about how the Clintons haven't created jobs, I think it's fair to say they've created a lot of jobs for lawyers.
So there is that.
They created jobs where?
For lawyers.
They've created jobs for lawyers.
Right.
Lawyers, absolutely.
And the people that sell antacid for indigestion.
They bought antacid too, yeah.
And people who sell sleep aids.
Yeah.
Now, you've served, of course, under the Bushes and the Clintons.
And I'm trying to not be obviously partisan, but I can't help but notice, Gary, that...
The Republicans seem to be fairly scandal free when it comes to affairs.
And I guess Jimmy Carter was in the same way with Democrats.
But thinking about the younger men who've inhabited the White House from the Democrat side, particularly JFK and, of course, Bill Clinton.
LBJ was a little older, but according to a guest we've had on Roger Stone, had multiple affairs and so on.
Is it seems that there's a higher hound dog element from the Democrats in the White House than from the Republicans?
Well, I don't know if it's because they're Democrats or just it happens to be happenstance, but you certainly can't.
You know, in the U.S., there's kind of an old saying, like, you know, from the 60s, We refer to Democrats from the 60s as, you know, the 60-50s.
And they had this mentality, if it feels good, do it.
In other words, whatever you want to do, regardless of the ramifications, if I like it and it feels good, I'm going to do it.
And that's the way I kind of see Bill Clinton.
I mean, I don't think any of his time or Mrs.
Clinton's time as a politician had anything to do with doing anything good for the American people.
It just had to do with them gaining more power and eventually making themselves multimillionaires.
I mean, who the heck can be in government their whole life and they have a foundation where they're sitting on $200 million, I believe it is, or even $100 million?
It's incredible.
And a lot of that money came from foreign governments that at least looks bad.
There's a discipline when you are not a politician that I think non-politicians just get by default.
I mean, Donald Trump having tantrums isn't going to put one brick on top of another because he's got to work in the relative free market and he's got to work with reality and he's constrained by budgets and so on.
So I think that there's a kind of discipline and you talk a lot about discipline in the book.
And I think that there's just something in people who work in the free market who have that kind of discipline.
I think it's the same with what's called the alternative media and the mainstream media.
It's the same thing with public sector unions versus private entrepreneurs.
There's just a kind of, if you have a tantrum, things magically change when you have a lot of power, but when you're constrained by the free market and subject to the voluntary choices of your customers, you have to develop a kind of discipline that way.
Yeah, you know, obviously I've never worked for Donald Trump, but here's what I can tell you that I believe in my heart.
First of all, I never heard I'm from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, which is about 60 miles from Atlantic City, New Jersey.
We're back in the 70s and 80s.
He built a lot of hotels and casinos.
And the only thing I ever heard about that man was that he was a smart businessman.
He made a lot of money.
His family worked for him.
They did a lot of charitable work.
They gave away lots of money.
I knew people that worked for him in his casino.
They always had positive things to say about him.
Not until he started...
Decided to run for President of the United States and started running against Hillary Clinton.
Have I ever heard anything bad about the man?
You cannot get where Donald Trump is today with the money that he's accumulated and the respect.
I mean, there was an interview done with Donald Trump 20 years ago or so, about 60 Minutes.
They interviewed his The people that he competes against in business.
And this guy said nice things about him.
I mean, even his competitors couldn't say anything bad about him.
The worst thing they could say is that his organization was so clean and honest, it was hard to compete against him.
So, it's true.
I mean, I'm sure you can find the 60-minute interview.
And so here's the thing.
I want to take my chance with Donald Trump.
I know what I'm going to get with the Clinton.
I know what I'm going to get.
I know it in my heart.
It's going to be one scale to the next.
With Donald Trump, maybe I'm taking a little bit of a chance, but I'm looking at what he's done for his company and for his family and what he's done for people in private, these stories you hear, and I'm saying that I want him to try to do this for me, and I want him to be President of the United States.
I want to take that chance, and that's why I'm voting for him.
I didn't start out supporting Donald Trump.
I did not.
But now he's the candidate, and what I've learned about him Invigorates me even more.
I believe he's going to be a great candidate, a great president, and he's going to do a lot for this country and the world.
One of the great simplifying principles of life, in my opinion, Gary, is the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
And people ain't going to change when they're in their late 60s and their early 70s.
The package you're going to get is the package you've had.
And if you want to know what's going to happen in the future, all you need to do is look in the rear view, and that's what's coming up over the headlights.
And that seems to be the case pretty consistently.
And once people get that principle, then it's a lot easier to figure out where people are heading.
Just look at where they've come from.
No, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
That was the point I was trying to make earlier about Mrs.
Clinton's behavior and Bill Clinton's behavior when they were in Arkansas.
Everything that we heard, those crazy tabloid stories, they were all true.
They weren't tabloid stories.
It was actual history.
And it was all true.
And everything you hear about them is true.
One more thing I'd like to mention that's in my book, Price of Character, is I worked with this Arkansas sheriff back in the early 90s.
I stood post with this guy for about six hours.
On a roadway.
And we were talking about this at the time.
Bill Clinton was still governor.
He was going to run for the president, the office of the presidency.
And I said to this guy, I've read stories about him, you know, and heard stuff.
There's no way this guy will be president.
He's too much of a, you know, he's chasing women.
There's issues.
There's rumors about drug use.
And no way the American people will stand for this.
And this guy looked me right in the eye, cop to cop.
And he said, Gary, let me tell you something about these people.
Everything you hear about them is true.
And if they run, they will win.
He said these people, there's a reason we call them the Arkansas Mafia.
He said they can spin manure into gold.
He said everything you hear, believe it, and you watch.
He'll run no matter what happens, and they will win because they don't care.
Whatever it is that he's done wrong, they have no remorse, or she's done wrong, they have no remorse, they just keep moving forward and just act like it's everybody else's fault.
And he was right.
There is a sentence or a fragment in your book.
Say, if you have a healthy fear of screwing up, you're fine.
Lose the fear.
Careers or lives are over.
And it always troubles me when I see people who I think objectively have made some questionable decisions who don't seem to have the capacity to circle back to do what we in the entrepreneurial world called a postmortem of a project, figure out what went well, what went wrong, figure out how to improve things.
That continuous feedback loop doesn't seem to be there with certain people in your book, I guess you could say.
Well, listen, Gary, I really appreciate your time.
I want to remind people, go to the link below if you're interested in this book.
I found it very eye-opening.
And, you know, the fact that you talk about things outside the White House, your career arc, your childhood and so on, I always love the idea a book is a chance to try somebody else's life on for size.
And I found it very Well written and enjoyable and gripping.
The book is Crisis of Character.
A White House Secret Service officer discloses his first hand experience with Hillary Bill and how they operate.
We'll put the link to that below.
Thanks so much for your time Gary.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it also.
Have a great day.
Export Selection