Ep 148 | 'The Justice System IS Rigged Against Republicans' | Guest: Bill Barr | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Only two people in American history have ever served as Attorney General two times.

One of them is joining me in the studio.

Born and raised in New York, today's guest always dreamt about being in the intelligence community.

He joined the CIA, I think, in 1971.

He was attending law school.

After he graduated, he focused on constitutional law and then joined the Department of Justice.

While he never saw himself becoming attorney general,

it kind of seemed like it was destined that he would.

Starting off in the Reagan administration, he quickly rose to prominence until President George H.W.

Bush made him the nation's top law enforcement officer for the very first time.

His second term under a second president came with Donald Trump.

I'm going to ask him, I don't think he ever really wanted the job.

In the two final years of Trump's presidency, there was a constant stream of unjust and often unconstitutional attacks against the president, and that brought him out of retirement to make sure that Donald Trump got a fair shake.

He was forced to deal with an impeachment, a a summer of racial turmoil, and on top of that, a global pandemic.

While he was sometimes critical of Trump and his actions, he also has defended him, and his book defends him quite a bit.

He defended him against the harshest of critics, which was practically everyone in corporate media.

And now, it looks like his final legacy, Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the Trump-Russia probe and Hillary Clinton, is hitting some pay dirt.

Through it all, today's guest

believes that he has always stood for what was right, his principles.

He always tried to do the next right thing, even in the face of massive opposition, no matter where it came from.

He wrote it all down in a new book.

It is called One Damn Thing After Another, Memoirs of an Attorney General.

Today on the Glenbeck podcast, William Barr.

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Bill, I think this is the best title of any book that could be written today

because that's, I think, every American gets up every day and goes, What the hell is this now?

It's one thing after another.

Yeah.

And you were at the center of the storm.

And,

well, I'll get into how you handled things a little later on.

But

did you even want this job?

No.

I mean,

I was very happy edging into retirement.

I was on some really good boards and doing some consulting with clients I liked.

And I was starting to enjoy my grandchildren.

I'd promised my wife

that at some point we'd be able to slow down.

And so the last thing I wanted to do was go back into the government, certainly not a job I had already had before.

So why did you?

Aaron Powell, because I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis.

I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice.

It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office.

May I ask?

ask?

And I don't,

I hate the word treason because it's the only thing in the Constitution and it has a punishment tied to it.

But is it at least seditious to do something like this?

Aaron Powell,

I believe it is seditious, yes.

And

whether that can be proved in court as a crime

is one issue, but I think people are now coming to see what actually happened.

People have to remember there's a difference between the standard you use in a criminal case,

which is the highest possible standard, and the standard of evidence that most people use in their daily life to make a judgment, which is much lower than that.

That's why I hate to use the word ⁇ because to me it's treason

the way this happened.

But

it's a very different standard than the one everybody always just throws out.

It was a gross injustice.

And it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we're seeing in Ukraine these days.

It distorted our foreign policy and so forth.

But I felt that the president was not getting his due as president.

He was entitled, having won the election,

to implement his administration.

And they had him on the ropes.

A lot of people, the regular bar, the lions of the bar and so forth, were not stepping forward.

And I tried to advance some other people to be Attorney General.

George Washington tried that too

but none were getting traction and the question ultimately became the president wants to talk to you are you willing to talk to him and I wasn't going to do that unless I was willing to accept it if he offered it and so I what'd your wife say well my wife was initially reluctant but I think

because I promised her you know someday

but I think it was the treatment of

of Brett Kavanaugh

up on the Supreme Court who she knew We knew him since he was a young, newly minted lawyer.

And to watch that savagery really appalled her.

She said, you know,

someone has to do something about these people.

And so she agreed that if the president offered, I would accept it.

So

this is going to sound like a backhanded compliment, and I don't mean it this way.

You've been an attorney general twice now.

One of the very few, two, maybe?

Two of you?

Two of me.

um

and

you were you started with reagan you went into george h w bush um you were there for really important stuff um

but you and

please understand listen to the whole thing you weren't a standout then

and that's because

Everybody was kind of solid.

You know what I mean?

You were a standout because

nobody was solid.

You know, a lot of us would listen and go, okay,

what are you saying?

And

that's troubling, very troubling, because

I think it's even worse now.

Well, yes,

I think it's harder and harder to get good people to go into government.

The costs are very high.

The sacrifices are very high.

What you have to put up with.

So

but I felt the reasons for me not taking the job all had to do with my personal comfort.

The reasons for me taking the job had to do with making sure that President Trump was treated fairly and had his due as president.

And

I've talked to President Trump about this.

I said, did you have any idea?

And he said, no.

I had no idea.

I'd be fighting for my life every day from all angles.

Did you feel that was the case too?

I mean, because you have always been respected, but you came under attack from everybody.

So I ignored the attacks.

I told my team when I went in there that we were going to be under savage attack.

I knew what I was getting into.

I wasn't going in to be Trump's best buddy.

I was going into run the Department of Justice and help try to right the ship.

But I also knew the left would hate me.

And

I wasn't disappointed.

And I just told my team, look,

some people get absorbed as how they're treated in the press.

And I said, ignore it.

Just ignore it.

And I did.

I tried.

You talk in the book about the Rodney King riots.

Can you

take me through the difference between the Rodney King riots and 2020 BLM riots?

and how they were handled and

what was different.

Well, the Rodney King riots, as bad as they were, people forget that

there was not widespread rioting

after

the beating of Rodney King.

People allowed the process to move forward.

And the police were tried by the state, but then they were acquitted.

And it was only after the acquittal that the rioting started.

Whereas, you know, with George Floyd, it started instantaneously.

There was no chance, the system was not given a chance to respond.

But even when it, even when it wasn't, I mean just the system of public opinion,

I think most Americans were locked up.

That was wrong.

Right.

That was absolutely wrong.

And yet that didn't seem to matter.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, I think after, you know, I think some of the initial reaction

was

spontaneous.

But I think after a couple of days, there was a deliberate effort to ratchet this up.

And I believe that the reason it was ratcheted up and the reason all these agent provocateurs got involved and the violence started around the country had less and less to do with civil rights

and more to do with the posture of the Democratic Party going into the election.

I think they were feeling desperate because

Trump had closed some of the gap on African-American voters and

they decided to turn up the race card.

And unfortunately, this event, which, as you say, everyone was horrified by,

gave them

the cover to do that, essentially.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

And then we had the response, or

what seemed to be a lack of response.

And I'm putting myself in your shoes and the president's shoes.

You're going to lose-lose.

What were the conversations like on how to ratchet those riots and Portland, how to get that under control?

Well, Portland is really a special case in Seattle, too.

I would put them in a category by themselves.

But

so, you know, a lot of people don't realize that the federal government doesn't have the resources to deal with civil unrest unless we use the Army, bring it to regular military, which we were reluctant to do.

I was involved in the last two incidents of that, including the Rodney King matter in Louisiana, where we brought in Marines.

But

we don't have hundreds of marshals we can deploy.

And that's a good thing.

Yeah.

So when I came into office, actually, I expected there would be some civil unrest, and I went to Congress and I asked for 300 more marshals so I would have a pool of trained people that could be used, but

I didn't get them.

But

the

I think they're being funded now.

Probably to chase after parents, right?

But

so I didn't get those resources.

And the name of the game, I think, was to push the states and the local government to do their job.

If the federal government comes in and bails them out, then they're just going to sit by the sideline.

But

they have the police forces, they have the local system, the prison system, and so forth.

So they're best situated to deal with it.

And so our strategy was to push them to do it and call out the National National Guard if necessary.

And some did.

Governor Kemp did a good job in Georgia.

He called out the National Guard and some of the other governors did too.

But at the end of the day,

what I felt was that the violence was ebbing, except in the Pacific Northwest.

And the question is, should we do anything further there?

We were protecting the courthouse in Portland, and we felt secure.

We could protect the courthouse with the marshals, which we had there.

And we were trying to pinpoint and arrest the key troublemakers.

And we arrested the arsonists and many of the interstate people who were involved.

And they were charged and prosecuted federally.

You just didn't read about it very much.

But

the president and I did have a difference of opinion.

He wanted, you know, he was talking to people on the phone all the time, and they were telling him, you know, you look weak and terrible.

You should sort of go out and crush what's happening in Portland.

And I said, let's step back from this.

What is the Army going to do when they get there?

If we detain people, we're going to have to bring them before judges.

The judges out there are not going to hold these people.

It will be impotent.

And instead of them throwing bricks at U.S.

Marshals, they'll be throwing bricks at the 82nd Airport.

And it will just show that

we really don't have the power unless we really use extraordinary military powers, which will then cause an eruption around the country.

The mayors and the governors in those other cities will sit back and say, you broke it, you fix it.

And we'll be deploying every division we have to pacify the country in an election year.

That's crazy, you know?

Aaron Powell,

that's why I started with you're in Iraq in a hard place.

I'm a small federal government guy.

I want the state to retain its rights.

And that's really one of the reasons why it's so disturbing what happened on January 6th on multiple levels, both sides.

Yes.

Tell me about your January 6th experience.

Well, I wasn't there.

I had resigned on December 14th, which was the day the Electoral College met.

And I felt

that was definitive, and I didn't see the election outcome was going to change.

So I tendered my resignation, and I was out by Christmas, and then I just saw what was happening on the Hill, and I immediately issued a statement.

Old habits die hard.

But I just called up my former press secretary and said, put out a statement.

Because I was revolted at that.

I think we all were.

Yeah, the violence, especially the attacks on the police officers and so forth.

And

I was very upset with the President because whether I don't think he legally, from what I saw, he didn't legally incite it in the legal sense of the word.

But he was responsible for essentially

sending a large demonstration that had a clear mob element in it.

They came just the way Antifa sometimes comes, you know, armed for combat and ready to go.

And I think

it's okay for people to demonstrate people have First Amendment rights, but for one branch of government to sick a mob on another branch of government to intimidate them and giving them the idea that something they can do up there can change what the vice president's going to do, I thought was wrong.

And for the same reason, I think what's happening with the Supreme Court is wrong.

It's the same principle

for Congress or the Democrats to be weak on the subject of whether demonstrations should be permitted in front of the houses of justices.

It's the same principle in Volve, which is you don't ⁇ one branch of government shouldn't be using a mob to intimidate another branch of government.

However, when you look at it, and I mean, I was upset with Donald Trump on January 6th.

What are you doing?

Why aren't you on television right now?

Not a little phone thing, but and saying this is wrong, this is not who we are.

And then we have the aftermath of it where don't let a serious crisis go to waste.

Right.

I can't even get answers on what's really happening with some of these people who are still waiting for their time in court,

been held.

What's happening with this?

Well, you know, I do think that,

as you say, they don't let a a crisis go to waste.

So

they have given this

the left is treating this as one of the greatest assaults on American liberties in our history.

It was not an insurrection.

It was a riot that got out of control.

And if people had a plan of stopping the count, they've been indicted for seditious conspiracy.

And we'll see if the government can win its case.

From what I saw, there were a few hundred people who clearly knew they shouldn't be breaking into the Capitol, were using force to get in, and they should be prosecuted.

But there were a lot of people who were let in from their perspective.

The guards were saying, Welcome to your house, and opening the way for them, and they were looking around and taking pictures and so forth.

And

there clearly should be some discrimination between those who were really using violence and broke in and those who were sort of found themselves in the Capitol.

And I think this administration has,

I mean, this is one of the biggest operations by the Department of Justice in its history.

They're going out and hiring 200 more prosecutors to prosecute these misdemeanors and so forth.

And

I think it's a political drama that's being played out here by the administration.

If you're one of the millions of Americans that suffer from really bad pain, I'm sitting here across from the Attorney General.

My fingers all look like they're all dirty and I've got black all of it.

It's not that I didn't take a shower or something.

It's that I've been painting.

And that is something that I didn't think I was going to be able to do ever again because my hands were in so much pain.

They would cramp.

If I just would hold a pen, it would cramp right away.

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I don't

sure there are.

I don't know a time in my lifetime at least where we've had literal political prisoners.

I mean, again, if you went in and you were broke in, you were breaking stuff, whatever.

But if you walked in and you weren't doing any of that, you were just walking through the Capitol, you weren't part of that,

and you have spent really any time in jail for a misdemeanor.

You are a political prisoner, aren't you?

I think it's fair to say that.

And I think that there are cases that have come to my attention that I find chilling.

And I think

a couple of things are very disturbing to me.

One, some of these individuals have a hard time finding lawyers to defend them.

Correct.

Now, when I was coming up as a young lawyer, the bar used to glory in the fact that everyone is entitled to a defense.

John Adams.

Right.

And

you were considered a great lawyer if you took on an unpopular defendant

and defended him against a baying mob.

But now it's political correctness, and lawyers will not come and defend these people.

I had one of the best law firms on the First Amendment.

I've worked with them for 20 years.

During the Trump administration, because they were getting heat from Google and others,

they dropped us.

I'm like, and I brought up John Adams,

what is this?

What do you mean you're going to drop us because of heat from them?

Tell them to go pound sand.

Do you believe in it or not?

Right.

Courage is in rare supply in many professions, including the law.

The other thing that I find disturbing is the conduct of some of the judges

who

are treating some of these defendants in a more draconian fashion than they would a pedophile or a rapist and

holding them, I think.

Some of these cases don't seem justified.

I know a federal judge who said, Lynn, a lot of the stuff that comes before me now is like they're making it up.

The judges are like, you know what, this feels right.

And it has no basis in law.

Right.

How do we correct that?

Do we get back to where America can trust its institutions?

I think eventually we can.

But when people say to me, for example, how do we clean up the FBI?

How do we do this?

And I do think the FBI needs serious reform.

But I say just the FBI.

It's not just the FBI.

It's all our institutions.

It's our institutions in government.

It's professional institutions.

It's science.

It's medicine.

All of it.

And what is happening, and I think what's happening basically is that

this is not politics

as usual in our country.

I think during the Obama administration, something very fundamental happened, which is that the left went outside the tent.

They are now no longer sort of playing on the right-left political spectrum that's part of liberal democracy.

They're not under the

liberal democratic tent.

They are now on the outside, and they're following much more of the French Revolution tradition of tearing down and destroying existing society, institutions, conventions, values, because they are going to lead mankind on this march to a perfect secular future.

That gives them this religious fervor because they don't believe in transcendental end.

Heaven will be achieved here on earth.

It gives them a

you know, a totalitarian temper because somebody who opposes them is no longer just wrong, they're evil.

They're standing between mankind's salvation and, you know,

they're standing in opposition to mankind's salvation.

And so this gives them a totalitarian state of mind and it means the means justify the ends.

And

this is the ultimate, ultimately what's attacking all our institutions because an institution by definition has a certain end.

It has a certain truth it's supposed to uphold.

In science, you know,

what is the scientific evidence?

Where does that point?

In law, it is what is the law, right?

And when one of these progressives comes in, their ultimate political end trumps, if I can use the expression, the institutional end.

They sacrifice the institutional

objective for their political, they substitute their political objective.

That's why it's all corrupted.

The media was of course the first institution to be corrupted and probably the most fateful in terms of the direction of the country because

once I saw the word narrative starting being used regularly, I said we're in for trouble because the whole implication of this word narrative is that there is no objective truth.

It's just everyone's perception and my perception and my story that I want to tell is as good as your story that you want to tell.

And there's no way to differentiate except sheer power.

And so journalists are no longer interested in the truth.

They have a narrative.

And the narrative is sort of prefabricated in the case of the political differences in our country.

And no matter what you say or do, they're going to come in with their narrative.

That's a corruption of the press.

And I think the press, I mean, I've done this for 45 years.

So

the press

has

had their own agenda, and they would come in and do a story.

Generally,

they might have an answer that they were going for before they asked the question.

But it wasn't something to be proud of,

and it was something that everyone would deny.

Now it's this is the way.

Yeah, that's right.

So

let's go back to all of the institutions.

Let's just, I'm going to be real honest with you.

I was really upset at the end of the election period with you, not for things that other people are upset with you.

And I have to apologize because I think it's turning out the way you probably foresaw.

You left and I thought,

Where the hell is the Durham Report?

Why?

Because it's clear.

I mean, I've done my own research.

It's clear just what happened with the impeachment, let alone

the Russia stuff.

It's clear there are dirty people.

And I thought,

what did you do?

Why would you leave and leave that out there?

Tell me what your thought process was on that.

Did that bother you at all?

I know you write about it in the book that...

No, so I thought the president was going to lose.

Starting in April of 2020, I went in and talked to the president.

I told him I thought he was going to lose the election.

That must have made him happy.

Well, he didn't listen to me.

He knew better.

But

so I thought that I would appoint Durham as a special counsel, but I would do it secretly before the election.

And after the election, the fact that I appointed him before the election

would look more and be more of a bona fide move.

In other words, I wasn't going to wait to see who won.

I was going to appoint him as special counsel.

And that gave him protection, and my judgment was I was highly confident he would remain in office and they wouldn't touch him.

Why?

They break all other rules.

Because I think

because

this administration had no real interest in protecting either Hillary Clinton or

Comey.

And at the end of the day, for them to lose the capital and cause the, you know, appear to be covering something up that would then never get resolved, I didn't think was in their interest.

And I think institutionally, that would have destroyed the new AG if he had tried that.

So, and he would have known that.

He had come from the department.

So I was confident they would keep him.

I was also confident they would keep Weiss up in Delaware, but I didn't appoint him as a special counsel.

But there's something, you know, I know a lot of my own side, so to speak, has been attacking me on the Durham thing.

And I'll just point out a few things that I think it's important for people to understand.

I felt from day one that the real issue that had to be explored wasn't collusion, which I was skeptical of, but how it got started, how the collusion narrative got started.

And so once I had dealt with Mueller, and that was put to bed, I immediately appointed Durham to look into that.

And I knew he was tenacious tenacious and

was extremely honorable and would follow the truth wherever it led.

And what people don't understand, though, is that

when he came on board at the beginning of the summer of 2020,

the IG had not finished his investigation of cross-fire hurricanes, so none of the stuff about the FBI was yet available.

And it made no sense for him to start investigating that.

He wanted to wait for the data dump, which is the right thing to to do from the IG.

So he was out looking at some other tangential things of different theories like British intelligence, Australian intelligence, Italian, you know, some CIA stuff.

People forget that the IG first said, well, we'll be ready in June.

It wasn't ready in June, ready in July.

It was not provided until December, the end of 2019.

That's when all that stuff got to Durham.

And then what happens three months later?

COVID shuts down all grand juries in the country.

No grand juries.

So if you don't have a grand jury,

or you don't have the, let me put it this way, I'm not going to say whether he had a grand jury or not, but what I am going to say is if you don't have the threat of a grand jury, no one will come in and talk to you.

You'll say, the usual thing is, please come in for a voluntary interview.

And people come in because they know if they don't, they're subpoenaed.

But if there is no grand jury, they say, no, I'm not coming in.

And there's nothing you can do.

And people don't understand that that state of affairs lasted until the month before the election.

So his hands were very much tied as to how far he could push things and how much pressure he could bring on people

through most of 2020.

So

that's the story as to why Durham takes time.

But I think there's something very important in our whole system that people are ignoring.

And that is, I alluded to it earlier, the difference between the standard of proof and the method of the criminal justice system and

how people actually make up their minds about things.

And I think politically, we're always, since Watergate, the impulse of both sides is to try to get things investigated as a crime so that will then expose the person as a criminal.

Correct, correct.

But what they forget is, number one, you're going into a secret system that you will not find out what's going on.

Number two, it takes a long time.

And number three, the standard of proof is the highest you can have.

And instead of where I feel what's more important is telling the American people the story.

If the facts about, for example, Hunter Biden had gotten out in public,

putting aside whether he was criminally liable, people would have immediately seen what's what?

They can understand what's going on.

It was a scuzzy, you know, shameful behavior.

But instead of focusing on telling the story and getting the story out and letting the American people reach a judgment about the moral quality of the people involved, the whole game becomes, was this a crime and what will happen in the criminal justice process, which is not really fit.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do.

Here's the question that I

had for you, because

I was pretty sure, but I'm no expert, obviously, didn't have any inside information, but

it sure seemed like it was legit, especially when the New York Post comes out with it.

Of course.

How come,

I mean, we were allowing people to not have any evidence, you know, former FBI and intelligence people, this is Russian, you know.

Sure.

And you knew that it was actually real and it was happening.

How come you didn't come out and say, this is under investigation or we've received this?

Well, first, you know, the department doesn't come out and say we're investigating somebody.

And

would it make

which would have done...

Okay, go ahead.

Okay, but

right after that letter came out from the intelligence experts, the DNI

the head of national intelligence came out and said there's no indication of Russian disinformation.

And the FBI, which works for me, sent a letter up to the Hill saying the same thing to a committee saying there's no indication of disinformation.

So that happened right after that letter came out.

So we thought it wasn't picked up.

No one reported it.

The president's cheerleaders out there didn't call attention to it.

You know, that's why I say that

the party, the Republicans should have focused more on telling the story rather than the machinations of getting this into the Department of Justice, because as Biden, Hunter Biden himself has acknowledged, he was under investigation.

But I could not come out and say.

And we wouldn't want to, I just want to say, you know, Glenn, that we don't want a country where when someone's under investigation,

nothing's been established yet, the Department of Justice can affect an election and do stuff by just saying they're under investigation.

Aaron Trevor Brearm.

The line used to be on these television commercials for, I don't know, sure or whatever it was, don't ever let them see a sweat, because it was covering everything up.

I think sweat blocks slogan should be, don't sweat

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I mean, it is crazy.

I don't know where you live, but I live on the surface of the sun for about nine months out of the year here in Texas.

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I'm a human sweater.

Okay.

I am a professional grade A sweater.

And

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i guess the frustration here and you must know this

the frustration is is nobody ever seems to go to jail except the little guys right you know

the durham my guess is um

that he's gonna have enough goods to go all the way up whether she's convicted or not, I don't know, but it will end up being the little guys, the suspects that get into trouble, not the ones who are directing it.

It happens over and over and over again.

And it leads us, well, especially with our

new AG,

it leads us to think the whole system is absolutely rigged against us.

Well, first,

I do think there is a degree to which the system had a double standard and still has a double standard and is rigged against Republicans.

No, but I wanted to, if Donald Trump, I said this on the air, if Donald Trump did any of these things, and quite honestly, at the beginning, I thought he had probably

a pretty good shot of it.

I wanted him to go to jail.

I don't want my side to get special treatment.

I just want the truth.

Right.

And

I think

there are parts of the Department of Justice that I think

have a double standard, and they will pursue Republicans.

How much of that is that way?

I mean, I don't trust the FBI.

I've never been that way.

I don't trust them.

I don't trust anybody at the national level.

Well,

I didn't trust Comey and his crowd that were running the FBI.

And I do think the FBI has some issues that have to be addressed.

But

I don't think it's thoroughly corrupted across the board by any means.

I think the local guys are...

I think pretty much solid,

good agents that do their job.

But like all our institutions, there's some generational change going on and the people coming in

don't have the same values as a lot of the mainstays.

But

so one, I'm not going to say there's no double standard.

I think there were a case, just for an example, well, I was attorney general.

No case that was embarrassing to the Democrats was leaked.

However, cases that that hurt Republicans were leaked.

And that's being done by the

career people who were partisan people, some of them.

Probably,

I think,

very sharp minority, but still, they're there, and there is a double standard.

But I also think that people have to understand

one of the reasons no one ever goes to jail is because,

I mean, I was a I would, would if I had no problem indicting anyone we could prove a case against and that's the standard the department uses do we have evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt it's wrong for the for the department to say well we're just going to throw the mud up against the wall and see if the jury will do it we have to ask ourselves would a fair jury a reasonable, unbiased, fair jury, have enough evidence to find this beyond a reasonable doubt.

If we think the answer is yes, then the case should be brought.

And

that's sometimes very hard to get because there's a gap between what you and I know to be, or pretty sure what the facts are, and what you could actually prove in court.

Correct.

And people have this way of saying, we all know what happened.

Come on, why can't this person go to jail?

Well, you know, John Durham is a prosecutor.

This is his bread and butter.

Correct.

And, you know, if he can prove a case.

I actually have faith

with Durham.

Yeah.

I actually have faith.

There hasn't been any leaks.

I know he knows he's up against everyone on the planet.

He's not a stupid man.

My faith when you left

was

there's no protection for this guy and they're going to derail him.

You happen to be right and I was wrong.

But

the problem is, is there are good people,

but they're going to get derailed by the bad guys.

Yeah,

I don't think he's going to get derailed.

Do you think?

And I think that if there is a case to be made, he'll make it.

And no, there's another thing that people have to understand, and this is something I tried to explain to the president.

Usually in the law, there are two things you require.

You require a bad act, actus reus, and a bad state of mind.

And the act that you usually require is something that inherently looks bad, like burning documents or telling someone not to tell the truth.

Those are acts that cry out that there's bad intent, right?

And show the person probably was acting badly.

But we're in this new phase where prosecutors like to go after acts that are not bad acts.

They are things that someone has the discretion to do.

And then their whole claim is, you had the right to do it.

It was within your discretion, but you did it with a bad state of mind.

And one of the reasons I could take all this obstruction nonsense that Mueller was trotting out, his 10 episodes,

and say that there was nothing there, was because many of them fell into that category.

And I say, you know, if there's no bad act, then you need a real hardcore smoking gun on bad intent.

We're not going to, you know, there's no crap shoot where you get in and try to do, you know, show the jury, well, you know, this guy probably had bad intent.

You need to have the ironclad case of bad intent in those circles.

Otherwise, you're going to chill everybody in government who were making these kinds of decisions.

That is the same principle, it seems to me, that when you're dealing with the FBI, which is

they'll be saying,

I really thought there was a threat to the country.

I was serving the country.

I was doing the best I could.

Now, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that raises questions in our minds about that, right?

But remember, we have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt that they had bad intent, and that's hard to do.

And I know people don't like that answer, but

if we're going to have a fair criminal justice system,

that has to be the answer.

The FISA courts.

Yeah.

So, you know, generally,

I generally support FISA

because, you know, FISA is directed at agents of foreign powers in the United States.

That's where the

main focus of it is.

But there is an area where it has been abused.

But when you have the FBI changing documents and lying to the FISA court, I don't know why the FISA court didn't say

it's a good question.

And, you know, I mean, that question that, again, puts their

credibility at stake because if they're not, I mean, somebody hurts my credibility and I'm trusting them and they're lying to me.

It's on me to say, excuse me, here's...

You know, here's what we're going to do now.

Right.

And I don't think they did.

No, and look what happened.

The judge basically gave the guy a slap on the wrist.

Nothing.

So for that.

For falsifying a document to spy on an American citizen.

Correct.

Right.

And that shows, you know, to me that's part of the problem that you and I have talked about, which is

the politicization of the system.

But

normally when you're using let me identify where I think the the area of potential abuse is.

It's not as much as people think, but

most of the time FISA is used where it's not just you think the guy is an agent of a foreign power, but you have reason to believe they're engaged in things like terrorism or espionage and something bad that they're not supposed to be doing.

But there's a narrow category of cases which essentially say, we think he's an agent of a foreign power, and that's all he is.

He's just an agent of a foreign power.

You know, he's acting on behalf of another country.

And in that area, there's a potential for abuse.

And that's essentially where they were going with Carter Page.

And,

you know, I do think we've done everything administratively when we're there to tighten up.

But, you know,

there should be some reform in that area to protect against abuses.

Have you seen the last episode of Ozark yet?

No, I haven't.

You should watch it because it's it's interesting the way the FBI is

using a cartel.

And

with what's happening down on the border,

we have emboldened these cartels and every single bad guy on earth.

Come on in.

Absolutely.

It is a disgrace.

Well, as President Trump would say, it's a disgrace.

Right.

But I have a chapter in my book about the cartels, cartels, and it is connected to illegal immigration, obviously.

But this is a huge problem for the United States.

And I'm surprised that more people are not up in arms about it.

It's fentanyl deaths.

Yes.

It is human trafficking.

It's everything.

It's everything.

It's everything.

Terrorism, our sovereignty.

And it's global.

Once you say the door is open, which we are saying,

then it's it's not just the Central Americans, it's not the Mexicans, it's not just the South Americans, it's from all over the world.

You have Haitians now going to Mexico so they can come up.

You have people from Iranians and Russians, Russians, and everybody.

And

so this is now the way of coming into the United States completely illegally and unmonitored.

But this is connected to the cartels.

We have a, I think Mexico is essentially a failed narco-state.

They have not recently been helpful on the drug war.

The fact is that they're essentially sharing sovereignty with the cartels.

The cartels can go toe-to-toe against the Mexican military.

And I felt at the time that the government would reach a modus vivendi with the cartels.

We'll leave you alone.

You stick it to the Yankees.

Just stop killing as many people in Mexico.

Of course, they have continued to kill a lot of people in Mexico.

But they have so much money money they can corrupt anybody down there.

And if they can't corrupt them, they kill judges and they kill their families and so forth.

So it's a completely dysfunctional system.

And we cannot afford to have a narco-state on our border pumping poison up into the United States, engaging in human trafficking.

You know, they get a lot of revenue from human trafficking.

It's a disgrace that they're living off people like this.

And they control the border.

I mean, on their side of the border, they have these plaza gangs that control different sectors and so forth, and we're turning control of the border over to them.

And,

you know, is there an answer?

An easy answer.

We can secure our border.

Trump demonstrated we can secure our border.

It just takes will.

And

I just don't see why the American people tolerate what's going on down there.

Aaron Powell.

I don't know if people really

don't think anybody's strongly making the case on how it's going to affect them.

You know?

Well, more and more people are going to get killed by these, you know,

some of the murderers and criminals that come across, the gang members, the MS-13 and the 18th Street gang members.

And as you say, fentanyl isn't drug overdose, it's poison.

People are being poisoned, literally poisoned to death.

They don't know what's in what they're taking.

They don't know how much fentanyl is in there, and a very tiny amount of fentanyl kills.

And so they're playing Russian roulette with the American people.

So

I don't remember

what it was.

Maybe it was the federal government against Arizona,

but

It was the ruling that said the Arizona can't do anything on their own borders.

And that is constitutionally the government's job.

But

I was talking to Ken Paxton today, the Attorney General of Texas, and I said, Ken,

it's not a suicide pact.

If they're not doing their job,

isn't there something that can be done?

Why can't Texas,

if the federal government is just, it's open season and we know what's coming in,

why can't

how would you solve this if I think the Supreme Court decision in Arizona was wrong and I think that's what he said.

Yeah, and I think that if the state officials are acting consistent with federal law, which they obviously want to,

they should, you know, that there's no conflict and it should be permitted.

So should they just do it?

I think people should be looking for test cases to take back up to the Supreme Court.

What would a test case be?

Well, where they're using state authorities

in a way that's consistent with federal law.

Yeah.

You said recently that you're going to testify for January 6th.

No, so they asked me if I'd interview with them.

What's the difference?

Well, I guess testimony is public testimony, and they haven't gotten to that stage with me.

And I'm hoping they don't.

I don't want to testify in public.

I was there at the White House the day

Trump found out his last

hearing was thrown out.

This is right before Christmas.

And I knew it was over.

And

there is no way in the the Constitution

to

correct this.

And I had many of the attorneys on, and I kept saying to them, if you have this,

produce this.

You get a lot of heat on the election because

you went to Donald Trump and you talk about it in the,

you talk about it, I think it's in the prologue, that,

you know, he was very angry with you.

Can you tell that story?

Well, sure.

You know, they came right out of the ⁇ well, first, the only jurisdiction that the federal government has over these elections is fraud, which means people are

⁇

there's some scheme whereby people who are not qualified to vote are voting and people who are qualified to vote, their votes are being excluded, something in that area.

But otherwise, these are state elections under state law enforced enforced by the state.

Right, and we want to keep it that way.

And so the only area that the federal government is, where is there's evidence of fraud, and you go and investigate it.

And by the way, that's a long process.

Yeah.

There's no way to get it done in the time of the year.

Right.

So, yeah.

In 2020, we were indicting cases from the 2018 elections of fraud.

So it's not a tool whereby you can come in and reverse the election.

You build a criminal case against the person committing the fraud.

So right out of the box, Giuliani and all those people and the president started talking about fraud, fraud.

But the things they were actually pointing to were not ⁇ they had some claims about fraud, but most of the stuff that actually was being surfaced in court were violations of rules, not fraud, like you were harvesting ballots against the rules or you excluded Republican observers.

And that has nothing to do with the federal government.

Right.

You have to go, and I kept on explaining to the president, you have to go and litigate that in the courts.

And it's your campaign and the Republican Party that's a party to that.

It's not the federal government.

It's not the Department of Justice.

The Justice Department didn't go down in Gore v.

Bush in Florida and take over things.

That was all done through private litigation.

So the Department of Justice has a limited role.

And I tried to explain.

As it should be.

I think as it should be.

But the stuff they were citing as fraud was absolute BS.

And I tell that to the president.

They were shoveling

a pile of something.

Right.

And they kept on doing it.

And just as recently as this past January, when the president walked off the set of NPR, that is, President Trump walked off the set of NPR, when he was sort of challenged, like, what's your evidence of fraud?

And he cited, and one would think that after all this time, he'd come up with a good shot, right?

He said, well, more people voted in Philadelphia than there are voters.

Not true,

just simply not true.

The turnout

in Philadelphia was a little bit below average for the turnout statewide.

There were not more people who voted in Philadelphia than there are voters.

And the voting in big cities like Philadelphia were pretty standard for elections.

There was no big upsurge in votes.

In fact, the big upsurge was

in the rural areas and in the suburbs, not in the big cities.

But anyway, the stuff they were pointing to as fraud had no basis.

It was all nonsense.

The idea that a truck driver brought 100,000-plus ballots down, complete nonsense.

And you investigated.

We investigated.

You write in the book that he was actually surprised that you knew the details of all of them.

Yeah, and I knew a lot more details than I was sharing with him.

But they were all nonsense.

And I explained that it was nonsense.

And especially in the machines, I said, you know, you only have six weeks.

You know, you don't get a do-over in a

presidential election.

The judges can say, okay, well, let's hold the election again.

It's in the Constitution.

This thing's decided by the Electoral College on a date certain.

You only have five or six weeks,

and you spent five weeks on this Dominion machine nonsense, which was crazy.

It was crazy.

They had nothing on that.

And,

you know, that's.

Do you still think?

have you seen 2,000 meals?

I haven't seen it, but I don't think that that is a sound argument that they're making.

Well, for two reasons.

First, I think

there's no doubt in my mind, and I say in my book, I think that they were probably cutting corners on harvesting, and there was more harvesting than is permitted.

But I don't think it's anywhere near the scale that they're suggesting.

So hang on just a second.

Because

I want to make sure we're on

solid ground here while we're talking about this.

I am not one of these guys that

there's no overturning the election.

It's over.

No matter if you found that it was completely fraudulent, it's still the process.

There's no constitutional reversal.

I don't care about the elect, I mean, I do, but I don't care about the election past as much as I care about election future.

I just want

an open and fair hearing.

I don't know who would hold it because there's nobody I think we could get everybody to trust anymore.

But I just want to have the facts up and I don't care if it's 100 votes or 10 million votes.

Those 10 votes, let's...

know it and make sure that never happens again.

I couldn't agree more.

And I keep on saying there are two separate questions.

One set of questions is, if you dilute the safeguards to the integrity of an election, then whether or not there's fraud, people are not going to have confidence in the outcome.

And that's what we're seeing today.

Correct.

And in a closely divided country where the only thing we have really going for us is peaceful transfer of power, we have to maintain the utmost confidence in election outcomes.

And we can't be monkeying around with protections, whether or not you can prove fraud.

So that's one set of questions.

The only way to protect elections is to have in place on Election Day the safeguards that you need, because coming in later to unscramble the egg is almost a mission impossible.

But the second set of questions is, was there fraud?

And that should be answered.

And by the way, I am all for post-hoc, you know,

I mean, after-the-fact reviews, audits,

anything that will push toward integrity.

Now, it just so happens that I think the methodology used in the Mules thing

is not adequate in the sense that if you take 2 million cell phone

and you impose it on any city and you say,

every time it passes within 100 feet of this receptacle, we're going to treat that as engaging with the recept

you will have several hundred, just statistically, people who regularly do that.

You know, repair men and other, you know, people running routes and so forth and so on.

And so

it's just not, it doesn't prove that these were

people

who were harvesting.

Now, I held my fire on the video of the cell phone information.

I held my fire on this until, because I assumed they'd be coming out with a lot of photographic evidence.

And

that would be strong evidence to me if they found the same guy visiting these boxes on a regular basis, throwing in multiple ballots.

But they didn't come up with that.

Well, they did, a few, but.

A handful.

Yeah, yeah.

So

I think, yeah, okay, maybe there was some

harvesting on a relatively small scale.

But here's the other thing, which goes back to the basic point we were talking about earlier.

Even if you can show harvesting, it doesn't mean you get to throw out all the votes.

You still have to show the votes were illegal.

And so

I'm for all analysis, all I'm for blockchain myself.

I don't know why we have to stand in line.

We have blockchain.

Put it in.

When you're

looking at the

elections coming,

I think, I'm hoping, that

this one was so screwed up because of all of I told the president's people months before

this is going to cause a problem and he would talk about it go litigate right now you know they changed the rules

all the way up once the vote happens you can't do anything about that right but they changed the rules those rules changed back now

no there's still fights going on in the states over a lot of those rules and by the way i was one of the most outspoken before the election about those rule changes and universal mail-in ballots and so forth.

Craziness.

But the president was warned about...

I just want to, you know, during 2020, people went in and warned the president.

They warned him about the need to build up a legal SWAT team to go around and deal with all of this.

One person went and said, Mr.

President, you have to set up an escrow of $20 to $30 million, bring in a big national firm the way you did in 2016 when he had Jones Day involved, and be fighting specifically in Georgia and Pennsylvania on these rule changes and so forth.

He ignored it.

He just blew it off.

And the reason he'd have to put the money in escrow, because no lawyers will work for him because he doesn't pay his lawyers.

So he ignored that.

You know, his campaign almost, I mean, they ran out of money in October.

It was pathetic.

And

they didn't have the legal effort they should have had.

The other thing he was warned about is he was going to lose the suburbs.

And one of the other reasons I'm comfortable that fraud was not the reason this election was lost was because you actually look at the votes, he lost where people told him he was going to lose.

The changes were not in the big cities.

He built up a strong head of steam in the rural areas, God bless him, and he came very close to winning just by gearing up his base.

But when you look at the suburban votes, he ran behind where he should have been running and compared to 2016.

Even in suburbs, he won.

There was a defection of Republican voters.

And here's the bottom line.

He was the weak Republican on the ticket in battleground states.

The Republican congressional delegations, the Republican state office holders and so forth ran stronger than he did.

He ran

75,000 Republicans, went to the polls in Aracopa and Pima County,

Maricopa and Pima County and in Arizona.

and didn't vote for him, voted straight Republican and not for him.

He lost the state by 10,000 votes.

There's no mystery, in my opinion, as to why he lost.

Trevor Burrus: How do we come back together on this?

Because there are people right now, I know, listening to this podcast, Maricopa County, are like, you don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

All the investigations up in Wisconsin, the sheriff that says, you know,

look at the harvesting that was going on.

Well,

you know,

I understand their frustration, but I also have to say

that they have an obligation really to learn the facts and not just accept what they read

on social media and so forth.

And as far as my own orientation on this, no one could have wanted Trump to win more than me.

And a lot of the people

who'd like to take shots at me, they haven't put themselves on the line.

They haven't made any sacrifices to serve President Trump.

And

I was hoping very much that Trump would win, but facts are facts, and I think we have to learn the lesson from the loss.

In order to play to his base,

he sacrificed another Republican constituency, and that was completely unnecessary.

They're not inconsistent groups.

It was not necessary for him to alienate 10% of the Republican vote in the suburbs in order to get his base out.

And

you know,

I just think it was suicidal.

You said that

Trump doesn't have the temperament to be president.

Explain that.

I don't think he has the temperament to be president going forward.

He did then.

I think he

his to the extent he had bad traits, they actually worked for him in 2006.

So to say, you know, and not only 2016,

you know, I was not a supporter of the president.

And

then I saw, because I see him as a human hand grenade.

He just goes in and just blows stuff up.

He's a wrecking boy.

Yeah.

However, when he would take down a wall, you'd be like, why did you...

Wait a minute, what's that behind the wall?

You know what I mean?

I don't know.

Of course, he will tell me that, you know, no, of course I knew.

I don't know if he knew some of the stuff he was exposing or if he just has a pretty good gut on it, guessing or surprised.

But that wrecking ball,

how important was that to at least get us to understand the problem?

I give him credit.

I think 2016 was a watershed.

Had the Democrats won, I think our country could have been going off a cliff and we could never have have recovered from it.

And he put on a full goal line stance, essentially, stopped the march of the progressives, and as you say, you know, just completely disrupted their game.

And I think

partly it was his direct style, his unorthodox style, helped him break through the hostility of the media and get his message out.

He told it like it is.

The American, average American, the working class, the middle class were tired, you know, as I say, you know, these cooing politicians who sort of went along with the the democratic program and never did anything about it.

And they were sick and tired of that.

And they wanted someone to talk common sense and actually do what they say they're going to do.

And I give him complete credit for that.

And he had the it's funny, he's very thin-skinned, but he also has a certain thick skin.

Yeah, that's weird, isn't it?

Yeah.

And he had the, he was able to weather attacks that I don't think any other politician could have weathered.

and he kept on going like the ever-ready

bunny.

And I give him tremendous credit for stopping the destruction of the United States.

However,

I think we're seeing that at

a pace that is

astounding and breathtaking.

Yeah.

But I think it's setting the stage for a comeback, not for him personally, because I think

there's a great opportunity here.

I see this as setting the stage the way the 60s and 70s set the stage for Reagan.

And the Democrats took a hard turn to the left.

Vietnam was a big part of that.

They tried to patch up the differences in their party by bringing in a cipher who could be all things to all people, Jimmy Carter, who was overwhelmed by the problems.

Same thing's happening now.

And

Biden is overwhelmed and more importantly the left has really shown their true colors.

And

you can get the most gain when you're in reaction to that kind of excess.

And so I think the American people are ready for a fundamental change.

But and this is what I say to all my Trump friends

and I was never a never Trumper, always, you know, I signed up, I signed up, but

is that we need a president to make America great again?

We have to start asking ourselves, what will it take?

Frustration is not enough.

Anger is not enough.

Thrashing out is not enough.

We have to create fundamental changes going forward.

And that takes a decisive victory with a strong majority.

And I'm looking for someone like a Reagan who can win, you know, won 40 states, then he won 49 states, then Bush, his vice president, wins 40 states.

You think DeSantis could be that guy?

Do you see anybody on the horizon?

Well, so my view is I'm for anybody who can pull this off because I think Trump would be the worst choice.

It would fritter away, I think, a historic opportunity to unite the party.

He's not a uniter.

He's causing civil wars in virtually every state he sticks his nose into.

And so we need someone to unite the party and put our best foot forward for a decisive victory, a conservative who will fight.

Now, so I'm not for anybody at this point, but I think DeSantis has a lot going for him in the sense that he's a fighter.

He clearly has

a clear path to, I mean, he has a clear agenda

and a track record.

Right.

And he's a leader.

You know, one of the things I compare him on COVID to the president.

You know, the president empowered Fauci.

And the president wasn't really sure how to handle COVID.

And he he let Fauci sort of be the face of it.

And he flip-flopped a bit.

You know, the reason he started his fight with Kemp was because Kemp wanted to open up Georgia.

People forget that.

And he attacked Kemp because Kemp wanted to open up early.

But then I look at DeSantis.

DeSantis goes out and actually brings in a public health advisor who's really good.

And then he makes really hard decisions and sticks with them.

Even when some of the data started coming back and everyone went after him, he stuck to his guns and he has been proven right.

That's leadership.

So I think DeSantis has a lot going for him.

But, you know, there are a number of other good candidates, too.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: The COVID stuff.

Again, I don't feel like, I don't know.

But there's a lot of dirty stuff that was going on, especially over with Wuhan.

There seems to be the same kind of stuff going on over in Ukraine in some regard.

Are we ever going to

is anybody ever going to really look into this and is anybody going to pay a price?

Aaron Powell I think the Republicans, if they gain control of one of the houses, will look into it

and have some effective investigations.

But until that happens,

nothing right now is going to be looked at.

Can they do more than just investigate?

Can they, I mean, well, if they find something that's criminal, they can refer it to the Department of Justice.

But people should not forget the reason we don't control one of the houses is because of our beloved president,

who, I think, sabotaged the Georgia.

Yeah, that sounds a huge mistake

in Georgia.

You talk in the book about

It's weird.

People who

might get a bad name on, you know, I don't like Trump,

The honest ones will say, no, there's, no, there's some really good things.

I mean,

when he was,

when we were coming down to the wire here, I'm thinking

the Middle East piece, like I've, I never thought that would happen in my lifetime.

I never thought Jerusalem would ever be moved in my lifetime.

The Supreme Court and the court system, I never would have expected that.

I mean, you were there with Souter and Clarence Thomas.

You know how hard that is to pick, right?

Absolutely.

And you talk about the new civil rights movement that is the religious aspect of Donald Trump, which I would have never expected.

He's not a religious guy, but he ends up being...

Well, he certainly supported our efforts to protect religious liberty, and that was sort of

in his wheelhouse.

So, you know, in my resignation letter, I went through all the achievements

because I think you'll agree my book is pretty balanced.

I give Trump a lot of credit in there, and I went through all

his accomplishments, including the ones you mentioned, rebuilding our military and so forth.

And when he read it, he went, wow, this is really good.

And I thought to myself, yeah, you should have been just hammering on this stuff in the last couple of months of the election.

But

no, so I think that

people who just dismissed Trump out of hand are wrong.

Well, I'd like you to talk about the religious aspect.

Well, because

Roe versus Wade, we probably are more free religiously, maybe if a few more of these

decisions come back this summer, then we've been in my lifetime.

I mean, we have really

shored up religious freedom in many ways, have we not?

Yes, we have, but on the other hand, it's probably never been under as much attack to require the shoring up.

The left has become virulently anti-religious, more so than in the past.

Make the case they are

absolutely.

It is a religion pursued with all the fervor of

it.

But

the thing that I have a whole chapter on religious liberty and

really education, because I think that's where the rubber meets the road.

For the first time in our history,

you know, I basically say that

for most of public education, most of the time, it was actually consistent with Christianity, Judeo-Christian tradition.

It wasn't

inconsistent with it.

And in fact, they used to read the Bible and so forth.

Then in the 60s, they tried to secularize public education by stripping away Christianity.

It left a vacuum.

But they know it leaves a vacuum.

Because you can't tell people

they morally have to do something unless you explain why do you have to do it.

Only my father could tell me, do it because I say so.

So what we've now, starting with in the Obama administration,

what

public education has become is secularization by addition.

They're putting in their alternative orthodoxy and ideology as a substitute for the historical metaphysical basis of Western civilization, which has been the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And that's where all this

CRT and transgenderism and all this nonsense is coming in, because they are affirmatively indoctrinating.

And I think we've reached a point where public educ, the only way you can constitutionally have mandatory education

and the only free option being,

the only publicly paid for option being state schools, is school choice.

Because if it's a state school, they're going to be indoctrinating.

And it's in a way that's inconsistent with traditional religion.

You know, you tell somebody, hey, they're more than one gender and you get to choose what you are and no one can say anything different about it.

That's contrary to Christian teaching.

And if they're indoctrinating kids that way and they're requiring them to go to school and the only way you can get out is to pay private school tuition,

that's unconstitutional in my opinion.

So I think the faster we move to school choice, the better.

I'm a little disappointed in Republican governors because

it's time to strike with that iron because

COVID exposed the public school bureaucracy and what they're all about.

Teachers' unions are extraordinarily powerful.

Right.

Extraordinarily powerful right but i think there's some we you know vouchers would would be a tremendous boon to the united states it would it would just enrich our education

you were with um

the uh

the cia originally right kind of wore you out

um

but you say that china is our

big threat.

I mean, we are so far over.

I wanted to talk to you about technology, too, because there's a great chapter in your book about technology.

But

something just doesn't seem right with this whole Ukraine thing where we're

sending

$60 billion over to one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

I don't know how many accountants we have on that, but I hope a lot.

We are picking a fight with China.

We're crippling our own food supplies.

We're crippling our own energy supplies.

And the UN and

World Economic Forum came out yesterday in Davos and said that

if the Russians don't allow grain to go through the southern port, it's an act of war.

Well, I'm worried about

the conflict in Ukraine getting out of control and sucking us into into an actual shooting war with Russia.

I don't think that's necessary.

Do you think that's becoming more and more probable?

I think the risks are going up.

And partly because I think Putin doesn't have an end game and I think he's probably going to be on the way out.

And that's what the president said was there is no off-ramp for

you can't do that.

Otherwise, you don't understand reconciliation.

You become Woodrow Wilson in World War I.

Aaron Powell, I have been upset about the fact that we've been making public a lot of our aid and what we're doing at every moment instead of doing things quietly through appropriate clandestine channels, the way countries usually do this kind of thing.

And then also, you know, to start war crime trials and all that kind of thing.

And,

you know,

we're making it impossible to end this thing short of bringing down Putin.

Correct.

But

I think one of the things about RussiaGate was it prevented the Trump administration from engaged in normal diplomacy with Russia.

Normally, what would have happened during that four years would have been some effort to reach a modus vivendi with Russia

and answer the question, which is, what is Russia's role in the world

with respect to the Western Alliance?

You know, are they...

you know, a little puppy dog that falls behind us, or do we recognize some of their interests and so forth?

And I'm not saying there would have been an easy solution, but we never even got to explore that.

And then as I say in my book, once they elected Biden, once the American people elected Biden, I just thought, I thought that Putin was going to act because he saw weakness

and he would take what he wanted.

Now, it hasn't turned out for him.

But I've felt for a long time that Russia is a secondary problem.

mainly because they have nuclear weapons, but NATO is strong and can protect Europe.

The problem is China, because of their technological and ultimately their military power, but they're stealing our technology and our future.

And Americans have gotten sort of fat-dumb and happy because we've been the world

technological leader.

And that's what brings our prosperity.

And that brings our defense and our security.

And since the late 1800s,

we've been the top dog.

The Chinese are very close to overtaking us.

And part of that is their stealing of our technology and their ability to...

A lot of that.

However,

it used to be that they had no ideas, so they would just steal it and reproduce and no new...

But now that's changing.

Now they are starting to have intellectual muscle as well.

Right.

But, you know, they got where they are largely because they used us as a slingshot.

Yeah.

But

We can't let that happen, and

it's going to take a strong leadership in the United States to deal with it.

Aaron Powell, how do we get around Taiwan?

If we go to war in Ukraine, I got to believe that Taiwan is gone.

The minute we started looking at COVID, Hong Kong was gone.

And they

were very

clear in the last week about how they feel about Taiwan.

Right.

I personally don't think, you know, if they believe the United States would support Taiwan in the same way we're supporting Ukraine and the other Western allies would support Taiwan, I don't think they're going to do it anytime soon, myself.

I think it's a big challenge for them.

And I think I know they don't have the landing craft to do it for a few years.

Right.

They don't have the naval strength to pull it off right now.

And also, I think they have to, after Ukraine, they have to really question how effective their military is.

I mean, no one would have predicted how weak the Russian military is turning out to be.

And the American military,

even though it's becoming more and more politically correct and needs to be reformed, it's still a very effective military with a lot of experience.

So

I think

it's going to take good statecraft and

strong foreign policy to navigate the shoals over the next few years.

I'm worried because of this administration.

I don't think they're very adept.

But, you know, the Chinese, you know, our allies like the Australians and so forth, they're very concerned about Chinese expansion.

They're behaving far more aggressively than I ever thought they would.

If the United States falls, say goodbye to New Zealand and Australia quickly.

Right.

And they've been trying, the Chinese are trying to get military or naval seaports

on the western shore of South America,

in El Salvador and other places.

They're all over South America.

And if they establish a Pan-Pacific Navy, that cuts off New Zealand and Australia.

That's what they're worried about.

So this could be a replay of the 1930s.

But again, the Chinese are not 10 feet tall.

They have their own problems, too.

I mean, part of what you were talking about, Glenn, is the

more they have innovation and

middle class,

upper middle class in the technology field and so forth, the more political rights they tend to claim and the less satisfied they are with the rule of the Communist Party.

And so that's why you see Xi really cracking down and really putting his control and the control of the party ahead of anything else.

It's because they're worried about

that freedom going too far.

you optimistic about

things in general, the country, the

world?

I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I'm not unduly pessimistic.

I think

Christianity, I think, naturally has to have a healthy dose of pessimism looking at human nature, right?

I mean, we don't believe that

heaven on earth, right?

No.

That's why we have a heaven.

But

I'm optimistic because

I think the left, as always, will overplay their hand, show their true nature, which they are now.

The American people, the average wisdom of the American people will recoil at that.

I think it'll lay the groundwork for

a Reagan-ish sort of a period of restoration.

And we have a lot of problems to solve.

We have to have an educational system that actually does its job.

And as we were talking, there are a lot of our institutions are

falling apart.

But nothing creates success like a big political victory.

I remember a few years before Reagan won, I thought the liberals were going to run away with everything.

And liberal became a dirty word after Ronald Reagan's victory.

I think we're living, you know, the early 1900s.

We're living the Wilson years again.

Wilson scared people so to death by the end of it that, you know, FDR had to change liberal

into meaning something entirely different.

And you didn't hear the word progressive for almost 100 years.

Right.

And part of this is the battle of ideas and an open free marketplace of ideas.

And I remember in 1992, when I saw George H.W.

Bush torn down

by the media,

I remember saying to Boyd and Gray, his counsel, look, until the Republicans just level the playing field a little bit,

you know, we don't stand a chance against these headwinds.

And that's why we need as many voices as possible out there.

So

I hope more people.

follow what you're doing and builds up a you know a strong yeah critical mass in in the media.

I do think it's coming.

Bill, thank you so much.

Thank you.

The name of the book is One Damn Thing After Another, Memoirs of an Attorney General by William P.

Barr.

Thank you.

Thanks, Clint.

That's great.

It's great to be with you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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