After Party with Emily Jashinsky - The Reverse MEGXIT, Vindman’s $16M Humiliation, Fauci Adviser Pleads GUILTY, & How the FBI Helped Biden, w/ Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show by reacting to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s stunning return to Britain and what it says about their failed, increasingly undignified attempt to reinvent themselves as American celebrities. Then Emily is joined by Michael Shellenberger, founder of Public.News, to discuss Alexander Vindman’s crushing loss to a DSA candidate and what it signals about the changing Democratic Party, new revelations about the transgender medical industry, and evidence Michael says exposes the FBI’s role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. They also dig into newly declassified documents involving Eric Swalwell and alleged Chinese intelligence operative Fang Fang, as well as the growing COVID reckoning, including former Fauci adviser David Morens agreeing to plead guilty to a federal conspiracy charge related to efforts to conceal government records and Michael’s increasing confidence in the lab-leak theory. Finally, Emily sounds the alarm over a disturbing wave of violent crimes involving illegal immigrants in Fairfax County, Virginia, and the progressive policies she argues have helped enable the crisis, and more…   Ghostbed: Discover how GhostBed’s cooling, pressure-relieving design can help you sleep more comfortably and wake up feeling refreshed, plus get an extra 10% off their lowest prices of the season at GhostBed.com/EMILY with code EMILY.   PreBorn: Help save a baby go to https://PreBorn.com/Emily or dial #250 keyword BABY   Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Party, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have a great show for you tonight. Michael Schellenberger is going to join us. And he has some really blockbuster reporting just in the last week into new documents from the FBI in the Hunter Biden case. But actually really what that was was an anti-Trump case, frankly, and we can connect it back to Russia Gate. We are going to connect it back to Russia Gate. We're starting to put the pieces of this puzzle together. And that's been happening for a long time. But now with the Trump administration doing, disclosure against, of course, their political enemies. We are starting to have a lot of the pieces in place to get a bigger picture understanding of what happened. It's good timing with Hunter's media tour as well because he's being careful with some of his language and Michael and I are going to get into that. Eric Swalwell, unfortunately for him in the news again, declassified documents being released to media by the Trump administration, just about the sexual relationship he had with Chinese spy Christine Fang known as Fang Fang were their candles lit. I'm sorry to bring you information on that, but we will indeed bring you information on that. And Michael's also going to react to

that massive victory from Angie Nixon, who came from absolutely nowhere as a DSA candidate last night, spent less than a million dollars to Alex Vindman's six million that he spent, I'm sorry, nine million that he spent, raised about $16 million, was so confident he already had a fundraiser in Nantucket booked for the general election this weekend. That's how confident this guy was. He raised $16 million, spent almost $10 million. She spent less than $1 million, crushed him by double digits. What does this tell us about the direction of the Democratic Party, about the DSA, but really about this populist moment in America itself? We're going to break all of that down. We're going to talk about new reporting on the reckoning, the medical reckoning, the nonprofit reckoning over

years of bad trans policy. We have updates in the W-Path scandal. We have updates from Michael's reporting on the Biden administration and, of course, a little bit of a WNBA update to go with that as well. It wouldn't be a day that ends in Y without a crazy, stupid shit happening in the WNBA. And finally, more news on the Fauci front, big news on the Fauci front. One of his key advisors who he's tried to distance himself from David Morins has pleaded guilty. basically to cover up charges in the COVID case. So much to discuss, I'm going to do a breakdown of an illegal immigrant crime spree that's happening right outside Washington, D.C. that the media does not want to touch.

Please subscribe. If you haven't yet, it helps us keep doing the independent journalism here on YouTube, the podcast feed. It's really helpful to sub on YouTube, like comment. All of that is great. Sub on the podcast feed where we're three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, because I answer all the question. you send in to Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com every Friday, as always, I record those Thursday afternoon slash evening. So get your questions in before then, and they will be featured on this Friday's little Q&A conversation we have back and forth. But first, there's breaking news. Apparently,

Prince Harry, I almost said Haggy, Prince Haggy, because I was going with Harry and Megan, and it just combined. So Hagen, I guess that's their celebrity. I hate that that just came out of my mouth. They are moving back to the UK with their children. This is from People magazine. This broke just recently Prince Harry and Megan Markle to make shocking move back to the UK with kids, Archie and Lilibet. They report they're moving back to Britain in the biggest shift to their family life since stepping away from Royal Duties in 2020, people can exclusively reveal. Isn't that nice? They are apparently relocating with their seven- and five-year-old to the UK for an extended period beginning this month with the children set to begin school there in September.

But they're going to keep their home in Montecito. Why would you not? And their vacation property in Portugal while establishing a private non-royal home base in Britain. A funny detail here from the People magazine write-up is at one point they say those close to the Sussexes believe they have successfully executed the, quote, half-in, half-out model. Harry and Megan proposed to the royal family in 20, With the base in Britain, Harry will be able to spend more time with charities, including his Scotty's Little Soldiers and Welchild, as well as the Invictus community, while Megan continues while Megan continues leading her lifestyle company as ever and pursuing future projects.

Sadly, many of her past projects have failed and have proven to be utterly useless, basically, with very little interest in Megan anymore. The Netflix, the podcast, it's not working. It's not working on YouTube. They obviously had to do something different. So I guess they're keeping their house in Montecito, and this is just an extended stay in Britain, which makes the headline a little bit misleading.

I guess they're technically moving back to the UK. I don't know what that means for their future, what they're going to do. But it looks like they're still trying to do the half in, half out thing, which never really worked because they're basically fully out. They don't have the privileges. They're not royals anymore. They're out. And so what they mean by half in is that they're continuing to try and cash in on the brand in some ways that are perfectly admirable, like their charity endeavors. But for Megan Markle, it's basically just been an influencer campaign, which is undignified.

And now we have Barack Obama starting a podcast. Michelle Obama has their podcast. Like, listen, I'm doing a podcast right here. Nancy Mace is doing her YouTube channel with like five-year-old ability-level Canva designs. It's also indignified. And far be it from me, far be it from me to criticize the dignity of others in the podcasting space that somebody in the podcasting space, but I'm not a member of Congress. I'm not a former member of the royal family or former president or first lady.

There is something about entering this genre of what is often characterized, hopefully not here on the show, but what is often characterized by emotional incontinence to have our public servants who are supposed to be ambassadors for the country or a cause engaging in the least stoic behavior imaginable. Stoicism has its limits, of course, as a personality trait, but it's actually there are benefits to it for our leaders. And I think that's part of what's so frustrating for the royal family about Harry and Megan. It's that they want to be part of the popular culture right now, which virtually demands to have a steady stream of cash. People act this way.

Now, I think there's something really valuable about scarcity. And I think making yourself scarce, like if Kate Middleton, came out of absolutely nowhere and said, I'm going to do a documentary. It's like the Melania documentary, which was, of course, a ridiculous Jeff Bezos Amazon boondoggle. I think if she wanted to do something like that, it would actually probably be in really high demand because she's scarce relative to Megan Markle. So I don't know. I don't care. I mean, I enjoy it. Enjoy the horrible winter weather. Sorry that it wasn't working out for you. in Montecito. I guess they'll have to, I don't think Ellen DeGeneres has fully moved back to Montecito yet.

I think she's still technically in the UK. That's also not gone super well for her. Like their properties flooded. I don't know. Whatever. Enjoy yourselves. Harry and Megan, look for them to start trying to play the official royal role more and more, be seen with the family more and more. So I guess there will be more to come. Stay tuned. Actually, in all seriousness, please do stay tuned because we have a great show coming up with the one and only Michael Schellenberger. Let's get to it. Well, you may not personally remember every time you toss, turn, or wake up hot during the night, you might not be able to say, oh, it was right at 1.15 a.m. But you know what? Your body does remember it. Remembers all of it. And I've noticed a real difference when I sleep on a mattress that actually supports me. And that's why I sleep on a ghost bed.

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So if you're waking up sore or tired before your day even starts, check out GhostBed. It can make a big difference. For a limited time during GhostBeds Labor Day sale, they're offering my audience an extra 10% off their lowest prices of the season. Go to ghostbed.com and use promo code Emily. That's ghostbed.com slash Emily promo code Emily. Happy to be joined now by my friend Michael Schellenberger. He is the founder of public.com. He's the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. He's the best-selling author and, of course, a Dow, Journalism Prize winner. Michael, thanks for stopping by.

Great to see you, Emily. It's so good to see you. And you have been cooking up some great reporting over at public recently. We're going to talk all about a lot of it. I wanted to start, actually, with Alexander Vindman's devastating double-digit lost in a primary. He had raised about $6 million. $16, I'm sorry, $16, $16 million from presumably like MSNBC blue and on boomers to absolutely be the shoe in this Florida House district.

He was so confident that he had a Nantucket fundraiser for the general election already planned for this weekend. Obviously, that's now been canceled because a DSA candidate named Angie Nixon absolutely destroyed him by about 12 points. as the count stands right now. Donald Trump wrote, Vindman is, of course, a familiar name to many people. He said, the most gratifying loss last night was that of a real treasonous creep, Alexander Vindman,

to a radical left lunatic who can't speak or think properly and who will go down to certain defeat at the hands of Ashley Moody. He goes on to say, Vindman, if you remember, was the one who lied about my perfect call with President Zelensky of Ukraine, only to find out that the conversation was routinely recorded and proved that I was 100% in the right, completely innocent.

It was indeed a perfect call, and Democrats' fake impeachment effort massively failed. Michael, this is an interesting point, actually, because Vindman, to me, represents the failed resistance against Trump. That really his first midterm cycle, yes, it was a blue tsunami, but it set the stage for Trump's comeback after he lost in 2020. Democrats kept hitting him with lawfare started really with the Vindman impeachment, obviously, which was before that.

But this was the tactic to try to swamp him in lawfare and take him down. Angie Nixon comes out of. absolutely nowhere. She's a state representative blows him out of the water by spending zero dollars on TV. He was one of the top act blue fundraisers throughout this cycle. It looks to me like the resistance has been eclipsed by the DSA now. Yeah, I mean, there is a way in which this particular race feels like a bookend to all the Russia gate stuff, doesn't it? Where it just, there already you had seen that the party was moving, the Democrats were moving away from the framing of Trump as a treasonous, you know, Putin-controlled person, I think there's some recognition that that really had already

played itself out by the end of 2024, but this has got to be the last gasp of it. It is satisfying for a lot of different reasons, this victory by this DSA person, even if you don't agree with her, because in part, you know, we hear so much about how money and politics determines everything, you know, the system's corrupted. I just listened to Daronasemoglo, who's got an MIT economist, got a new book out, lamenting all the money in politics, how we have to do something about it, which is never going to happen because the Supreme Court has, has, has, says, treats money in politics like free speech. So, um, it's absurd, but this just shows that money can't buy you.

Um, can't buy, you know, can't improve on a bad candidate. I mean, to be fair, he was a bad candidate, bad message. And then pride comes before a fall. So I think, uh, another, uh, another case where the hubris and voters sense that. You know, voters sense it when their vote is being taken for granted. And we do as Americans, I think one of our qualities is to really, side with the underdog as kind of a rule. And even if we, you know, are like sort of neutrals or maybe even don't like the person, there's something admirable in that kind of comeback. So I think

voters wanted to be a part of that. And they didn't want to have much to do with Vindman. It does reveal the disconnect between Democratic establishment donors and what's actually happening on the ground. The fact that so many people poured money into this race and he got blown resoundingly out of the water. Let's take a listen here to a little bit from Mark Caputo, Florida, great Florida reporter on CNN just last night after it became clear Vindman was going to lose. Colonel Augs Vindman did outraise and outspent Angie Nixon and also Senator Ashley Moody and he lost. What does that tell you?

He was a terrible candidate. It's difficult for me to put that in words. And some of our conference calls at Axios, I would just start to rant about it. I was almost offended by his just inability to campaign properly. I don't really know where that money was spent because you didn't really see him on television. You didn't really see him in the community. You didn't see him in mailers. You didn't see him in text messages.

There was no presence of... He has no real roots here. He's essentially sort of carpet-bagged here. I didn't even know the guy lived in the state. I thought like his brothers in Congress, he lived in Virginia. Mm-hmm. Meanwhile, didn't he move there? Yes, he did. That's exactly what happened and thought he didn't have to go to these conversations, could just spend his way. And to your point, that is, they just showed she spent less than a million dollars, less than a million dollars. He spent, I think they just showed nine million. Nine million dollars. He raised 16 million dollars, presumably from a lot of deep-pocketed donors. That's a crisis for the Democratic Party establishment who now is facing a. a Democratic socialist running against Ashley Moody in the seat, which, yes, Florida is red,

but the conditions for swing states, again, I don't think Florida is particularly a swing state at this point, but the conditions are really right for Democrats to have surprise upsets this cycle. So meanwhile, the Republican who won the gubernatorial, I'm sorry, the former Republican who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, David Jolly, who was working in Republican politics since the 90s, kind of became a resistance figure himself. He won. He's going to go up against Byron Donald. He's already trying to distance himself from Angie Nixon, who again is a Democratic socialist. Let's take a listen to him on MS Now just last night. Is this a state, Florida, that can elect you as governor, but also elects progressive Angie Nixon for the U.S. Senate at the same time?

Well, we're going to find out. We're going to find out. Look, I reject the DSA. I reject socialism. I'm a capitalist, Listen, I think capitalism provides the greatest amount of economic mobility. I have been with Angie on the trail, and I'll tell you this, she's a fighter. She leaves it all on the field. She goes in every room talking about what I talk about. Can we improve your access to housing, affordable housing, to health care? Do you know where to educate your kids? What is it that government can do where the private sector is unable to improve your life?

Angie's out there fighting for those same values. I think she and I have a very different approach to this. But look, I reject socialism. I'm a capitalist. We'll see how Florida's voters sort that out. Okay, Michael, I was really excited to talk to you about this because you also recently interviewed Evan Barker, who were trying to get on the show. She has a new book out about her experience, fundraising and Democratic politics. And you posted on X, yes, DSA has a good ground game.

But the reason it keeps winning is that voters rejected open borders, D.E.I, trans, et cetera, which the party establishment embraced to avoid economic populism. And you had a whole conversation with Evan about some of this that folks can go check out. But that is actually kind of a fascinating part of this dynamic in Florida because Angie Nixon is talking like an economic populist, but Democratic socialists still have the woke one policies on open borders and trans issues. Yeah, I think this is so interesting. I didn't really all click for me until I talked to Evan, who's this former Democratic operative fundraiser who's written this tell-all memoir called Nothing Left. And what I finally clicked for me was that after 2018, which is, of course, the midterm cycle where AOC is elected, you have a kind of accommodation. I'm not going to say there was like a single meeting or something. There was a meeting between AOC and Pelosi, but more like an accommodation that sort of emerged organically within the party that the establishment would embrace all the woke stuff, the stuff on race, on border, on trans, to the point where in a sloppy way, so that Kamala Harris just signs that ACLU thing saying,

She's going to do transgender surgeries for illegal migrants and prisoners. Sloppy in the sense of Biden, just opening the border. Sloppy and just the kind of over the top, aggressive DEI policies. But then they said, well, we're not going to do the economic populism. So the stuff that's, so, you know, as Evan says, moderates and leftists and the party sort of both manifested their worst instincts. And that was the compromise. I mean, it was kind of the worst compromise.

So they didn't have the stuff that they really. are succeeding on Medicare for all, affordability, high prices. They got rid of, they didn't do all that. They did all the stuff that everybody hates on the culture war stuff. And we're Republicans have an advantage because swing voters tend to agree with the Republican base more on those issues. So that helped me to understand. But then at you go through 20, so then 2020, 2020, 24, all the woke stuff proves a disaster. For 2024, Trump's elected. And DSA quite skillfully is able to say, well, this because they were the establishment. They weren't strong up on Gaza. They didn't emphasize our populist issues. Never sort of acknowledging that it was their woke agenda that they got, you know,

Biden and Harris and the establishment to embrace that was the stuff that was most repudiated. So I think it's very, you know, if I'm like, I'm just trying to analyze it objectively, I don't, like, if I'm trying to be a neutral or a Machiavellian scientific approach to this, I think DSA is doing well. Like, I think that they're actually, you know, They're threading these needles really well, so they're not actually deleting all their crazy stuff. I thought that AOC's effort to kind of reset with the woke one was directionally right. I'm not sure she executed that exactly right. But it does seem like they're trying to do a thing that I saw her do very early when she went on Colbert in late 2028, when he was like, aren't you a communist, aren't you a socialist?

And she was like, let me tell you what Democratic socialist means to me. It means basically working hard, playing by the rules, having health care. I mean, it's basically Bill Clinton, circa mid-90s, and just completely reframing it so that it seems much more mainstream, stuff that I'm like, okay, yeah, I'd like for people to have good health care. So I think the DSA has behaved in a very deft way and left the establishment sort of holding the bag for those 2024 losses. I totally agree with that. And I wonder, I mean, I think maybe the most interesting internecine squabble right now is within the ranks of the DSA, the fight between the people who are like material. Marxists and people who are truly like postmodern Marcousin or Foucaulian folks who combine, what I think is actually fair to describe as cultural Marxism.

I know people in the DSA world like laugh at that term, but what it does is create a hierarchy of people who are victimized not just by capitalism, but by imperialism and more than anything really by racism, which they tie to imperialism and capitalism. but it creates that actual like intersectional hierarchy directly. And those are a lot of people that are within the DSA right now. Alexander Casio Corses herself, I think goes, is pulled in both of those directions. I don't think she fully understands which direction she should go in or she does believe in. I honestly don't think she understands that.

She went on the fighting oligarchy tour with Bernie Sanders drew massive crowds, some in red states out in the mountain west. And they were basically prioritizing the first basket, the economic populism and leaving out the cultural progressivism. So she's learning. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of these guys believe in ideas, not just on the economic issues, but on the cultural issues that sound to me just like woke one. I mean, Abdul al-Said, not DSA, but DSA aligned, is still out there talking about how, yes, there should be funding for transition surgeries for minors. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's still going to be the problem that DSA has to deal with is this weak spot that their own members believe passionately about and that the interest groups are going to demand them to obey. Now, you know, as Matthew Iglesis points out in his recent piece, the DSA is sort of unencumbered by those interest groups in the way that the establishment is. So it's interesting to think with the famous example is, of course, Bill Clinton sort of reforming the Democrats so that he can run on a more moderate way in 1992. If anybody was able to do that now, it would be like Mom Doni. Like, he would be the, you know, and it's so interesting to see that, like, there's a way in which like Mom Donnie has absolutely eclipsed AOC. He's in an

executive role. I think there's a lot of ways in which he's actually a better politician. He's able to sort of do two sort of seemingly different things at the same time. He's made some mistakes. Obviously, we saw Francesca Hong lose in Wisconsin. She's the one that wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. You know, she, obviously, there are limits, right, for voters, somebody that she also had confessed to having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So there were other problems with her. But even she was willing to come out and just like, I think she posed with the Thanksgiving dinner and said Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

So that sort of, I hate to say, but ruthlessness on the part of the DSA, I think is a sign that they're formidable and they're not something that can be dismissed and that they're going to have to find a way to manage all that woke cultural baggage. But I think that parties can do that. I think that politicians are able to do that. proven themselves able to do that. And so that it's sort of like, if you keep raising it, they go, look, I've already addressed that. Let's ready to move on. And I think people will be kind of like, yeah, okay, fine, we'll move on. Right. Well, let's talk about one of their biggest cultural

albatrosses, which is the trans topic particularly. Now, to be clear, when you're in a bad economy, yes, this issue matters to people. I always describe it as a sanity litmus test that people apply to politicians who if you can't have a non-bizarre weird answer to the question of other boys should be in girls' sports and whether they should be changing in locker rooms, it just is hard for people to take you seriously. Now, on the other hand, if you're like Grand Platner, and you clearly believe that, yes, all of these things should be happening and you cling to it and you own it, it's probably a better approach than trying to water down your past positions. On the other hand, in a tough economy for Republicans, this issue definitely carries less water. It has less

power. Meanwhile, though, it's still a very real battle on the left, although it's not, they're not really dealing with it at all. Let's talk about the WMBA as a jumping off point to get to some of your new reporting. News on the W-path front as well. So Sophie Cunningham was asked about the booze that she's been getting recently, although there's been some support too. And here's what she had to say at a press conference this week. So we got booed a little bit tonight. Really? Yeah.

I was kidding, I know. I think it was because of the ketchup chips? You know what, yeah. I like where your mind's at on that. Maybe I should try. I heard I was supposed to try a different brand. So, but you know what? I will tell you, I want to shout out the tempo crowd in the city.

I think we've had so much fun. It's my first time being in Canada. It's a lot of our first times being in Canada. But the crowd was absolutely amazing. And, you know, I think that's what sports is all about. You're going to get booze. going to get tears, but just the fact that they're so passionate, they're loud, and they're putting on for the city. I think it's amazing. So shout out to you guys for coming out and

supporting. So she obviously very casually and civilly came out against boys playing in girl sports. That's what kicked this whole thing off. Now, she's had some supporters showing up at games. We can put this athletic tear sheet up on the screen. They reported multiple fans were asked by WNBA security to cover shirts bearing messages regarding transgender athlete participation in women's sports during Sunday's game between the Indiana Fever and the Atlanta Dream. A statement from a WNBA spokesperson said the individuals should not have been asked to do so. I think they were just X, X, X, Y shirts from Jen Say's brand. Michael, but this is, the WMBA has made this both racial and turned it into a sexual orientation battle in a way that I have to imagine is turning a lot of average Americans, not who are exactly WNBA diehard viewers, but a lot of average Americans see this insanity.

And they do still attribute it to the ideological left. Yeah, there's no question. about it. I mean, for me, trans as well, it's just a super important issue. I think kids are being harmed. And, you know, the big one for me is still gender affirming care, mislabeled gender affirming care, but trans medical procedures on kids, it's just a bright moral line, you know, for me. I think for a lot of people, it's a switch, not a dial. Like, you can look something like Medicare for all and how are you going to provide health care. It's like, it's all gray area, right? Like, we're all like, there's just, you know, I mean, you can be like a hard libertarian

be like, that's my bright line. But for most people, the government's going to provide health care at some rates. It's going to negotiate as complicated. Like trans, it's like, like, it's a bright line. Like, you either want boys, you want males in female sports and spaces, or you don't. You want minors protected from these medical procedures or not. And I think we saw in the 2024 election, it did have a kind of broader brand value, you know, the common law is for they, them, and Trump is for you. I do think that that's still there. And so 100% agree. Albatross for the left, the biggest one, maybe bigger than race, which is, I think, close behind.

Probably not as big as borders, but now the borders closed and the Democrats have endorsed a closed border. That's off the table. But, you know, I think trans is just going to continue to be a problem for Democrats. And, you know, Republicans probably are glad that it's still going to be an issue. I mean, it's amazing to me that we saw Gavin Newsome very briefly right after going to have for elections, he kind of puts his toe in the water and goes, yeah, I don't think that, you know, males should be a funeral sports and is just shouted down by the base of the Democratic Party. And he had to back off and sort of say, oh, I have a trans nephew or a trans godson.

So I do think it's-self molten as well. Yeah. So, you know, they seemed, the Democrats really seems stuck on it. It seems like it's a really big problem for them. And so, yeah, I mean, it could be one of those things that until the Democrats can find a way to get, get away from that and take a position against it, that they are going to lose votes on it. will it ever be decisive? The only thing I was going to point out too,

it was like, Democrats should be just killing it right now. I mean, like, Trump's in a super unpopular war. It's raising gasoline. It's keeping gasoline prices high. Nobody knows how we're going to end the war in Iran. Was it really necessary? I think most people were like, you know, it seemed like,

you know, maybe should have been leaves, you know, sleeping dogs lie. And the Democrats should be killing it, and they're really not. They're still working this stuff out. That's why Evan is like it will take a generation. It's more like 10 to 15 years for the Democrats to sort it out, not, you know, not 12 to 18 months. But in stepping back from politics, there's a real reckoning, professional reckoning happening for the industry, the nonprofit industry, the medical industry that literally profited off of this happening right now. This Daily Signal article pointed out, interestingly, it was by Tyler O'Neill.

Shout out to Tyler, who's done some of the best SPLC reporting as well, that. while Democrats, activist groups, and medical associations cannot emphasize that last part enough, by the way, medical associations have long cited the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care as the ultimate authority on a scientific consensus for sex-rejecting procedures. W-Path just made an admission in court that threatens to undermine that exalted authority. They're being sued by the FTC, basically for deceptive practices for promoting quote-unquote gender-affirming care, as Tyler notes that causes harm to patients, particularly minors. They asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit by claiming that the government was just retaliating against them because they disagreed with their protected speech.

They claimed basically that their standards of care were, quote, opinions. Opinions. Meanwhile, Michael, you have a new report. You say puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries are life-saving for trans-identified people, said Democrats. In truth, they've resulted in the worst medical scandal since lobotomies. Now a major new study finds the Biden administration, facilitated the fraudulent billings that financed it. And I went through this study and read your reporting, Michael, this is a real reckoning. And it will hopefully, I'm curious for your take on this.

It will hopefully change what was happening where you had some 14,000, according to Do No Harm, a conservative group, some 14,000 transitions happen. I think close to 5,000 of those, probably more, were actual sex surgeries, were actual surgical interventions. So there is a reckoning happening. Tell us about your reporting. Yeah, I mean, this was very provo to HHS for doing this study. You know, when we did the W-Path files, which were, of course, these internal files leaked to us, they showed a lot of conversation about basically billing things in the using the billing codes for insurers or for Medicare or Medicaid, you know, basically billing the government or billing insurers using these particular codes,

but that didn't apply to the person in question. So they were doing arguably this whole thing has been based on fraudulent billings. It reminded me a little bit of like how they finally got Al Capone, not on, you know, running the mob, but through tax evasion. So in that sense, I'm like, you know, bravo, I applaud it. But the underlying issue is just that this is an awful medical scandal. And the public, you know, the public is clearly moving against the stuff. I mean, the Democrats' opposition to trans medical procedures has just increased every year. I've seen it in the progressives that I talk to, who I've been talking to for years, trying to get them to see how terrible this stuff is.

Finally, I've seen them come around a bit more. So I think something has changed. I don't know if it was 2024. I don't know if it was just repetition. My experience, you have to show people the victims. You have to be like this person, Chloe Cole, you know, 15 years old, you know, double mastectomy. How is that okay? She can't consent to that.

So, yeah. And I think that, look, it's just, my view, it's lobotomies. It's just people are going to look back on this moment and be in horror. It's a little bit like a horror movie where the character does something. I don't want to spoil the plot of a great horror movie that's in the theaters now. But sort of something where you sort of wake up at something and discover that you've been doing something horrible. I think that's the experience that a lot of Democrats and progressives are having and are going to have a lot more. You know, bring us into this reporting too, because when you're going through the HHS document,

as you did, you notice what they're using is like endocrine diagnoses and stuff to get. Can you explain to that just like a little bit of the nuts and bolts of what they were doing to get some of these medications and treatments? Yeah, I mean, well, so one of the categories, I mean, maybe the prototypical category was precocious puberty. And so, you know, this is for kids that go through puberty too early. You want to slow them down a bit. And so we use these things called puberty blockers to do that.

These are very potent chemicals, very serious chemicals. So they're just claiming that children that identify as the opposite gender are suffering precocious puberty. Well, that's fraud. I mean, that's just not true. You know, and so the kids wouldn't say that. The parents couldn't say that. The provider wouldn't say that. So that's medical fraud, you know, and they should be prosecuted for it.

The amounts of money, like, aren't the point here. It's just that you're, you've got now, the government now has a mechanism to basically go after the insurers and the providers. the medical providers, and it is having an effect. I mean, we know for a fact that it's had big impacts on, say, the Boston Children's, on California Children's. You know, we emailed, gosh, it was dozens of hospitals asking them what their policies were. Most of them didn't want to say, but I just think that they know they're under the microscope and they could face lawsuits and that they can also see the public is turning against this,

which means that juries will be turning against it. So, yeah, that's the underlying fraud, was that they're, were just mislabeling. They were giving puberty blockers to trans-identifying children and claiming that they were suffering from precocious puberty. The Terps like Kara Dansky have obviously, and J.K. Rowling have obviously been on this for many, many years. But I'm curious, you know, people who maybe don't know some of your back story, you spent a lot of time on the like anti-corporate left. And to me, this is such an obvious example of how corporations, pharma, were funneling monies to funding money to organizations like HRC, which were then talking about how great these pharma products

were treating kids, making money off of it. And I wonder if you've had any luck even using that angle to try and highlight how wrong some of this is just with friends of yours that remain progressive. Like, what has it been like for you? I know you were talking about individual stories like Chloe's incredibly powerful. But that angle as well, just it drives me crazy. We have this institutional trust like decline across the board in the United States. A lot of that is going towards corporations, pharma, and here we have such a classic case study of it. And it got so little attention from the left, leftists.

Nothing. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think the harm that the thing is causing has to come first for people. Because obviously, if you think that it's really medically necessary, then the cost of it or even having some billing problems seems like a minor issue. It reminds me a little bit of renewables. Like I think conservatives would complain about renewables as expensive, which they are.

But if you think renewables are good in our saving nature, then you kind of go, well, then we should pay a little bit more for it. Or even with a COVID vaccine, people will say, oh, you know, Pfizer made all this money, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but if you think the vaccine was good, then I think the money that they, most of us would be like, wow, we want people to profit when they're delivering a good product. So in my experience, particularly when you're talking to people that are on the fence or on the left, you really have to start with the harm it causes. and to really break through that really hard ideology of I'm a moral person because I support trans kids or whatever, you have to be like, what about this kid? Like, it has to be really specific.

It has to penetrate their little dream world and the bubble that they're in. And I think it has to be repetitive. You have to keep doing it. I think when you kind of go, there's these other parts of it that were bad as well. That can come later. But if you think that doing these things to children is good,

then I think the fact that there was medical fraud involved just doesn't have the same impact. Let's take a quick break. We're going to be back with more Michael Schellenberger. In just a moment, we're going to cover Hunter Biden. Eric Swalwell and top Fauci advisor pleading guilty. We'll be right back. All right, everyone.

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Think about that. 50,000 babies this year. 50,000 babies this year. To dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby, or visit preborn.com slash Emily. That's preborn.com slash Emily. We're back with more Michael Schellenberger, of course, founder of public. That news.

He's the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of R. also a best-selling author and a Dow Journalism Prize winner. Michael, let's talk about some of your recent FBI reporting, especially in light of Hunter Biden's latest media tour. I mean, it's kind of been a perpetual rolling media tour at this point since he first sat down with Andrew Callahan. But interestingly, when he was on with Tucker Carlson, I did a segment a couple of weeks ago just going through kind of why he's not being truthful about everything that was found on the laptop and why he's kind of trying to whitewash with this populist gloss, actually what is a pretty gross record of insider trading and alike, but not on the scale of what we've seen in this

Trump administration from the Trump family, certainly. Now, though, he's trying to say he doesn't recall, it's very clever, the language that he's using, that he doesn't recall dropping off that laptop at John Paul McIsaac's repair shop in Delaware. Listen to the language here in his conversation with Tucker. I just want to ask you point-blank, did you drop off laptops? No, and this is the thing that I've said over and over again. I have literally zero recollection of memory of ever dropping off a lap. Oh, you don't remember.

John Paul McIsaac. No. Okay. It was probably hammered, though. I mean, you kind of go like, he was high and drunk like a lot. So the idea that he couldn't remember something is not hard to believe. Remember, his signature is on a computer repair store. So, I mean, what, I mean, no one's, I mean, no one's.

I've never heard anybody even alleged that his signature was faked or is fraudulent or is inauthentic. So you remember when the New York Post story came out about the Hunter Biden laptop, which shows the family influence peddling at scale. They have the FBI subpoena taking the laptop in December 2019. And they have the repair store owner, whatever is the invoice or the signature. I mean, the paper trail, as a good journalist, to have a paper trail that good is pretty rare. So we're dealing with like stuff where we have no paper trail. This is pretty, for me, very solid. So I don't know what he's trying to do there.

He's being careful. He's saying he doesn't recall it. And actually that's right before he says he got sober. When he would have dropped the laptop off and the laptop ends up in John Paul McIsaac's hands and we have the signature of the drop off, that's before he says he got sober, which is why I think he's carefully using the do not recall language. The serial number was matched in court. It's pretty clear that likely Hunter Biden, himself.

dropped that laptop off. Now, he's also claiming someone hacked his cloud. I think the implication is that the Israelis hacked his cloud. Tucker's saying that the Israelis were shopping the information to him. But Jill Biden did an interview recently where she was asked to comment on a hunter's explosion in the media recently. She said, well, we're just so proud of him that he can be so honest and say things other people won't say and feel comfortable with it because he's been through it. I think now is Hunter's time to shine. He's doing really good things. Of course, he launched a substack, says there's $17 million in debt. She tried to sell her book. Joe Biden's about to come out with the book. I think they're genuinely in financial problems, Michael, and they're trying to

deal with it by going on these media tours and hopefully trying to prove their relevance now that their patriarch is waning. He probably doesn't have much time left and make themselves more valuable back in the Beltway. Good luck with that. I mean, the last time I checked, he had raised I think under 10 million for his, I mean, I don't quote me on the exact number, but like, very little for his library. And I think Trump had raised like over 100 million or something. And who's going to buy those books? I mean, this is, it's, they're probably going to go bankrupt. I mean, if they're, that levels of debt, I don't know how they come out of it.

I don't see any path for that family. I mean, that name is, I think, is just gone. I can't see any path for that family to really. I think Carter had enough time and he was just such a better person. never involved in this kind of animal's way, that he could just go and start a habitat for humanity. He could try to get peace in the Middle East. He could do all these things to revive his reputation.

But I think the Biden name is mud at this point. Well, and I mean, what's frustrating is that claims about him being kind of a victim are really like spreading like wildfire because he's running a very clever social media campaign. And the unfortunate, I think, downstream consequence is that it's going to continue. continue to gloss over how the FBI, and again, the CIA as well, that 51 former intelligence officer letter, part of that was being organized with a CIA email address, like the official CIA.gov, as my former editor, Sean Davis reported, as soon as we found out, you've been doing a lot of reporting on this recently because you're still putting the pieces together as a reporter

of this. Let's put Michael's post up on the screen. You reported, we've known since 2023 that the FBI illegally spread disinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop, an operation that culminated in the censorship of a New York post-sorty in October 2020 by Twitter and Facebook. Now, newly released documents reveal the partisan FBI group that ran it. You also reported that in recent days, Jim Jordan says the FBI gave him a fake defensive briefing back in 2020 in what appears to be the same deception operation that resulted in Facebook and Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. There's now strong evidence linking the head of that op to FBI director Ray. Michael, they were in Hunter Biden's corner.

The intelligence agencies were in his corner throughout all of this. Tell us more about what you've learned. Yeah, I mean, this is, it's really, I'd say it's fun, but it is fun because you get to the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. And obviously, one of the things you fear the most as a journalist is that like you maybe got it wrong. And so when you see the puzzle pieces falling where they should, you're like, yeah, even though it's all terrible. But basically, yeah, I mean, what happened is that ODI and I, the Office of the Director of National intelligence released a report about what they called an informal group, but it had a name Round River, and it was basically run by the foreign interference task force, which for people that

remember within the FBI, also was the ones that were engaging with Twitter and Facebook and constantly asking them to censor things and had all these weird interactions right before Twitter made the decision to censor the Hunter buying laptop in October 2020. That's a important because we know Mark Zuckerberg said that the FBI had gone to them directly to warn of the Hunter Biden or to warn of Russian interference. My hypothesis, and I think the data show it, but I can't prove it yet, is that it was the same group who did that with Twitter. Then you kind of go, well, what else was going on at the time? This dawned on me, I think like a year or two ago, where I realized that there was a single FBI disinformation operation aimed at misleading.

people about the Hunter Biden laptop and it was going on really starting, because this group, the other thing, it starts in December 2019, right after FBI gets the Hunter Biden laptop. That is such an important bid in the timeline. So they get the laptop, but the public doesn't know about it. And so they start briefing tech companies or people start briefing tech companies to prepare for something that looks like Russian disinformation as soon as it comes out that we have this letter that's saying it has all the hallmarks, right? That's the progression. Yeah, it really goes December. They start. this little informal group within FBI.

Already in spring of 2020, there's other things that are going on. There's a weird, again, I can't prove it. It seems connected. It seems like it's coming from the FBI. A Stanford group puts out a report saying, we have to get over the Pentagon Papers Principle. Pentagon Papers Principle is that the New York Times is going to publish these leaked documents from the Pentagon

about how we're losing the war in Vietnam. It's 69, Supreme Court, 70. major foundation for free space, why we can publish leaked government documents and not risk going to prison. It's still illegal often for the leaker, but for reporters who are protected, here they come out with this whole report being like, we reporters should get over that idea and not report on the leaked information, which is like basically saying, yeah, we should just be, you know, puppets of the military intelligence community. then you get this other thing that I only connected later, which was that the FBI goes to Senators Grassley and Johnson and gives what's called a defensive briefing saying, we have intelligence that your investigation into Hunter Biden's corruption is being used by the Russians to spread disinformation.

They then, FBI then turns around and goes and tells the news media, in this case it was Politico. They go do these stories on it. Then the Democrats come out and they go, Pelosi and Schumer come out and they go, we have word that this investigative. to Hunter Biden is contributing, is being manipulated by Russian disinformation, something, Russian disinformation somehow. And then you get to the, and that's all in like the summer. I saw when they released that OD and I report about Rand River, they'd also released a spreadsheet, apparently an FBI spreadsheet where they identify conduits of Russian

disinformation and then targets. The conduits were all Republicans, the targets were all Democrats. One of the conduits was, you know, one of the top one was Julian. which, you know, FBI was spying on Giuliani. And he was the guy that was shopping the New York Post laptop story. Below that is Senator Johnson, below that Senator Grassley. After that, it was House, you know, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. And I was like, wow.

So I, you know, I texted the chairman. And I was like, did you get a defensive briefing? And he didn't reply. And I was like, God, I wonder if that was, like, awkward. You know, like, you're like, did I ask like an awkward question? Next morning he just calls me. And he's like, yeah, I got that briefing. And so we did that follow-up story that there had been a defensive briefing.

So, you know, I was trying and we're going through the other list, like, who else got that defensive briefing? It's all very, this all can seem very complicated for people. What's important to know is that these briefings were just ways for the FBI to use the excuse to go to the media and tell the media that the Russians were planning disinformation on a hundred-bion laptop. So the whole deception operation. It's kind of like Comey briefing Trump, right? the dossier? It's exactly right. They're using defensive briefings as an offensive tactic to spread deception and to misdescribe and misframe things. But I mean, I think if you look at it holistically, there is a single, first of all, I mean, look, I think you can kind of go, there is a single FBI

weaponization program that really starts with dismissing the Hillary Clinton server to starting the Russia gate hoax against Trump, to getting the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019 to then really a year. These are sophisticated. By the way, this is sophisticated stuff. Like, this is stuff that, you know, I can't see CIA in some of the stuff, but you kind of go, this is the kind of stuff you would see CIA doing in terms of regime change operations abroad. So they're running this deception operation from December 2019 to October 2020. Part of it, I think, I can't prove, but strongly suspect, that it included the general counsel of FBI taking a deputy general counsel role at Twitter. why do I emphasize that? General counsel of FBI is second most powerful person at FBI. I mean, this is a huge, huge role. It takes the junior attorney job at Twitter. You say, oh, well, you want to make money or whatever. Sure. The timing is right at the very moment when FBI is doing this stuff. And then lo and behold, that's that guy, his name is Jim Baker, who is the one that convinces the censors within Twitter, who had concluded that the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post did not violate their terms of service.

He convinces them to censor it anyway. So this is a, I mean, it's sort of a masterpiece of a deception operation, all carried out by kind of the same, probably the same group of friends, you know, like the same people that all know each other, senior people within the FBI. The Jim Baker component of this goes right back to the Twitter files, where you and the other Twitter files reporters followed how he was part of this pipeline to censor and suppress American.

speech. If I'm remembering correctly, Jim Baker was a part of the pipeline from the government to the social media companies where these posts and narratives that they wanted to suppress on the tech companies, you would get that pass along from Jim Baker and others straight to the company that he then went and worked at. Yeah, so they're playing both sides of it. They're putting pressure on, FBS putting pressure on Twitter from the outside and on Facebook. And so, spreading disinformation to them. And they've got people inside Twitter. And again, I say people, I can't prove that they were still running this operation, but it really looks like it. Anybody looks at it. There's all sorts of other weird stuff. Like one of the members of that

foreign influence task force within FBI is a guy in the San Francisco Bureau whose job is liaison with the social media company's name is Elvis Chan. At one point, Elvis Chan emails Twitter executives and is like, huh, is there anybody at Twitter who you think has a security clearance who we could give a briefing to. And they go, and the Twitter people are like, oh, well, what about Jim Baker? And he goes, oh, God, I hadn't even thought of that. And you're just reading it going, like, you know how you read stuff? And you're like, this just sounds like bullshit.

Like, I just kind of don't believe any of that. You're creating the paper trail to, right. It's classic. You know, it's a classic intelligence op. So, yeah, I think it's, anyway, I'm excited about it because for me, my most important Twitter file contribution was this inside look at how the FBI had created a little cell inside of Twitter and that they played these decisive roles,

particularly in the Hunter Buy on laptop. But there was other things going on. I mean, the other thing was this Aspen Institute was running part of the deception operation, programming journalists in a tabletop exercise before the New York Post story came out. That is another weird thing people don't know enough about Michael. It's crazy.

I mean, Aspen Institute is heavily funded by State Department, right? It's widely considered to be an intermediary with the intelligence community. You know, a lot of people from the IC show up at our conferences, but they decide out of the blue to run this tabletop exercise, which is a kind of workshop to essentially program the journalists. I can't find a better word for it, but it's basically to get all the mainstream journalists, New York Times, Washington Post, you know, all the social media platform sensors. And they basically train them. They go, how would we deal with

a major leak around Hunter Biden and his corruption and his barisma? And they go, well, we should, what we should do is you should cover how the leak happened, not the contents of the leak. So the equivalent with Pentagon Papers would be saying we should go and basically examine Daniel Ellsberg, the guy that leaked the Pentagon Papers, because he was going to a psychotherapist. That's actually what happened. That's what they said. So you would actually make the whole story about Daniel, you make it. So basically, it's a distraction of it. You're going to like, don't look over there at all this evidence of the Biden family influence peddling. Look over here. at how that information got leaked in the first place,

because it's Russians. I mean, that was the, the other thing is just, it just keeps coming up is that these guys had a master frame. And it starts early on. It starts with Hillary Clinton. That's the earliest thing we know, that she's going to frame her Republican opponents as controlled by Putin because she's worried

that she's going to get tarred with that because she basically, her and her husband did take a bunch of money from Russians right around the same time that she approved uranium deals. So, but this, Russia becomes a kind of master, frame in which everything you want to, you know, either, you know, I mean, so that you basically have a single way that everybody knows. So it's like when you can, it's a conspiracy, do they all get together and plan this? They all know that if you're going to try to dismiss something, you say

it's Russian disinformation. It's Russian interference. And that was, that runs all the way from Russia Gate all the way through to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. Incredible. And it's so hard to follow these details, but I feel like in conversation, the full story comes out. So I'm just grateful to you, Michael, for keeping all of the keeping track of all of this. Speaking of foreign influence, though, Eric Swalwell, back in the news, not for good reasons. Chuck Ross put up this tweet pointing out, Eric Swalwell told the FBI, these are according to new documents that were published by Just the News, that he and Fang Fang, Christine Fang, quote,

hooked up at his apartment, which she visited twice. He does not remember whether candles were lit during her visit per declassified documents. She's published by Just the News. But, Michael, you also have been doing reporting on this. you reported newly declassified files revealed that the FBI dropped its investigation into Eric Swalwell's romantic relationship with an alleged Chinese spy, even though it had concluded she was an illegal source of campaign contributions as it ramped up its investigation of Trump. Now I'm going to sound really like Charlie Kelly at the whiteboard doing his Pepe Silva connections here.

Swalwell was one of the premier Russiagate FBI BS narrative peddlers. This is all very strange, Michael. Amazing. I mean, I made a very simple point, which is that there was so much evidence of foreign interference in the case of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and now Eric Swalwell. And there was like zero evidence of Russian interference with the Trump campaign. I mean, it was all conjured. You know, there's so many parts of it, but basically faked memos, the PP memo, the, you know, George Papadopoulos, shaking a Russian guy's hand, meeting somebody. these reverse targeting where you have an Australian bump into somebody at the bar, also Papadopoulos. Actually, I just mixed up page with Papadopoulos, but basically you're sort of conjuring, like the intelligence is going to be like conjuring supposed relationships and interference by Russians in the case of Trump. But here you just have like entire servers of data, you know, huge, you know, huge tranches of intelligence on the hill, on the Clinton influence peddling. you have the Hunter Biden laptop, which is just like a gold mine of conflicts of interest and influence peddling. And then you have the FBI saying, in their words, that they have this woman's stone cold on breaking contribution laws.

And she, we can't prove it. I say alleged spy. Her parents work for the equivalent of the Chinese CIA. She's bragging about how she's able to get access, like looks like a spy. And they drop all that. And so it was like, what other information do you need to know that the FBI was completely weaponized for partisan purposes? Right, right. That's such a good point. Where were the defensive briefings about Swalwa? He got one. So he got a defensive briefing about...

And it was not leaked to the media. Exactly. In fact, it was the opposite that when the, I think, I can't remember, I think it was Axios, don't quote me on this. But somebody did do a story. And I saw an ex that Glenn Kessler, the former fact checker for Washington Post, fact-checked people that were, because you may remember, like, I remember first seeing it being like, what is there this Fang-Fang thing about? Like, why is everybody accusing Swalwell of having slept with a Chinese spy? That can't be true. And I was like, it's just too absurd. Like, that can't be the case. Of course it is. And then, but then when, then, like, FBI basically then leaked to the media, then no, Swalwell's totally clear. There's nothing there. It's all fine. It's all good. So, yeah, he got a defensive briefing. At that point, she left. You know, he was like, okay, you know, I'll, you know,

whatever, it'll end. But they had like this illegal activity on the campaign contribution. And then in terms of the defensive briefing, yeah, it's exact opposite. So with the defensive briefing, it's on Trump, you know, or with Johnson and Grassley, or with Congressman Jordan, they use those things to then go to the media to spread their disinformation. In this case, they go to the media to spread disinformation, but in a way to protect the Democrat. Well, which is remarkable because in this case, your comparison of Page and Papadopoulos' alleged Russian connections, paling comparison to the fact that Eric Swalwell actually was sleeping with a, I think, pretty obvious espionage asset for the Chinese.

Like, it's not murky. It was murky in some of those cases, or it was, like, so disconnected from actual Russian government apparatuses, or maybe it was there, but the links were murky. This is not like that. This was actually, he legitimately could have been compromised. Literally in bed with her. And also it's important to remember this is the thing I didn't really focus on in the piece, but probably should have said something more about. The FBI was interested in her to make her a double agent for the U.S. intelligence community. So the assessment from the intelligence community is that she was close to Chinese intelligence. Right. So like that's why she was identified. You know, that was one of the reasons they were trying to recruit her. But I mean, Emily, it's so crazy. Like I actually, because I'm a sort of a newcomer to Russia Gate, like it was not paying attention to do it for a long time. So you get that beginner mom. I found like there's two stories, one of the New York Times Magazine, one of the New York Times regular paper where they were suggesting that because Trump banked at Deutsche Bank and because

Russians banked at Deutsche Bank, that that was evidence of him being controlled by the Russians. I mean, I kid you not. That was literally to Russia. There was an entire fake wire transfer from a Russia bank to the Trump campaign that they, basically the Democrats hired some IT people to. go, oh, well, we've detected these strange signals. It was nothing. I mean, it was like routine.

What's that? The Prague thing. It was McClatchy. Was it? Yeah, I can't. It was, it was alpha bank? It was the alpha bank hoax. I mean, it was just, there was like literally, I mean, I can't, there was literally

nothing. I mean, to the point where they would be like, well, but Trump at one point wanted to build a hotel in Moscow. It's like, well, but Trump's wants to build a hotel everywhere. Like, what are we doing here? You know, like there's literally no. evidence, and as opposed to on the other side where it's just abundant. Well, so, but this is actually really interesting that they were looking at Fang Fang

as a possible double agent because it's, again, we're sounding like tinfoil hat people, but it then sounds like perhaps they would have been using Swalwell to turn Fang Fang. Okay, well, you're like, you're playing five-dimensional chess and I'm catching up with you. As usual, I'm just like, that could be. That could be. I mean, the reason it's not tinfoil hat is because it's FBI. documents. I mean, all these cases, that's what's so exciting. It's like we have documents now.

We've been demanding them for frankly now two years, you know, really, or a year and a half. And I think a lot of us are getting impatient after 2025. And now that I think they're finally coming in. And, you know, I think Cash Patel and Tulsa Gabbard have sort of said these things got hidden and covered up. And this one, you know, the Round River one is like an informal group where people were pretty careful, actually, to not. So, I mean, there's a whole other world that was stuff never written down. you know, that we may never know about. But we now have all the transcribed interviews with these characters because they were interviewed. We have these documents.

I think it's a pretty clear picture of the most extraordinary weaponization of a U.S. intelligence agency since Hoover. Since Hoover is stuff in this, since his mischief in the 60s, mostly targeting the left, this weaponization that we saw in this, in the Trump era, I think, is on par with that. You know, it is possible. Now that I'm thinking about it, because Walwell was so, he made his career basically on Rushagate, his early career, he staked it on Rushagate. So it would make sense that he had a good relationship with the FBI because as he was coming into Congress, he gets briefed and then is getting questions fed to him, documents possibly, or leaks fed to him from the intelligence agencies just because they had, that all seems, you know, here you have a man in Congress who's being protected by the, the FBI. They don't leak any of this to the media. And he was sleeping with a basically confirmed Chinese spy and the FBI knew about it. So I don't know. That's very weird. I think it's a really interesting thing to look more at and whether we could get, whether there's some sort of an investigation that could be done to get the interviews with Swalwell. But no, I mean, I think that's,

I think that's absolutely right. I mean, remember, he was famous for leaking all sorts of confidential information to reporters so much so that there's a viral video that went around. I think, last couple days of Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House Speaker, getting angry at a journalist by describing how, I mean, I can't remember where there's like a vote, don't get me wrong, but I think there was like a vote on the Intelligence Committee to like not include him. And I think McCarthy was saying we can't have him on the intelligence community because he leaks too much classified information. It was like a well-known, it was like as well-known as his, you know, sexual predatory activity

was the fact that he leaked information from the intelligence community. You're at next level, though, because I hadn't thought about the ways in which actually Swalwell might have been upon, you know, for these politicized elements in the IC. It's certainly not out of the realm of the possible. You know where we're not talking about the politicized IC quite enough is actually on the Fauci story, which I want to discuss right now, because David Morins, a name familiar to people who are deep in kind of COVID-Gate or COVID-Lore pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from a scheme I'm reading from CBS News right now to hide federal records during the COVID-19 pandemic. under a deal reached with federal prosecutors in Maryland, David Morins, who was 78, also former senior advisor at the NIAID, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. He faces up to five years in prison. He was a senior advisor at NIAID's Office of the Director, who we know, 2006 to 2020. He was indicted in April,

charged with five counts for what prosecutor said at the time was his role in a scheme to defraud of the U.S. by shielding federal records relating to the COVID-19 pandemic from the public. Well, we can go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is an email to Peter Dasak and others, May 13th, 2021 from Morins, who said, I suggested Arthur to try to interview Tony directly and connected him to our, quote, secret back channel. He emailed Tony a few hours ago. I mean, it's just, it's so perfect.

But on top of that, there are actually more, there are more emails where that comes from of Morins himself talking about avoiding FOIA, hating the, like, how he knows the FOIA officer who also hates FOIA and is giving him tips. He figures out how to delete emails after the FOIA request comes in, but before they go diving for the documents. I think Fauci is connected in a lot of these emails. He's referred to in a lot of these emails. He could also be in trouble. I mean, he has that pardon. This is Fauci. This is a little bit of Fauci saying under oath that he never defeated, never deleted official records versus an email of him saying, quote, please delete this email, play the thought. Okay. Dr. Fauci, did you ever delete an official record? No. Dr. Fauci, did you ever

conduct official business via email? To the best of my recollection and knowledge, I have never conducted official business via my private email. To the best of his knowledge, well, this is July 2020, Libs of TikTok pointed out the email where he says, if so, and he says, please delete this email after you read it. That's an official government document being deleted. Michael, now Fox is reporting that the Fauci scandal is growing because the House Oversight Committee is now questioning why his diary and cell phone weren't turned over to Congress before this year. And it's, according to Fox, placing the blame on former President Joe Biden's top health official in the letter set Monday, Chairman James Comer highlighted a November 2023 request by House Republicans for

former Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Bacera. Sarah, who's running for governor in your state, California, of course, Michael, to produce any records from Fauci containing the words COVID-19 gain of function and Wuhan, meaning those records should have been included in this. We are now, like we were talking about actually on the W-Path and trans issue, in the middle of at least a sub-reckoning. It's not happening in the corporate press really, but beneath the surface, there is a reckoning happening with the cover-up itself. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what's, I always joke, it's like, in spy world, there's sort of the Mission Impossible spies, and then there's burn after reading, the Great Cohen Brothers movie.

Yeah, it's so good. It's one of my favorite DC movies. It captures DC. It does. It's perfect. It's a perfect film about the arrogance and the clumsiness and the stupidity and the ego of people and that sort of State Department, blob, I see World. I mean, David Morris remember, I thought you're going to put up his most famous email, which was one that was saying, if I send this from my Gmail, it can't be FOIAed. It was like, like, how could that possibly be true? Like, the whole purpose of FOIA was to have some sense of government business. And you just go and do it on your Gmail.

I mean, such a boomer kind of way of viewing the world and so clumsy. I have to say, I reacted probably incorrectly when I saw the news that they had achieved this against Morins because I was like, oh, he's going to be a fall guy. But then it did turn out that, no, actually, there could be more coming. So we shouldn't. And I think one of my lessons, because I get frustrated, like everybody and kind of go, where's the documents? Where's the investigations and prosecutions? These things take time. That's kind of what the administration have been saying for a while. You know, apparently RFK deserves a lot of credit for actually scrounging through the servers to find the Fauci Diary, which is an amazing historical document.

I mean, it's so interesting you kind of look back at like how the historians are going to write about this stuff in 20 years. And these things are going to be, or the museums and these like emails and these like quotes and stuff are just going to be kind of remembered forever as kind of the key moments. But yeah, I mean, I think we're all not, we don't feel like we've had justice yet for all of the bad things that were done during COVID. And there's just still half the country that doesn't understand. I explained to some progressive friends of mine a couple years ago. I was like, no, they were like, well, what are you saying about Fauci? I'm like, what we're saying, I think what we're saying is that the guy that created the COVID pandemic was then put in charge of responding to it. And the first thing he does is he covers up how he caused the pandemic.

Like, that's an amazing, like, that's better than anything coming out of Hollywood right now, you know, in terms of just how kind of on the nose it is. You know, like, it'd be kind of too obvious or too, might be seen as too much of a cartoon character. But that's basically what we're looking at when you look at the, you look at the, the COVID scandal when you pull back and look at what they did. And so I think there's a lot more that's out there and is going to come out about the ways in which they covered it up. Because, you know, as the old saying goes, the cover up is often worse than the crime. I'm not sure that's the case if you're talking about COVID itself, but certainly there was a lot of covering up to do. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if just tying all this together, it gets back to, actually

there's a great piece out in the free press right now from, I believe, a Norwegian writer talking about how a lot of this starts, Fauci's connection to the defense world starts after anthrax, after 9-11, after anthrax, there's this major scare that we need to be developing research in the bio-defense sphere much more aggressively. So Fauci gets brought in. He was at one point, I think, supposed to go to Iraq and be inspecting potential bio-weapons. And it just feels like there was such a hubris after Iraq in the defense intelligence space that built up really robustly, really quickly. And they didn't anticipate the populist moment and the reckoning that could induce legally. Maybe the media is still not covering it.

But I don't think they realized that there would be this democratization of media, that there would be such a populist uprising that politicians face pressure to have this reckoning, to push the CIA, to push even NIH for these types of records. It seemed like they thought they were home free to write dumb emails like this. And it would just never really matter. Yeah, I think it's a really great point. I mean, and you sort of see it in those diaries where Fauci's always talking about how much the media loves him and how the glitterati love him.

And he wasn't really, he didn't have any relationship to the public. And that's where you end up then with Fauci, of course, famously going to this black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and being confronted by a black resident who's saying, you're just fearmongery, you're trying to scare us into this vaccine. Fauci repeats that the vaccine, if you take the vaccine, you won't get infected, which of course is a lie. The other thing I think is so interesting, Emily, is that out of the diaries, out of the pre-diaries, because there's the COVID diaries, and then they also released these pre-diaries. I thought the most interesting thing was it changed my view of the story. I'm not sure, I think we did a piece on it, but there's been so much. But basically, I think there was always this question of like, is there somebody behind Fauci?

Is there somebody at CIA or Defense Department who's pushing him to do? all these experiments. We don't see that. Like, if any way, it's like the opposite. So there's this famous moment when the bios, say, there's a biosafety review board that I think has 20 members on it. And it's all these really senior scientists that are raising, that are there to monitor and be an advisory board to the federal government around these experiments. And they come out just absolutely alarmed by these experiments that are done with ferrets that show the transmissibility of a virus to the ferrets. And the National Security Council gets involved. The White House is involved.

They're really looking at regulating it. Fauci takes control over the process. See, the way I had described it in the past was that Fauci did a run around, that Obama did a ban and Fauci did a runaround on it in terms of gain a function of increasing the infectiousness of disease. What actually happened is that they were moving to take control away from Fauci. Fauci, the most brilliant, consummate bureaucrat, like maybe the greatest, one of the greatest bureaucrats that's ever existed in Washington,

its control of the process, basically writes the prohibitions in that process, redefines gain of function to say that, no, no, it's not about making just the virus more infectious. It has to actually be infectious with mammals, with humans, and it has to cause harm. So they basically then just completely redefine what it means to basically allow them to continue to the experiments. And then that's the basis upon which he was then able to go in front of Senator Paul and continue to say, no, no, we didn't fund gain a function. We didn't fund gain a function.

I mean, for people that haven't followed this for a while, I think the most important thing to know is that these guys, Dazok and these guys had a proposal into the Defense Department to insert the key ingredient, the fur and cleavage site, into these coronaviruses. They claim, oh, the grant was never funded, but anybody who's ever been in the grantmaking foundation NGO world knows that nine times out of ten, you've already done the work you've described that you're going to do to a foundation. funder. So for me, that's one of the biggest smoking guns here is that there's just such a great paper trail now showing that they were funding this, that we through University of North Carolina, then trained the Chinese on how to do it. We then funded EcoHealth Alliance to fund the Chinese, and then they had the final step to be funded. And so you have to believe, oh, no, it's somehow that didn't happen, even though they described it in their grant proposal. I think it's all coming together. I'm like 95% lab leak at this point. I was.

probably 75% a year ago. And now I just think it's pretty clear that that's what happened. Michael, I'm so grateful to you for taking the time to break all of this down. I'm grateful to you for what you're doing over at public.com. News. I hope everybody goes subscribes to that. Thanks. It was great to have you here, Michael, and catch up a bit on all of this great reporting you've been doing. It's so great to be with you, Emily. Thanks for having me on. Everyone's constantly talking about weight loss injections because the results, let's face it, are so dramatic. We talk about it here on the show. Those were, work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight,

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Emily at take lean.com. Well, there is an illegal immigrant crime spree, a vicious crime spree happening on the nation's capitol's doorstep. And that would be Fairfax County, one of the wealthiest counties in the entire country. And the legacy media is really not touching it. If you combine all of these stories from recent months together, the picture is absolutely disgusting, disgusting. And yes, there's some outrage in Fairfax County as a very blue county, but you would think people would be up in arms protesting outside of the prosecutor's office, demanding change from Abigail Spanberger. And it's basically as though the people of Fairfax County, with a few notable exceptions, are numb to what's happened. So let's start with the most recent story in this case.

19-year-old illegal immigrant arrested after deadly Great Falls stabbing. This just broke this morning. We found out in this case of a woman who was brutally stabbed to death, she was doused in gasoline. It was an illegal immigrant who is now being charged with this murder. So reading here from local media, this is going to be ABC 7 in the DC area, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant has been arrested after a woman was found stabbed to. death and doused in gasoline near her car in Great Falls earlier this week. If you've ever been to the D.C. area, Great Falls is idyllic. It is right outside of D.C. It is, like I said, very, very wealthy, very tony neighborhood. It's actually also absolutely beautiful. Fairfax County police detects, said detectives, according to ABC 7, arrested Alexis Antonio Sadiahs Campos 19 in connection with the homicide of 42-year-old Carmen Lizette Pooch. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed to 7 News that Sadiah's Campos is from El Salvador. So after the story broke, nobody knew, like the person was on the lamb. We didn't know what had happened. Now, Cidia's Campos was arrested

by Border Patrol agents in April 24 after illegally crossing into the U.S. near El Paso, Texas, under the Biden administration. He was later released back into the country, according to DHS. Now, let's get the big picture together. This is the most recent case, and it is absurd. It is disgusting. This woman was doused in gasoline. and she was stabbed, doused in gasoline, and left. Abigail Spanberger, quote, moderate Democrat governor of Virginia, one of the first things that she did

was order the termination of ISIS agreements with state law enforcement. After being inaugurated, this is one of the first things she did, and that was in an attempt, the local media reported to establish principles for agencies and divisions. This was at the height of the internet, ICE movement, of course, because of what happened in Minneapolis with Renee Good and Alex

Pretti. The results since February of her decision to do that, it sends a signal, right? Like, it's not just about whether state and local law enforcement is cooperating with ICE, but it sends a signal. And the Fairfax County prosecutor is a man named Steve Descano. My former editor, Tim Arnie has covered Descano closely. Tim is not prone to hyperbole. Tim writes, Descano is an office because of left-wing billionaire George Soros. Discano was first elected as Fairfax County's Commonwealth's attorney in 2019 when he knocked off the incumbent. Discano raised about a million dollars between the primary and the general election, which is Tim points out. A shocking amount for down-ballot county race, about two-thirds of his cash came from two Soros-funded

organizations, the Justice and Public Safety Pack, and the new Virginia Majority Pack. Tim writes, Descano also tried to single-handedly turn Fairfax County into something of a sanctuary county, wherever possible, his website declared until recent minor edits, Tim caught. Steve will make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences. This is a naked admission of discrimination, writes Tim. Discano's stated policy is to prosecute a U.S. citizen more harshly for a given crime than he would prosecute in a legal immigration. Sure enough, in 2025, Descano's office declined to prosecute Wilmer Osmani Ramos Girone for allegedly strangling the mother of his child. Instead, he was thrown with a misdemeanor charge for brandishing a machete.

Just the day before, just yesterday, we are hearing this right now, just yesterday. Local media reported, Fairfax County Commonwealth's attorney Steve Duscano's office gave the green light to an alleged killer to go to Washington, D.C. and get a passport at his home country's embassy. You'll never guess what happened next. Local media reports next. Abdeloy Tashpal Zoda boarded a flight at Washington Dallas International Airport to his home country of Tajikistan. Right away, straight from Descano's office. They have absolutely no good explanation for doing this except for exactly. exactly what they just, I'm going to put it up on the screen, exactly what you would imagine. He was charged with murdering a man in Fairfax County, this Toshplodzota fellow, in Fairfax

County in 2019. When police arrived at the scene, the officer said he had blood all over his body and he admitted to stabbing a man to death. In 2022, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity for second degree murder. He was committed to the custody of the state's Department of Behavioral Health and development. Now, a 2025 document from last September said he was a candidate for conditional release. According to court documents, ICE issued an immigration detainer for his arrest. And what happened? They allowed him to go get a passport. And Descano's office confirmed to ABC 7 that the prosecutors did not oppose him taking this escorted visit to get his passport. They say they oppose. They oppose his release and they said he should have remained in state custody, what did they think was going to

happen when they allowed him for literally no reason, no reason, to go get a passport. We've covered two cases so far, but let me put this Fox News article up on the screen because it aggregated a lot of what's happened in Northern Virginia, particularly just in Fairfax County, since Spanberger returned to office, and since the anti-ice fever, which, by the way, here on this show, we did, I think, pretty clear coverage of what went wrong in the Preti and good cases. And I really don't think there's a defense for what happened to Preti. Legal defense. Well, let's just say I don't think there's a moral defense

for what happened to Prattie in the way the government misled us about what happened to Prattie. Difficult situation for ICE, absolutely no question about it. No question about it in both of those cases. You go watch back the coverage. But this is all to say. This fever is sweeping Democrats, and they don't have an answer for what they're going to do differently because the Biden administration, according to New York Times estimates, which is low, let eight million non-citizens into the country in a period of about three years. And again, that's a low estimate. But in the period of about

three years, eight million non-citizens let into this country. We're going to see the consequences of that in communities from coast to coast for years to come. And they will be worse in places. They will be worse in places where prosecutors and state officials like the governor are not leading and being tough on this kind of crime, which has been disincentivized on the left, because people don't want to look like they're cooperating with ICE at all, at all. They don't want to look like they're giving in to the Trump administration's allegedly xenophobic, bigoted efforts to round people up, innocent people up and kick them out of the country. They don't want to look like that at all. So they're afraid to make tough policy decisions

that crack down on some of this. They're afraid, for example, Abigail Spanberger should be calling for all summer should have been calling on Steve Descano to get the hell out of that office. If she wanted to lead on this issue and really prove that she's a moderate centristial, Democrat who can be palatable in a swing state, state with a lot of rural areas like Virginia, but that she could take that act on the road to the entire country. She would be calling for Steve Descano to resign and would be calling for Fairfax County to be making wildly different decisions, would be aggressively leading the push to figure out what's happened in all these cases.

I'm going to read a lot from this Fox News article because it's stunning what's happened in Virginia. Look at this. DHS detailed 17 alleged instances of serious crimes by illegal immigrants that took place in Virginia in 2026 alone. Nine out of those 17 cases took place in Fairfax County. It's county of about a million people, a little over a million people according to the last census. Nine of those 17 cases took place in Fairfax County. This is from July, the seventh month of the year. And these are serious crimes. So let's go through some of this list. In June, ICE also lodged detainers with Fairfax County for a Nicaraguan illegal immigrant Moises Domingo Rico Rosales, who was arrested for abduction of a person with an intent to defile and indecent exposure,

also for Christiane Wilfredo Alvarenga Aguilar, an illegal alien charged with abduction, assault, carjacking, and robbery. In May, DHS said that it arrested Wavin Victor Hugo Garcia after he was released by Fairfax County despite facing charges of raping a child under the age of 13, was released by Fairfax County, despite facing charges of raping a child under the age of 13. The month before, ICE arrested Guatemalan illegal immigrant Ronnie Mendez Escobar after he was released while charged, after he was released, while charged with possession of child pornography

with intent to distribute. That same month, ICE lodged detainers for Salvador an illegal alien, Israel, Christopher Flores Ortiz, who was convicted of nine counts of assault and battery for groping underage girls at a Fairfax County High School. This keeps going. Guatemalan illegal alien Misal Lopez Gomez, who was charged with murder and felony child abuse

after allegedly bludgeoning his three-month-old daughter to death. Two illegal alien murders, murderers, Maldine Anibal Guzman Vides, and Luis Alonzo, Sort Portillo, who were convicted of stabbing a man to death and given plea deals of five years in prison each. In March, ICE also lodged a detainer for Anabal Armando Chavaria Muay, an illegal alien from Guatemala, who was charged with second-degree murder after allegedly fatally stabbing a man inside his home in Bailey's crossroads. Have you heard of the case of Abdul Jalou? I think we covered it here.

Abdul Jaloh. This is another real gem from Descano. I'm actually going to pull an article on this one up on the screen, just so that everybody has. the reference point and can see the local media coverage about exactly what has happened because you thought the Tajikistan case was bad. I mean, they're all bad. They're all bad. But some of these are just absolutely mind-numbing. Mind-numbing. Nick Minok, who's been an incredible reporter on this beat, March 4th, I don't know how it keeps up with all of it, every day. emails show Fairfax police warned a prosecutor about suspect in High Blah Valley killing. Fairfax County police warned the county's Commonwealth Attorney about the undocumented immigrant

accused of killing a woman at High Blah Valley bus stop. Email correspondent shows Mynock obtained these emails in a FOIA request. They show the Fairfax County Police Department warning Fairfax County Commonwealth's attorney who Steve Descanal's office about Abduljo Lowe, a Sierra Leone National who DHS said is in the country illegally. He is now charged with murdering Stephanie Minter and a fairfax. Fairfax County bus stop. Stephanie Minter was the victim of Jalow who had 40 past charges in Fairfax County, ranging from rape to assault. Discano's office dropped those charges in almost every case they say because witnesses wouldn't come forward. The explanation for that is they were likely members of the homeless community, addicts, difficult people to get to come forward as witnesses. But these are 40. past charges. 40 past charges, including, by the way, one where he was an offender in a, quote, malicious wounding, where he stabbed a man in May 2025, which he received a bond on July 31,

2025. Three weeks later, this incident occurred where he assaulted an older male and stomped his head into the ground. I'm scrolling through his rap sheet on ABC 7's website right now. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. Starts in 2014. He's just been terrorizing Northern Virginia for over a decade. Over a decade. You can see the emails yourself on the website. Outrageous, and the people of Northern Virginia are just putting up with it. Democrats in Virginia are just putting up with it.

In case you want details of what happened to 41-year-old Stephanie Minter, she was stabbed at a bus stop shelter. Again, off the Richmond Highway in Fairfax County, Virginia. Multiple stab wounds in the upper body. She was pronounced dead at the scene. That probably will not surprise you, unfortunately. Unbelievable. There is nothing just about this. There is nothing fair about this to the people of Northern Virginia. Who should be, again, out in the streets demanding change to keep the women of the county safe, to keep the children of the county safe, genuinely, Democrats should be asked what policies differentiate themselves from Descano.

Descano should be a national villain. His face and his misdeeds should be plastered across cable news channels. They should be everywhere because there's obviously a direct link between his stupid policies and more people dying, more people suffering. But the media barely touches these stories. Thank God the local media is touching these stories. stories. But this is outrageous. This is a full-blown crime spree. We're talking about nine of these in Fairfax County alone. You see how serious all these cases are because we just went through the

full list. They're not petty crimes. These are serious crimes. And the allegations in all of these cases are serious too. I've reviewed them. They're not iffy. A lot of these cases you've just heard, they're more than serious or they're more than solid. It's disgusting. Nobody should be putting up with us. And I pray to God, Fairfax County is not the tip of the iceberg and that this level of terror is not visited upon other counties around the world because prosecutors are cowards and don't want to look like they're on the wrong side of a political battle when people's lives are on the line. But the other element of that is just, you know, for people on the left to seriously think about what a just policy looks like, right? When the defund the police heat was really

high, when that was intensifying. They heard from a lot of people in minority neighborhoods, poor black neighborhoods that didn't want the police to be defunded, that didn't want these significant defanging efforts to happen. They actually wanted more police. What a more funding. So I would say, why don't we just skip that discovery part to the extent we still can and talk to people on the ground who are at bus shelters getting stabbed. to death by people who shouldn't be here in the first place and should certainly not be out of prison. Disgusting. Sorry to end the note of the show on such an awful note today, but appreciate everybody tuning in. Again, subscribe. It helps us keep doing the independent journalism we do here on

after party. Appreciate it. Tune in for happy hour on the podcast feed on Friday. Send me your emails at Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. We'll be back with more soon.