Judging Freedom - Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) : COVID, Ukraine, and Government Spying.

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) : COVID, Ukraine, and Government Spying.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Thanks for watching! Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, April 18th, 2024. My guest is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Full disclosure, Senator Paul and I have been friends for many years. Senator Paul, in addition to being a member of the United States Senate, is a physician, an ophthalmologist. He's an eye surgeon. He is a champion of civil liberties and a champion of public health.

And he has risked his political career to champion both of those causes. My dear friend, welcome very much to the show. I have a lot to talk to you about, but I want to start with your new book, Deception, the Great COVID Cover-Up. Where did COVID originate, Senator Paul, and how did it get here? You know, I think the preponderance of evidence, I would say 95% chance is that it came from a Wuhan lab. The only thing that would convince me otherwise is if they found an animal that was a reservoir. And when the first SARS epidemic happened in 2002, 2003, they did find, they found an animal within a few months that was harboring it. They found that the animal handlers all had an increased incidence of infection and antibodies

were present in their blood. They never found this in this case. And so there's a lot of scientific evidence pointing towards the lab. Also, if you look at the genetic sequence of the virus, it's the first of its kind. It is novel in the sense that it has a special way to enter the cell, enter the human cell,

called a furin cleavage site, and no other coronavirus has ever had this. And this is very, very suspicious for genetic manipulation. The origins of my interest and of looking into the viral origins of the book were basically discovering that all of the people who were publicly the experts on this that were telling us there was no chance it came from the lab, were all saying in private exactly the opposite. I don't think we've ever had a cover up so more completely revealed in the sense that through Freedom of Information Act, we discovered that all these scientists were saying exactly the opposite at exactly the same time. Publicly, they're saying it had to have come from animals. There's no way it came from lab.

And then privately, they're saying, damn, this thing looks like it got manipulated. It looks like it came from the lab. Never seen anything like this before. How did it get from the Wuhan lab into the United States? So the theory of what's going on, and there's quite a bit of evidence, is that the Chinese wanted to create a vaccine. So sometimes to create a vaccine, you create a, well, it doesn't typically work this way, but they think they could create a virus. And because coronavirus doesn't infect humans very well, they had to make it more infectious to humans. And then they were going to try to have the antidote from creating a virus that's more deadly for humans than they would create an antidote. And we think that it leaked at this point in time. Sometime in 2019, there's evidence that three researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick in November

of 2019. There's evidence in September of 2019 that Dr. Shi was taking down the virus, the genetic sequences from the internet. There's also evidence that the lab in October 2019 underwent a week's time where there was no one in the lab. As you know, they can snoop on you everywhere with your cell phone and somebody, and this is actually not even a spy agency, some public non-classified agency looked at the lab and looked at all the cell phones and said, hey, nobody has a cell phone on in the lab. Every week, there's hundreds of cell phones in the lab. Then also there's a week with no cell phones. People think that that's when they began to

discover they had a problem and when they began fumigating the lab. But there's a lot of evidence pointing towards that this came from the lab. And there really isn't any evidence other than historically viruses do come from animals. But when they come from animals, typically they're not very infectious. So in 2003, the first SARS epidemic only infected 8,000 people worldwide. This one infected millions. So what we think is, is that lab workers got sick initially in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that the lab is on a subway link to the international airport. And Dr. Stephen Quay is really an expert in looking at the early epidemiology of this. And he has maps that show it going right down the subway line.

And it's like four or five stops till you get to the airport. And from the airport, it went everywhere. And when you discover people sick in the fall of 2019, which the Chinese deny, but when you discover them sick, apparently there are people already in Italy sick in 2019. There are people in far-flung places of the globe. So it spread very quickly, was very contagious. Some say it may have even been spreading as early as October. There was a military games where military people came from all over the world to Wuhan. And I think it was a sporting activity, but for the military, then they all went back home. And some say that that was the beginning of the super spreader event that sent this thing worldwide. What did the United States government do wrong in confronting the epidemic?

First thing they did wrong was funding it. You know, we should have never funded this. And this was Anthony Fauci's chief error, and it had been going on for a decade. And you'll recall from 2012, Anthony Fauci says that, yes, a pandemic could occur with this type of gain-of-function research, but the knowledge would be worth the risk. And I really think that that judgment error by somebody in charge of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars was unforgivable. And he's never owned up to it, never admitted he made a mistake. And to this day, we still have the same kind of research going on. But how did it spread or how, you know, why did this happen? I think they, some of them would claim they have

noble purposes. They were trying to create a vaccine and this thing accidentally got out of the lab, but most of them won't even admit it got out of the lab. They still want to say, oh, nothing to see here that it came from the animal kingdom. Is it true that Fauci and company just made up out of thin air, the restriction of everybody's got to wear a mask and everybody's got to stay six feet apart. You remember those days, how horrible they were for human freedom. Was there a scientific basis to those regulations that were imposed upon us by Executive Dick Dott? The short answer is no. As you know, government studies everything. So they've had pandemic studies going on for a decade

or more. We probably spend billions of dollars. They do simulations and they in all of their efforts to figure out what they would do before a pandemic occurred in 2020. They all discounted masks because the studies uniformly showed that masks didn't work. We've we've tried masks and studies for influenza, which is also a virus. And it's of a similar size, although I think COVID's smaller than influenza. But with influenza, they found that when you wear cloth masks versus no masks, that you actually had more infections with cloth masks than no masks. And so for most of this epidemic, you had Anthony Fauci parading around in cloth masks. Sometimes you had him

parading around in two or three masks. There's no scientific evidence that any of this work. And in fact, if you do large studies comparing states that had mandates to states that didn't have mandates, it's identical. In California, they'd arrest you from almost anything. Florida was much more open and free. The curves look identical. The death curve's the same. The infectious curve's the same. And most of the studies that showed a benefit from masks were small observational studies. And most of the studies that showed a benefit from masks were small observational studies. And really, the experts have poked holes in these. And really, they're so badly and poorly designed and the conclusions so overwrought that it makes people lose trust in government because they believe that these studies appear to have been manipulated

simply to get the result they wanted. But no, up until 2020, everybody acknowledged masks don't work. So if you want to catch Fauci actually telling the truth, you have to look at what he says in private. Right. So early on in 2020, a member of the cabinet says, I'm going on a trip on a plane. Should I wear a mask? And he says, no, they don't work. Wow. Did Dr. Fauci commit perjury in your presence before a committee on which you sat? Without question. Over and over again, in committee said that he didn't fund gain of function research in China. And that's a lie. We now have a Slack email from FOIA in which he describes the research that he was funding in

China as gain of function. And he also says, that's why we're worried that this came from the lab. That's what he's saying in private. Within a day or two, he's also then saying in public, there's no way it could have come from the lab. So it's just amazing the level of dishonesty of all of these people. Many of the people who ended up switching their mind from it came from the lab to saying in public it couldn't have also had big NIH grants that were then approved by Dr. Fauci in that same period. Christian Anderson has a $9 million grant approved in March or April of 2020 after he flips. You know, he'd been saying privately he thought it came from the lab and thought it was manipulated.

And then all of a sudden Fauci has him write a major journal article. And then a month later, he gets a $9 million grant. It just doesn't pass the smell test. For the non-scientists among us, what is gain of function research? What does that mean, Senator Paul? Basically, it means that you manipulate viruses. You take a part of one virus and a part of another virus and you mix them together. It's not really the virus, but it's their genetic sequence. And then you create a new virus that doesn't exist in nature. And so this is something that we consider to be incredibly dangerous. Now, Fauci would say, well, it's not gain of function unless we already know that these are pathogens in advance and unless we

already have them on a list. And he also would say they have to already be human pathogens. Well, that's kind of ridiculous to say that, well, it already has to be known to be a gain of function. There's a real danger to taking part of one virus from a bat cave and mixing it with another part, knowing that many of these viruses can infect humans, and that maybe one tweak will make them worse. But when you look at COVID-19, it's worse than that. They weren't just randomly putting viruses together. They specifically took an entryway, a cleavage site, and they put it into COVID-19, the furin cleavage site, that they historically already knew made it more infectious than humans. So that without question is gain of function. The reason this is important is they're still doing this.

And I'll give you an example. Ebola is spread by bodily fluids, kind of like AIDS. So you can figure out ways to try to stop the spread of Ebola. It would be, I think, completely insane to see if we could take Ebola and say, why don't we see if we can mutate it to make it spread through the air? I mean, that would be no sane person would want to do that, you would think. And yet those are the kind of research projects that are still going on and there's not sufficient oversight over any of this.

Are any of the COVID vaccines safe, dangerous? Do they protect you from getting COVID? None of them stopped transmission and they weren't honest about this from the very beginning. And so there really, there was always this guilt sort of trip. You need to take it to protect other people.

What turns out that if you've been infected, you don't, you know, there's no reason to take it because your natural immunity from having been infected is better than the vaccine. There is still some debate and their evidence still shows that it didn't stop transmission, but it lessened hospitalization and death for people in the target range risk. This would be people of a certain age, people of a certain body weight and people with a certain health risk. But the opposite is also true. If you are a younger, healthy person, there's no measurable health benefit to it.

And in fact, there's actually a risk profile that shows that for a young, healthy person, the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease. Now, it's good to put this in perspective, though. It's not that everybody got the vaccines like dying like flies. There is some, you know, people spreading on the internet that, you know, it's worse than, you know, any other disease. It's still fairly rare. So for a young person, the chance of getting an inflammation of the heart is about four out of 10,000. That's not a huge number, but if you're already healthy and you're not going to die from the disease, you might want to know that that's a risk and not do it. Right. But the other thing is, is these doctors are, I think, committing malpractice

by trying to pressure a child or a young person, young, healthy person to take COVID vaccine. And they never asked the first question, have you already had COVID? So if you've already had COVID, there's absolutely no excuse for giving it really probably almost to anybody, but particularly young, healthy people. But they really aren't obeying any of the science on this. And so there are dangers for young people. And then for people after a certain age, my conclusion still would be that at least in 2020, the dangers of the disease were greater than the dangers of the vaccine. Now, if you tell me, well, I got vaccinated twice in 2020, I'm 75 years old, but I've already had COVID twice, so I've had two vaccines and COVID twice.

Do I need it again? I think the answer to all likelihood is no, but the CDC is not honest about this. They won't tell you what it means. They don't include natural immunity at all in the discussion. But I think your chance of going to the hospital or dying from the current variant, which is mutated to be less dangerous, and your immunity has gone

up over time, both through vaccines and through infection, I think the chance is virtually zero if you've had a couple of vaccines and been infected a couple of times, or just simply if you've been infected a couple of times. But we aren't getting honest statistics from the government, which is one of the main problems. Transitioning, Senator Paul, what is your understanding of what the deep state is in American government? The deep state is the bureaucracy, bureaucracy that doesn't change over with elections, and it grows in power over time. Anthony Fauci was part of the deep state. So was J. Edgar Hoover. They would be extremes of the deep state because they last for generations. Basically, Fauci was there for two generations. So was J. Edgar Hoover.

I actually wrote an op-ed comparing the two and comparing their abuses of power to their longevity. And just for grins, I tried to submit it to the Washington Post to see what would happen. No luck. No luck. But we did get it published. I can't remember where we published it. But, you know, the deep state are people that are immune to the electoral or democratic process. And so it's funny that the left goes crazy when you call things deep state and they all talk about democracy and representative government. But the deep state thwarts representative government in the sense that, for example, with the COVID research and with funding gain of function research, they've hidden all of it from me and continue to hide it from me. I can't find out where we're doing it, how much money goes to it. I can't get the discussion of what's dangerous and what's not. So when Anthony Fauci says, oh,

nothing to see here, this is not gain of function. Well, I'd like to see the deliberations. If scientists are arguing this is not dangerous, and some are arguing it is, wouldn't we want to see the deliberations? Because I think with regard to COVID-19, they made a mistake. Even though it was an animal virus, it was dangerous. They mixed them together and they created something incredibly infectious. And so I just think that when you look at this, the deep state is this existing bureaucracy that goes on and on and on, and even the elected officials can't seem to get at. Soon the United States Senate will be examining what the House of Representatives recently passed, which actually expands Section 702 of the FISA Act.

Section 702 allows the intelligence community to spy without warrants on foreign communications and on the Americans with whom they communicate. Some of our colleagues in the House proposed very reasonable legislation to require the FBI and NSA, et cetera, to get warrants before spying on what Americans say. The vote in the House was 212 on this amendment, was 212 to 212. Speaker Johnson left the Speaker's chair to break the tie to vote against it. Shortly before this happened, you gave a great speech on the floor of the Senate. It was flattering because you mentioned twice that you had read what I had written. I'm going to play

a clip from that speech and then ask you where you think this is going to go next. R3, Chris. As Judge Andrew Napolitano points out, the Constitution requires probable cause of a crime to be demonstrated to a judge before a judge grants a warrant. That was the law of the land until FISA. But now FISA has set up a special court that meets in secret, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and it authorizes judges on that court to issue search warrants based on a lower standard of probable cause. The Fourth Amendment says you have to prove to a judge probable cause of a crime. This says you only have to prove probable cause of an association with a foreign entity. This is contrary to the Constitution. This is not the Fourth Amendment.

The Constitution requires that warrants be issued on probable cause that a crime has been committed. But as Judge Napolitano makes clear, FISA established probable cause of foreign agency. So he lowered the standard, and it's not probable cause of a crime, but it's probable cause of association with a foreign agency. But even that standard morphed down not probable cause of a crime, but it's probable cause of association with a foreign agency. But even that standard morphed down into probable cause of speaking to a foreign person, which then again morphed even further down to probable cause of speaking to any person who has ever spoken to a foreign person. All of that happened in secret and without congressional approval.

Do you think the Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Democrats as well who voted against Andy Biggs' amendment and Chip Roy's amendment to require a search warrant even understand what you're saying? Do they care or are they terrified and intimidated by the deep state, by the spies who share secrets with them? It's usually scaremongering that gets them in the end. See, Johnson's inclinations at first were to be more on our side. He historically actually had doubts about FISA. He had historically thought a warrant was a reasonable thing until they take him into a secret room and they say the end of the world is coming and here's the secret data that we only give to the overlords

and you're a special overlord now. We're going to show you the keys to the kingdom, what would happen if we don't do anything. And it's scaremongering. And they're very effective at it because, see, they control all of the data. So if I take you into a secret room and I say, well, this attack was thwarted and this attack was thwarted and this attack was thwarted and it wouldn't have been without 702. We have no way of investigating that because they have all of the data.

They won't allow you to have staff in the room. They control the flow of data to you and their purpose is to defend and protect their power. And so this is what's happened. But if you were to ask the American people, should an American have their information revealed without going to a public court of law, to an Article III judge, to having a lawyer on your side, most Americans would say no. This used to be just sort of a libertarian issue, and we'd get killed on every vote. So it was actually a big success to get to a tie vote. We lost, disappointingly. But 10 years ago, we would have gotten 50 or 60 votes in the House. So there is more outrage. And some of this came from Donald Trump because he was

a popular main candidate for a main party, and people saw that FISA was used against him. Right. And he's been somewhat erratic on it. He has opposed it and railed against it, and then he approved it. I can still remember the day when FISA was approved the last time with Trump in office, because I had been on television that morning condemning it. He calls me up and says, I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you, and I'm going to do it. I'm going to stop it. And an hour later, Paul Ryan and a bunch of generals are in his office telling him the world will end. And then he reversed course and he, you know, reauthorized FISA.

But there's going to be a fight in the Senate. I do predict that we'll lose. This is something that Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer love this, the idea of spying on Americans. They go along with, oh, the world will end. And, you know, my response to them is, and the media comes up to me breathless and looks like, what will happen on midnight if this expires? And I usually look at them calmly and say, well, couldn't we survive on the Constitution just for like a day or two? And, you know, they're flabbergasted. And most of them don't realize this, that before 1978,

there was no FISA, and we still spot on foreigners. In fact, I don't think there's a statutory or constitutional reason why you can't spy on foreigners. We have the technological ability through our defense agencies and through our intelligence to collect every phone call in Libya if we want to. If that's in our national defense, I don't think there's anything constitutionally stopping that. But if those people are talking to Americans, we don't have the right to put in Americans into that database and search them at all. So this is while I'm for the warrant requirement, in some ways, I'm not really for any search of Americans. I'll have a competing amendment that I'll put forward that says you can't search Americans with or without

a warrant because the data you're looking at has been collected in an unconstitutional manner. Correct. You truly are the greatest understander of the Constitution in the Senate today. And I'm comparing you to people who've studied law, practiced law, written about the law their entire careers. You truly have your finger on it, Senator Paul. I only have a few minutes left. Here you are predicting that the House, I hope you're right, it hasn't happened yet, will not take up the bill to waste $61 billion in Ukraine or two, Chris. So I, for one, think that the American people are opposed to this bill. I think they're opposed to the concept of Ukraine first and America last. And I predict that this issue doesn't go away. I predict that the House of Representatives is not going to take up this bill.

I predict that the vast majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives are more conservative than the Republicans in this body. And I predict that this fight is not over. What do you think will happen now? My prediction could be wrong. I hope I'm still right. But I do think that the Republicans in the House are more conservative than the Republicans in the Senate. And there's still a chance that it could be delayed. But we now have Speaker Johnson disappointing me to my very core. I mean, he started out at least saying that foreign aid should be paid for, and that would be a big step forward. And he's backing away from that. Now he's talking about passing all of the foreign aid unpaid for. And it really doesn't seem to be much difference between his position and Joe Biden's or his positions and Mitch McConnell's.

And so if he's craving the polling numbers of Mitch McConnell, he'll get them. Mitch McConnell's popular with about 6 percent of Americans, unpopular with about 60 percent of Americans. And that's where Johnson is headed at this point. The question is, will he be able to ram this through? Probably. But people at home need to realize what Mike Johnson has now done as Speaker. He passed a spending bill with the majority Democrats. Majority Republicans voted against his spending bill. That spending bill will lead to a deficit this year of at least $1.5 trillion. Then Mike Johnson came forward and voted with the majority of Democrats against a warrant requirement to search Americans.

And now he's going to come forward once again with the majority of Democrats and vote for foreign aid to everybody, you know, 60 billion more to Ukraine. I saw one report that's going to be over 20 billion now to Israel, and then unpaid for, and then more for Taiwan. And then they're going to ban, you know, TikTok. Everything under the sun they can do, they're going to do wrong coming forward. And it's all Mike Johnson. So I've run out of patience with trying to not be too harsh on him because I'm letting the world know now that he's no better than Hakeem Jeffries. And it's not even worth voting for Republicans for the House if that's what they're going to do to you. He's completely abdicated the power of the purse.

He's not doing anything to defend our country. He's working with Joe Biden. And that to me is just a miserable, miserable mistake. Senator Paul, you're a champion for the Constitution. And you're very gracious and generous to give us all your time this morning. I hope you'll come back again soon. I can tell you from the comments and from the numbers of people watching, you're very, very much appreciated throughout the country and throughout the world. Thank you, my dear friend. Thanks, Judge. Of course. Coming up later

today at three o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer, and at four o'clock Eastern, the one and only Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.