Morning Wire - Pam Bondi Let Go & Cali Fraud Fire Spreads | 4.3.26

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

President Trump ousts Attorney General Pam Bondi, the historic Artemis II mission enters day three of its ten day trip around the moon, and a new report reveals extensive fraud in California that has cost taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 2715- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text 'WIRE' to 83848 to learn more.Equip Foods - Today’s sponsor: Equip Foods; you’ve heard our team talk about Equip’s Prime Bar - but we’ve become huge fans of their Prime Protein, too. Voted the cleanest protein on the market by Men’s Health and this comes as no surprise when you see the short ingredient label. Morning Wire listeners will get 25% off one-time purchases, or 40% off first subscription orders for a limited time by heading to https://equipfoods.com/morningwire and using code MORNINGWIRE at checkout.- - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a major shakeup at the Justice Department, President Trump fires Attorney General Pam Bondi. Why was Bondi pushed out? And who is Trump eyeing for her permanent replacement? I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley, with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, April 3rd. This is Morning Wire. The Artemis 2 crew fires off their final major engine burn, setting course for the moon. And new audits put California fraud at over $100 billion, implicating everything from Medicaid to spending on homelessness. What he's done in California is a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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So let's start with the biggest news. President Trump announced yesterday that he was removing Attorney General Pam Bondi. Talk to us about that. How did this decision come down? Yeah, John, absolute bombshell here in Washington. It's all we've been talking about for the past day or so. As our own Mary Margaret O'Ollahan reported yesterday. The president reportedly made the decision to remove Attorney General Bondi because he was frustrated with what he saw as the lack of criminal prosecutions of Democrats who committed lawfare against him. Now, we're also hearing some chatter that the removal could be an attempt by the president to distance himself from the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which has drawn him scorn certainly from his critics on the left, but even from some critics on the right. Think about former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green and

others who expected more from Trump and Attorney General Bondi. They wanted more files released, more prosecution. So that could certainly have something to do with this. But of course, you know, that's old news already. Pam Bondi is out. The big question now in Washington is who is going to replace her. So the number one contender and sort of the contender being floated by the White House is EPA administrator Lee Zeldon, an attorney and former New York congressman, big ally of President Trump. We're keeping an eye on him. A couple of of other candidates that I would keep my eye on personally, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, two erstwhile Trump allies who the president might just want to

bring up to the big leagues. No doubt some big names and contention for that very coveted spot there. Jumping back a bit, what's the response been to Trump's Iran speech? We talked about that yesterday. What's the fallout been in D.C.? The response in Washington has been a lot more extreme than what I would have guessed it would be, mostly among the media class who are full. furious with what the president had to say, I think in a large part because a lot of them got the story wrong. People were expecting the president to say this war was going to go on indefinitely, or he was going to say that the war was ending right then. They thought he said we were going to pull out of NATO, or he was going to give some other sort of extreme announcement.

Of course, none of that actually happened. The president gave a pretty standard overview, said that we've been hitting our goals, we're continuing to hit our goals, gave us a timeline of about two to three weeks before the end of the war. But I think ultimately, again, this has to do with the fact that a lot of the prognosticators and the reporters here in Washington got it wrong. Interestingly, the White House is hitting back at some of these people, notably Dasha Burns from Politico, who was one of the people who reported that the president was going to use this address to both declare victory in Iran and pull out of NATO. Again, two things that didn't happen. The White House has taken every opportunity they could since the speech to call Dasha Burns and Politico's

report, fake news. Before we let you go, what's going on, I'm almost afraid to ask this at this point, what is going on with DHS funding? Is there any movement at all? There's nothing but movement, John, but that doesn't mean that we're going anywhere. So very briefly, yesterday, the Senate reversed course. You'll remember that last week, the Senate passed a partial DHS funding bill, funding the entire department with the exception of ICE and Border Patrol. So yesterday, they reversed course, passed what is essentially a full funding bill for the state. the entirety of DHS and sent that bill over to the House. The House is still on recess. They're not supposed to come back to Washington until April 14th, so about, you know, still

less than two weeks away, but a good stretch of time away. And it's really unclear what's going to happen. One thing that is absolutely happening in the interim, though, Democrats are seizing on this moment of uncertainty to do their best to pin blame on Republicans. Chuck Schumer has been really pivoting back and saying this is the Republican shutdown, blaming Mike Johnson, and House Republicans for dragging things out this far. Honestly, at this point, it's hard. You know, the blame is getting passed around so much. Is it the Senate's fault?

Is it the House's fault? This is like the 50th iteration of these bills. It's kind of everyone and no one's fault at this moment. But of course, as we've discussed on this show before, when Republicans are in power and they have the White House in both houses of Congress, it's way easier for Democrats to say this is their fault. Well, I am shocked, shocked that you're telling me there's finger pointing going on in D.C. Tim, thanks for reporting.

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Where do things stand now with the mission? Yeah, me personally, if the rocket gets off the launch pad and is able to actually take off, get into space, I can say that as success because that just shows you how perfect the conditions have to be for this to happen. I mean, it is normal for delay after delay to happen and push it back. You have the two-hour launch window. So the rocket taken off Wednesday evening at the very beginning of the launch window. I was really impressed. So now we're entering day three, and this is really cool.

So last night, the Orion spacecraft, which is what the rockets called, that's carrying the people, just completed the trans lunar injection burn, which is a huge engine firing that gets the spaceship out of low Earth orbit and toward the moon. So this means the rocket has broken free from the Earth's gravitational pool. Now, to do that, the rocket's engine had to burn for more than five minutes and have enough power to move 6,000 pounds away from the Earth's gravity. So that's going to wake up the astronauts a little bit. So it'll be about four more days for the Artemis II mission to get to the moon before the space crew heads back to Earth.

This is a test mission for sure. No crew have ever ridden this before. We'll keep gathering data over the next 10 days. We'll share updates. So the four astronauts on board are NASA astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Christina Goek and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first people to launch toward the moon since Apollo 17 mission back in 1972. And as I mentioned, they might not be feeling too good right now

because the first few days of this mission are the toughest on their body, and they're having to be waking up a lot for these engine fires. The engine had to fire on Thursday, then fire again Thursday night to get them on the right trajectory to get to the moon. So there's a lot of science up there to make sure that rocket ship can safely go thousands and thousands of miles away. So they've just broken out of Earth's orbit. Now they're heading toward the moon. What happens next?

So they're going to cruise for the next few days. But then on day five, Orion will enter the moon's gravitational sphere of influence, but they're not going to actually enter lunar orbit. Then around day six, the Artemis 2 crew will go to the far side of the moon. And that's going to be briefly outside of radio contact with Earth. So there's a chance this weekend that this crew could break the record for the furthest anyone has traveled from Earth, which was previously set back in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13. So they're going to spend day six of the mission making naked eye observations of the moon, taking photos of the moon, which at closest approach will appear as large as a basketball held at arm's length. So that is pretty neat.

Then they're going to prep for their return to Earth and things get really spicy. That includes the rocket ship heating up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere to 3,000 degrees on day 10. One of the coolest parts, once they get back in the Earth's atmosphere, the astronauts get to parachute. They're going to go about 17 miles per hour as they travel back down and splash into the Pacific Ocean. And once they splash and come back up, then that's when you can officially call the mission a success. Well, amazing to watch it launch, but I think even more exciting sometimes is to watch them re-enter the atmosphere. year. Yeah, it's going to be something really cool. And I've never seen a rocket launch in person. It was cool enough from YouTube for me. But people that were there just can't even describe how

cool it was. And I thought this is fascinating. NFL player Josh Jobs, he used to be the quarterback of Tennessee. He's actually an aerospace engineer. He has interned with NASA through the NFL. So he was on hand for the rocket launch. It's not the first time he's been there in Florida to watch a rocket take off. But it was really cool to see him in the crowd. And then another thing, just right up the road from Cape Canaver. There was a softball game going on between the Florida Gators and the Stetson Hatters. This was in the Jacksonville area. And they actually got to pause the game because they could see the rocket clearly taken off through the sky.

And the umpires like call time out. The players got to grab their phones, come out in the dugout and just capture that piece of history. Yeah, I had a friend who was there on the ground and he said it was absolutely a dazzling amount of light. Lyndon, thanks for reporting. Thanks. A new report from City Journal and its investigative team led by Chris Rufo dropped this week. The investigation reveals extensive fraud in California that has cost taxpayers over $100 billion. Here to discuss the report as Daily Wire contributor, Tim Pierce.

So, Tim, over $100 billion is a shocking number. What did this report say? Yeah, the report details massive, systemic brazen fraud in California. The state has an annual budget of $300 billion, but since Gavin Newsom became governor in 2019, this report suggests that the state has lost at least $180 billion to fraud. And this fraud isn't just stealing from California taxpayers, but from taxpayers all over the U.S. For instance, according to Haywood Talcove, a fraud specialist and CEO of Lexis Nexas Risk Solutions for government, California ran one of the most corrupt unemployment insurance programs in the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unemployment is administered by each state, but part of the funding for it comes from the federal government. In California, the fraud was so bad that a Memphis rapper that goes by the name Newk Bizzle, released a song about making money off it. He later pleaded guilty to stealing $700,000 from California's unemployment insurance program. So with corruption this bad, why is it just coming to light now? Yeah, it's a good question. It's not something that has been looked into by any outlet or investigator at the Scope's City Journal is right now. Part of the reason for that could be because the people in power in California

benefit from keeping the state's welfare rules loose and its programs bloated. Here's Rufo explaining that on a recent episode of the Daily Wire's Friendly Fire. Let's talk about Medi-Cal, which is California's health care system for the poor. During his time in office, Gavin Newsom has almost doubled public expenditure on Medi-Cal. It's something now like $200 billion a year in public spending in California, which is bigger than the GDP of many, many countries around the world. And we know from government estimates that between 10% and 25% of, Medi-Cal is lost to outright fraud. Criminals who take that money and in many cases send it overseas.

And so you're asking, well, what interest does someone like Gavin Newsom or state Democrats have in allowing this to continue? And that's where you get the indirect beneficiary. One of the most powerful unions in California is, of course, the union of health care workers, which is trying to pass this wealth tax, which has tens of thousands of members that benefit from the system being engorge with public funds. And so in many ways, the unions see this as a form of corruption that simply expands the pie. And then they get a cut of that. They forward that cut, part of that cut, to the Democrat politicians in the legislature, to the governor's reelection campaigns. And all of this money, oftentimes at arm's length, not directly but indirectly,

it really pays the bills and greases this corruption wheel. So while officials recognize that these programs are rife with fraud, their political allies are also benefiting greatly from the money that these programs pay out. Now, speaking of people in power in California, Governor Newsom has been out in public a lot recently, getting a lot of media attention, challenging President Trump. And that has generated some talk that maybe he is thinking about a 2028 presidential bid. Is reporting like this going to be a major liability for him? Yeah, it could spell a lot of trouble for the California governor. Now, we should note that City Journal is not an unbiased investigator here. In fact, Chris Rufo's stated goal here is to ruin Newsom's political career,

essentially doing to Newsome what a recent City Journal investigation into Minnesota fraud did to Governor Tim Walls. And according to Rufo, there is much more fraud in California than he uncovered in Minnesota. I think what does have a chance to really damage him is if we can show definitively that what he's done in California is a disaster on an unprecedented scale. And so my team right now is finishing a report which should come out in the coming weeks where we're tallying not just billions or tens of billions of dollars in fraud,

but potentially hundreds of billions of dollars that has disappeared from the California state budget during Newsom's tenure. So it sounds like there is plenty more coming from Chris Rufo's team at City Journal. And we are definitely going to cover it. Tim, thanks for reporting. Good to be on.

Thanks for waking up with us. And to those listening to the show, you can also now watch the show free on DailyWire Plus. We'll be back this evening. More news you need to know.