The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guests: AG Ken Paxton & Peter Schweizer | 3/15/23

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

America and Russia had a little air squabble, but fear not! If war begins, the Pentagon's new strategic management plan, focusing on climate change and equity, will save the day. The ATF is trying to pass a stabilizing pistol brace ban, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joins to explain how he's fighting it. Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer joins to debate whether the Democrats' constant aid to Ukraine is just a money-laundering scheme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Pat. Favorite, favorite news story on the show today. What is that? What would it be? Oh. So hard to choose. Yeah, yeah. Credit Suisse, perhaps.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's a great one. It sounds like it's not happening here. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Credit Suisse, bank, possibly, by the time you hear this, maybe it has gone over. maybe, I can guarantee you. You won't know for five years because

the Fed doesn't have to report anything to us mortals for five years. But I guarantee you in five years from today, they will release that they have poured billions, if not trillions, into the market over in Europe. The market took a beating on the

banks and Moody's downgraded our banking, our entire banking industry went from stable to, what is it, danger? Negative. Negative. Yeah. But Glenn, that'll never happen.

Well, it just did. So we got that going for us. Tonight, you've got to watch the TV show. We'll have all of the information on what you're actually facing. And we'll tell you that. Not to scare you. We tell you that so you can mentally prepare and physically prepare yourself for the next phase of whatever comes.

We had a lot on the show today. We also talked about guns with Ken Paxton. And how do we stop an out-of-control government? Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of the great state of Texas. And I think he said he has 38 cases against Joe Biden right now. He was 45. It is crazy how out of control they are. All right.

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Russia and the United States got into a little squabble yesterday. Just a little drone situation. Dron was downed. It was no big deal. Actually, it actually isn't a big deal. Normally, it may become a big deal because we keep pounding our chest, which is not the smartest thing to do right now. By the way, so you know, if we do go to war, the Pentagon has its new strategic management plan out. And it is, it's fantastic. It's fantastic.

And I mean this sincerely. Roughly one out of every six pages dedicated to diversity and climate change. So, in fact, they're prioritizing climate and diversity and equity and inclusion as their short-term. goals at the Pentagon. They want to make sure they have that ready to go by 2026. So they, one of the three goals focuses entirely on managing anticipated impacts of climate change. Like, I would think poverty might be one of those things, you know, but maybe not. Then the second goal out of the three is, you know, the broader diversity, equity, and inclusion. and the good thing is what they're doing is they're going to department they're going to a partner with the universities

to be able to get new recruits to come in and i would think the universities would be the first place i would go to find a soldier oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's going to be so don't worry if we go to war all right enough of that uh uh uh there uh new report out from the government. What are they worried about? Well, they are quite upset that crash test dummies are not diverse enough. Oh, they're too white? Yeah.

I don't think I've ever seen a dummy of color. Have you? I haven't. Have you seen a dummy of color? I haven't seen a lesbian. dummy either. No, that's, I haven't either. I haven't seen it. I think some transgendered dummies who might be fat and black, you know, should be in the seats of it because they're people too. Yeah. So they need to crash just like white people do.

Smash into the dashboard. Exactly right. Go through the windshield. Yeah. This is how this is how crazy this is. You know, you're looking at the dummy. What the crash test does. is supposed to tell you is how your bones and flesh will behave in a car accident, okay? Not the color of your skin makes no difference. But I thought we had learned that. So anyway, Debbie Wasserman Schultz yesterday said Americans are to blame for the fentanyl smuggling. Now, I thought, I thought she was blaming. people saying because the demand is high here, okay?

You want that highly addictive, deadly drug. And so, you know, that's why it's being smuggled. And she would have a point, but no, no, no, that's not her point. Her point is that xenophobia stops border reform. And because we're so racist, we will not go for border reform. And that's why fentanyl is coming through. I just, I'm pointing these out. I'm pointing these out because I just, I want to find an expert anywhere on any subject that is correct.

Okay. Stop listening to the experts. Stop it right now. By the way, Granholm has been, she's, she's been asked to, just, can you just, define what you were talking about where we can learn from China on climate change? What exactly is it that we can learn? She said, the Chinese have tackled climate change and they've been very sensitive. And they've actually invested a lot in their solutions to achieve their goals.

Now, if their goals are to destroy the West, I would agree with you. On climate change, you keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think it means. Because I, well, I'd like to hear. She hasn't answered. But if you are in New York and you're the Attorney General, okay, you're the attorney, you are the chief law enforcement person in New York. What are you concentrating on?

Okay, I would say, you know, crime, crime. Maybe the murder rate that is gone. No, no, no. The AG's office in New York is proud to host a drag queen story hour readathon this Sunday from 11 till 3. They're going to have the Attorney General will be there, drag storytellers. And city and state elected leaders are going to be there. Hopefully they've invited a lot of three-year-olds to this event. Oh, it's going to be the safest place on the planet for your children.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course it will. So hopefully all of New York's children will be gathered around. All of them will be there. Now, you can't get tickets. But, you know, all the people that are co-sponsoring this event are all Democrats. But New York City Mayor Eric Adams has previously praised the practice of having drag queens read children. I would like to hear from the expert on what new information we have about how healthy that is?

How healthy that is. Because you know it is, right? Of course I do. Yeah, it's the only reason they're trying to force this on our children is because they understand it's so healthy. Because the experts know things that we don't know. They know. Okay? Well, that's why they're experts.

Right. And it's not, the goal is not for just our children to be academically smart, but also emotionally intelligent. And drag storytellers support that. I'm not making it up. I am not making it up. Meanwhile, a transgender pro fat doctor is furious. that four thin white, white rich, able-bodied cisgender men were behind the movie The Whale after it won its Oscar award. I hate thin white, cisgendered fat.

Fat. Non-fat. Non-fat. They're thin. Yeah. They probably hate fat, although they made a movie about a fat person. Fat person who won the Academy Award for portraying that person. And it wasn't it wasn't prosthetics. I thought it was. No, he gained a bunch of weight for that. Yeah, a lot of weight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would never, that would be the last role.

Yeah. I would play that role and then I'd be like, you know, I don't know what I don't get a little. There are any other roles were really fat, Mabel. Well, when you go from George of the jungle where he was ripped, you know, a washboard abs to the whale, you're going to win an Oscar. That's going to happen every time. If you were once super attractive, but you make yourself unattractive for a role, that's a lock for the Oscar.

Sure. Sure. You know, you've got to go that extra mile. Yeah. If you are, if you're a model, a beautiful, beautiful woman and you're willing to say, I want to play the Joker and I'll literally cut my face up. Right. You'll probably get an Oscar. You probably won't.

Yeah, you probably won't. That's not. look, you're not, you're not doing anything. It's almost a sin not to cut your face up. You know what I mean? I know. You know, you say that's mutilation. No, no, no.

You're a consenting adult, but even if you were five years old, you make any cuts on your body you want. Mutilation, where did that even, where'd that come from? That's Bible thumpers. Oh, jeez. Christian nationalists. Yeah. You know, like, well, you.

for instance. Me? Yeah. I'm a Christian National. Christian Nationalist. I didn't know that. Yeah. I didn't know that.

Have you read the daily cost yet today? Because you need to. Really? No, I haven't. Dare I say, no one has. Nobody. It might be the only person who read this. Yeah, yeah.

No one has read that. This, here's the headline. This is very bad. Glenn Beck has purchased a trove of Roe documents, Roe v. Wade documents, for his revivie. Visionist History Museum. Bum, bum, bum!

Yeah. Ooh, it's scary. It is scary. Sickeningly... Is that your word or their word? It's his word. Yeah, yeah. This is the exact opposite of what the seller wanted to have happen.

Oh. Yeah, the exact opposite. Had I known that, I might have bid more. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Oh, I remember the days when Glenn Moody's will never downgrade the United States, which they did. Glenn, they would never. Our banking sector is the strongest in the world. Following the biggest bank failure since the financial crisis of 2008, yesterday Moody's Investor Service downgraded its rating for the entire U.S. banking system. they went from stable to negative. Okay, that's good.

That's why your stock market is down about 600 points right now. And you look like you are on the verge of having bank failures in Europe. One in France. One is Credit Suisse. I'm surprised if Deutsche Bank is not involved in that. But I can guarantee you we are shoveling. money towards Europe right now to stop the contagion, but it is coming. Please prepare yourself.

Ken Paxton is here. He is the Texas Attorney General, and he's fighting to get an injunction to freeze the ATF stabilizing pistol brace ban. Have we gotten that yet, Ken? No, we haven't. there. We're waiting for a ruling from the court. I'm pretty optimistic, given that the ATF has no authority to regulate these pistol braces. So if they don't do an injunction, what's next? So then we would proceed to actually trial, to make our arguments in a district court,

arguing that this should not be permitted. The ATF shouldn't be able to just make up new regulations that Congress didn't pass. We've been pretty successful. I think we've won about 80% of our cases against Department of Justice. So, you know, it always depends on the court, the judges. You never know what's going to happen all the way up to the Supreme Court. But this, to me, looks like a winner. So you had an executive order come out yesterday,

and he has taken the Federal Trade Commission. He has taken the Justice Department. you know, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Explosives, and he is pushing to have all kinds of different changes made, but isn't this the same kind of thing? These changes cannot go through these agencies. If you're talking about a right, it's got to go through Congress, does it not? Oh, yes, well, this is what he's been doing from day one when he announced that, you know, we weren't going to deport people anymore. It's why we have 45, lawsuits against him because he's doing this in all kinds of different areas. And to have his

agencies or his executive orders come out on background checks that Congress, he claims, fail to do that suddenly now, if Congress doesn't deal, well, I'll just step in and do it. That's not the way the system works. He has to work with Congress. He wants to regulate more. If he wants to somehow affect our Second Amendment rights, either have to pass constitutional amendment or, you know, work around the edges of that amendment and work with Congress. He can't just do it on his own. So are we going to see, I mean, I'm sorry because I know how hard you, you and others are working. You know, you've got, you really do have 45 lawsuits against him right now. Do you not? That's correct. They have, they've sued up like eight times. So we're, we're involved in over 50

lawsuits with the federal government right now. That is crazy. I'm just, you know, we seem to be running out of time, and they just keep doing these things, and it gets worse and worse and worse. Do you see a time when one of these cases will say, enough is enough of all of this stuff? Because it's really the same case over and over again, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. Whether you're dealing with the Second Amendment, whether you're dealing with the First Amendment, whether we're dealing with whatever immigration, it's the same case over and over because it's him looking at. Looking at laws, knowing he can't pass a change that the people who elected our representatives are not going to vote for that.

And so he makes his own decision to be an imperial president. That's what we're talking about. And the problem with the court system is it's not fast. It is not designed to be fast. It is because of all the litigation going on, it's a slow process. So I think you're going to need all, you're going to need Congress to step up. You're going to need state legislatures to step up. Like, I'm encouraging my legislature right now to pass something that will allow me to get sued by the federal government over the immigration issue.

So we can take that back up and try to overturn the U.S. v. Arizona, which said that states can't pass through immigration laws, which is insane because the results affect us more than it does the federal government. So what are they responding on that? Are they, is, do you have any support in the House, in the Senate? It's, there's a House bill and Senate bill. We're looking at both of those. I'm actually going to go testify in front of the Border Security Committee tomorrow about this very issue. And so, yeah, I think they've been listening to what I've been saying. They've been listening to what others have been saying. I think they are going to try to pass something that will basically challenge what was done by, you know, Justice Kennedy, Justice Roberts, and three liberal judges where they said that Arizona couldn't pass their own immigration laws.

And we can see the consequences of that. That cannot be the right result. It cannot be that states have to watch the federal government not enforce laws and then come and say, well, you can't protect yourself. That doesn't make any sense for states. So let me go back to putting them all together. I was just looking through some documents on Roe v. Wade. And it wasn't just Roe versus Wade. they were trying to drag in a couple of other cases as well to make a fatter, more robust kind of argument.

Is there nothing we can link together out of all of these lawsuits and bring to the court and say, look, this is the same thing. It's an abuse of power. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that we can do that. But typically what, and this is just the way the Supreme Court will work, they like things narrowly defined, they like to make their decisions based, and this is Roberts' focus. He likes to confine things to the most narrow result possible.

And so we're sort of forced into making more narrow arguments about that specific violation of law as opposed to trying to make it broader. It just doesn't seem to really work with Roberts and the Supreme Court. Well, that's unfortunate for us because, I mean, I like them to be very, very narrow as well, but they're using that against us right now. They're just, they'll abuse it in one very narrow way and then they'll come back and abuse it in another very narrow way. And they're using our strength against us. No, it's absolutely true. And that's why, you know, that's why elections matter.

I mean, we've got a president that doesn't have any respect for federal law. state law, the U.S. Constitution, none of that matters to him. He'll walk around. They call it workarounds. Work around the Constitution. Work around federal law. They have no respect for it. They're literally no different than, you know, we're no different than what happens in China or as far as our presidency. This is very similar to what dictators do. Yeah. So may I ask you, and I know you you haven't been, you know, doing any more than casually following this, I'm sure. But does, doesn't this fit the same kind of thing that they just did with the FDIC? I mean, you know, Congress has ruled.

And they've, they've raised this amount several times since, what, 1936. And they've raised it to 250,000. And then the Treasury just goes in and says, no, we're going to take care of all of it. I mean, you can't do that, can you? I don't know that issue super well, but I can say this. It fits the pattern of exactly what you and I've just been talking about for the last five minutes. Exactly right. They just make stuff up, and then they make us stop them.

And the reality is we only have so many resources to stop so many things. So they just keep throwing stuff at us. And that's why it's pretty important that other states get involved. That's why it's important that Congress gets involved. We need every possible angle to stop. them from from abusing their authority and abusing the Constitution because that's what they're doing. So how can we support you and our other AGs all around the country? I think what you're doing right now, just letting people know what we're fighting for,

that it really doesn't matter. These aren't just like random lawsuits that are about even though immigration is a really important issue or the Second Amendment, obviously super important. It's bigger than that. It's about the power of government and whether we have a Constitution that matters, whether we have a constitutional republic that's going to last, if we don't protect it now, and people don't know that that's the fight, we are going to lose it. All right.

Ken, thank you so much. I really appreciate all that you do. You are really one of the leaders of the AGs, and you guys are making a huge, huge difference. I think, dare I say it, I think the AGs are the ones that are making the biggest difference in the last couple of years. So thank you for your leadership, Ken. I appreciate it. Hey, thank you.

I really appreciate it. You bet. Texas Attorney General. Ken Paxton, if you don't have a good attorney general in your state, you need one. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. My good friend and a man I so respect because he calls the dirty on both sides of the aisle. Peter Schweizer is with us now, head of the government accountability Institute. and the author of Red Handed and the co-host now of The Drill Down.

Welcome, Peter. How are you? I'm great, Glenn. Always good to be on with you. Thanks for having me. You bet. So let's start with the Biden crime family stuff. You're following, I'm sure, what's happening in Congress.

And they keep coming out. Every day I see something new. Oh, man, we just got some evidence. Oh, look how we got them now. Is this, should I even pay attention to that, Peter? Is something going to be done? Well, I think you should pay attention to it. Look, what I would say, Glenn, is let's look back at how far we've come.

I first wrote about, we first exposed the China deals that the Bidens have, the extent to the Ukraine deals. Back in 2018, I came on your show. We talked about it extensively on your podcast. We were voices crying in the wilderness. The Bidens at that point were saying, there's no deals in China. know, what are they talking about? We're at a stage now where they've had to admit, yes, okay, there were deals. Then the laptop emerged and people realized, okay, Joe Biden was actually involved.

There was communication. And then we are now at the point where, as I exposed in red-handed, and again, you were really the tip of the spear in exposing it, who was actually giving money to the Biden. So I am encouraged by what I'm seeing, but look, here's the key thing. The leaders in Washington, I think, want to think there's going to be a legal bullet that's going to fix this. There's going to be some crime that they're going to find. That's not what this case is ultimately about. What this case is ultimately about, in my mind, is about espionage, because it's about who gave these tens of millions of dollars of money to the Bidens.

They don't dispute that they got the money. The three people that got them the money have links to the high. levels of Chinese intelligence. And so this is not going to be resolved ultimately by some prosecutors saying, oh, we found some technical crime that we're going to get the Biden's on. It's going to take Congress and Capitol Hill holding the family into account for the money they were receiving, who they were receiving it from, and that's going to be the solution. So we need to make sure that our political leaders are doing that and not just outsourcing this. and hoping that some lawyer's going to do something about.

Now let's go to Ukraine. Ukraine is one of the dirtiest countries as far as money laundering and everything else in the world. And we have had everyone from George Soros, Barack Obama's people, Joe Biden's family, the Clintons, everyone is involved in this that's shady. and now we're going to war and we're sending them billions and billions of dollars.

And there's no oversight. Is this really just nothing more than a money laundering scheme? Well, yeah, I'm very concerned about the way in which the aid is being sent to Ukraine. You and I, I know, both agree for the Ukrainian people. we support the Ukrainian people. The problem is Ukraine is led by this corrupt government. I mean, let's remember Zelensky's chief financial backer. It's not even close.

Right. Is a oligart named Kola Moiski. Colomoisky is known to have ripped off billions of dollars of foreign aid in the past. Right. It was something called Prevot Bank that got money from the IMF firm from the United States or from Europe. Wouldn't it like $7 billion or something like that? I mean, it was an extraordinary amount. Yeah, and it basically disappeared.

And one of the things that emerged was that all these like LLCs had been established that siphoned all the money off. So that's who Zelensky is. So obviously there are Ukrainians fighting bravely for their country, but you have this cast of characters at the top of Ukraine. And then you have Americans who are making decisions who have been involved in leadership here, who have their hand in the trough and have had their hand in the trough not just in Ukraine, but in Russia.

And with Vladimir Putin, I mean, let's remember 10 years ago, the Clinton's, the John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, counselor at the State Department, were all doing business with Vladimir Putin. He had already invaded Georgia back in 2008. They didn't care. They were taking money from oligarchs and people in Russia and Ukraine. So it is very hard not to look at this and say that there is a financial corruption component to this. And all the people now who want to make Zelensky the Thomas Jefferson of Central Europe have been getting rich off of people from both sides.

The Clintons took money from Ukrainian oligarchs. They took money from Russian oligarchs. So the entanglements are there, and to pretend that that didn't happen, that sort of part of this history didn't happen, is not being accurate as to what's really going on. John Podesta has an energy company, and he got a $40 million investment from Putin's personal government investment fund, right? That's right. That's exactly right.

This is it. The company is called Jewel Energy. He joined the board of Jewel Energy back, I think it was 2012, 2013. Within a couple of months, they got a $40 million investment from Rusina, which is a sovereign wealth fund that was called Putin's child by one of the Russian ministers. This was Latimer Putin's investment fund. He was happy to take that money, John Podesta was. When he then went and worked for Barack Obama in the second term, and the Wall Street Journal's reported on this, James Freeman did. What basically happened was he tried to hide that asset. He took his ownership stake in the energy company and gave it to one of his adult daughters to try to mask the fact that these assets were being held. You look at Hillary Clinton. When Hillary Clinton was

Secretary of State, again, already, Vladimir Putin had already invaded Georgia. She said, we're going to come up with this scheme as Secretary of State called Skolkavo. And this was to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley. We're going to get all these big tech companies to go and invest in Russia. What could go wrong, Glenn? Well, what went wrong is, among other things, the Pentagon under Barack Obama later said, because of Skolkavo, Russia was able to get the technology for this hypersonic missile, which they have now been using in Ukraine.

And, of course, Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation collected money from the people who were running Skolkow in Russia. They actually donated to the Clinton Foundation. So, I mean, this is all in black and white. This is not speculation. We've reported on this. You and I have talked a little bit about this in the past. And nobody in Washington, official Washington wants to bring this up.

If you discuss these things, you're somehow undermining the Ukrainian cause. No, you're not. You're showing that the Ukrainian people have been victims not only of Vladimir Putin, but of the aggressive financial actions of elites in the United States as well. So, you know, when we first got into this, I thought they, the cynical part of me, immediately went to, they are destroyed. evidence. They did so much dirty stuff over there. They're paying people off and destroying evidence. I don't know if that's true other than the labs that Hunter Biden was involved in. But the money seems to me to be some sort of a payoff money laundering. Do you think we're going to be able to track this ever and see if any of that money came back to people here in the United States? I think it'll be hard to do. Certainly, we're going to do that. And I know you and your team are going to try to trace that. But I mean, here's really the problem in the nutshell, as far as I'm concerned. I am in support of providing, you know, food supplies, even some military supplies to the Ukrainian people. What I don't want is these blank checks, these tens of billions of dollars in cash that are basically being dumped into Ukraine where you're going to, you're going to, to have Zelensky and of course his chief financial backer Kolomowski and these other ukrainian oligarchs like uh you know that have donated the clinton like victor pinchuk and others

i don't want them handling that money um and of course they are going to be handling that money it's going to be going through their companies and their entities that to me is a huge problem the way you make sure that the ukraine story never gets reported in terms of of what was going on, the people that were doing deals there, the corrupt deals. The way you make sure that story doesn't get out is you continue to pay the leaders of Ukraine and provide them with financial support. If you end that, that's when you are at risk. So in my mind, there's no question.

Yeah, there's no question that has got to be some motivation as to what's going on. Why was Randy Weingarten and Janet Yellen there? I don't know if they're planning to change the Ukrainian school curriculum. I certainly hope not. But yeah, it's again demonstrates that Randy Weingarten is a political figure. She's not ultimately a teacher, an advocate for teachers. But again, this is part of the network because it's government money, but it's also NGOs and nonprofits. These are organizations like the Clinton Foundation that Randy Weingarten has given lots of money to. and as head of American Federation of Teachers has done work with,

they have received large sums of money to do various projects in Ukraine. And again, there's no accountability for that. We think about government corruption and taxpayer money, but there's a lot of, you know, nonprofit organizations that receive money sometimes from governments to carry out projects in countries like Ukraine. It's really, in my mind, a very cynical takeoff of, you know, the old Rahm Emanuel line about never let a crisis go to waste. That applies to global crises as well.

That applies to war zones, unfortunately. And to see Randy Weingarten there, you know, provides no positive basis for anything good to be happening in Ukraine as far as I'm concerned. Hang on just a sec, Peter, if you can. Let me give one minute break and then we'll come back to Peter. Some people have the ability to fall asleep just about anywhere, whether it's bed standing up, even talking to other people. Those people, you know, make it to be the president of the United States sometimes, I'm just saying. And that's a rare gift, usually not at that age.

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800, the number four relief. Call them now or go to relief factor.com. Dream big, sleep tight with relief factor sleep. 10 seconds, station ID. So, Peter, tell me about the Republicans. Do we have Republicans dirty? in Ukraine as well that would want to stop the investigation on this kind of stuff? Yeah, I'm sure that there are.

I think the reason that there's so much focus on, for example, the Clintons and, and, you know, the Biden's is because they made obvious and clear efforts early on to stake out claim in Ukraine. And it really is one of the ultimate ironies, right? when you think about it, that, you know, the, the quote-unquote biggest advocates for Ukraine and Ukraine independence have been people like the Bidensit, ostensibly. And yet, Vladimir Putin chose two occasions to go into Ukraine. One time in 2014, when he moved into Crimea, which, of course, was the Obama-Bide administration. Then he skipped the Trump administration. And when Joe Biden

became president of the United States, he decided to move in again, which is really strange when you think about it, because Biden has sort of thumped his chest that I have been such a staunch supporter of Ukraine and Ukraine independence, and yet when he has been at the highest runs of power, that's when Vladimir Putin has been the most aggressive. So he sees weakness there. But to answer your question, yes, I'm sure that there are Republican political consultants, that have gotten, you know, NGO grants to do sort of nation-building work in Ukraine. The problem is that those efforts, of course, always go through the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian political parties.

And when you look at the spam there, there's not a lot of clean hands in any of the political parties there. So John Podesta's brother, Tony Podesta, was over in Ukraine, did some really, I think, some dirty stuff. all of a sudden just disappeared. He just like went away. I'm closing shop. Like literally overnight.

I'm shutting it all down. Then when Biden got into office, he opened shop again. Is he involved in Ukraine again? I don't know if he is again, but he certainly was before. And let's remember Tony Podesta, of course, his brother, John Podesta, ran the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Tony Podesta was a lobbyist who did an enormous amount of work with foreign clients, some of them Russians, some of them Chinese, some of them Ukrainian, veritable United Nations of

clients. And he never registered as a foreign agent under the so-called Farah Act, which is, of course, what they went after Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for failing to file. PADESTA retroactively filed, I think, 30 filings for clients after they went after Paul Manafort. They never went after John Podesta. Yeah, what a surprise. What a surprise. In my mind, I'm glad that they went after Manifert for fair violations.

Me too. You've got to be consistent. You've got to be consistent. It seems like they never are. Real quick, and I know this is kind of out of your expertise, but I know you know a lot about Putin. Are we headed towards war? I think we are headed towards war, and I think here's the problem. Vladimir Putin has sort of put all his chips on the table in Ukraine. You have to give him some way to save faith. Yeah, if you say unconditional surrender, that to me is a recipe to escalation,

and this is the kind of man who would start using battlefield nuclear weapons. And once that happens, you know, God help us all. So you have got to have some kind of a negotiated settlement that protects Ukraine, protects the Ukrainian people, but also gives Vladimir Putin something. The problem is that's not Joe Biden's strategy. Joe Biden thinks he's FDR fighting Hitler. Hitler, of course, did not have nuclear weapons. It's a totally different world we live in. Yeah. And we also had a plan after Hitler, too, where we're just saying, you know what, the next guy will probably be better. The guy standing in the wings do not look better

by far. Peter Swiser, thank you so much. You can listen to his podcast. It's called The Drill Down with Peter Swizer.