The Megyn Kelly Show - Kavanaugh Character Assassination, and America's Place in the World, with Victor Davis Hanson and Mike Pompeo | Ep. 479

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of “The Dying Citizen,” to talk about the latest on the classified documents story and hypocrisy of the DOJ and FBI, Hunter Biden’s role in all of this, a new film about Justice Brett Kavanaugh and continued character assassination of him, the United States sending tanks to Ukraine and continuing the escalation, the dire crisis of open border policies, the dangerous consequences of cartels crossing the border, and more. Then, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, author of "Never Give An Inch," joins to discuss his revelations about Nikki Haley and John Bolton, how to properly handle classified information, how the Trump administration understood the need for a secure border, the proper way to handle the China threat, the successful North Korea negotiations, 2024 presidential politics, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Trump, Biden, Pence, you and I, all of us apparently have classified documents everywhere. Do you do, right? Raise your hand. No. It's really become absurd. Now, the story is continuing to grow more ridiculous by the day. So we'll get into the very latest twists on all of that. And this is unbelievable. Hollywood filmmakers reigniting their never ending character assassination against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Despite apparently revealing

nothing new, the film's producer is now claiming tips about Kavanaugh are pouring in and they're reopening their, quote, documentary to add more accusers, potentially. OK, sure. Later, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be here. He's going to disclose all the confidential classified documents he's been hiding. JK. But joining me first, Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He hosts his own podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, and he is author of the great book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Trib progressive elites, tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of America. VDH, great to have you back on the show. There's a lot to go

over today. So let's start with Pence has got the classified documents too. And now what we're hearing in the press is, well, you see, it's different because what Trump did was advertent. It was intentional. And what Biden did and what Pence did was inadvertent. You see, they were just clumsy. They were just careless. But Trump, he meant to steal. It was theft. This is what we're hearing from the left, people like Mehdi Hassan over on MSNBC. And therefore, we really can't make any comparisons between these cases. What do you think? Well, they were different, but I think the difference doesn't favor Biden at all, because Joe Biden ran for president, and he was elected president, and he served as president the entire time. He knew that he had unlawful documents in his possession. And if you go back to the Senate, it's 15 years in five or six different places. So if you calculate the factors of time and space, there was far more opportunity to access them for people who should know than Mar-a-Lago for 19 months. I think anybody who looked at the garage or the homes, nobody in their right mind would

think it'd be easier to get into Mar-a-Lago than to those places. And then you have the whole FBI performance art. I mean, they went into Trump's with a black SUV. Some people were armed. They came lightly and very lately to the Biden investigation. It was a big myth also, Megan, that Joe Biden reported this. He didn't report it. He didn't report it when he was a senator, when a private citizen, when he was a candidate, when he was elected, when he was president. He only reported it because either he thought somebody was going to leak it or when Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, people felt, you know, hey, Joe, do you have exposure? Because we'll look hypocritical. So they didn't report it for years,

and they only did it when it was in their interest, and they only did it after the midterms were over so it wouldn't hurt their chances in their midterms. And then the other thing is with Trump,'s been so investigated that this trove is not going to lead to any big new disclosures I mean they can lie and say well we leaked it and there's nuclear codes or nuclear secrets but nobody really has any proof of that and that story's kind of dropped but with the Biden family this is sort of like the Watergate break, and it leads to all sorts of different explorations. I mean, why was the Chinese Communist Party fueling this

pseudo think tank with millions of dollars? And did Hunter, it seems like Hunter had access to the garage and the dwelling where these documents were there. And I think Miranda Devine has suggested that some of the emails that Hunter sent didn't look like Hunter's, that they had government ease in them, the language and intelligence. And are the FBI taking fingerprint tests on all these documents? Because, you know, there's one red line that we don't talk about. And that red line is if Hunter Biden had access to these unlawful documents, and that would be provable, I think the Biden presidency is finished. Because that would show you that Joe Biden deliberately broke the law to bring out classified documents so that his family consortia could get classified information about potential business rivals or business associates. And I think that's what they're paranoid about. That's next level stuff.

And actually, it is that far out of the question, because we know I mean, the House is going to investigate Hunter Biden. And they're looking into this influence peddling scheme that may involve Joe Biden as the big guy getting 10 percent of whatever Hunter managed to get dealing with the Chinese dealing, uh, with Ukraine and so on. Um, so that's happening, but it does raise serious questions because we know Hunter was in the house where those documents were kept and nobody who's got any sense at all, trust Hunter Biden, not to do something nefarious, not to do something illegal. Nobody, if you've been paying any attention at all. And that's why you've got the House Oversight Committee chairman giving an interview to Maria Bartiromo over at Fox, James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, saying the following. This has gone from just simply being irresponsible to downright scary, saying we really need to know who had access to those documents in the Biden home because this is an ongoing investigation for influence peddling.

And so now it's starting, as I've been saying all along, you can't get Biden out of running for a second term or out as the nominee because he had a couple of documents that are classified. You know, that that will, I believe, stop the Trump prosecution. But I didn't see it as a big political problem for him. But if you enlarge the circle to who had access, was it intentional, were they used in an improper manner, totally new ballgame. Yeah, I mean, you look at the emails that were found and publicized on the laptop, and they're semi-literate. And then Miranda Devine quotes or produces this 13,000-word email that is very elegant and detailed and is informed about all of the geostrategic implications of sanctions and what would happen Ukraine vis-a-vis Britain and Russia. And it's not even written by him. You can tell it's not. So maybe he was reading The Economist or something. Who knows? But you can't make an allegation without absolute proof. But all the FBI has to do is take five sentences and run them through an electronic

search of all the classified documents. And if that word and that phraseology turns up, I think they're done with, because that that shows a deliberate intent to use government documents for personal profit. So I think they're very scared. They're not scared about the documents per se. They're scared that what's on the documents and why they were taken and Hunter's role in all of this and why uh the ukrainians would hire this guy when he was such a liability even though his father had been vice president might be a presidential candidate but when you read that that long email that hunter wrote to his associates it sounds as if he's john bolton or somebody you know hypa hypotheticals if, but very detailed and very exact with a lot of

knowledge. And it's not typical of what is in that troll. On the subject of was it intentional or not, here's just a little bit of how the White House sounds on this issue right now, the distinction they're trying to draw. I guess this is where they're going. You know, we've been wondering, how are they going to try to land this? how are they going to try to land this? What are they going to try to distinguish this? And of course, Trump's case is different. He submitted a signed affidavit or declaration, same thing, from a lawyer saying all documents had been returned when in fact now we're told they hadn't been.

He hasn't been afforded the chance to defend that claim in court yet. Just know what we read in the papers. But here is the new line of defense from Karine Jean-Pierre. This is Soundbite 3. We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced. The Biden approach was very different in the sense that it looks, as far as we can tell, that it was inadvertent. This was just an inadvertent matter of filing in sharp contrast to his predecessor.

So none of that is relevant legally, not even a little. The law does not care whether you did it accidentally or intentional. So they must think that this somehow helps them, does it? No. I mean, when you look at the pictures next to the Corvette of these lopsided boxes that are askew, and you think that's an inadvertent filing. It's just somebody had a bunch of stuff and threw it in their garage, and then it appears in a library. It appears in another room. It appears everywhere. And I don't even think they – and it appears at the Biden Center.

And where was it before? How did it get – there's kind of a chain of passage where we don't know and it appears at the Biden Center. And where was it before? How did it get? There's a kind of a chain of passage where we don't know how it gets to the Biden Center from, you know, the classified document trove in the vice president's possession. We don't know who brought them there. Lawyers obviously didn't bring them there. So it wasn't just inadvertent. It was deliberate. And they wanted to take them there. So it wasn't just inadvertent, it was deliberate. And they wanted to take them out. And they floated, if you remember, at the very early, when the news first

broke, they floated this balloon, trial balloon that said Joe Biden was really rushed. And it was chaotic when he left the vice presidency. Or he was at the time engaged writing his memoirs, and he needed, they've tried everything. And then they sort of quiet down. But I think the more that the details come out, the more concerned they really are. And they're paranoid that Joe Biden took these things out and he examined them and he either informed Hunter about some information on them or Hunter had access, either knowing access from the vice president or Joe Biden when he was a private citizen, or he just took them and read them because, and it was not inadvertent. Well, and here's the thing. If you look at what they're saying, the last tranche of documents to have been found, and we don't know how many are in there,

include documents from when he was a senator, as you point out, 15 years ago. Now, my understanding is if you are a senator, you don't get to look at classified documents without the person who's got the clearance, who's there as the security enforcer, coming to you, showing you the document and taking the document back and then walking away. You don't get to keep it for homework. You don't get to ride on the train home to Delaware, perusing it as a Senator Biden. And so that raises real questions. How many of those were there exactly? And how did he get documents out of the secured facilities and out of the watchful eye of the person overseeing them back when he was a U.S. Senator? How is that consistent with the,

as you know, I take these documents very seriously, I take classified information very seriously, line? It isn't. The only defense that Joe Biden has that's credible is that he's non-complimentes. In other words, he's not cognitively aware of things. And then you kind of use that. So if you have a president that shakes hands with an imaginary person or can't doesn't address somebody who's dead. And then the person said, well, I didn't know anything. That's a compelling argument. But that's the only one. And they haven't quite made it yet. If they were smart, they would say, as you know, Joe Biden is cognitively impaired. Therefore, you can't hold him to be responsible because he has no idea where he is and he has no idea where these his house is so everyone would believe that they would they would and uh they may they may have to they may resort to that but you know another thing is that you're not supposed to comment on the ongoing investigation so here you have joe biden and before the special counsel is appointed and joe biden's doJ and Merrick Garland and the FBI and he's asked on 60 Minutes and he says it's totally irresponsible. In other words, he's tried and convicted Donald Trump of being irresponsible and it's impossible to imagine when we don't

really know that the degree to which some of these documents were declassified, it's being adjudicated. And then when he talks about himself, and there's an ongoing investigation, what does he say? He says, there's no there there. So you can't have the President of the United States editorializing about respective ongoing investigations. We should also remember, Megan, that the subtext of the first impeachment was that Donald Trump used his office as president to delay aid, which was granted and which had not been approved, in fact, by Obama. But he delayed that for personal interest by harming or investigating a potential Democratic rival to himself. That's what the written said, that he was punishing the Bidens or he wanted them investigated because Joe Biden would be a candidate in 2020. That's exactly what Joe Biden is doing. He's been investigating Donald Trump on these allegations, and he's commenting on it when he knows that Donald Trump was a likely and now a confirmed candidate for president of the United States. So it raises all these symmetrical questions, and it's just not

a fair application of the law. Whatever you think about Trump or Biden, the way the FBI has handled it, the way the DOJ has handled it, it's just so asymmetrical. And that's been characteristic of the Bidens for a long time. They've let, and Biden, of course, continues to say he handled these appropriately and that they handled it appropriately. They notified the proper authorities. And we know now, we talked about this yesterday, that in fact, what they did was they didn't find these documents and immediately called justice. They called his personal lawyers called the White House. That's who they called the White House, not justice, not the National Archives.

That's a really good point. It would be as if I called the local Fresno County sheriff and said, you know, 10 years ago, I stole some stuff and it's in my living room under the couch and you can come and get it. And they would say Victor Hansen called the sheriff to report, you know, that he did something wrong. But I didn't do it 10 years ago, did I? I didn't inform them. So he's had plenty of opportunities. And now when it's politically expedient and necessary, his team decided it was fine. After probably over a decade and a half half it was time to come clean and

then say that they brought forth this information voluntarily they didn't if they did they would have told us before the midterms if not years earlier i do think it's interesting i i don't think there's any way merrick garland can'd can prosecute uh donald trump after this i really i've been saying that for a while um but we did we did get his, our first statement from Merrick Garland, uh, yesterday or Monday on this. And this is what he said. Uh, this is of course, after the FBI conducted the most recent search of Joe Biden's home and did in fact, find more documents. Merrick Garland says, we do not have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or the powerless, different rules for the rich or for the poor.

We apply the facts and the law in each case in a neutral, nonpartisan manner. That is what we always do. OK, now that's a boilerplate statement for somebody like him. He wants to convince us of that, even though many of us would question it in his case. But Merrick Garland being a what I think is a hard partisan. Do you think there will be a way where he will try to do what we're seeing some of these Democrats do and say inadvertent different situation because of the signed affidavit in the Trump case? You know, they'd love to get out in any way they can. Do you think he will do this just because of his hard partisanship? I do, because he's done a lot of very stupid things. He's sick the FBI on parents in Virginia. He's had these performance art arrests of people like John Eastman taking his cell phone, big public, kind of a ceremonious type of

encounter. He's done the same thing with Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon. He's been a hard... Look at James O'Keefe. Look what they're doing to James O'Keefe right now. Yeah, absolutely. Took him out as an underwear at two in the morning for the crime of having Ashley Biden's diary either in his possession or at one time he had looked at it. And so, yeah, he's capable. I think he's been traumatized because of his experience years earlier when he was a nominee. And Mitch McConnell just squashed that using the Biden rule that he would not come up for confirmation of a lame-dope session. And ever since then, he's been on the warpath.. It doesn't matter. On the subject of James O'Keefe, there's another piece of that. So the James O'Keefe case and this case, the Trump-Mar-a-Lago raid, both have something in common, which is suddenly the New York Times and the Washington Post had the story like that. I covered justice for a number of years when I was at Fox and I was covering the Supreme Court.

I did a lot of justice reporting as well. They don't leak. It's impossible to get leaks out of justice. If you get something out of them, it's definitely by design and it's blessed at the highest level for good reasons in their views. So it is no accident. You remember the Roger Stone thing where they, Roger Stone, CNN was waiting there when the SWAT team came up. There's another one. They leak. And who, how did we learn that Donald Trump supposedly had nuclear codes? That came from the FBI. They deliberately leaked that. leak. And who who how did we learn that Donald Trump supposedly had nuclear codes that came from the FBI? They deliberately leaked that. Yeah. And they delete they leak that photo op picture with scattered and they didn't have any context. So the average American looked and said, oh, my God, Donald Trump had classified documents spread all over the closet floor. The FBI showed that to us. That was all photo op.

And the James O'Keefe raid that the FBI did because he had gotten access to Ashley's diary, which he did not wind up publishing. It is not a felony for a reporter to have stolen goods in his or her possession as long as he or she did not assist with the stealing. But they raided him in the middle of the night. And you know who had the story within a couple of hours? The New York Times. And there's a reason. It's not like James called them. The feds clearly let them in on it. So all of this stuff shows us that we have a politicized DOJ and FBI. But really, I think this is a DOJ call. I don't think the FBI would be randomly leaking. I think this came more likely from the top. And it does make me second guess my own predictions about what they'll do to Trump, because he's just got such a proven history of being a partisan as opposed to what he just said

in that statement. I wouldn't let the FBI off. I mean, if you look at the last four directors, Mueller claimed under oath that he didn't know what the dossier was, infusing GPS, which were the two pillars of his investigation that had prompted it. And then we had the next one, Comey, who under oath claimed 245 times he didn't know anything. And then we had the third one, Andrew McCabe, who confessed that he lied four times to a federal investigator. And why Bill Barr did not indict him, I don't know. And then we had Christopher Wray that said he couldn't really talk much because he had an appointment, which was a private trip to his home in the area on docks. And when you look at what will the FBI not do, Megan, they wiped the data of the Mueller investigation, those cell phones that were subpoenaed. We didn't have any of them. They

staggered the firing of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, so it looked like there was no connection between the two. They altered a FISA document with Clinesmith. And it's very weird what's happened in the United States. We on the traditional side were big supporters of law enforcement and the FBI, and the left was very critical. Now the left has adopted the FBI because they feel that they can avoid the logjam of the legislative branch and they can just enact social change very quickly. You could really see that when Andrew McCabe was quoted in the paid struck exchange as if Andy won't let this happen. There's no way we're not going to let this happen with Donald Trump. That was very scary because it was almost a coup. Then we get into Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe discussing whether

to wear a wire to entrap the president of the United States. So the FBI has been, and then that's not even getting into Michael Flynn and their sort of boast how they easily ambushed him in that crazy Logan Act. Or the fact that the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop since, what, April of 19 and did absolutely nothing to investigate it and then ran around telling all the social media companies, we were expecting some disinformation from Russia to hit soon. They hired him. They paid him $3 million as a contractor to suppress the truth. Absolutely.

That's a good point. And so I have no confidence in the FBI, and they have to get rid of that entire Washington cadre. If I had any say in it, I would break up the FBI, and I would move the division and farm it out to a different cabinet, the Homeland Security or Treasury, but do not concentrate that level of power in Washington, D.C. It's just a prescription for abuse.

We had a we had a former FBI guy on last week and I was asking him, what would you do to find the Supreme Court leaker? You know, what we've gotten on the leaker is, oh, oh, Gail, who's got a background as a lawyer who's now pretending she's an FBI agent, wasn't able to get to the bottom of it or so they would have us believe. And then they bring in Michael Chertoff to fig leaf it. Oh, I also see nothing little Gail could do. I guess we just have to throw up our hands and say, sad face, single tear. No, no, we'll never know. And I asked him, could the FBI actually get to the bottom of this? And he said, as a former FBI guy, he said, yes, but I wouldn't use the Washington field office, especially on something like

Supreme Court leaker. No, I don't know what's happened with the left. They used to idolize the Warren court and that was, they felt that they could fast track social change without legislative impediment. And it's very strange what happens. If you remember what they're doing with the leaker and then Chuck Schumer right at the doors of the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Gorsuch couldn't even, I mean, Kavanaugh couldn't even eat. They went into a restaurant. So the left has had these very strange tactics of, you know, they invaded the Kavanaugh hearing. They were boisterous. They had to get kicked out.

They confronted senators in the elevator. They followed Sinema on plane, into a bathroom. And it's also weird because the whole January 6th prosecution and hysteria was based on the idea that people improperly went into the Capitol to influence a political decision, which they did, and they should be prosecuted. But the fact that you have a U.S. senator threatening personally the Supreme Court judges, it's against the law, it's a federal law that you cannot go to a Supreme Court person's, a justice's house and demonstrate to influence a case. And they were just exempt. It was just amazing. And they're going to keep doing that. Well, that's a great segue into the Kavanaugh discussion because once again, once again,

he's being targeted. I mean, this guy, you'd think he took his licks in that confirmation hearing, which was unlike anything we'd ever seen before. As bad as the Clarence Thomas hearing was, it didn't hold a candle to what they did to Kavanaugh. And now they're coming out. I love that they continue to call these things documentaries. They're nothing of the kind. They're just opinion pieces. They're assassinations. It's yet another attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh in a different way. So the title of this documentary is Justice. And no one's seen it other than the people who were shown it on a surprise basis at the Sundance Film Festival, where apparently they just surprised the audience of some 300 people with it. You can't find it online, but they're looking for funding.

And I'm sure it will hit because this is, you know, of all the things you just said and the way that left feels about Kavanaugh is produced by Amy. Is it Herdy? H-E-R-D-Y. It was directed by the Bourne Identity Director, Doug Lyman. And these people have connections as well to like Lyman. He did swingers. He did Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I mean, he's he's got an impressive resume. This hurdy calls herself an investigative journalist, which would normally mean you have some fealty to the facts no matter where they take you. Not so in her case, from what I read. She served as the producer for the documentary Allen versus Pharaoh. This is the claim that Woody Allen molested his Mia's daughter, whatever their daughter together, Dylan Farrow. And even the Guardian far left publication said that that whole film was pure PR. Why else would it omit so much? So this is her history. So, and I could go on about her. She did this whole thing, like bashing the college sexual assault process as being unfair to the

women. The problem is exactly the opposite. Uh, and did a film that was criticized even by slate, even by lefties. So that's this woman's history. So should they come out now with this documentary where they're going to recirculate things we've already heard, Victor? It apparently is not based so much on Christine Blasey Ford. It's based on this other woman, Deborah Ramirez, who already came forward. We already heard her testimonial during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. She was the one who claimed that Kavanaugh, back when they were at Yale, allegedly exposed himself to her in a drunken circle of like Yale, he's playing some game. And but she remember the same woman who couldn't remember it. She actually didn't remember that until she sat for days with her lawyer.

And then suddenly it came back to her. The whole film is based on her. And they're saying that they've got a tip line over. They're getting tons of tips now on Kavanaugh from people don't feel like he's been adequately investigated. They'll never let up on this guy. Yeah. You know, I think what's happened, though, with this new Republican, even though they have a small margin, they've decided that you're never going to have symmetry or equity in the application of the law or procedures unless you give a dose of it back

to them. So this is why McCarthy is barring Schiff and people from the committees the way that that happened on the January 6th. I think they're going to do the same thing. They're going to say, you know what, if you're going to keep doing all of this stuff, we're going to open up the Delaware papers of Joe Biden. We've got hundreds and thousands of papers that have been esconced. And because we're going to get a subpoena, we're going to see that we're going to look at the Tara Reid. And so I think they're going to do each tit for tat until the left understands that there's consequences, whether that's, you know, on committees or the way that they ran the house or Adam Schiff's behavior. And the thing about Kavanaugh is it's all confined to basically they're saying here was an upper middle class Catholic preppy who went to prep school in Yale and he drank a lot for two or three years.

He was kind of rowdy. And I don't think American people are going to get too upset about that unless he did something criminal. There's been no evidence he ever did. And they have to go so far back. And I think the strategy is they always do this. They do two things when they get a John Paul Stevens or Brennan or Souter. They either try to flatter a Republican appointee and have the whole Georgetown circuit dinners to coerce them or flatter them or win them over to flip them. And they've been very successful.

You know, Eisenhower and Nixon and Jerry Ford and Bush appointees have been, they've gone very hard left. Or when they can't do that, then they reverse it and use not the carrot, but the stick. And they go after Clarence Thomas or Kavanaugh. They went after Gorsuch too. But the, and then the rules of them, the rules, the implicit rules that we're supposed to tolerate, Megan, or you don't do that to left-wing judges. You can't do that. If you're doing that, it would be sexist, racist, whatever. But I think a lot of people are understanding that they're never going to learn if you continue to play by the Marcus of Queensbury rule.

Yeah, exactly right. But to me, it's amazing that they won't they won't let up. I mean, the man was subject to an attempted assassination. I mean, the guy self-reported, but he was on his way to go kill Justice Kavanaugh. He was the subject of the conservatives were of this unprecedented leak, which further endangered them. They were not enforcing the laws against protest around the justices houses. They were not run running to fortify security around them during that period of the leak versus when the opinion actually came out reversing Roe versus Wade. They seem to want to get these guys hurt. I mean, if you wanted to get them hurt, would you behave any differently?

No, you wouldn't. I think if they don't want them to get hurt, they want to so intimidate them that I guess what they're thinking is that Gorsuch will go home to his wife and say, my gosh, I have to worry about the safety of our family. Any moment we're in danger, the assassin turned up. You know what? On this next case, I'm going to pull back a little bit. I'm going to do it with David Suga. I can't afford it any longer. I can't take this. That's their strategy. I don't think it's going to work. They tried it with Clarence Thomas. It backfired. He turned out to be the most adamantly conservative justice on the court. And so, they're Jacobins. They're capable of anything because they believe that they're they're jacobins they're capable of anything because they believe that they're so morally superior to all the rest of us that any methods uh or any methods are necessary and approved because the ends are so noble and once you get into that frame of mind they'll do anything

look at this look at this just this past sunday okay we thought this was over just this past sunday there are still these people out there it's huge, but it's here they are out in front of Justice's Justice Kavanaugh's house. Listen, they should not rule the court. Cut his time short. A rapist should not rule the court. Cut his time short. A rapist should not rule the court. Cut his time short. A rapist should not rule the court. Cut his time short. Rapists should not rule the court. Cut his time short. Rapists should not rule the court. That's enough of that. Yeah, I mean, they won't. And what does cut his time short mean, by the way? OK, because that's threatening, too. Yeah, I mean, it's a felony to go in front of a justice's home and be threatening to influence his ruling on the case. And that's what that was. They say

they're just generically demonstrating. No, it's always about a particular case such as abortion. Wait till the affirmative action case comes down. And I think that's one of the things they're thinking about. We're going to really intimidate these people and say, you know what? Abortion was nothing if you overturn affirmative action. It's very scary because very third world is what happens outside the United States. Well, and on that point, it's propaganda. What they're doing, and here's just a little more on the movie, per the Washington Post. They intersperse archival footage with testimonies from Christine Blasey Ford, uh, her friends and from this woman, Deborah Ramirez.

Um, they, the big reveal is a tip to the FBI from some guy who claims to have gone to Yale with Kavanaugh. And this guy, his name is Max Steyer, claims in this, this is the big moment, claims that, again, tip to the FBI, that he heard, did not witness about this alleged party incident with Ramirez 35 years ago, that he heard about it too. So he's offering some support for Ramirez 35 years ago that he heard about it too. So he's offering some support for Ramirez having seen Kavanaugh expose himself. And then secondly, he says that he had witnessed firsthand a separate incident of Kavanaugh exposing himself. What is less clear is that the, this man, Max Steyer, number one is a former Clinton lawyer. So he's a Democratic operative. Number two, he declined the filmmaker's request to comment on the contents used in that film. And he was not directly interviewed for the film and really wasn't participating in the film.

So you tell me, Victor, whether any stock should be put into the call to the FBI from this Democratic operative clearly trying to stop Brett Kavanaugh because he remembers the incident. Deborah Ramirez couldn't remember until she sat for days with her lawyer. And based on that and his reluctance to actually say it on camera where he could be held to account, this is the big reveal. And yet this is what the publications are going to go with, like new new evidence. FBI tipster. I know we've what the publications are going to go with. Like new new evidence. FBI tipster. I know we've already been through this with Michael Avenatti.

Remember this, the future presidential candidate? He went through all of this. He brought them in. It was total fraud. Then we had Mark Judge. They tried to destroy his career and his life. He wrote a book about it. So it's all been discussed. It's all been out there. It's been character assassination. It didn't stick. He's the Supreme Court justice. And they are paranoid now because you have a strong conservative majority in the way that they had a strong liberal majority for years, but they're asymmetrical. And they think, you know what, if the court is not left wing, then it's illegitimate and we can't change it. So we're going to go after individual conservative judges and so intimidate them and browbeat them and threaten

them that they will, in very nuanced ways, will sort of pull back and rule in a way that we've had a good record before of flipping Republican judges. And they do. I mean, it's very, yeah, it could be I'm leaving. I can make millions of dollars in private practice. I don't need a public servant's salary and constant threats at my house calling to cut my time short in front of my young children, my kids. And so like, I'm sure he this happened to Amy Coney Barrett, who's got young kids at home. The address is online. Especially during a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, because that, they could, you know, they'll get another appointment. Wouldn't matter if there's a Republican president in Senate, but now they have an opportunity. They write that, you'll find an article every two or three weeks about how unfair it is that there hasn't been a Biden appointee and they've

only got two years left and maybe this particular judge, Kagan, should step down and get a more radical person, a younger person. So they think about this nonstop because the court is, in their way of thinking, has been anti, in a way, anti-democratic in the good sense it bypasses the legislature it makes laws and it always makes laws uh in the progressive mode and they really like that and they think that they've lost that that that lever and they want it back at any cost and so that's that prompts all these other subsidiary discussions we need to pack the court to 15. just say if you just said pack the court, that was kind of a disgraceful moment in FDR's administration. And everybody, every historian knew that. And all of

a sudden, they recalibrated that as something that was good because it intimidated the Roosevelt-era judges that after that failed, it kind of won. They keep whining and bragging about now, well, we didn't pack the court. But if you look at subsequent FDR era Supreme Court rulings, they approved most of this New Deal after that. And that's what they think is a good formula. do. The propaganda is already out on this. I mentioned the Washington Post. This is their report about this Deborah Ramirez, again, who couldn't even remember the incident until all the days with her lawyer. This is the Washington Post's take on it. Though the interview doesn't contain much that hasn't already been reported, it's powerful to hear someone who doesn't enjoy being in the spotlight tell her own story with all the anguished starts and stops that come with trying to recall a nearly 40 year old traumatic event. So traumatic. She couldn't

remember it at all, uh, for 40 plus years. And even then after witnessing Christine Blasey Ford come forward, it took her quite a bit. I will say this as a lawyer, there's a reason we have statutes of limitation. It's because memories become unreliable and because it is unfair to the defendant after a certain amount of time passes to ask them to defend charges like this. They too lack the ability to go back and find contemporaneous witnesses and prove where they were on any given night. The system recognizes that would be an injustice to the accused. And to do via media what we are not able to do via a court of law is deeply unfair. When you are an investigative journalist like this woman claims,

you have an even heightened responsibility to make sure you are careful and judicious in the approach. And this ain't it. Victor, stand by. There's much, much more to get to with you. We'll pick it up right after this quick, quick break. So, Victor, this is just breaking. The United States is agreeing to send tanks to Ukraine, 31 of them, 31 Abrams MI tanks to Ukraine. Germany is sending 14. We wanted to get them to do it. They said, we're not doing it unless you do it. We don't want to look like the main aggressors in this thing. Otherwise, Russia is going to set its sights on us. So like we've been doing so often, we put our tail between our legs, came back home and said, all right, we'll send 31. That's my editorial. All told, with US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden,

and others expected announcements, Ukraine can expect to receive hundreds of tanks, which it does absolutely need if it wants to try to regain the upper hand in this war. The US is going to train the Ukrainian troops. That was one of our concerns that we didn't think they'd know how to use them. They're rather sophisticated pieces of machinery. The reporting is that it's not going very well over there. It's going. It's ongoing. The reason it wasn't a quick victory for Russia is the rest of us helping Ukraine, but that we may be looking at a sort of do or die spring for the Ukrainian troops. So where do you stand on the United States now? I mean, this is a significant escalation, sending 31 tanks to Ukraine. Yeah, this is the largest conventional war since the Korean War. Or maybe Vietnam wasn't, I mean, it wasn't conventional war like this. This is sort of a World War II curse, World War I Verdun.

And we forgot in our euphoria, because everybody admires Zelensky and, you know, that he was invaded. But the idea that he was going to stop Russia that has 10 times the GDP and almost four times the population, 30 times the territory was always predicated on the Europeans and the Americans matching that and trumping that advantage that Russia intrinsically enjoyed. So that means that for him to continue to fight, we have to support him at the continuous level or escalate. And the second thing he has to do if he wants to win, and he's defined victory, Megan, as getting every single Russian out of Ukraine and going back to the pre-2004 borders, that is before during the Obama administration, they took Eastern Ukraine, Crimea. But to achieve that grandiose strategic game, he's going to have to sink more ships of the Black Sea fleet.

He's already conducting raids 400 miles into Russia with drones and missiles to hit depots and supply areas. He's going to have to increase that. And I think there's going to be a level of escalation that at some point we're in a paradox because he has to escalate to achieve his strategic aims, but the very fact that he escalates is going to be considered intolerable at some point by the Russians. And I think they're going to say, well, yeah, during the Cold War, you guys supplied the people in Afghanistan to hurt us. We supplied the Vietnamese to hurt you. We supplied the Koreans during the Iraq War. We supplied the people in Afghanistan to hurt us. We supplied the Vietnamese to hurt you. We supplied the Koreans during the Iraq war. We supplied the Taliban. That's how it goes.

But this is different. It's right on our border. And this is a huge conventional army. And Ukraine used to be part of Russia. We're making new rules now about aiding a third party or proxy war. And we don't, the thing that's striking about it, we don't take that seriously. We just say, ah, he's just talking. He'd never use a tactical nuclear weapon. And so we just pour this stuff in. We take 300,000 shells from Israel. They're there for a reason in case there's a war and Israel runs out

and they need 155-millimeter shells. And when we give them an Abrams tank, the Abrams is the best tank in the world, but it has one great liability. It has a gas turbine engine, and it's a gas hog. So we have to bring them special tankers and protection of the tankers, a whole subsidiary army, basically, to allow these superb tanks to operate. And I think we're about five years now it will take to restock the Javelin supply depot. And when this is all happening, we've got the South Koreans, the Japanese,

the Australians, the Taiwanese are saying, are you able now to supply us if this same thing happens to us? And the answer is no, we're not. We've depleted our stocks. And it's very funny for the left to have this cause celeb and say, you know what, you got to give everything to Ukraine, but they've been opposing the defense budget and cutting it under Obama and now on Biden. And for Ukraine to be viable, you would have to have spending five or 6% of GDP on defense to rebuild all of our munitions so that we would be safe, you would have to have spending 5 or 6% of GDP on defense to rebuild all of our munitions so that we would be safe, they would have adequate weapon, and all our other allies could draw on them when they have their own Ukraine. And they're not doing any of that. It's almost as if, well,

we failed with Russian collusion, but we know Putin is evil, so we're going to transfer all of our exuberance over to Ukraine, and it's not going to be negotiable. You cannot discuss anything unless you're 100%, get every Russian out at any cost, then you're somehow an appeaser or you're pro-Putin. And I don't think Americans are going to accept that, not with an open border when you had 5 million entries, and we're over there to defend the sovereign borders of Ukraine and we're being attacked with a hundred thousand fentanyl deaths in the United States, most of it coming, the drug coming from Mexico. So they don't think this out and I think American people

are thinking it out and they're starting to have questions. It doesn't mean that they don't support Ukraine, but they're questioning at what level of support is necessary for Zelensky's strategy to work and how dangerous is that to the United States? And what are we doing elsewhere that's not in our interest, whether it's our own border or shorting our allies of specific weapons that we'll need to give them in the same situation? We're much closer to Japan and South Korea and Australia and Taiwan and Israel than we are to Ukraine. But yet, we've taken this one country and we've told the other allies, we're not going to have enough to supply you. In fact, we're going to take 300,000 shells out of Israel, which were there for your safety in case you've

got an extremist in a war with Iran or the Arab world. So these questions are not going to go away. And it doesn't do any good to call people names, which the left is doing now. I should remind our audience, this is probably obvious that Victor is also a war historian and knows what he's talking about, written about several wars and teaches this for a living as well. The escalation concerns me as an American citizen, as a mom, as you know, we're now doing the thing that Germany thought would get it in trouble with Russia. They didn't want to be the ones to support to supply the majority of the tanks. And now we're doing it and they're coming. They're backdrafting, but not as big a commitment as we are. The

Russians are angry and all everything we continue to do because we it's like we can just, you know, we can get them just over the line. We're just like this could be the deal breaker. This could be the thing that turns the tide in favor of Ukraine. And I don't know. I'm not sure whether we can turn the tide in favor of Ukraine. I hear all the reports you hear about the struggling Russian army, but Putin's got forces and they continue to replenish. And what I according to what I read, this is the attempt to sort of get ahead of some of that replenishment coming in the spring with these tanks. But what if they don't win? What if the tanks don't work out? What if the Russians are as angry as they say about the 31 or the 30 tanks that we're providing?

How in danger are the American children as a result of this? Well, that's a good point, because what's the next step? Because Russia has 144 million people and Ukraine has 40. So you can kill 300,000, they still got more available manpower than does Ukraine. And they're going to use it because it's an existential war they feel now at this point. And so we always say this is the ultimate weapon. The patriots are going to solve things. The drones are going to solve things. The tank, the ambulance, they're not.

It's just another escalation. And at some point, we had a member of the parliament in Russia say that he wanted to destroy Berlin today with a nuclear weapon. And we've had Turkey now threatening Greece and saying, you know, Greece, you're going to wake up some morning and there's going to be a missile coming into Athens over the dispute of the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey that have been Greek since antiquity. So the point is that this war is lowering the bar of international threats. And I call it nuclear porn. People are talking about nuclear weapons in a promiscuous fashion that they haven't since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And all of our bipartisan establishment just pooh-poohs out and says, oh, it doesn't matter. It does matter. And it's getting dangerous. You've got to take this very seriously.

It is getting dangerous and you can feel it. Stand by. Victor stays with us for another block as we take a quick break and then resume on immigration and a horrendous crime that just happened in California. So, Victor, I don't have to tell you that the immigration situation is getting even worse than we thought it could. The numbers are absolutely devastating, and Fox News has been doing a good job reporting on some of them, just a couple to bring it home. Border Patrol in Del Rio

continuing to arrest sex offenders, according to Bill Malugin of Fox. Ten sex offenders arrested so far in just January. 38 since October 1st. Majority are pedophilesiles convicted of sex crimes against children terror watch list uh names also crossing the border at record rates in fiscal year 2023 38 so far okay that just began on october 1st 38 so In fiscal year 22, it was a total of 98. Just to go back to 17, there were two. 18, there were six. 19, there were zero. So last year, we're at 98. And this year,

so far, just since October, we're at 38. So we're letting terrorists cross the border, and we're letting child molesters come in. And then we're putting them through a criminal justice system that has really no desire to prosecute anyone. How's that going? Yeah, I don't know. I don't understand it. I mean, there used to be the argument over there was a secure border, but the left wanted to have more people cross it. But there is no there is no border now. It doesn't exist with five million entries.

It's almost postmodern. They've just destroyed the border. It does not exist as we know it. And, you know, it filters into people's lives. I live 300 miles north of the border in California, but I can say, I have to be very careful because I live in a rural area, but I don't want to endanger my family. But I can say that within a two mile radius in the last three years, there's been three SWAT raids on homes where there were gang members that had a shootout. I could hear them shooting. There were chop shops.

I had a group of people who created a prostitution ring inside an orchard. And they were so bold, they put it on the internet, but they got the wrong address. So it was at my address. So for a year, we had people showing up not speaking English, looking for women at my home, even though we were at least a quarter mile away from where this illegal operation was running. And it's on and on. We've had it shop, shop. A month ago, I had a person come out in the driveway with a Glock tucked in his pants, and he was looking for his three-wheeler, he said,

which I was told later by the law enforcement that he had stolen it and had broken down somewhere in a field nearby. I've had a person with an AR-15 speak a language that I didn't know what the language was. It was some Oaxacan indigenous dialect, but it wasn't Spanish. And so these are things that people in rural California deal with all the time. You don't dare, Megan, go up into the Sierra Nevada in certain areas and hike because it's not that you will run into a marijuana farm run by hippies.

You will run into a marijuana farm run by the cartel. That's a different experience. It's changed everybody's life and we don't know why. The left is doing this, but is the purpose to import voters? Is it to help Mexico get the $60 million, $60 billion, excuse me, in remittances that we offer generous entitlements, health, education, housing, food subsidies, so that that frees up cash to send back to Mexico, its largest source of foreign exchange, 60 billion. I don't know what the idea is, but it's really destroying the United States. And people in our community that are mostly Mexican-American are the most adamant against it. You faded out for one second. You said they're more likely to run into, what would you say, a marijuana field being operated by the cartels?

Yes. Yeah. And that would be a good scenario rather than a meth lab or fentanyl distribution point. But they're all over the Sierra Nevada. And it's not just the old guys 10 years ago that were back to nature hippies growing pot up among the redwoods or the cedars or the pines. It's serious. And they don't fool around. The town of Goshen is about 15 miles from where I speak. And two weeks ago, they went into a house and executed six people, including a woman and her children, shot them in the head. This is the crime I wanted to bring up to you.

But before I do, I'll just set the table this way. Hearing you talk about what you've experienced as somebody who is close to the border, it puts the lie and the absurdity to the things we were hearing from those Martha's Vineyard residents, like in the 36 hours they had some unlawful immigrants there. They enriched our lives. That was actually a quote. They enriched our lives. Well, that's not the experience of actual border states who have to deal with these people who tend to be criminals. Like we just pointed out, a lot of them are criminals. The pedophiles, the terror watch list people, the criminals, the people associated with the cartels. And that brings us to Goshen, California, town of 5,000, straddles State Route 99, which is heavily trafficked commercial corridor, I'm told, connecting Interstate 5, which goes from the Mexican border. I live one mile from the 99. Okay. So this is Bayou. This is just January 16th.

3.38 in the morning, a teenage mother and her baby who were each shot point blank in their heads. And a 19 year old man who often stays up late, stayed up late playing video games. The baby was 10 months, months old. This is how the article describes the mother and the baby being killed. Um, the, the woman's name is Alyssa Perez, 16, who tried to flee only to be cornered by a gunman who stood over her as she clutched her baby, Nicholas, and fired rounds into their heads. Four generations of a single family murdered. according to the police, who also say these murders are the calling card of the Mexican drug cartels, that their tentacles have extended in recent years from the border regions and up and up and up into the farthest reaches of the country.

This is cartel action in a U.S. state. And it's unusual, correct me if I'm wrong, because normally even the cartels don't kill the women and the babies. I think that's kind of not operative, that idea anymore. Cartels, I think, are capable of anything. And the biggest thing that I find frightening is that no one wants to talk about it because, and I'll give you an example, I have to be very careful that there's a person that I know who works in my town, Mexican-American. And she told me that a gang member was attacking her son because he didn't speak Spanish. She got angry and reported that person as illegal.

That person went back to Mexico and called her on a cell phone and said, we know where you are, we know your house, and we're coming. And she's terrified. And so there's a new atmosphere in rural California that either law enforcement can't handle it or won't handle it or are scared themselves of it, but there's no protection. What I'm getting at is if you do something, if you're a drug dealer and you work with the cartels or you're doing what I'm doing right now, talking and you mention the cartels in any detail, then that's a very dangerous thing to do because there's not going to be anybody on the American side of law enforcement that can protect you.

Even if they want to, they can't. And this is all a result of sending five million people into the United States since Joe Biden took office and not deporting anybody. And the thing about Trump was that he tried and tried and tried. And he was undermined by people within his own administration, the courts, the left, that finally, right on the eve of COVID, he was successful. I mean, he pretty much had a secure border. And once you have a secure border, then you can go back and adjudicate this person, that person, should we deport them? You have a finite number you can deal with, but we don't now. And you have no idea. So what I'm getting at is I

walk my dogs before we came on the air, Megan, and there's a whole dryer. Somebody just came into the orchard and dropped a dryer and that sits next to a refrigerator. And if I don't get that out very quickly, then the word will get out in the illegal community that they can dump trash at this particular spot. A month ago, I walked out and there was somebody who didn't speak English with an AR-15 from my rudimentary Spanish. He said he was out shooting squirrels for bounties. I don't know if that's true or not, but my family's been here since 1870. And I grew up with stories of my grandfather telling about his grandfather, how they conquered malaria and typhoid and the depression. And I don't think they'd ever witnessed anything like this. And most of my family have left because of this. I'm the only

one who left on the farm and most of it's been sold off. But it's hard to live under those conditions, especially when it's politically incorrect off. But it's hard to live under those conditions, especially when it's politically incorrect to do what you and I are doing right now. We can't say that this is an illegal alien problem. Yet every time I pick up trash and refrigerators, which are dangerous with the doors open for kids to get into or car seats, the literature is all in Spanish. And I mean, bills, advertisements, newspapers. And if on a rare occasion, somebody will have an address. And if I call the sheriff or the police and say, would you go to this address? They won't do it. And on one occasion, I took all the trash and went over and dumped it on the guy's lawn.

And he told me it wasn't his fault because there's a stealthy, illegal trash service that goes around to houses where illegals live and picks up all their trash and throws it in people's orchards or vineyards. And so it's all known to the law enforcement. And what I get really angry is when I hear Gavin Newsom do these virtue signaling lectures, sermonizing about how illiberal everybody is to bring it up and how wonderful he is from all of these enclaves that he and Pelosi and Feinstein all live at, who were the architects of the destruction of the border here in California. Yeah, that's a good point. And what they're saying now is that it's not just where you live, that the cartels are expanding right now into more rural areas in America where they know for the most part they're going to be left alone by law enforcement and by others to the point where we're all afraid to talk about what's happening because nobody wants to wind up like this poor family. Again, maybe they had to. No, I don't. I mean, it involves every little thing though, Megan. If you want to get a building permit, like I did for solar panel, and you get inspectors out in rural California, they're faced with a dilemma. When they see these

old farmhouses that are now enclaves of illegal activity from people who were here illegally. You go in there and say you're having porta potties. You don't have a septic system. There's 50 people living in this house in this ground. You've got six trailers you've pulled up. Everything here is against code. Your dogs are unlicensed. They're not vaccinated. They could carry rabies. They're coming from Mexico. Or you go over to someone like me and say, you know what, I have to do something. So, you know, Victor, that's to get your solar permit. I need to get that shed. I need to have one quarter inch more support on that joist so that we can. So they are high to regulate. This is the most regulated and underregregulated state at the same time.

Because it's total chaos. And the regulatory people in this very hyper-regulated state, oh, my God, it'd be dangerous. And so when you say to them, as I have, why don't you just go down the road? Because everything is out of code. They'll say, are you crazy? I'm not going to risk my life. And if I did find an infraction, they're not going to support me because it would be racist or it would be unfair to the poor. So we have a whole alternate universe in California. And it involves very million people that don't follow the law.

There's no – I can buy anything that you and I have on or we're eating today within a five-mile radius at a rural crossroads. I can buy a shovel. I can buy a milkshake. I can buy jeans. I can buy a bicycle. It's all off the record. There's no sales tax. I don't know where it comes from. And people do that. And it's like the law doesn't exist anymore. It's like 1870s. Right. And this is why I don't know what to do about it. By Kevin McCarthy and others to impeach Mayorkas because he's not doing his job. I hope the border is secure. That's an obvious lie. And, you know, they're going to have to do something about it. It's reached the level that even Joe Biden went down there.

Why do you think, though? I'm curious about this, Megan. Why do you think they do it? Why do they want? Is it the future constituents? Are they under pressure by the Hispanic? What's the purpose of just destroying the border? I think it's two things. This is based on my exposure to New York City liberals for most of my adult life.

I think there is something to the fact that they want future voters and they call this, you know, the great replacement theory, this racist there, there actually could be a political motivation to get more people who they presume will be left-leaning voters into the country to get them citizenship or at least voting rights. Um, and that's, we've seen that in New York, the push to get non-citizens voting. So I do believe that there's a political motivation. And, but secondly, I know enough New York City liberals that I've had this conversation with

where you get this kind of talk, Victor. My parents came over by the Statue of Liberty. You know, this is the country that welcomes, give me your poor, your tired, whatever. That's what America is based on. You know, they think back to the 1900s when we were welcoming the Irish and we were welcoming the Italians

and we were welcoming, right? And they're like, what's the only reason not to be like that now is racism. That's the only reason we wouldn't be doing that. And they don't they really do look at the Martha's Vineyard people and the they enriched our lives and say, what's wrong with you that you would say no to these oppressed people who are just looking to support their families and just want a better life. And they ignore pedophiles, terrorists, people in your backyard, cartels, gangs, the fentanyl everywhere that is killing their kids, too. But they don't they have no interest in figuring out what the supply is, what the supply source is, because they would be in that lack of interest is predicated on the assumption that they either have the money or the influence or the wherewithal that they're never going to be subject to the consequences of their ideology, that their kids will go to a safe place or they will never be hit by a hit and run driver, which happens almost at 40 or 50% of all accidents out here where the driver just takes off after he hits you. I've had that happen before. I've had eight people before. I've had

eight people run off the road and destroy orchards and vineyards and just left, left the car there. And when every time I've taken a tractor and tried to pull it and sell it for junk, the highway patrol suddenly appears and says, we will arrest you if you do that. We have to impound that. And they give it back to the owner. Yes got yes i think that's that's it's got to stop because uh it's every country is not sovereign if it doesn't have borders historically yeah that's one of the reasons rome just imploded that that that is why it's such a smart strategy to to move some of these immigrants to places like these sanctuary cities or sanctuary states and give these people a dose of their own medicine just so they can see. And I'm sure most of these people are moving our law abiding

immigrants, illegal immigrants for the most part. Like they're not, they're not going to turn into a terrorist is what I'm trying to say there. I'm sure many of them are not child molesters. However, just the influx to the school system, to the town has been absolutely overwhelming for places, even as big as New York city. So to me, it's a good strategy. Otherwise, people up north, like, you know, up here in Connecticut, they don't care, Victor. They're like, this is Victor's problem. No, we're not. We're going to feel good about ourselves.

I know. You get the most adamant critics here are people who are Mexican-American, and they will say the following. That's 90% of the town that I live in. They will say, my grandmother needs dialysis. Now I can't get her in because there's a seven-hour wait because there's hundreds of people coming in. Or my son wants to have an AP. He's having AP. They might have to get rid of AP because they have to have English immersion or bilingual education for all these people. Or these young people that come in from Central America in gangs,

they make fun of third generation Mexican American kids and say they're gringos because they don't speak Spanish and they attack them. Or my daughter got hit out on a rural avenue and the driver left and she bled to death. So you hear that all the time. And because these people are not influential or rich, nobody cares. And that's what's striking. And that these people- And instead, what we have is Gavin Newsom bragging about how you have the strictest gun control laws in the nation, right? So good luck, you know, trying to arm yourself against these folks. And at the same time, spending time on things like reparations for slavery, 160 years ago, for people who were probably not descended from slaves at all, and certainly not

in California where there was no slavery. That's where he's devoting his energies. Yeah, he does. He has to because he has no record. He has the highest tax basket in the United States. He's got the most poor people, the highest poverty rate. It's a complete disaster, the infrastructure, the schools. And he's monster run for president. And everybody knows he's the antithesis of DeSantis' record in Florida. And so what he does is he just gloms on to the latest news story. We're in a very wet year. He let out 12 million acre feet. So because he didn't want to store it, because he doesn't want to give it to agriculture for which it was intended, went out to the ocean. And what did he say? Well, this is a sign of climate change. He was all ready to demagogue the shooting as if it was Trump, as other people did. And then he found out that it was Asians shooting Asians. And then he sort of backed off. But then he used that when during COVID, he said, this is a chance for progressive capitalism. When we had illegal immigration during

COVID, he said, we're going to give 500 million. He's 25 billion in the hole and 1% of the population here pay 50% of the income tax and 300,000 of them are leaving every year. So he knows that this is going to be a permanent deficit. And so he can't talk about his record. Gas is the highest in the country, except for Hawaii. Electricity is the highest in the country. And so it's a medieval society that we've created. It's a bunch of wealthy people along the coast, specifically in Silicon Valley, and then it's poor immigrants, and then the middle class is leaving. And the Reagan, Pete Wilson voters, they're gone. I know you say your family's been there since the 1800s. You have the farm, you have your life, you have your friends, you have everything. Do you ever think,

even you, Victor, at this point about leaving? All the time. All the time. And it's getting very hard because once a week, see, I drive into another world at Stanford in Palo Alto where I work, 180 miles away, and I have an apartment there. And then you have to deal with all this. And then you hear that from the Stanford faculty, what you and I were talking about. You're a racist. You wrote Mexifornia. How dare you? Linda is the best housekeeper I ever had. Juan cuts my lawn in a perfect fashion. Her Linda cooks for my grandmother.

How dare you say this? And then when you look at these people, they're all living in Winnebago's long El Camino Real because they can't afford it. And they're just a service class to these wealthy people. So all, you know, it's ironic. The people who created all these problems are this bi-coastal, largely white, upper, upper, upper class professional elite.

And they did it on the premise that they were very privileged and they thought they were morally superior to everybody. But of course, it would never happen to them. And that's what DeSantis and the other governors really understood, Abbott, that if you gave them a tiny dose, they would go ballistic, because they're basically exclusionary, and they have apartheid existences. They don't want to live around people unlike themselves. I don't know if it's a projection or what, but I've had people come from the coastal areas, very wealthy, to come out to our farm and visit. And they look around or they drive here

and they get very uneasy. And they say things like, why would you live here? These are very left-wing people. And I say, well, it's diversity. Why not? But I think it's the most crucial issue right now in the United States. And that's why I think you and I brought it up during the Ukraine, because we're fighting a foreign war to ensure sovereign borders when we can't. We refuse. There's not even an attempt. There's not even, again, a fig leaf at an attempt. Victor Davis Hanson, this is a great exchange. I'm really glad you were here today. A lot of important subjects, and you're just the man to tackle them. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Megan. educational, wasn't it? He's so interesting. He's just so articulate and he knows so much. He's a gift. Love talking to VDH. Up next, another big guest, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is here. Boy, is he making some headlines. We'll talk about some of them. My next guest served four years in the Trump administration, first as CIA director, then as America's top diplomat. On the job, he met with some of America's fiercest critics and enemies. Topics he discusses in great detail in his new book, Never Give an Inch, Fighting for the America I Love. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, welcome to the show. How

are you doing, sir? Very good, Megan. Thanks for having me on today. It's great to be back with you. My pleasure. Never Give an Inch. You could have called it never give and then expletive because you go there. You go to the places, the dark places. So, first of all, let me ask you what you think the general response to your book has been. It seems to me the mainstream press hates it. Yeah, that's that's fair. The mainstream press hates it. My friends and family who have read it said it sounds like me, so that's good. They said, Mike, that's your voice. I can hear you saying that. And the other reaction has been I've gotten

lots of comments that say, thank you. Thanks for defending the things that matter most to America. I was listening to a little bit with Victor Davis Hanson. We secured our southern border. We knew how to protect the United States from the folks who wanted to destroy our way of life. We were determined to achieve it. And on the things that really mattered, we never did give an inch. We fought hard for it, Megan. One of the stories making headlines is about possible talk during a Trump administration or with President Trump about replacing Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley. Can you tell us that story? Oh, sure. Chief Kelly, then the chief of staff for the president, General Kelly, called me one day and he said that one of the ambassadors,

one of my ambassadors, Ambassador Haley, had been in with the president. She told him she was going in for a private matter, but that he had later learned that she had gone in with Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump. And they were talking about replacing the vice president on the ballot in the 2020 election. He told me that he apologized to me. He wanted to make sure that when an ambassador was in there talking about foreign policy, that the secretary of state was aware of it. And so he said, my God, I didn't get it done. That's how that story came to my attention. I wrote it, Megan, actually for a different reason.

I wrote about that story because in the Trump administration, we had lots of turnover. We had lots of people who not only got fired, but a lot of people who gave up and quit. They were trying to protect their reputation. They had done their part. They checked the block. And I had no time for those people. There was too much to do. You hear us talk about 25th Amendment

and the like. I never for a moment, never for a moment thought about leaving when I had the incredible privilege to serve. We only got a handful of days to do it. And it took every single minute we had to try and get it right. I'm going to play Nikki Haley's response in a second, but you've also managed to upset John Bolton. I think that one was by design. You're upset, what, that he disclosed classified information according to you in his book? Yeah. Think about the people who weren't working on the team, Megan. They were supposed to be part of the team. He leads the administration and writes a book talking about intimate details about what happened in the White House while we're still in office. So imagine my next trip abroad where the foreign leader says, I could be a friend

or an adversary, I suppose, for that matter, hey, you've got a national security advisor that just wrote a book about what you and President Trump are doing. You think they're going to tell me something secret, dark, troubling, quiet, something they don't want shared? No, it is indecent to leave an administration and write a book about it while the president is still directing the nation. Did you get along with him when you were both in office and serving Trump, the administration? Largely did. He and I come from the same worldview in terms of keeping America safe. I've known John before he came in. I was happy to have him on the team fighting for America. And then somehow he just he couldn't he couldn't get it right. He worked for President

Trump and he never really understood that. And it angered him when he when he left. He threw a hissy fit and wrote a book. He's responded and Nikki Haley's responded to these claims we've just discussed. And here is a soundbite showing both of those a bit. My book went through a four month long pre-publication review process precisely to make sure there was no classified information in the book. This is entirely consistent with Trump behavior, trying to suppress other books. And that's what happened here. And I think Pompeo knows or should have known about it if he didn't know about it. It's incompetence in writing the book for not checking out the facts before he put it down on paper.

And if he did know about it, that's malicious and well beyond reckless to say things like that. Were you trying to get Mike Pence off of that ticket? No. And, you know, Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true. I never had a conversation with Jared Ivanko or the president about the vice presidentship. And, you know, what I'll tell you is it's really sad when you're having to go out there and put lies and gossip to sell a book. I mean, I don't know why he said it, but that's exactly why I stayed out of D.C. as much as possible to get away from the drama and get away from the gossip. It's sad. And your book is full of lies and gossip, in particular on that claim.

How do you respond? Everything I wrote, I stand by. Why would she lie? I can't account for it. I don't. She gets to say what she wants. For me, Megan, this isn't personal. This isn't remotely about me.

It's not about selling books. It's not about Ambassador Haley or Ambassador Bolton. This is about America. I wrote a story about an administration that was working against the tide of the mainstream media that suffered under the Russia hoax, that had many conservatives that just didn't want to be part of the team, that didn't want to be around Donald Trump. Let's be honest about it. You'd have people call you, Megan, and say, everything he touches just turns to ash. Get away, Mike. You have your reputation. And a lot of folks took that bait. They took this, I didn't. I didn't do it for a second. I knew that America mattered too much. And for those folks who either didn't want to be part of the team or didn't want to work on behalf of America

or who had important jobs, or so they say, the jobs were important and then quit, I had no time for those folks. So what's your level of confidence on the Nikki Haley conversation? Because she says Pompeo even says he's not sure if it's true. And you say John Kelly is the one who told you what happened. I know two things for sure. John Kelly told me that happened. Obviously, I wasn't in the room. John Kelly told me it happened.

I knew him to be someone who told the truth. And second, Kellyanne Conway has confirmed this story. She thinks it's true as well. You can ask her why she believes that. All right. How about John Bolton? Because I've heard you suggest that, well, in the book, he should be in jail for spilling classified information and accusing him of treason. You heard his response that he didn't disclose any classified information, that there was a long pre-publication review. That was point number one. Yeah. There was a district judge that had a different view of the information in his book.

The Trump administration tried to stop it. He ran afoul of that by publishing the book. And the judge basically says, well, there's nothing I can do. It's already out there. Now, both of these people are, we know in John Bolton's case, we suspect in Nikki Haley's potential presidential contenders, Bolton announced on Good Morning Britain. That's that's where it's done. And Nikki Haley, we expect is probably going to throw her hat in, though it's uncertain. You as well are always mentioned and polled as a potential contender. So is all of this just 2024 presidential politics we're watching? Oh, God. This isn't about personalities.

This is about who's ready to fight, who's ready to actually deliver, who not only has been in that, who's ready to go do it. I wrote this book months and months ago, long before Ambassador Bolton made his announcement on whatever show he said he made it on. I had no idea he was thinking about running for president. It seems, anyway, I'm surprised. Suffice it to say, this isn't remotely about what I'll choose to do in 2024 or those candidates.

This is about presenting a case to the American people for how I worked as CIA director and secretary of state. And there's some fun stories. There's some great stories. The media has picked out a handful of things to try and create catfights. It's the worst of Washington. But I think the American people also need to know who was there, who was prepared to actually work every day for four years to get good outcomes for them. Now, one person we know is running for president in 2024. Forgive me a

little walk down the lane of presidential politics while we're there is Donald Trump, your old boss. You think you could beat him? Only the American people will get to sort that out. Okay. So you're not saying no. And have you made a decision on whether you're likely to throw your hat in that ring? I haven't made the decision and will only run if I believe two things. One, that there's a chance that I can beat and beat everybody who decides to get in the race. That is, I can ultimately be successful. And second, I believe that if the American people gave me that mandate, that I could actually deliver the outcomes for them. It's not enough to win elections. That's important. You got to win for it to matter. But in the end, what really matters is at the end of eight years,

did you get it done? Did you actually achieve the things you promised the American people you would? If you think you can do those two things, you have a duty to get in. You mentioned your time as CIA chief, and that's sort of in the news these days because of all this classified information, right? Like I'm sure you had a security clearance and saw a lot of things that the rest of us are not allowed to see. So, first of all, have you gone back and checked all your boxes to make sure you don't have any hanging out in your garage? I don't have a Corvette, so I think it's unlikely I parked any there. More seriously, I've done a pretty good review of everything I have.

I think we've got everything in the right place. Two other thoughts about that, Megan. I did. I handled tens of thousands of classified documents. I had a SCIF in my home, both as CI director and Secretary of State. Just explain what that is. A secure facility, a contained facility where the documents, when they come in the house, that's where they go. Inside of that room, there is a safe. When you leave that room, you put the documents back in the safe, spin the safe, leave the room, spin the door on the office as well. That's the secure comp, but that's the process. I was pretty diligent about it. Is it possible I got it wrong at some point in time? I suppose. Two other thoughts. If someone says, boy, Mike, when you were on the House Intelligence Committee, you did X and you did Y. If I did, the first thing

I'll do is make sure we get it back in the box as quickly as we can. And second, I'll own it. I won't blame staff. I won't blame somebody else. And unlike President Biden, I would regret having done that, having failed to protect that information. I handled lots of it and we kept it secret for a reason. And we have every obligation to try and get it right. How does a senator get a classified document in his home? That one's very puzzling to me, Megan. I served on the House Intelligence Committee and House members don't have skips in their home. When you read classified material as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, it material as a member of the House

Intelligence Committee, it is in the basement of the Capitol in that secure environment. You walk into a room, the documents are there on the table. You read them. When you leave the room, the documents are there on the table. You leave them. It confounds me how someone in the legislative branch would have gotten documents to the Penn Biden Center or to their home somewhere. I don't know. At this point, what's your take on, I mean, your lawyer, on whether Trump gets prosecuted in light of all we've seen with Biden and now Pence? Oh, you know, I don't want to predict what they'll do. They've behaved politically in raiding their home. I was on the Benghazi committee making you'll remember those days.

I think it's where I first met you. We found classified information on Hillary Clinton's server in New York, in Chappaqua. They didn't raid their home. We got the information back. So I hope when they make decisions about whether they're going to file claims or administrative or prosecute, I hope that they will do it not based on politics, but based on the law. That would be the right thing to do. But realistically, realistically, what will Merrick Garland do? I don't know what the attorney general will do. He's behaved politically in too many cases.

I hope that doesn't happen here. I don't know. I feel like the political considerations weigh against doing this. They do. I realize there may be a partisan goal of getting Trump, but realistically, how is the American public going to respond if everybody and their brother has classified documents coming out their ears who used to serve in the administration, but Trump's the only one who gets it? They're not going to get the nuance of, oh, but there was a signed declaration saying we've given it. That's my take on it.

Yeah. I think that's probably right. I think the fact that now this is broadened and deepened probably makes it less likely that he's prosecuted. But Megan, I'll say one other thing. I was a young soldier, granted, four decades ago. I handled classified information then, too, as a lieutenant in the United States Army. prosecuted for mishandling of information. We should make sure not only that we don't divide left-right, Democrat, Republican, but that we don't let senior officials off the hook when we prosecute more junior people for their mishandling of classified information. Fair, equitable, even. That should be the rule. Let me shift gears back to Victor Davis Hanson, since you say you heard part of that, and that the last part was about immigration and how bad it is. And you have an interesting anecdote in the book about Trump and immigration. Let me read from it in part. You write between the border and trade issues. We talked about Mexico almost daily early on at one presidential daily brief briefing. The president was trying to

get a sense of Mexico's capabilities relative to those of the U.S. Mike, he mused, how would we do it if we went to war with Mexico? Sir, I quipped, they'd come in second. This is a great line. But talk a little bit about Trump's thoughts on Mexico and his understanding of the southern border. Yeah, he knew, as do I, that without sovereignty, nations are weak. And without sovereignty, you risk your republic. And when you have an open border, dangerous things happen. Not only the people which we're He campaigned on, you remember, right? Build the wall. He tweeted it dozens of times. And so the whole administration was focused on it. As a CIA director, I was down there as Secretary of State. I was probably in Mexico more than any other Secretary of State.

And in the end, it took us a couple of years. We finally got it right, Megan. We created what became Remain in Mexico. I went down to Mexico with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and made clear to the Mexican government they were going to let us return people who claimed asylum in the United States back to Mexico. And it did the trick. The caravan stopped. The huge flows of people stopped. We secured our border. It is possible to do. I hear Vice President Harris say we've got to go to root causes. She's just that's just nutty. You don't need to go to root causes. We know how to secure our southern border. We have to do it.

Why do you think, Victor was asking me why I think they're not enforcing the southern border at all in this administration, Victor saying we don't have one anymore. What do you think is the reason that they refuse to do anything about it? I think there's just different motivations. I think in the progressive left, they view America as evil and not the greatest nation in the history of civilization the way that I do. And so if we reject someone here, we're contributing to that racist history of our country. I think in some of their minds, there's that we have to be decent, we have to be nice. And that means opening our border to anyone who wants to come here. They're simply wrong about that. Second, I think there's some who think, gosh, it'd be just great if we have these folks here. We need them for labor. So I think there is a

commercial aspect to this as well. And I think that toxic mix, mostly on the left, drives their set of policies where they have absolutely no intention of securing our southern border all right let's move on to china because uh there's an allegation that you were told in your book by trump to stand down on some of your criticisms of china or xi jinping by trump because he needed to have a relationship with them and getting if i remember correctly ppe uh supplies from china during the covid pandemic. So is it true he told you to lay off your criticisms of the Chinese? Yes, he told me to shut the hell up. There was a phone call between him and Xi Jinping. I was on the call. I assumed the Chinese foreign minister was on the phone call too. And Xi Jinping just railed at me. I am full-throated in my view that the Chinese Communist Party

is the singular threat to the United States of America. Just like we took down the Soviet Union, we're going to have to defeat the Chinese Communist Party as well. And we were at this critical moment when we had the Wuhan virus spreading across America, and we needed stuff out of China. Think masks, think gloves, think ventilators, think all of that kind of protective gear. And Xi Jinping basically threatened the United States

and said, if Secretary Pompeo continues to talk the way he is, I won't let that equipment out. And so it was late at night Washington time, if I remember right. And President Trump called me back afterwards and said, man, that guy effing hates you. And from what Xi afterwards and said, man, that guy effing hates you. And from what Xi Jinping has said, I think that is a fair summary of his views of me. They've not sanctioned me, confirming

just exactly that. And the president basically said, hey, we got to get this stuff in. You need to be quiet for a while. And if you look at the record, I actually did that. And then were you loud again? Yes. And I am today as well. Do you think it was the right call by Trump just to have you put a muzzle on you for time being so we could get what we needed? I think probably was. I think we should have taken even stronger actions to get that stuff out. It was stuff we bought, stuff we purchased. Most of it was coming from companies that were American companies operating inside of

China. The fact that we let ourselves to get into that place, to be dependent on China, to have this stuff, pharmaceuticals included, that we needed was tragic. But in that moment, it may well have been the right decision. Trigger, trigger the talk about masks and PPE equipment. Let's move on from that. Let's mosey on over to North Korea.

Sorry, didn't mean to trigger anyone. Sorry, Megan. You've been around the world in this job. Actually, that's part of the fun of the book. North Korea. So, you know, in your job, you have to deal with friends and foes alike. And the visit by Trump over there, you know, made headlines around the world. What was your take on whether that was worth it and Trump's approach to North Korea?

Absolutely worth it. I was fully supportive of our engagement policy and indeed having the summits. I thought it made enormous sense. For 25, 30 years, we tried everything else. None of that had worked. And this was worth doing. I was sent on the very first mission over there on Easter weekend of 2018. It was really amazing. Three Americans were held hostage. We got them out. By the way, we got them out without paying a dime, no pallets of cash. We didn't apologize for America.

We didn't trade Victor Boot. We didn't do any of that. We just said we want our guys home, and we got them back the best of American power. In the end, Megan, we weren't successful at our grand objective. Our grand objective was to get Chairman Kidd to give up his full weapons of mass destruction program. So we didn't achieve that. But during our time after that first summit, not a single long range missile test, not a single nuclear test. We got the hostages. We got the remains of some four dozen Americans returned to their families. So the project was worthy and we had a real opportunity. In the end, we didn't pull it off. I know you think you were the top diplomat negotiating that relationship, but really we all know it was Dennis Rodman. So if you're an honest man, I had him on my show at NBC after he came back. He gave me a basketball of Kim Jong-il or Trump and Dennis Rodman. Can you imagine what I could sell that for right now, Mike? Can you imagine the dollar value of that thing? There are two great Dennis Rodman stories in the book,

too. I hope folks will go read them. He was there an awful lot. He's the Henry Kissinger of our time. All right, let's talk about Jamal Khashoggi, because you've made some comments about him, a journalist writing for The Washington Post who was murdered by the Saudi regime. And you called him an activist and were critical of him questioning his journalism credentials and lambasting what you call the media's sympathetic coverage of his brutal murder in Saudi Arabia. The Washington Post has some thoughts for you on that. Last night, they came out and called this a revolting embrace of MBS and say that you coddled the person who sent the Khashoggi hit squad. They find it absolutely reprehensible that you would take a shot at Khashoggi in any way, never mind criticize the media coverage of that brutal murder. What's your response? Yeah, the left media lost their mind on this thing. Let's go to first principles. My task was to defend the American people and our security and our prosperity. The Saudi Senate team to kill Jamal Khashoggi, that is bad. Sign me up. That is murder. It's always bad. I personally sanctioned 13 Saudi

officials for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. I signed the documents myself. We took it incredibly seriously. But what we weren't going to do was put the American people at risk because of this. We weren't going to walk away from the relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, important commercial partners, important security partners. We have soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines stationed there. We weren't going to risk that relationship because of it. We wanted to keep America safe, and it was my judgment. I recommended to the president, he agreed with me, that we were going to both hold the Saudis accountable for what they did and also maintain the relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It turned out to be

incredibly important. Megan, you'll remember, when COVID breaks out, oil prices go to minus 30. Minus 30. We had to deal with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to make sure that they reduced their output so that we wouldn't destroy the American energy industry. Flip to the other side. President Biden, a couple of years later, says the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a pariah state. And we get exactly what you'd expect. We get an American economy that is about to be destroyed by them, while President Biden then has to go and beg for more oil from that place. We understood the things that matter. We were prepared to defend them. I was totally prepared to take abuse from the Washington Post for having done so. And I regret only this. The Washington Post ran a full-on campaign. They

ran full-page ads about Jamal Khashoggi. I wish they'd have done that about the Iranians when they held Americans. I wish they'd done that about the 13 Americans who were killed in Afghanistan. They completely misunderstood how we deal with friends, partners, allies who do outrageous things like murder someone like Jamal Khashoggi and still protect America. It is possible to do both. Are their ethics situational? I can't. They'll have to account for what they did. I am fully confident that we got this one exactly right. They go on to say that your case you're making that the Middle East is a tough neighborhood is lame and it's ignorant and that you never really cracked down on Saudi Arabia. In fact,

that you refuse to impose serious penalties against them. I assume you dispute that. But do you, in retrospect, wish we had gone a little harder on them so that we could we could adhere to the deterrence principle? No, look, remember, we're not trying to deter Saudi Arabia. They don't have rockets and missiles fired at Israel. Well, we don't want them to kill any American journalists, however. No, we don't want them to kill anyone. No, no American, no non-American. No, that's exactly right. No, I think we got it right. The people that we had evidence that we could demonstrate were connected to that. We sanctioned them all. Is there anything in this book about our dueling Easter bunny cakes? You mentioned Easter. Anything in there at all? You know, I should I should have put it in there. Didn't quite make it. It's on Easter's coming. Game on, Megan. All right. People got to go back

and look at my first interview of Secretary Pompeo to see what we are talking about. It's called never give an inch fascinating read. If you're not in a lured into it already, the Washington post calls it says hatred animates this book. It's got more venom than a quiver of Cobras, which I think will make people want to read it. Maybe they were doing you a solid bike. Thank you for being here. Thanks Megan. So long. Good luck with it. It's available right now. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.