The Megyn Kelly Show - Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Episode Date: January 30, 2025Megyn Kelly begins the show by talking with aviation experts John Hansman and Matthew "Whiz" Buckley about the tragic plane and helicopter crash in Washington D.C., what likely caused it, how rare thi...s type of accident is, and more. Then Glenn Greenwald, host of Rumble's "System Update," joins to discuss the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard during her senate confirmation hearing, the non-stop focus on Edward Snowden, why Gabbard wouldn't say Snowden isn't a "traitor" when pressed on it, Gabbard's fight against the bipartisan establishment, the hypocrisy about leaking classified documents, Kash Patel sparring with Democratic senators like Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal at his confirmation hearing, the truth about the Deep State, and more. Then Calley Means, author of "Good Energy," joins to make a direct plea to GOP Senator Bill Cassidy to vote yes on RFK Jr., the truth about toxins and children's health, how to restore trust in science, the fear-mongering about RFK Jr. from the left and the right, the corporate capture and deference to Big Pharma, the attempts to distract from the real issues, and more.Buckley- https://nofallenheroesfoundation.org/Hansman- https://aeroastro.mit.edu/people/r-john-hansman/Greenwald- https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwaldMeans- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/727184/good-energy-by-casey-means-md-and-calley-means/JustThrive: Visit https://JustThriveHealth.com and use code MEGYN for 20% off your first 90 day bottle.Birch Gold: Text MK to 989898 and get your free info kit on goldFirecracker Farm: Get 10% off with code MK at https://Firecracker.Farm/Grand Canyon University: https://GCU.eduFollow 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
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and our second show from Washington, D.C. today.
We actually had planned on sticking around this morning and we were going to do the interview with Marco Rubio,
which we already released today.
Check it out.
A lot of interesting stuff in there.
It's his first long foreign sit down
since becoming Secretary of State.
And then we were going to fly home
and cover the Kash Patel, the Tulsi Gabbard
and the second day of our FKJ hearings
from our home studio in Connecticut. And that
plan fell apart after the horrific plane crash last night here in D.C. I just I mean, I'm sure
like you, I've not been able to stop thinking about it. I'm absolutely devastated for these
67 families now who have the most horrific experience in front of them and now behind them
of waiting in the airport to see if there's any sort of good news coming out of this awful tragedy.
And then late last night, we were told it was a recovery mission. They did not believe at any
point thereafter that they actually could actually save anyone, which seemed clear with a helicopter slamming into a regional American Airlines jet. I mean,
it was a fireball in the sky. And here in D.C., we were in our hotel room, Abby and I.
And in downtown D.C., you could hear the sirens, one after the other, after the other.
We were actually supposed to be flying out of Reagan today, like right now. And we knew that wasn't going to happen. Amazingly, then they did open the airport.
And I just, like, I cannot imagine. We are flying later today. I just can't imagine
flying out of Reagan right now with that scene still in recovery and them still trying to find the bodies, the remains of
those killed. They don't have everybody. The last number I heard was 28 bodies from the plane and
one from the helicopter have been recovered and the family members must be in a holding area.
Just in such pain, I cannot stop thinking about them. So we're going to start the show today with news
on the plane and we'll bring you the very latest. It's truly like all anybody's talking about.
And then we will get to the politics happening in D.C. because President Trump,
if there's one thing we've learned over the past 24 hours is he needs his cabinet in place.
He needs his top advisors.
And yes, thankfully, he has Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation.
It was his first day, couple of hours on the job.
And Hegseth had been confirmed to DOD, which obviously is involved because of the helicopter. But God forbid this had been an international crisis or a terrorist attack.
He needs his DNI.
He needs his FBI director.
He needs his CIA.
He needs all of them. He needs his FBI director. He needs to see he needs all of them.
So no more jerking around. You know, these senators stop. Stop delaying. If you're going
to vote no, then you're going to vote no. Then go ahead and vote no. You're allowed to vote no.
But stop with the we need additional documents. We need seven more rounds of questioning.
It's like this is serious stuff we're dealing with here. There were three major
Trump administration confirmation hearings today after we interviewed the Secretary of State. We
did go by the Tulsi Gabbard hearing, which was actually quite interesting. It wasn't full of
fireworks, although there were some, as we saw with RFKJ yesterday, or certainly what happened
over in the Kash Patel hearing today. But my God, it was like almost only because it was uniform opposition to her. It was amazing.
Usually you sit in these things, you can tell which side is the Dem, which side is the Republican by
who's giving them the hardest time. And today, I think she got a tougher time from the Republicans
than she did from the Democrats, with the exception of Michael Bennett.
Or at least that was my impression in the hour plus I was in there.
We've got all the highlights. And then later in the show, we're going to have Callie Means, who's going to talk to us about the RFKJ nomination.
We're also, after we start with the plane, going to get to Glenn Greenwald.
He's got a lot to say about Tulsi and cash. He wasn't mentioned
that I heard by name, but his reporting was by almost every senator. Glenn is the journalist
who published the Edward Snowden leaks on the NSA spying program, the domestic spying program,
or, you know, that's not exactly how they refer to it. And he, I think, is completely aligned with Tulsi's worldview about that needing to stop and about Snowden deserving a pardon.
I know that. He's in favor of that.
So we'll talk to him about whether these were fair attacks inbounds, out of bounds, and whether we were being told the truth by the senators who are all over her today.
But we begin with a tragic crash. It was an Army Black Hawk helicopter
that collided with American Eagle Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, arriving here in D.C. at
Reagan National. Sixty-seven dead, 60 passengers, four crew members, plus the three soldiers aboard
the helicopter just before 9 p.m. last night. The jets plunged into the icy waters of the Potomac.
While yesterday here in D.C. it was above 50 degrees, the water temperature was still just above 30, 35 degrees, they say, which comes as no surprise after weeks of it being just a frozen tundra down here. was much of the Northeast. It was a horrific accident that is leaving us all, those of us
here in D.C. and beyond, across the world wondering, how on earth could this happen?
John Hansman is the chair of the Federal Aviation Administration Research Engineering and Development
Advisory Committee. He joins me along with Matthew Wiz Buckley, decorated U.S. Naval aviator and Top Gun graduate.
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John, Wiz, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.
John, I'll start with you with that question. How on earth could this have happened?
Well, we're obviously still looking at all the information that's coming in, but apparently this was sort of good visual conditions. Airplanes could see each other
in an area like Washington National. You have military operations to the Pentagon and things
like that, and you have the airport right there. So it's not unusual in these kind of conditions
for the air traffic controllers to allow the airplanes to look at each other and self-separate.
In this case, the controller had given the clearance to the helicopter to avoid the traffic to basically had them in sight.
And apparently, for whatever reason, the helicopter pilots got distracted or something happened and they
didn't see the airplane and collided. I mean, didn't see the airplane. I guess we have to
rule that in as a possibility, Wiz, because you can hear the controller saying,
forgive me for not having the exact quote, but can you see the plane? And the answer was yes.
And then the collision happened seconds
thereafter. It was something like seven to 10 seconds thereafter. So we don't know, you know,
the instruction, the question is a little vague, you know, which plane must've been obvious to the
air traffic controller, but we don't know that it was obvious to the helicopter pilot.
Megan, you nailed it. First of all, good afternoon. And you're right. Very, very somber day,
just absolutely devastating. But I think you nailed it. Well, all, good afternoon. And you're right. Very, very somber day. Just absolutely devastating.
But I think you nailed it. When the pilot in command or the pilot in the helicopter said, hey, traffic in sight, it clearly most likely wasn't the same. Once the air traffic controller hears from the Hilo crew, hey, traffic in sight, kind of a mental check in his mind that says, OK, let me go do some other things now.
He has that traffic in sight.
Clearly, he didn't have that exact traffic in sight because he ends up hitting him.
Might have had a different traffic in sight, might have gotten test saturated, as John alluded to.
But I've seen what are allegedly the ATC tapes.
I'm pretty sure they are the real ATC tapes on X.
And when you have two contacts on your scope going towards each other, you got to say something.
The controller could have potentially come up and said, hey, PAT-25, confirm that you have traffic left 11, same altitude in sight. So maybe a little bit more directive. But as John alluded to, and you certainly said, worried, it's almost passe to say, but it is a
hell of a lot more dangerous driving to the airport. This doesn't happen too often because
of the safeguards, of the visual lookout that we have, of the air traffic control procedures.
Something broke down. And as John knows, in aviation mishaps, we call it a Swiss cheese
model, right? All the holes have to align up for a mishap to happen.
And it's going to be very interesting to see what the different holes are.
But Megan, when I went to Pensacola Naval Air Station as a young naval aviator, they
told me a couple of things.
Aviation is a self-cleaning oven.
You have got to have the most elite, the most qualified individuals in the cockpit and in
the tower. Because years ago,
CRM, crew resource management, we actually brought the controllers technically into the cockpit.
They're kind of a crew member. And I'll never forget one of my crusty flight instructors
telling me, hey, Wiz, everybody's trying to kill you, including you. So keep your head on a swivel.
Can you guys explain, I don't know, John,
maybe this is for you, but can you explain what we're seeing in that video that we just played?
Because I mean, if you look at it closely, you can see what appears to be the plane,
the regional jet, the American jet in the front. And then there does appear to be another aircraft.
I'm assuming it's the helicopter, but I don't know. Coming from behind, like almost, it looks almost like it's chasing the plane. But I don't know that that's
the helicopter. Yeah, I think, and I don't know if you want to play it again, but the helicopter
is actually, it's just a very, a light dot that's moving from left to right. Okay. In the airplane,
you're actually seeing their landing light coming at you there.
In the bigger picture, there was another airplane behind.
So what happens in a place like Logan or I'm sorry, National, you'll have multiple airplanes lining up.
So this is the way you might. So the one you see now in the distance is an airplane that's behind. Right.
But see, yes, there's something approaching it. So that's not the helicopter. That's a different airplane. Yeah, the helicopter
is coming from left to right in the image. So it's a very faint line. They don't have a very
light thing. And so this is one of the issues, you know, did the helicopter pick up the wrong
traffic? They were given the location when they acknowledged the traffic over the bridge at 1,200 feet.
So they knew where to look.
They saw a target there.
Was it the right one?
It's not clear.
The other thing that we understand is that this was a night training mission.
One of the things that happens in night training missions is the pilots will be actually using night vision goggles.
Normally, you would not use night vision goggles in the city.
You would use it in a dark area.
But who knows?
Through the goggles, in the goggles, things kind of blow up, so they're harder to get depth perception.
So night vision goggles would not be good.
I've never worn them, so I don't know.
But you would not want those on the helicopters.
You wouldn't be using them near the city because what happens is when you have lots of lights,
they kind of glare out or they blow out on the image.
So it's hard to distinguish things.
So use the night vision goggles in dark areas.
And when you get to where there's lots of lights, you would normally not use them. So I would be surprised if they were using them. The one other thing I would say is
that, oh, I'm sorry. No, no, you go ahead, John, finish. Oh, yeah. So the controller did point out
a few seconds before that, did see they were close and did confirm to the helicopter, go behind the
jet, don't go in front of it. So there was acknowledgement
on the part of the controller. They did do a reminder to the airplane. It may have been too
late by that point. So do we think, Wiz, that this was, does it look to you at this point like
helicopter pilot error? Because what I'm seeing on the screen and what I'm hearing from you guys
isn't really looking at the pilot of that regional jet so much as, you know, what was this helicopter doing?
No, exactly.
The RJ crew, they were in the zone.
They were clear of the land, gear down, flaps down, stabilized approach.
They're looking at the runway environment.
Is there an airliner on there?
Is somebody crossing?
They are singularly focused.
If I was the captain of that RJ and I heard a potential traffic call and I heard that traffic say, hey, that guy's in sight, done, I'm going to press forward here.
So nothing on the RJ crew.
And Megan, I'll be honest with you, as a naval aviator, after these type of mishaps, I'm torn, right?
Because you don't want to spike the football. But also as an aviator, we type of mishaps, I'm torn, right? Because you don't want to, you don't want to spike the football,
but also as an aviator, we want to dig into this.
Half the crowd says, oh, we need to wait for the investigation.
Everybody, nuh-uh.
I'm not in that crowd.
I'm in the crowd of this is aviation, man.
We have got to figure out what is it?
Oxum's razor, right?
The most reasonable thing often is. So in this case,
the pilot in command of the army helicopter is you signed for the jet. I was a single seat F-18
pilot as a young 27 year old kid. I took a pen and I signed for that airplane. I am the pilot
in command and ultimately responsible. So on that mission and last night when, Hey, traffic in sight, I got this again. I,
I, I, I hate talking like this in this type of moment, but at the end of the day, it's most
likely going to, uh, to come down to that. This since day one of aviation, uh, Megan, it's don't
hit anything in the sky or anything on the ground. That's kind of rule number one of aviation and the,
the controllers do their best to help us out.
But at the end of the day, it's eyeballs in the cockpit.
And as I said earlier, everybody in aviation is trying to kill you, including you.
So you have to keep your head on a swivel.
As John alluded to.
No air.
No.
And in and around Reagan, you know, DCA, that whole area, it's almost the Battle of Britain. Sometimes you have VIP helicopters, you got airliners and it's very crowded airspace, even though it's the most controlled airspace on the planet, especially neck is going to stand up with a lot of aviators in a lot of environments that say, hey, man, we have got to keep eyeballs out of the cockpit and let's not hit anything.
Mission objective number one. It feels like the helicopter should not be allowed anywhere near
the path of these commercial airliners, though I realize they've been doing it a lot without any
incidents. So it's like, OK, just because one went bad doesn't say it should all be banned.
But John, is there some minimum required distance that they're supposed to keep, you know, when they're in the airspace?
There is minimum distance that depends on the conditions.
So if it had been cloudy and they were being controlled by radar, there is a minimum distance that has to be separated, which is actually very large.
As a result of that, that slows traffic down into Reagan, et cetera. So
you would actually have to shut off the jet traffic to allow a helicopter to go by. And it's
not just the military helicopters. At the same time, there was a medevac helicopter that was
operating in the airspace. So this is really a result of Reagan being so close to the city. And they've worked out
procedures where the helicopters stay over the water and move around. So there are sort of
standard procedures. And the minimum when you're given visual separation and you accept the
responsibility, which the helicopter did, is that you then,
you're responsible for staying out of it. But there is no minimum distance at that point. It's
just where you feel safe and clear. So I think the real question is...
Would you know as a helicopter pilot, you just, I mean, I don't know, is there a calculation that
shows you how big you are and how close you're getting to the plane? Or is it just your knowledge of this is the size of the aircraft I'm in and I don't want to get anywhere near that?
It's like driving your car around a parking lot. Don't hit the other car. Don't hit the other airplane.
So, I mean, you're used to the different dynamics and speeds in whatever.
And, you know, they should have been able to do it.
So was there a miscalculation? Did they get distracted? Did they see the wrong target? Were they using night vision goggles or something? We don't know that. This in accident investigation is to dig into the cause. What is
it that would have caused the pilots to be head down? And we don't know what that is right now.
So, you know. I mean, I suppose we should be open the possibility of helicopter malfunction,
too. I mean, we don't know for sure. Yeah. I mean, with something going on in the helicopter
with somebody sick and they get distracted. That's what I'm saying. There can be distraction. There could be equipment problems.
You know, and this was a training mission. They could have been focused on what they were doing
on the training. So we don't know. But they, up until that point, appeared to be operating normally.
So what were you going to say? Well, no, there wasn't any last minute call, you know, hey, an emergency out of the Hilo or any issues.
I think the final calls were like, hey, traffic in sight type of thing.
But John brings up a good point. We have no idea what happened in the Hilo cockpit.
Somebody dropped something. Hey, you take your goggles.
Were they having a split goggle cockpit? Hey, put the goggles on to see how bright the city is and
how these things are worthless you have no idea what was going on did the crew chief
come up and say something so it is you know with three people in the helo there's potentially a lot
going on or a last minute uh issue with the aircraft whenever there's black boxes will show us all of that. They potentially should, right?
Yeah.
Not on the Hilo side, but mishap investigators usually start at the top with everything, right?
Was it weather?
They kind of step through a checklist of was it this?
And it'll be left with just it's kind of an inverse funnel of what it most likely was.
But there's always potential human factors.
My pal Janice Dean was reporting the weather this morning for Fox,
telling us that last night, while it was windy here in D.C.,
very windy yesterday, by the time this happened last night,
just before 9 p.m., the wind had died down.
It was extremely clear.
The temperature had calmed down, too.
She was convinced as a meteorologist that weather was not a factor in this, though she said bad weather is coming, which is going to affect the rescue workers as of tonight.
Bad winds and rains.
And, you know, you just got to feel for the first responders and the families still on site hoping for any sort of miracle, John.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, but it doesn't look pretty good right now.
You know what, Megan, real, real quick. I, the control tower folks, I'm equally as devastated
because the folks in the tower, I guarantee you were second guessing. You can, I think on one of
the tapes, you can hear an audible gasp in ap. And I've never been to air traffic control school,
but I can probably speak with some authority
that on day one, they teach you,
let's not have two airplanes hit on your watch.
So all those folks who are on duty,
I'm feeling for them too and the families.
Just absolutely devastating.
Me too, it's so awful.
All these ice skaters, our young promising ice skaters, the future of our U.S. Olympic team.
Apparently it was the young ones, not the ones who will compete in a year, but the ones who would be competing in four years after that.
And some, at least 14 members of the U.S. figure skating team believed to have been killed.
That doesn't include parents and coaches.
These two Russian figure skaters who had moved to the United States,
Evgenia Shiskova and Vadim Naubov, married 1994 World Pairs champions. Just the beauty of those
two on the ice. And to think of just these promising, incredibly talented, I'm sure they'd
been sharing their gifts, athletes with everything in front of them. And then the others, you know, we haven't gotten
all the details, but undoubtedly there will have been children, there will have been grandmas,
there will have been people who had no idea that getting on a flight from Kansas to Washington,
D.C. would be the last thing they'd ever do. The only comfort to me as somebody who has a
mild to moderate fear of flying
is that they wouldn't have suffered guys right i mean like they wouldn't have suffered this would
have been a very quick ending yeah yeah it's uh it said megan in 15 years of flying hornets i lost
16 buddies and not one of them was a combat loss. So my heart definitely goes out to obviously all the civilians too.
But three army folks woke up yesterday, threw on their flight suits and did not expect that this happened.
And they passed serving their country.
So God bless them as well too.
And they take an oath to protect and defend.
They're out there to save lives.
That's what those guys are doing in no way.
Clearly, did they mean to do anything that would cost them? Guys, thank you. Thanks so much for your expertise and for being here. Yeah. Thanks, Megan. Thank you. Thank you.
Say a prayer for the families and for the first responders. And he's right for the air traffic
controllers who still have to go out there and do their job. You know, I'm not a great flyer.
My friend, Abby, a different Abby, and I have been joking
for years that we're going to go learn how to fly, you know, because they said that's what
cures fear of flying, but I'm too afraid to do it. But here are some of the stats that were
circulating last night. Every day, more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers traveling for work or fun
or to visit friends and family and trust their lives to the FAA. More than 45,000 flights a day.
And we have not had an aircraft crash like this since 2009. Think about that. Think about that.
And then, hold on, my pal Yashar Ali, independent journalist,
last night tweeted out the following. He said, I know this doesn't always help,
but please remember that the last time there was a commercial airline crash in the U.S. was in 2009.
Since then, there have been over 150 million commercial flights in the U.S. alone. Not one
crash until tonight. Commercial air travel is
the safest mode of transportation. Now, that's absolutely true. More than 150 million flights.
Totally safe. No crash. But the New York Times had an article in August, this past August,
about how close calls happen far more often than was previously known publicly. Multiple times a
week, they said, involving commercial airlines, including thanks to mistakes by air traffic
controllers stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage. And obviously there's the
risk of pilot error as well. And this is one of the reasons why President Trump, we have no idea.
This is not a DEI comment, but that's one of the reasons why he's eliminating DEI in all aspects of the government, including the FAA.
This industry, all industries, but this industry and the medical industry where lives are at risk must, must be based truly solely on merit.
So beyond that, it's so hard.
We're going to do things to fix the risk of a helicopter running into a plane.
We'll put those patches in place.
But every once in a while, out of 150 million, you're going to have an accident.
And the thing about air travel is it's just so catastrophic.
It's not like a car crash where, you know, it's tragic enough if a family dies or a couple dies.
But, you know, to see 67 people dead in an instant right over the nation's capital is traumatic.
It's jarring for regular Americans who get on planes all the time.
And it's just part of living in a free society where air travel is the miracle it is, and we use it and rely on it heavily. I, despite my fear of flying, will be back on an airplane today
out of Washington, and God willing, I'll be fine and so will you. But prayers for those
affected by the horrific tragedy in D.C. today.
Glenn Grewald is here. We'll be right back as we take a turn to politics. is releasing their ultimate guide for gold in the Trump era with a foreword by Donald Trump Jr. To get your free copy, along with Birch Gold's free information kit on gold,
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over into gold with Birch. Text MK to the number 989898 today. It was an extremely busy day on
Capitol Hill, so let's get into two of the hearings,
and we'll do the third in a minute. Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel. My next guest is the perfect
person to be discussing those with. He's Glenn Greenwald, and he's the host of Rumble's System
Update. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, which we mention every time he comes on. Well, we don't
always mention what it was for. It was his reporting at The Guardian at the time based on the documents that were provided to him by Edward Snowden, whose name was mentioned nonstop at the Gabbard hearing today. coming. But I mean, if you had walked into the room and offered to testify at that moment,
they would have said yes in a heartbeat to cross-examine you like they did with Tulsi.
Let me play a little sound before we get into it. And I'll kick it off with, okay, I'm going to do,
I'm going to do three sound bites. Okay. And I'm going to set it up and then you're going to take
it on Snowden. But I want to give the audience a feel. Here first is a Democrat. He was the one
who first started it, Senator Angus King, Democrat of Maine. His was rather gentle. Here's how it
went. The first item, Edward Snowden perpetrated the largest and most damaging public release of
classified information in U.S. intelligence history. Snowden caused tremendous damage
to national security and the vast majority of the documents
he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy. But you don't
recall ever seeing the work of that committee. I'm aware of those conclusions drawn.
You're aware now, or were you aware at the time? Yes, I was, Senator. Edward Snowden broke the law.
There's no question about
that. He should not have released all of that information that caused that harm. So he broke
the law, but it wasn't all that serious? Is that what you thought in 2020? I take very seriously
upholding our Constitution. Confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, I would take seriously
the responsibility to protect our nation's secrets, just as I have for almost 20 years of holding a security clearance of some sort myself.
All right, I lied. I'm going to show you two soundbites because they're too long.
That was that was a Democrat. Now here's Republican James Langford of Oklahoma trying to dig down on Snowden, too.
Was Edward Snowden a traitor?
Senator, my heart is with my commitment
to our Constitution and our nation's security.
Ours too.
Thank you.
I have shown throughout my almost 22 years of service
in the military, as well as my time in Congress,
how seriously I take the privilege
of having access to classified information.
Was he a traitor at the time when he took America's secrets, released them in public,
and then ran to China and became a Russian citizen?
Senator, I'm focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again.
Well, they didn't stop there, Glenn. As you know, they, I guess I will play it, Forgive me. I just want to set it up properly. Michael Bennett, he's a Democrat from Colorado, went all in and was not happy that she would not sign on to the T word traitor. Watch.
Was Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?
Senator, I will also repeat my answer. He broke the law. You said,
Senator, I've confirmed this is when the rubber hits the road. I will work with you to make sure
that there is not another Snowden-like leak. This is not a moment for social media. It's not a moment
to propagate theories, conspiracy theories, or attacks on journalism in the United States. This is when you need to
answer the questions of the people whose votes you're asking for. As my colleague said, this is
not about you. It's about the people that serve the intelligence agencies of the United States.
Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?
That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high.
Senator, as someone who has served in uniform...
Your answer, yes or no, is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?
As someone who has worn our uniform in combat,
I understand how critical our national security is. Apparently you don't.
Okay, Glenn, having said it all up, your thoughts.
Obviously, the question of what Edward Snowden did, whether he did everything exactly the way people think he should have, is a point that can be debated, has been debated for a long time.
One thing I will note is that at the time of the reporting, there was a lot of support, both from the left and the right, the kind of anti-establishment populist wings of both parties.
I remember it very well. And it was the centrist, bipartisan establishment wing that was enraged by what Edward Snowden did. Because what
he did, I think we have to remember, is in this question of whether he's a traitor. Let's remember
that like Tulsi Gabbard, Edward Snowden, after 9-11, went to enlist in the United States Army.
He heeded his government's call to go to war to defend his country. He then went to work for the
CIA and the NSA. And only there did he discover that the NSA was doing things that it was never supposed to be doing, namely turning its very powerful surveillance tools onto its own citizenry.
It was always supposed to be directed outward and spying on Americans without warrants in ways that Obama's national security DNI, his chief intelligence officer, James Clapper, falsely denied to Congress that they were doing. And he felt duty bound to come forward and let his fellow citizens know.
And some of the programs we were able to reveal as a result of what he did ended up being declared both unconstitutional and illegal.
And none of the people on this committee are angry about that.
They're only angry at him for having exposed it because these people on this committee have supreme loyalty to the part of our government that's secret and that has been abusing its power, which is why President Trump
picked her to go in and confront that. The other thing I want to say, Megan, this idea of who's a
traitor or not, being a traitor means you tried to betray your country. You tried to harm your
country and help your enemies. Edward Stone didn't have this archive of information that he was
entitled to have. He had
classified top secret security clearance. Think of all the things he could have done with that
archive. He could have sold it to some foreign government or some group of non-state actors
that made a huge amount of money. He could have passed it secretly to America's enemies. He could
have dumped it all on the internet without regard to what it was exposing. He did none of that. He
came to American journalists, myself, who was working at The Guardian, Laura Poitras, who was working with The Washington Post.
And he said, I only want you to reveal what is necessary to reveal that's in the public interest for Americans to know.
And all the decisions that were made about what got released and what weren't were decisions that we as journalists made. He played no role in deciding what was
released and what wasn't. And the vast majority of the archive to this very day was never released
because we acted in accordance with his very conservative views about how the archive should
be treated. So again, you can dispute things he did, say he should have done things in a different
path. But the idea that he was a traitor when he could have done so many things to harm the United
States and everything he did was about protecting the privacy rights of American citizens as
guaranteed by the Constitution that courts said were being violated. That's why Tulsi defended
him, not because she believed everything he did was perfect, but because she knew that he was the
only person with the courage to come forward and risk his liberty and risk his life, which he did
in a very courageous way simply to
let american citizens know what their government was doing to them in the dark and i think
this kind of histrionics about demanding that he should call him a traitor is so is ridiculous and
the one last point i wanted to make megan quickly if i could you know i know tulsi i have a lot of
respect for her even though i disagree with her I think I was just talking to your team about this. If you look at those clips you just showed, Tulsi knew so well that if she had just called
him a traitor, her path to confirmation would have been much clearer.
But she doesn't think he's a traitor.
So she refused to do that because she's not willing to say things she doesn't believe
in order to advance her own career or gain power.
Why didn't she say no character?
I actually was thinking about that because I feel like if if you'd been out there, you would say, no, he's not
a traitor. And let me explain why. Why do you think she because she just knew she'd be losing
too many Republican votes in particular if she was just forthright? Yeah, I mean, and maybe even
Democrats. I mean, probably Republicans, though, if she had said no, that she does not think he's
a traitor, her confirmation possibilities would be over.
They're already at risk, but it would have been over.
And so you could say, yeah, she should just do it on principle and go down with the fight.
And then they'll just put somebody in that seat after her who says, yeah, trade Snowden is a traitor who should be murdered.
The government did nothing wrong. The CIA did nothing wrong or the NSA.
You know, what's the victory in that? But the fact she wouldn't affirm false claims,
I think is what made what she did. So I don't know. I wish she had said no. But if she had
said no, her nomination would have been destroyed. So it was striking to me to see how much time was
spent on that. Granted, I was only there for about an hour and 15 minutes of the whole thing. But
that almost that entire time was spent on Snowden. I was thinking I'd be drunk if we were playing the Snowden drinking game, Glenn.
And then swoops in, right before I left, Senator Ted Young, Republican from Indiana, who is a critical vote.
And I don't feel good about him voting yes on Tulsi.
I could be wrong. You know, it could be like a Cassidy situation with RFKJ
where like he played it in a way
that confused me at the hearing
and he winds up voting yes.
I don't know whether Cassidy's gonna vote yes,
but I didn't feel so good about Ted Young
and I know a lot of eyes are on him.
He also brought up the Snowden stuff
and here's how that went.
Was Edward Snowden false to an obligation
or false to a duty?
I don't understand what you're saying.
False?
Yes.
Did he betray a duty?
Did he betray the trust of the American people?
Which is according to Merriam-Webster, that's the definition of a traitor.
Edward Snowden broke the law and he released this information in a way that he
should not have. He also acknowledged and exposed information that was unconstitutional, which drove
a lot of the reforms that this body has made over the years to make sure that Americans'
constitutional rights are protected. For what it's worth, Mr. Snowden is watching these proceedings. He's posted on social media even,
indicating that Tulsi Gabbard should indicate that I harm national security.
This may be the rare instance in which I agree with Mr. Snowden.
What are your thoughts on that one, Glenn?
Okay. First of all, go and look at that tweet just to get an understanding for how politicians so readily lie. The tweet was saying, look, if Tulsi Gabbard needs to say that I harm national security and the sweet feelings of people in Washington, have her go
say it. I know it's the Pledge of Allegiance you're required to take in Washington. He wasn't
saying, oh, I'm here to finally confess that I harm national security. And yet that's the claim.
And I have to say, there's so many claims that get made about Snowden. I know we don't have time to go into them. I just did a
segment on it last night about how he ended up in Russia. He didn't choose to go there. He was
trying to pass through there. The Obama administration trapped him there. All the
things that are used against him. But be that as it may, I think the key point here is that when
Donald Trump ran in 2016 and when he ran again, he did not run against the Democratic Party. He
ran against the establishment wings of both parties, what he called the swamp. People who believe that
these institutions should never be reformed, that they never err, they're there to protect the
status quo. They don't want Washington changed. Trump ran on a promise telling the American
people what they already believe, which is that these institutions are fundamentally broken,
that he wants to go in and radically restructure them, rebuild them and make them work how they're supposed to work in the interest of the American people and not
against them. And the nominees he sent there are people who shared that commitment, at least the
ones that are controversial, to change these institutions that haven't been working. And I
think it's important to realize that there are a lot of people in Congress, Senate Republicans
and Democrats, who are very much have that pro-establishment ethos.
And even though they have to praise Trump and pretend they're on his side, they very much are there to subvert and impede what he does.
And you're seeing a lot of that in these committee confirmation hearings.
I mean, it was pretty amazing.
John Cornyn, too, Republican, was all over her, not on Snowden, but on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FISA court and the warrants
and Tulsi's reversal, which again, you tell me if you disagree, she had to reverse herself
on the use of the FISA court and these warrants or she never would have been, she'd have zero
chance of getting confirmed. So she did an 11th hour like, oh, I support it even though I've been
very against it because they amended it and they made some changes that were acceptable. Literally, she might have just kissed her
nomination goodbye if she hadn't said that. And so these senators were not accepting the reversal.
And Republicans like the FISA court. They're now much more controversial under Trump and with MAGA,
but old school George W. Bush Republicans love FISA. So John Cornyn is part of that crew. And here's a little
bit of how he and he was bringing up the 702, this provision, which allows these these behaviors
under FISA. Watch. Are you aware that overwhelmingly the courts that have looked at a challenge to
Section 702 based on the Fourth Amendment and any potential warrant requirement have overwhelmingly said that the Fourth Amendment is not
implicated by search of lawfully collected intelligence? I am aware, yes
Senator. What would be necessary to be shown in order to establish probable
cause to a judge in order to obtain a warrant? Again, Senator, that's not for me to say.
That would be for you all to decide and for the Attorney General to weigh in on.
Do you know what the elements of probable cause are and whether that's a practical
and workable solution? This is the center of the debate,
the high standard of probable cause that's required to get a warrant.
Where would the warrant be sought?
Would it be in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
or would it be in some other Article 3 court?
My understanding is that it would be in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Are you aware of the fact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
has held that a warrant is not required?
I am aware.
I'm going to put him down for a no too, Glenn. Am I wrong?
Probably not wrong, unfortunately. I do think he might actually get a yes vote from Senator
Wyden, whose entire career has been about warning of the dangers of NSA spying on Americans without
warrants. But Megan, it was like a Jekyll and Hyde from yesterday with RFKJ with with with him.
Why? I know. I was like, I know. And there she was, you know, agreeing with him. I guess the NSA
has too many. But I just want people to understand what this issue is that they're debating.
Since when is it a plank of the Republican Party or the American right that the federal government
should have the right to spy on the communication of American citizens, which is what we're talking about here, without any warrants
required by law. We all grew up studying the Bill of Rights and are taught that the Bill of Rights
is what distinguishes our country from all the others. And I actually agree with that. I have a
lot of critiques of the United States. I treat with reverence the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
The idea that the government can't spy on us without warrants is foundational to everything that we believe in.
And here is John Cornyn on behalf of the Republican Party treating Tulsi Gabbard like she's unqualified for a position in government because she believes the government should only be able to spy on American citizens once they first get the warrants required by the Constitution and the law. And this is what I'm trying to say. You have
a huge part of the Republican Party still who has to pretend and appease Donald Trump because he is
by far the most popular person in the Republican Party. They don't actually, they're far more
ideologically aligned with a lot of the established members of the Democratic Party than they are with
Donald Trump and the people who worked so hard to get him elected and the ideology that he defended
in order to be elected.
And this is what you're seeing.
Tulsi Gabbard isn't there because Chuck Schumer chose her.
She's there because Donald Trump did.
And now they're going to vote in secret, which gives them the ability to vote no without
any real precautions.
And I do have a lot of concerns about her nomination and the fact that her nomination
is endangered because she has been a longtime
defender, both in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, of the privacy rights of
American citizens is mind-blowing to me, but so reflective of how Washington politics has changed
in so many ways. Now, I am nowhere near as neck deep on FISA as you are, but I do remember the
Fox News days of defending the FISA court
and the FISA warrants because we were post 9-11. We were very scared and they were using the FISA
court to try to get warrants on people they believe might be domestic terrorists, might be,
you know, going to let off a bomb. And so in that posture, I was like, great, do it, go, go for it.
And I remember defending even the NSA program
that Snowden leaked on and you revealed in your reporting
to some extent because it was,
they defended it by saying
we weren't really spying on Americans.
What we were doing was we would,
if a suspected foreign terrorist was talking to an American,
then we would listen to the conversation.
But you had to have that link.
It wasn't just like, let's listen to Megan and Glenn. It was, oh, Meghan's having a conversation with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Yes, we're tapping in and we're not going to give
her all of her Fourth Amendment rights before we do that. So can you take those two points on?
Yeah. So let's remember that the most dangerous part of American history was the Cold War
under in the 60s, the 50s, 60s, 70s and the 80s through the Reagan administration and then Bush 41.
The entire time when the U.S. government, the NSA, the CIA were spying on phone calls,
if they learned that they were spying on a foreign national and they began speaking to
an American citizen, they would have to hang up the phone and go and get a warrant.
We managed to win the Cold War despite
the warrant requirement being honored against all those presidents. And the reason why that's
necessary is because we found out in the mid-70s with the church committee that the CIA, the FBI,
the NSA had been wildly abusing their spying power for years against political opponents,
for blackmail purposes. And the FISA court was an
exception. It said, look, this isn't a real court. It's going to be in the DOJ. Only the government
goes. And 99 percent of the cases are going to get the warrant anyway. But the need to have to
justify it at least provide some safeguards without actually impeding the executive branch's
ability to spy. And as you say, it was only in the wake of 9-11 when George Bush and Dick Cheney
said, we don't care what the law says. Start spying even if it's on Americans without the warrants
required by law. Lots of things happened right after 9-11, but we're far away from 9-11 now.
People in both parties have said this is too dangerous to allow the government to do. The
founders viewed the warrant requirement as absolutely central to securing a free
country. Again, you can debate it. But the idea that Tulsi favors a
warrant requirement for American citizens cannot possibly be disqualifying. The other part about
the program that Snowden revealed, that's 702. The main program that he revealed that ended up
being declared unconstitutional legal was the fact that the NSA was collecting all of the
information about all of our telephone calls, where we were, with whom we
were speaking, for what duration, including by and among American citizens without warrants and
in complete secrecy. And when you can find out the so-called metadata, meaning I called a HIV doctor,
you called an abortion clinic, you're talking to some person that's not your spouse late at night,
you get a very comprehensive picture of the person
whose data you've collected. And they were collecting that data on every single American
on U.S. soil, unbeknownst to not even the people in Congress with no warrant or supervision at all.
That was the program that most bothered Edward Snowden. That was the first one I reported at
The Guardian. And that's the one that courts found were both unconstitutional and illegal,
which again, you can debate all these other
details. But to try and claim that someone's a traitor or that they somehow are in in in
unfit to serve in government because they believe in a warrant requirement or think it's a good
thing that we found out our government was violating our constitutional rights. That's
when I think you see this fanaticism to protect the U.S. security state. That's very unhealthy
for our democracy. Well, it's like you broke trust. He broke trust with the United States. Like, OK,
if that's going to be our standard for declaring someone a traitor, Joe Biden is going to have to
be accused of being a traitor. I mean, like how many lies did he I'm not going to pardon my son.
I never did business with my son. Oh, and by the way, I'm totally competent to do the job.
Kamala Harris, she should she's a traitor because she told those same lies and they weren't true. It's like that can't, that dictionary and he's going to probably vote her down. I know she can still head to the floor, but how can she get
a vote? I think that I think even the floor vote can be stopped if she doesn't get cloture, if she
doesn't get 60 votes for cloture. So I don't know, Glenn, I think that nomination is in trouble.
Yeah, me too. And just by the way, the Constitution defines treason being a traitor. It means aiding and abetting an American enemy in a time of war. That's what treason is. He still doesn't know treason. But yeah, it's and also you can pick up the newspaper every day, as you all know, Megan, and every article begins with according to classified documents provided by the New York Times.
Washington leaks classified documents every single day. People in the highest levels of government
for their own purposes.
No one thinks they're a traitor.
Yeah, maybe that could stop
if we got somebody at the top of all those agencies
who could be trusted to protect Americans'
Fourth Amendment rights,
to be honest with President Trump
about the intelligence assessments that are coming in,
and wouldn't be so interested
in seeing her information appear
in the pages of
the Washington Post or in overseeing organizations that have people like that. I mean, what could
happen if we tried radical change there, too, in the same way we're trying radical change at
DOD and hopefully HHS? Like, that's the point of Tulsi. What we've been doing has led to
the collapse in some ways of some of our most fundamental ideals in our country.
And people have had it. That's why they elected Trump. He said he was going to put her, you know,
at the top. It's just there is a mandate for Trump's nominees. Why can't we just try it? I
don't know. Like they want us to believe we're going to get bombed tomorrow by some terrorist
organization because Tulsi said no to FISA or Tulsi thinks Edward Snowden might not be a traitor.
And that's really impugning
the woman's integrity as someone who's not a patriot, who doesn't love the country, who won't
act in our best interests. And I'll just I'll play this one last soundbite, then I'll give it back to
you and then we'll move on to cash. But here was Tulsi defending some of these attacks in a more
sweeping form and as part of her opening statement in Satu. You may hear lies and smears in this hearing that will challenge my loyalty to and my love
for our country. Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone
other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States.
Accusing me of being Trump's puppet, Putin's puppet,
Assad's puppet, a guru's puppet, Modi's puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously
being the puppet of five different puppet masters. The fact is what truly unsettles
my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet.
That nails it.
That nails it. And also, anyone who knows Tulsi will tell you that of all the people who are in prominent positions in Washington politics, she's basically the least likely to submit to
someone else's will or do as she told. I think there's a lot of assumptions going on there that
she's incapable of real autonomy. She always has to have men pulling her strings. There's a lot of
kind of embedded assumptions going on. And also, you know, I remember the time that I was most
offended. Hillary Clinton, who voted to send people to the Iraq war because she knew it would
serve her presidential aspirations, but of course, never went and fought herself. No one in her
family did never got near a front line. Tulsi Gabbard answers the call of people like Hillary Clinton
and Washington, George Bush, et cetera,
to go fight in Iraq.
She goes and risks her life there.
She's been in the military for 20 years.
She still is.
She's a lieutenant colonel in the military.
And then Hillary Clinton turned around in 2016
and said, I think she's being controlled by the Russians.
Her loyalties lie elsewhere.
And then you have all these people today, again,
trying to say that somehow she's in Putin's pocket or she's in Assad's pocket. It is really reprehensible. You can disagree with
Tulsi Gabbard's view on Syria or Russia or Ukraine, whatever. Those things should be debated
and are debated. And like you said, what's the worst thing that can happen? You put someone like
that into a position, you have a debate, you have vibrancy. There's still safeguards. You can
impeach her if she really does any of these worst case scenario things.
But to watch somebody who has given their entire lives to being deployed overseas, to putting their life in harm's way for their country, and then have a bunch of politicians who send people to war but never go and fight them or send their kids to go to fight them, impugning her patriotism constantly or her integrity is really disgusting.
And I feel very offended when I watch it.
Honestly, I'm glad you said the woman thing, because I was I was talking to Steve Bannon
yesterday on his podcast.
And he said, why do you think they're coming after her over and over with this?
Like she's Putin's puppet and Bashar al-Assad.
And I said, I have to be honest, there is something that is jarring to me that has to
do with the fact that she's a woman, like she's easily manipulated.
She's too dumb to see through
an attempted manipulation by Bashar al-Assad. You know, it's like I went over to Russia repeatedly.
I sat with Vladimir Putin, former KGB agent. He definitely tried to manipulate me. He knew
exactly which buttons to push. He knew I was a mother. He tried to talk about my children. He
tried to talk about his own children to soften me up. I understood fully what he was doing. I was
not manipulated by Vladimir Putin. I understood. It was interesting to watch the stagecraft, you know, the witchcraft, spycraft of it. But there was there's an assumption with her, I think, that she's just easily she doesn't understand how they're trying to manipulate her. view, like not not not emerge from the meeting with Bashar al-Assad or from studying Putin by
saying they're the most evil dictators ever. But to say I wasn't manipulated, but I do see
this situation differently than some of the neon neocons do. That's it. Right. That's her biggest
sin that she's not allowed to have nuance. You have to be totally against them. I will do one
more soundbite back to Michael Bennett of Colorado, who's very angry about what she said the night Russia invaded Ukraine. your own words are in alignment with what the Russians have said to justify their invasion
of Ukraine. Yes or no? Senator, I don't pay attention to Russian propaganda. My goal is
to speak the truth, regardless of whether you like it or not. Thank you that you basically said
that Putin was justified in rolling over the peaceful
border of Ukraine the first time since World War II that a free nation had been invaded by
a totalitarian state. And you were there at 1130 p.m. that night to say that you were with them,
not us. Can't we do better than somebody who doesn't believe in 702?
Can't we believe that somebody who can't answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today?
Who made excuses for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine?
I'm questioning her judgment.
That's the issue that's at stake here.
Go ahead, Glenn.
This is the exact same impression I had with the RFK Jr. hearing yesterday.
You would think that these people are defending policymakers and decision makers and institutions that have been unerring, that have done nothing but great things for America.
How dare you say that our health regulatory system has anything
wrong with it, needs fixing. We just got lied to over and over about one of the most consequential
health crises in 100 years. And we know we got lied to. Same thing here. We have fought,
so many wars got involved in so many overseas conflicts that have been absolutely disastrous
for the United States. A lot of it has been based on lies, based on false intelligence,
that's Iraq, that's Vietnam and many other things. And here you have somebody, Tulsi Gabbard,
saying something that has been said for decades in Washington at the highest levels of the CIA,
which is if you try and expand NATO into Ukraine, the Russians will perceive this as an existential
threat. And you're going to provoke some sort of conflict where they go over the border into
eastern Ukraine and even into Crimea and try and annex it to defend
themselves. So she's trying to say, you don't have to agree with her. Hey, we should think about the
things we're doing in eastern Europe that are threatening to the Russians, and we should try
and get along with them, given that they have the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, something
Ronald Reagan did, something Richard Nixon did, went and visited Russia, did arms deals with them.
If you do anything other than simply clap like a seal for everything the
U.S. foreign policy establishment does and says and never criticize them and only side with them
and say everything they do is right, if you do anything else like that, it means you're with
them and not us. I want people in our government who are able to be engaged in self-introspection
and say, hey, maybe the policies that we're pursuing are causing harm. It doesn't
mean Putin was justified in invading Ukraine. She never said that. She said the opposite.
But we still should look at our policies all the time. And the idea that if we're critical of our
leaders or our government's policies, it means we're a traitor. To me, the highest duty of
patriotism is to try and improve your country, improve your government. And sometimes that
means by criticizing it. Amazingly well said. Exactly right. So we'll see. I do believe that we'll find out what the vote was.
Tom Cotton is running heard on that committee and he's very much behind Tulsi, which is good.
He's such a noble guy, too. I just I think he'll he'll do his level best to get her across the
finish line. Just not 100 percent sure it's possible because the questioning on the Republican side
was just so negative and kind of nasty.
And she's definitely not going to find those votes
over on Team Blue,
but it would be amazing if Wyden comes through for her.
He was so nasty yesterday.
Everybody was like,
he looks like a waxy, pallid funeral director.
And I was like, that's it exactly.
But today he was like, oh, my BFF.
All right, let's talk about Kash Patel, who spicy fireworks. He was given as good as he was getting that they
don't they don't like him. The Democrats don't like him. It wasn't going badly for him with
the Republicans, which is really what he cares about. We kicked it off. Actually, Senator Tillis,
who's a Republican, had a funny moment that went viral on X.
And you'll see why. Here it is.
Colleagues, I created a cash bingo card that I have available to any of my colleagues who would like it on the other side of the aisle.
Some may view this as an unserious caricature and not appropriate for this committee.
Sadly, I consider it a serious caricature of what I expect to be witnessed today.
I think we'll have words like enemies list and deep state. I've already X'd out four boxes in the opening statements alone.
The fact of the matter is some people will be here to simply substantiate a false narrative.
Okay. So I love that, the Cash Patel bingo card. And true to form, that's how it sounded. I'm going to kick it off with an exchange cash
had with Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota. And she ran for president not long ago. And he
really was not taking her trying to give him the business watch. Asking to be head of the FBI.
And he said that their headquarters should be shut down. Mr. Chair, parliamentary inquiry.
You got anything you want to say, Mr. Patel, before I go on to Senator Lee?
Simply this.
If the best attacks on me are going to be false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations,
the only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI.
I stood with them here in this country.
In every theater of war we have, I was on the ground in service of this nation.
And any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair.
And I will have you reminded that I have been endorsed by over 300,000 law enforcement officers to become the next director of the FBI.
Let's ask them. Mr. Chairman, I am quoting his own words from September of 2024. It is his own words. It is
not some conspiracy. It is what Mr. Patel actually said himself. Facts matter.
You forget that you had three minutes in the next round to say what you just said.
Okay, I'll say him again.
OK, so a couple of things I observed there.
Grassley, who's 88, is still really strong.
Listen to him yelling at her at the end, like, get off my lawn, you angry lady.
And she she was like those Democrat women at the at the Pete Hegseth hearing, like,
like a whiny, scoldy lady.
And Kash Patel, every comeback he had in the entire hearing should have been punctuated with,
boom.
You could see him kind of doing it, too, like, boom.
Go.
It was fun to watch.
I don't think they laid a glove on him, but it wasn't
for lack of trying, Glenn. This is the thing that really amazes me, Megan, and it's been
amazing me for two years now. The Democrats keep saying with a straight face that they are concerned
that first Donald Trump won. And now if Kash Patel gets confirmed that they're going to politicize
the Justice Department in order to weaponize the
Justice Department and go after their political enemies. And you're sitting there and you're
watching this and you're thinking, I just watched you bring four felony cases against Donald Trump
and openly admit that your election strategy was to make sure he was imprisoned prior to the 2024
election because you thought that was the best chance for you to win the election with Joe Biden. I've watched you spend the entire first Trump term unleashing Robert
Mueller and every posture you can find based on this bizarre conspiracy theory that Trump
collaborated with the Kremlin, which came out of the FBI and the CIA because they hated Trump.
And Robert Mueller himself ended up saying there was no evidence for it. They've done nothing but
the Democrats have politicized and weaponized the CIA, the FBI, the entire justice system and intelligence apparatus.
And then they have the nerve to turn around and say that because Trump is putting somebody in
there who wants to clean that out, they're the ones that are going to weaponize the justice system.
The level of audacity to this is almost impossible to swallow. Yes. So on that subject, Dick Blumenthal
of Connecticut, he comes out there trying to suggest that he hold on a second to make sure I
get it. I can't find it on my list, you guys, but it's the it's the one where he's pushing him
about whether he's going to protect FBI agents against retribution. Do we have that? Stand by as we get
our act. So that's SOT 21. Yeah, here it is. SOT 21. Will you commit that you will not tolerate
the firing of the FBI agents who worked with the special counsel's office on these investigations.
Senator, I appreciate the time to visit with you.
It is a yes or no answer, and it is your first test.
Senator, every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard,
and no one will be terminated for case assignments.
I'm not going to accept that answer, because if you can't commit that those FBI agents will be protected
from political retribution, we can't accept you as FBI director. All FBI employees will be protected
against political retribution. Those individuals deserve to be protected from Trump retribution.
That was your first test. You failed it.
By saying all FBI employees should be protected?
I mean, what more does he want from him?
Also, what they're really trying to do is basically create an immunity
for people who broke the law.
Let's assume that it is true,
which of course it is,
that people inside the FBI and
these other agencies abused their power because they wanted to destroy Donald Trump because they
disliked him politically, which of course we know. We've seen the emails of people inside the FBI
saying exactly that who brought the Russiagate investigation. Should those people be allowed
to just continue in the FBI as if they never abused their power? Or should the people who
abused their power be removed from that position? Of course they should be removed from that
position. They're trying to extract a promise from Kash Patel that he won't remove any of the people
who did the Democrats bidding by abusing these agencies and destroying their credibility.
And he's saying, look, they won't be subject to political retribution, but obviously the people
inside these agencies broke the law. Of course they should be investigated. That's what it means to have a rule of law.
Yeah, if they misused their power, if they abuse their power, they're gone. Finally,
there will be some accountability. It's not a political payback. It's you're horrid. You're
trying to destroy this nation. Goodbye. Go find another job. I really enjoyed the exchange about
what's going to happen with the FBI HQ,
because, you know, politicians like Ron DeSantis and others and Trump, but explicitly DeSantis
made this a big issue. I've been saying we need to get the FBI out of Washington. This is not
this is not the place for this building. They need to, you know, touch grass, one of those
kinds of things. And this came up in response to a questioning by Chris Coons, who's a Democrat from Delaware, with cash.
Take a listen to SOT19.
How would shutting down the FBI headquarters impact its ability to prosecute violent crime and drug traffickers?
How is that possibly a serious proposal?
Thank you for bringing that up and allowing me to answer.
It was to highlight the significantly greater point that I was actually making in that interview, which is well documented over and over again.
38,000 FBI employees, 7,500 FBI employees work in the Washington field office and Hoover building
alone. If you increase that aperture just slightly to encompass the national capital region,
that is 11,000 FBI employees work in the National Capital Region.
A third of the workforce for the FBI
works in Washington, D.C.
I am fully committed to having that workforce
go out into the interior of the country
where I live, west of the Mississippi,
and work with sheriff's departments and local officers
and having one agent prevent one homicide
and having one agent in Washington
prevent one rape. And I will do that over and over and over again because the American people
deserve the resources, not in Washington, D.C., but in the rest of the country.
And Mr. Patel, frankly, if that had been your statement, that would be something that would
be defensible. It's the rest of it saying you're going to turn it into a museum of the deep state
that causes repeated questions and concerns from people like myself.
Again, Cash gonna finish with, boom.
But he's telling him what he means and this pushing back on relocating the FBI HQ
is ridiculous.
They love to go through and find the silly podcast rhetoric,
like the bellicose language.
This is like another J.D. Vance childless cat lady, right?
Like you said something provocative.
Well, here he is like you everything you want to know.
And I really think he got Coons to stand down there.
Well, also, you know, look at what the Democrats are defending.
They just got done with an election where they largely got crushed because they were
perceived as correctly as the party of the status quo, as the party that defends even
rotted American institutions that people hate. And now they're defending the pharmaceutical industry from more regulatory
scrutiny. They're defending the U.S. surveillance state for being able to spy on Americans without
warrants. And here they're defending the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington.
And obviously, when Kash Patel is saying we should close it or whatever, what he's obviously saying
is this was never intended to be some permanent part of Washington power.
This is not this is a law enforcement agency that was supposed to solve federal crimes, investigate and solve federal crimes throughout the country.
Instead, it's become yet another arm of how Washington exercises power against the rest of the country.
And we should take these resources and put them inside the United States,
not putting them all in Washington,
because that's how it becomes a political entity when you're centering everything in Washington.
Everybody wants to work in Washington,
be around Washington.
Of course, it's going to then become politicized.
And this idea of a museum to the deep state,
we do have a deep state in the United States.
Dwight Eisenhower warned about it 60 years ago
on his way out of the office. It's a permanent power faction that exercises power regardless of the outcome of elections and outside of democratic accountability. And it used to be foundational most resistance, Kash Patel, RK Jr., Tulsi, because they're essentially saying there's something
very wrong in how Washington works. The power that has been centralized was never supposed to
be like this. And we need to break it up. We need to smash it up into little pieces and make sure
that that abuse becomes manifest and can't be replicated again. I hope President Trump picks
up the phones and, you know and puts some pressure on these Republican senators
to stand by him and give him the cabinet he's asked for.
They're not a rubber stamp.
It's true, they're not.
But the president has a clear agenda
and that agenda does speak to exactly this strain.
He definitely ran on this.
And so if this is your objection to his nominee,
you're not gonna like the next one either.
I don't think Trump's going to abandon these kinds of promises to remake the FBI, certainly, or to bring radical change to HHS with his next nominee.
So, you know, we'll see whether they get these guys out. I certainly hope not.
I really hope Tulsi gets through. And I think RFKJ is going to get through depending on this.
Senator Cassidy.
We'll talk with that about Callie Means next. Glenn, thank you.
Great to see you, Megan. Thank you.
You as well. Callie Means up next.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. back on the hot seat today on Capital Health.
Do you believe they made him do this twice?
I don't totally understand why, to be honest, but he had to go in front of that was that was finance yesterday. And now today was the Senate Committee on Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions. HHS is just so big. It answers to both. This committee is the committee will not
vote on the nomination in order for it to go to the full floor for a vote. That's going to fall
over to the Senate Finance Committee, which RFKJ appeared before yesterday
and we covered for you in yesterday's show.
But these Republicans matter,
so they're all showing their hands a bit
on whether they might actually vote for him.
And we care.
We especially care if they're Republicans.
And we especially, especially care
when we're looking at Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy,
who is a Republican and who, in my own view, yesterday did not appear exactly warm toward RFKJ.
Keep in mind, Trump can lose three but not four Republican senators.
He already got hosed by Murkowski, Collins and McConnell on Hegseth.
The odds of them not tanking him on his more controversial nominees, which in
some ways RFKJ is, are slim. And so they cannot lose Bill Cassidy. So are they going to? So he
was the chairman of the committee before which RFKJ appeared today. And he, as the chairman and the ranking member always do, gave his own opening remarks and spoke openly about some of his reservations.
It's no secret I have some reservations about your past positions on vaccines and a couple other issues.
Now, Bobby, I've learned you got a tremendous following.
My phone blows up with people who really follow you.
And there are many who trust you more than they trust their own physician. And so the question
I need to have answered is what will you do with that trust? Senator Cassidy, who was a physician
before entering politics, also told a story about the worst day of his career, treating a young woman in liver failure due to hepatitis B.
He told Kennedy $50 in vaccines would have prevented this.
And then the two of them, Senator Cassidy and RFKJ, had a very tense back and forth regarding the measles and the hep B vaccine and autism concerns.
Now, at the end of this hearing, Senator Cassidy made clear he is still unsure,
still unsure about his vote for RFKJ, saying,
my responsibility is to learn if you can be trusted to support the best public health.
You may be hearing from me over the weekend. What does that mean?
Lift the dress up, Senator.
Show us all.
Callie Means is one of
RFKJ's top advisors. He's truly one of the reasons why he's even been chosen for this role. And he
is one of, if not the founding member of the whole Maha movement. He's the man responsible for the
Trump RFKJ alliance. He and Tucker, I would say, are the two. And when RFKJ endorsed Donald Trump last summer, he mentioned Kelly in his speech.
A few hours after the assassination attempt at Butler, I got a call from a safe food advocate named Kelly Means.
He'd been advising me for many years and on my campaign.
And he told me that night that he was also advising President Trump.
And he asked if I would talk to President Trump.
And I said, of course.
And we talked about not about the things that separate us because we don't agree on everything,
but on the values and the issues that bind us together. And one of the issues that
he talked about was having safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic.
Right on. Kelly's a former food and pharmaceutical consultant. He was on the inside, you see,
and then realized what they were doing to us and has been working to save us all
ever since. He entered that industry with good intentions, trying to shape policy, but realized
something was deeply, deeply wrong. Callie joins me now for the first time on the show. Callie,
what a pleasure. Oh, it's great to be here, Megan, and great to see you yesterday. Oh, gosh,
likewise. I'm such a huge fan of yours. So I saw you yesterday, but I didn't see any of the hearing
today. My team pulled some great soundbites. Didn't see any of it today because I was with Rubio and then Tulsi. So
you've sat through it all. How did today differ from yesterday and how are you feeling?
Megan, there's a lot weighing on, I think, the country right now. We're at a true inflection
point for American health from your first interview with Bobby years ago, putting him on
the national scene or really helping with that to that incredible endorsement with Donald Trump of bringing millions of Maha moms to this coalition that elected him. We are
at a fork in the road for American health. And I'll just be really blunt. The takeaway from this
hearing is that road goes through Senator Bill Cassidy. Senator Bill Cassidy is a very influential
senator. He's a doctor, he's a physician, He's chair of the health committee. And I'll just be
blunt, as Bill Cassidy votes, we'll go the way of Maha and RFK. And I'd love to, if it's okay with
you, Megan, make a direct plea to Senator Cassidy, because I know he cares very much about public
health and trust in public health. And I know he is legitimately still considering this vote.
And I think everyone needs to focus their attention on him right now. I'd love to make a couple points to him.
Please, go ahead.
So Bill Cassidy, by all accounts, is somebody that, as I said, deeply cares about trust in
public health. And I really do believe that the so-called MAHA movement, this loose coalition
of folks that came together that
are really concerned about children's health, and Dr. Cassidy, who's a person who's spent
decades working on healthcare and health policy to help patients, I think they're talking past
each other. The crux of Dr. Cassidy's deliberation is around trust in public health. And I want to
just make a couple points to him as a parent as a parent speaking I think trying to channel what brought Bobby Kennedy
into popularity and into helping President Trump
The public health crisis and the trust in public health is not because of Bobby Kennedy just speaking as a parent
There's anxiety among every single parent in this country. I mean kids are
Looking looking at kids.
There's autism rates that are skyrocketing.
We don't know why autism is skyrocketing.
I'm scared as a parent of a three-year-old about autism.
It's now one in 30 in California.
The NIH and the public health authorities
have not come to a conclusive answer
on why autism rates are going through the roof.
Kids are subjected to an unending array
of environmental toxins and toxins in our food.
The FDA, which is fully bought off
by the pharma and food industries,
75% of the drug approvals at the FDA are funded by pharma.
They said, we don't even know the chemicals in our food.
There's 10,000 chemicals in our food
that aren't allowed in any other country.
And the red
dies and things like this the fda still tells us are safe we've we're trying to ban one there are
still many other chemicals like that that are totally inappropriate kids are walking into a
treadmill of drugs right now the american academy of pediatrics is saying that the standard of care
for a two-year-old for excuse me for a 12 year old is ozempic if they're overweight or obese. And they're studying
for as low as six. The health authorities are saying that if a kid is sad, they need an SSRI.
SSRI rates have doubled in prescription rates among teens in the last five years. They're
saying if they have high cholesterol, it's a statin. Statin rates have doubled in the past
10 years among teens. Metformin, ACE inhibitors, all of these drugs our kids are getting on as they're getting more sick. The standard of care is totally clearly rigged where 40% of our teens are on a
pharmaceutical product. And there's 4.6 billion pharmaceutical prescriptions written per year
that clearly aren't working. And I'll be honest, I'll just be blunt, Megan, as a parent, I'm
concerned about vaccines. We have a different schedule in the United States than other countries.
As Bill Cassidy said today, it is not appropriate for a kid to get a hepatitis B vaccine, which
is an STD on the first day of life if the mother tested negative for that condition.
That is not the mandate right now.
It is a mandate for first day of life.
That is the CDC guidance.
So what Senator Cassidy said even today contradicts the specific, unambiguous CDC guidance.
There are questions to ask about all these things.
And again, when we come to the issue of trust, I would plea to Senator Cassidy from knowing
Bobby Kennedy, from seeing Bobby Kennedy, I have never, ever heard him say that he wants
to get in there and exert his own opinions.
He has consistently said, and he believes are strongly, strongly,
they're helping on restoring trust in science,
on getting money to scientists who do not have conflicts of interest
and unleashing them to do true scientific inquiry
on why we're getting so sick.
He means it when he says to Senator Cassidy
that he wants to restore trust in science. And the crux to Senator Cassidy that he wants to retort to Justin Tynes.
And the crux of Senator Cassidy's final message and his final question to Bobby Kennedy is,
will Bobby Kennedy definitively say unambiguously that vaccines don't cause autism?
And Bobby Kennedy wouldn't answer that question directly.
I think it's inappropriate.
Wait, stand by, Callie.
We have that.
We have that. We have that.
Let me play it,
and then you take it on the back end.
Watch.
Does a 70-year-old man,
71-year-old man
who spent decades criticizing vaccines
and who's financially vested
in finding fault with vaccines,
can he change his attitudes and approach
now that he'll have
the most important position
influencing vaccine policy in the United States.
I recognize, man, if you come out unequivocally, vaccines are safe.
It does not cause autism.
That would have an incredible impact.
That's your power.
So what's it going to be?
Will it be using the credibility to support lots of articles or will it be using credibility to undermine? And I got to figure that out for my vote.
Go ahead, Kelly. most important issue in the country, which is trust in our institutions and trust in science. The way to increase trust in science is not for the HHS secretary to make a religious,
basically, opinion, a fully 100% firm opinion one way or the other. It's for the HHS secretary to
say, Senator, we are going to continue to conduct science on every question, particularly the most taboo questions, particularly the questions that we've been told are settled science.
How many times do we need to be reminded of the greatest inventions in American history, but also the fact that the two largest vaccine makers, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, have settled billions of dollars of criminal penalties in the past five years, and their findings should be continually subjected to science, that in order to gain trust in public health, we need to be able to ask questions and have continued trust in science. This is the key
question. It is inappropriate for, and against, frankly, Bobby Kennedy's nature to give a specific
opinion. And he's not coming in to HHS with opinions. He's coming into HHS to set a process
where the metric of success is that, according to Gallup polls and other polls, Americans trust science more. Americans trust vaccines more.
The absolute implosion of public trust
and public health is not because of Bobby Kennedy.
It's because of the public health authorities themselves.
And I think Bo Cassidy understands and knows that.
Can I just say that?
Because I had a very visceral reaction to that soundbite.
That's the first I've heard that.
And I really feel like,
how dare he try to extract that statement from RFKJ? I mean, there are millions of Americans
who either are personally or their children have been vaccine injured based on different vaccine
experiences. It doesn't mean the vaccine's always unsafe. It does depend on the person sometimes. But how dare he try to get him to say out loud,
vaccines are safe and I favor vaccine.
Well, like which vaccines?
The COVID vaccine?
Because I can tell you,
I, along with a lot of other Americans,
have had very negative experiences with that.
And I would be outraged if I heard him issue
such a sweeping declaration.
I mean, as you well know,
is it safe for a 15-year-old boy who, you know, might have a heart murmur? Senator Cassidy, why should RFKJ
say it is? Kids could get killed. Like, that's a crazy thing he tried to get him to say at the end
there. And I'm glad RFKJ won't do it. Yeah, the reason there's low trust in public health is
because we've infantilized the American people. We've made something like vaccines a religious issue where you can't ask questions, where it's either or. It's binary.
When there's 72 shots, there's different formulations to each of those shots. I mean,
these are questions we should be able to ask. I think it's much wider than that, Megan. I think
what I'd really stress to Senator Cassidy is that the lack of trust is warranted and pervades the entire system.
Clearly, the American Medical Association codes, which underlie our entire healthcare logic,
are totally broken. I mean, right now, the science, according to the American Medical
Association, which underlies Medicare and Medicaid, is that a two-year-old can undergo gender transition surgery and gender
affirming care. That is the stated medical scientific consensus in the documents that
underlie American insurance reimbursement. That should continue to be questioned. This is the
judgment, right? I mean, it shouldn't continue to be questioned. It should be immediately called out as an absolute sin and an absolute crime against
humanity. But that's the judgment of the science right now. The American Medical Association,
which is the most powerful group in the country, I would argue, because they control the logic for
20% of our economy and every single doctor that we all have is a pharmaceutical lobbying
organization. By definition, it outsources decision-making to these specialty groups,
like the American Academy of Pediatrics, where the two largest funders are formula makers and
the American Academy of Pediatrics is now questioning whether breast milk is as good as
formula and drug makers. So like, so like, Oh yeah, and the American Academy of Pediatrics
was a big vaccine pusher on the COVID vaccine.
They were, at every turn,
they're big on the trans thing.
They're big on the COVID vaccine.
There's a long list I've learned,
and I think a lot of people have during COVID.
Do not trust them.
Again, this is not because of Bobby Kennedy.
It's much, much larger than vaccines. We are dying as a country. We are decimating our children's future with not just autism, but 40 to 50 percent of teens having prediabetes, autoimmune conditions.
The New York Times recently reported on the front page
that cancer rates are at an all-time high among American children,
and nobody knows why.
Bobby's saying, let's figure out why.
Let's get the NIH away.
He's willing to look.
Nobody's willing to look.
I mean, we all know it should not be a controversial statement
that there are side effects to every drug. nobody's willing to look. I mean, we all know it should not be a controversial statement that
there are side effects to every drug. We know vaccine injured children. That's not a should
not be a heretical statement. They should not be hiding. We should be acknowledging that we should
be working on therapeutics for those kids. We should be coming out with the data. But again,
it's much wider than that. We don't know
what's in our food. We are totally being misled on the standard of care for our drugs. I talk a lot
about my mom who was on five different chronic disease medications based on 15 minute appointments.
It was high cholesterol. Take that stat high blood sugar. Take that metformin. No problem at all.
This is normal. 50% of 65 year olds take this drug. It's fine.
She was robbed of curiosity based on our medical logic of what's going on metabolically in her
body. And it eventually led to cancer, which is a metabolic disease in many cases too.
We have lost the plot. But instead, you pointed this out yesterday. I'm just going to be honest with you. Instead, what we got was an obsession with measles.
That's, I mean, like, they were really, none of this was discussed.
Unless Bobby intentionally seized the mantle to try to inject it into the conversation.
And Senator Ron Johnson did a great idea, or did a great job of allowing him to express his ideas.
It was all about measles.
We've got such small ball nonsense, Callie.
You're outlining,
we are in the midst of a massive public health crisis. People at home, everybody experiences it
like it's just them. It's just their mom. It's just like they made bad choices. They have chronic
obesity. Oh, well, I have bad luck. Like what you and your sister, Casey and RFKJ and others in this
movement have done
such a good job of is connecting the dots and saying, you're not alone. Look at the numbers.
There are millions, tens of millions of Americans suffering. Someone needs to care
about investigating why. I want Senator Cassidy to know this. And again, we should all be
communicating to him in the next 48 hours with love and an understanding that I know in his heart he wants what's best for patients.
But I will say this.
I have never heard the word measles uttered in a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy.
It is not what the focus is. There is no plan to do anything other than raise faith and trust in
our standards of care. And by the way, forgive me for interrupting, but President Trump is on
record as saying he's not going to touch the MMR vaccine and Bobby will listen to Trump that he
made that clear. So it's not in danger. Keep going. It's even more than that. Bobby, the meetings with Trump and Bobby are about truly
getting money to the best scientists in the world and not standing in their way at all to getting
the American people the truth and with no preconceived outcomes. Right now, science is
conducted where we already know the answer. That's most of the FDA studies that underlie our drug
prescription processes. He wants true unfettered science and absolutely not staying away.
The words measles, I've never seen uttered. What I have seen in my small vantage point,
watching this movement form is true emotion around reversing and preventing chronic disease.
It was just shocking to me, Megan, yesterday. I
honestly couldn't believe it. The words obesity, diabetes, and heart disease were not uttered
one time by the Democrats. I would just say to Senator Cassidy, you've got this partisan
weaponization of culture war issues like abortion, where pharma is funding Mike Pence's group to attack Bobby on
abortion, like vaccines, which pharma clearly sees the wedge issue for Bobby. This is what they do.
I saw this. They're hijacking these issues. The Democrats are falling for that. They've said the
word measles 25 times. But if someone in this country cares about children's health, right, 230 million Americans are battling chronic conditions, many of them kids.
Measles is important.
But even before the invention of that vaccine in 1963, 300 to 400 Americans per year died of measles.
Now, I am not dismissing that.
But that is just not where Bobby's focused.
I just can't stress this enough. He wants, of course, great science to be conducted
on pharmaceutical products, particularly pharmaceutical products created by literal
criminal enterprises that have settled billions of dollars in criminal penalties over the past
five years. Of course, who would disagree with that? I don't think Senator Cassidy disagrees with that. I don't
think Senator Cassidy disagrees with resetting the NIH to understand the complex milieu of issues
that are impacting our metabolic health, our microbiomes, and leading to skyrocketing rates
of every chronic disease
to reach an all-time high this year. That is what Bobby wants to do. That involves food,
that involves the impact of sleep, that involves the impact of movement, that involves the impact
of chronic stress, that involves the impact of light. And yes, it involves the impact of the
4.6 billion pharmaceuticals that we are prescribing the United States per year.
It involves investigating scientifically whether we are getting an ROI on the fact that we are 4% of the world's population,
but produce 75% of the worldwide pharmaceutical products while ranking 60th in life expectancy.
Something is clearly not working.
And the first phase of MAHA that Bobby's talked about is not having opinions.
It's getting to the truth.
Bobby understands that there's no way we're going to get past this existential moment
for American health without bringing Bill Cassidy along, without bringing the American
people along.
That can only happen with great science.
The best way for Bobby to blow up this movement, he understands this, is to come in gunslinging
with opinions.
He is not doing that.
He's made that clear.
And I can tell you that is in his heart.
He wants President Trump to win the Nobel Prize
for resetting science
because science is not in a good place right now
in this country.
No, no.
I want to tell the audience,
with respect to Senator Cassidy,
who needs encouragement to vote yes on Bobby Kennedy,
call his office.
Do so respectfully.
Don't be nasty.
We don't have nasty audience members.
But just call and express in the clearest, most strong terms you can find how important
it is to you, especially if you live in Louisiana, how important it is to you that he support
Bobby Kennedy.
And here's the number for his D.C. office.
202-224-5824, 202-224-5824, 224-5824, 224-5824. Call there and please make clear, especially if you live in Louisiana, how important it is to you that he support Bobby Kennedy. I mean, there's so
much that hangs in the balance with him. And the media
attacks on him have been so unfair, Callie. The Democrats attacks on him were so unfair.
I think Senator Cassidy is an honest broker. He didn't go to the totally unfair places. He's just
very focused on the vaccine thing. But he seems to be controlled by it right now. No, I'm just going to say this again,
and I can't stress this enough. Of course, as he said, he's already hearing from the Maha moms. He
saw those Maha moms behind you at the hearing, Megan, but by all accounts, and we all need to
understand this, the Maha movement, it's this what you've been unpacking, what Casey and I have been
unpacking with so many leaders in the medical freedom and in the health reform space have been talking about for decades.
It is a bit of a learning curve to understand.
We're talking not about the details and intricacies of Medicare and Medicaid policies.
We're talking about the overarching incentives that are leading Americans to get sick.
And I would just say to Bill Cassidy, I would everyone to call him.
It's just there's a real positive opportunity to have absolute gold star trust in science
for Bobby to come in there and not be gunslinging opinions, but really work with senators bipartisan
to restore trust to American science.
And, you know, there's a positive path ahead.
We would love to have Bill Cassidy and his expertise in this Maha movement.
I'm sure Maha moms help him get reelected, which I know he wants to do.
I mean, there's a real positive.
This is a growing
movement. The Maha movement is the most potent political force in politics right now. You know,
the gender gap was supposed to be 22 points for President Trump. It was seven. You had just
staggering amounts of independents and young people coming to the Trump coalition. This is a
true opportunity to improve children's health. And it's a real political opportunity, quite frankly,
because I want Maha to embrace Bill Cassidy and I want them to help Bill Cassidy, quite frankly,
get reelected. I want to show the Democrats who had zero interest on that panel on public health,
get the Democrats, you know, a more Maha, more preventative. This is a true fork in the road. And we can't mince words.
Every emotion, all the work that's gone into this, all the energy behind Bobby, it does go
through the structure of our systems. It goes through one man right now. And that is Bill
Cassidy's decision in the next 72 hours. Just to make clear again, the number is 202-224-5824. That's his DC office,
202-224-5824. I know it's asking a lot. It's kind of is to ask somebody to pick up the phone,
make a call, say something, you know, kind of plaintiff, you know, something that may not be
well-received, although I'm sure they'd be very respectful there, but it's for the health of your children.
It's for your own health.
It's for the health of your mom and your dad
as they go into their golden years.
We need to try this.
That's how I feel.
I feel really strongly about this one.
We have to try this.
It is an inflection point.
And if we don't get him in,
I don't know when it will be.
I mean, I think Trump will appoint somebody who is generally aligned with some of these views,
but not somebody like him who cannot be pushed around and who has a lifetime of taking on these industries,
who seems to almost enjoy it.
Like, that's kind of what you need.
You can't have a witherer.
You know, that's the great thing about Trump.
Well, he's not a witherer.
He will stand up for us.
So, Callie, and by the way,
I think we're going to get three for the price of one
because he's very close with Callie and Dr. Casey Means,
and it would be great to have them advising.
I'll give you the last word. Go ahead.
I think this is an existential moment.
I'm not going to mince words.
There are people that are not Maha
that are already vying to replace Bobby,
funded by Pharma
and ready to completely reel back this movement.
They are already angling. This is a fork in the road moment for American health. I think we had to get
that 2024 election right. I thought that election day was the most important day of my life
to get President Trump to write the BS we're seeing. I actually think we would have had a
hard time coming back if he didn't win. This is a very, very important
moment for American health. And we need to express to Bill Cassidy and all the senators,
the incredible opportunity to improve children's health and the disaster if we continue down our
current road. So thank you, Megan. Thank you for everything, Callie. Thanks for being here
and to be continued. Wow. We are so lucky to have him.
I mean, he and his sister, you know, his sister's Dr. Casey Means who came on with her book,
Good Energy, and then Times Thereafter, but he doesn't have to be doing this. Callie, I think, went to Stanford and Harvard. She went to double Stanford. They've received the most elite
educations. They were accepted in the most elite circles. And they both said, we don't give a damn.
This industry, these industries are killing people.
The things we thought were helping people are killing them and no one's talking about it.
And so they've made it their mission to help the rest of us, which is what brought them, you know, into RFK's world.
And now they're willing to work for us.
They're willing.
They've spent their adult lives
studying what's wrong. What's what is the FDA doing? Why aren't the medicine, the drug companies
working to actually develop cures? What what who should we distrust the most? Well, how can we
solve FDA to actually work for the people instead of just grease the skids for their entry into the
private sector so they can build a nice beach house. What's going on with our water
supply? How can we protect ourselves until we actually clean up the actual supply? How can I
prioritize maha-ing my life? What are the three things I can do if I have no budget to try to help
make my maha lifestyle happen? What foods at a minimum should I avoid? Where can I go? It's not
Whole Foods. It's not Trader Joe's.
It's the kind of foods.
Like, make it easy for me.
That's what they want to do.
What we have right now is a government that's trying to make it harder and truly is working to make you sick.
There's no other conclusion if you look at the number of things they're doing.
And this could be the before and after moment.
Senator Cassidy, please, please, please do the right thing.
I'll call you too.
I don't live in Louisiana,
but maybe you want to hear from me.
Maybe not, but I'm going to call anyway.
I'm going to do it, you guys.
I hope you do it too.
202-224-5824.
Spare 90 seconds and make that call
and see if we can get him over the finish line.
Thanks to all of you.
What a busy week, right?
And we're not done yet.
We're going to be back tomorrow with Charlie Kirk. I will now begin my journey back north. Wish me luck
and much love to all of you. Talk to you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear. Thank you.