The Ricochet Podcast - Guilty Pleasures

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

About what President Trump is planning to put in his cabinet... Lileks, Cooke and Hayward have opinions on the digestibility of some of the picks. They're joined by Andy McCarthy to discuss the stunning nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and the gang gets into what Trump will need for his cleanup on aisle DC.  - Soundbite from this week's open: Rep. Max Miller (R - OH 7) ABCNews YouTube Channel

You're the one who said that broccoli is good. I don't believe it at all. Even George H.W. Bush, I'm a real squish, even George H.W. Bush hated broccoli. Right. For the left of him. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward and myself, James Lalix. Today we talk to our old friend Annie McCarthy about the cabinet nominations and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. When it comes to the selection of Representative Gates, I just think it's silly. I believe that the president is probably rewarding him for being such a loyal soldier to the president. But the president is smart enough and his team is smart enough to know that Mr. Gates will never get confirmed by the Senate. We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.

Believe me. Welcome. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 717. I'm James Lilacs on a beautiful, crisp fall day in November in Minnesota, and I'm joined by Charles C.W. Cook, I presume in Florida, and Stephen Hayward. Lord knows where you are. Where have events taken you today? I'm in Washington, D.C. at the annual Conference of the Federal Society. Ah, you were in the thick of it. You were in the belly. Yes. You are in Trantor. you are in koryaskan great well we'll get to what the capital is doing and how you're i i assume you've taken a cab drive a cab and have some wisdom to impart from the cab driver since that's every column this is cliche not really uh you know the uh the cab driving

population here as i think you know, is overwhelmingly foreign. They do tend to listen to NPR a lot, I notice, when I ride around Washington with the cabs. And so I generally shy away from trying to play Tom Friedman in the cab. Right. When I lived there, it was an influx of Afghan doctors for some reason. Every single cab driver I had was a neurosurgeon from Kabul. All right, gentlemen, here's my theory. I'm going to toss it out. Hear me out.

Trump has been playing a long game. And the reason that he ran for the presidency in the first place was not because he got a pickle up his posterior when they needled him at the correspondence dinner. No, as a devotee of McDonald's food, this is all about using his power to bring back frying French fries and beef tallow. And that's why the RFK appointment is in there. RFK is going to say that what we've done to our food is an abomination. And at a minimum, we should go back to frying our French fries in beef tallow because they're better. So we have all these cabinet nominations, some of which landed a little bit better than others. Is there any one particular that you guys find out? I mean, RFK, we want to have a talk about fluoridation. Okay, we can have a talk about fluoridation after all these years. But going back on the idea of vaccines being a useful tool to prevent disease

in children and otherwise seems a conversation that we could maybe not have for a while. Take up seed oils if you want. Take up high fructose corn syrup if you like. But let's not do the vaccine thing. You should go first on this one. On RFK Junior or in general? In general. Pick a nomination. Who do you like?

Who do you not? I mean, we're going to talk. We've got Andy McCarthy coming up, and we're going to talk about Matt in a bit. So take that one off the table for a while i think that the good nominations have been very very good and the bad nominations have been very very bad if i can't talk about matt gates i'll talk about rfk jr who's a crank and the argument for him is based on the logical fallacy that because hhs is a disaster and the public health establishment has disgraced itself, both of which are true,

we therefore should or are obliged to put in someone awful into a department of the federal government that controls, I think, 20% of the entire budget. I don't think it's a secret that I am one of RFK Jr.'s biggest critics. I think there is very little redeeming about him. And what is redeeming doesn't particularly intersect with HHS, that being his desire to make America healthy, which is fine. Broccoli is good. Fruit loops are bad for you. But I don't need to hand over

20% of the federal government to a Kennedy to make those reforms. And I'll finish by saying I think that even those people who wish to see wholesale changes in that area, I'm not opposed to that,

would be better served by choosing somebody better. Not that he's available, but someone like a Ron DeSantis really could go in there and shake things up. I think RFK Jr., if he gets through the nomination, will not. Charles, I'm going to disagree with you about this because I don't think that broccoli is good, as a matter of fact. I think it's irreplaceable.

Yeah, and I think Froot Loops are awesome, but that's me. Stephen, what do you like and what do you not? Well, I think, well, I agree with Charles that RFK is a dubious appointment at best. If he were, you know, supposedly he was on the list of possible EPA directors under Obama back in 2009. And if he or Biden, Obama or Biden had put RFK in the cabinet, I think our team would be appalled, opposed, up in arms. And this is partly tribal politics. On the other hand, I think why this is happening, why Matt Gaetz, why Pete Hegseth, and I don't lump all three of them together, by the way. I think Hegseth is, I think I agree with Charlie on this, is a worthy appointment.

There's two things. Trump wants loyalty, and he's appointed people who he thinks will be much more loyal to him than this first term. I'm doubtful about RFK, by the way. He could easily go off the reservation very fast, depending on a variety of things. And he wants disruptors. And in Gates, I think HECSA, too, and certainly RFK, you see people who want to go in and smash up the joint, disrupt the places

that might create chaos. I have to say, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I read, as I did in the paper this morning, that something like 40% of the staff of the Centers for Disease Control say they'll quit if RFK is made Secretary of Health and Human Services. It's like, Bryce, they're making

Elon Musk's job of reducing federal employees easy. We hear about this at Justice. We hear about this at FBI. Everyone's heading for the exits. And you get the picture almost of a silent movie comedy skit where you have a variety of corpulent people attempting to fit through the door at the same time. Yeah, I mean, it's the government downsizing version of self-deportation. Yes. One of the ones that I found interesting, because I had no idea who he was, was John J. Ray, which sounds like, you know, a comedian from the You Can Call Me.

John J. Ray III, who is being floated for Secretary of Education. And I thought that was interesting because we've had the statement that the Department of Education should be eliminated, which causes hair to erupt spontaneously all over in certain quarters because how can you say that with the appalling educational results that we already have in the country? How can you?

Because they don't have any students. Because the very idea of dismantling hauling educational results that we already have in the country. How can you? How can you? Because they don't have any students. Because the very idea of dismantling this top-down apparatus and taking the money and giving the responsibility back to the states seems like a capital idea. Because it's not as if we've had an efflorescence of brilliance in our public school system since the Department of Education was established. We've had a series of mandates and ideas and acronyms and the rest of it, all of which have distorted and contorted and led to appalling results. The only chart that you have to show people, really, is the chart that shows

the amount of money that I'm going to students and the amount of money that's been going to administrators. That's all you need to do. And if you say that, you know, we're going to take that money, we're going to give it back to the states along with control and have the people will have the well, again, they're terrified of that because they think then that the people who show up and complain at the school board meetings about books in the schools are going to be the ones who dominate the the local politics. It's just not a necessary department. Ray, I knew nothing about him, was the guy who was put in charge of FTX, the crypto thing, after it fell apart. And the reason that I trust him if he takes this job, because according to the Wikipedia page, he's

paid a $200,000 annual retainer and makes $1,300 an hour as the CEO of FTX by his appointment. So if he's willing to give up that kind of capital in order to do this, I'm thinking he might be coming in to dismantle and help take apart the Department of Education. Or are we all just huffing the paint fumes and it's never going to happen because when is a cabinet position ever gone away? Well, yeah, it looks like an odd appointment. I mean, usually you want someone who has some background in education and, you know, from our point of view, a sensible reformer like, you know, William Bennett in the 80s or Betsy DeVos in Trump's first term. And yeah, this guy looks like someone who is not a specialist in receiverships

and bankruptcies, but that's kind of what he's looking at here. He wants to go through and dismantle the assets of the Department of Education. Some functions I think you have to keep that predated the department when Jimmy Carter created it. You know, I made a suggestion online about two, three weeks ago that one of the things the Trump Education Department should do on day one is copy what the Obama and Biden administrations did, namely send a dear colleague letter, like they did with Title IX, to every university and say it is the legal opinion of the Trump administration that every DEI office of the university is a presumptive violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,

and unless you abolish them, not rename them, not shuffle deck chairs, but abolish them and dismiss their employees and get rid of all the rules and guidelines, we are cutting off your federal funding today. And Trump this morning said something very close to that. He said, my first week in office, I'm going to tell universities through the Department of Education, if they don't end their tolerance of anti-Semitism on campus, we're going to review their accreditation and cut off their federal funding. You know, if the Department of Education and the Secretary does things like that, then Democrats will want to abolish the department.

So, again, I like this very aggressive strategy, possibly, that we're seeing shape up so far. Charles, how do you think that's going to play out? Because people are also saying, in addition to the dear colleague letter to the universities telling them to knock it off with tolerating the anti-Semitism, there's been floated, as ever, again, the idea of taxing the endowments. Taxing the endowments and using the money to fund a free online university which would be accredited that people could use that that people who do not have access to the ivs shall we say would be able to use what do you think of that idea no i just want to tax them anyway yes you know why right Because President Biden illegally and willfully spent, I think the most recent number is $140 billion.

The aim was to spend $500 billion on transferring the liability for student loans from the people who took them out, spent them and benefited from them to people who didn't. That money is going to come from somewhere, taxes or debt, which eventually becomes taxes. And I would like to see that money paid back so that no funds are taken away from the people who did not benefit from those college educations. There are a bunch of things raised there. I would just say on the department of education i'm entirely in favor of its abolition it shouldn't exist there's no federal role for education it shouldn't be the likelihood of congress using its political capital to do this given the hyperbole and demagoguery that that would yield from the left i think is relatively small perhaps you might get something in reconciliation to reduce its budget, although I won't hold my breath. The

problem with, and I know he was half joking, the problem with expecting Stephen's excellent idea of the Dear Colleague letter to sell Democrats on the case for getting rid of the Department of Education is what you are doing with that and what Trump should do with that is reaffirming its power and Democrats are just going to want to take it over again and do the opposite We're just going to see see-sawing back-and-forth letters on due process on college campuses on DEI and so forth But I'm a hundred percent with you on the details. I think that The best thing and I know a lot of people on the right were squishy about

this i wasn't the best thing trump did in this area was right toward the end of his first administration um where he sent a letter to was it princeton after princeton announced that it was racist in that glorious summer of nonsense 2020 princeton said we are a racist institution could have been yale i can't remember but one of these big ivs said we are a racist institution and trump's doj i think said oh well if you're a racist institution then we're obliged under the law to investigate you yeah that's absolutely quite seriously that is absolutely what the federal government should be doing. The DEI push is obviously in violation of the Civil Rights Act, and if you believe that the affirmative action decision was correct, arguably of the 14th Amendment as it's been construed by the Supreme Court as well.

And while conservatives are in charge of these organizations, if they're not going to abolish them, which they should, they should be directing them in precisely this way. I'm with you on that. The problem, of course, is that if you have an online university only, then you don't have toga parties. And if you don't have toga parties, then you don't have those rituals of college, where, of course, the next day you drag yourself off to class. The problem is, of course, is that, you know, when you do that and you overindulge, you feel bad. But let me tell you, there's a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh the next day after a night of toga partying. And that's with pre-alcohol.

Pre-alcohol. That's right. Z-Biotics. Pre-alcohol probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D PhD scientists to tackle those rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. And it's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day.

Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make Z-Biotics your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Now, you know me. I've been talking about this for a long time, and I don't like to do anything and tell you about it that I haven't done, and I've done this. And it was sort of like, you know, some assignments are, oh boy, do I have to? But the other is, try this and have yourself a scotch. And I did, and I felt great. So this is it, though. With their GMO technology, Zbiotics is continuing to invent probiotics that will help enjoy everyday challenges of modern life. And you can get started at Zbiotics.com slash Ricochet to learn more and

to get 15% off your first order. That's if you use the Ricochet coupon code at the checkout. Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money-back guarantee. So if you are unsatisfied for any reason, they will refund your money. No questions asked. You got nothing to lose. So remember, head to Zbiotics.com slash Ricochet and use the code Ricochet at the checkout for 15% off. And we thank Zbiotics for sponsoring this, the Ricochet at the checkout for 15% off. And we thank ZBiotics for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast a brand new guest we've never talked to before, and we're eager to pick his brain on a variety of things. I'm kidding. It's one of our

faves, Andy McCarthy. Andy McCarthy, senior fellow with the National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and the author of Ball of Collusion, the plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency. Well, that presidency is back. And so is Andy. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, guys. How are you?

Good. Capital. All right. You know, we've been talking Trump appointments. We wanted to save one for you. So we know you probably have some thoughts about it. So if you could just tell us, where do you stand on Tulsi Gabbard? No, I'm kidding. You know who I'm talking about. Yeah, look, Gates is an appalling appointment. But it's funny that

you mentioned Gabbard, because I think there's a logic to those two appointments together. I think Trump believes, and he's got colorful reasons for this, that the main insiders in the government that went after him were in the Justice Department and the intelligence community. And I think if you think of Gabbard and Gates as being sent into those agencies to kind of clean house and either get rid of or marginalize the people that Trump believes not only gun for him, but in general politicize their authority, which is a big problem in the government, and in particular in the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus, then those appointments

make sense. I don't have to like them, but I think that that's the logic of the appointments. Yeah, Andy, it's Steve Hayward in Washington. I'm actually at the annual Federal Society Conference, where I know you've been present in years past. And no one has taken a poll, but everyone you talk to is similarly appalled at the Gates nomination and think there is zero chance he will be confirmed. I mean, I have my theories about this that are congruent with yours. Trump wants disruptors. He wants people who he thinks will be loyal to him when he thinks he couldn't count on, I think incorrectly, couldn't count on his first attorney

general from Trump won. But boy, I don't know. I'm sort of at a loss to say, how could he have thought this is a good idea? I mean, I get the other people, even RFK Jr. I get to a certain extent, even though I think that's a dubious idea. I kind of get that one, but this one's a real head-scratcher. Well, I've kind of made a resolution, Steve, that I'm not going to get myself all whipped up about the second Trump administration, because I was actually talking to Rich Lowry before on our podcast about this. If you look like month to month in the last Trump administration, there would be nonstop drama. I used to call the Twitter feed all in all the time, right? And then there were the people who provided guardrails for him, the Bill Bars and Mike

Pompeo's and those guys of the world, right? So if you rode this thing like a daily roller coaster, it would drive you nuts. But if you looked at where the country was on the 1st of the month and the 30th of the month, it was pretty much the same place. And there was a lot of good, I think more good than bad, certainly, during those four years. So I'm going to try not to get whipped up about the ups and downs. I think this is an extraordinary one because the framers put the Senate vetting of high government officials into the Constitution precisely to protect liberty and because they didn't want too much power to be accumulated in any one person's hands. So the president gets to fire anyone that he wants in the Justice Department, but you can't appoint somebody who can't get past the Senate, which is supposed to be looking for whether they have the characters, the scruples, and the capabilities to do the47 Republican majority in the Senate, and you think you have

to do a cockamamie recess appointment scheme to get somebody appointed, then that should say even to Trump, this is someone who you should not appoint. And I just, with respect to Trump on the all-in, all-the-time sort of theory, I don't buy into four-dimensional chess theories of Trump. I am totally, even though I would find this hard to believe in other circumstances, I'm totally open to the idea that, you know, Susie Wiles left the room and left him together with Boris Epstein and Gates for five minutes, and then the next thing you know, Gates was the Attorney General, right? I totally believe that. I don't think that there's a great scheme behind this, but the fact that you would have to do a scheme to get him confirmed

because he's unconfirmable should say to anybody sensible, don't do this. Well, I've been tempted to try and advance the joke that Susie has left her wiles at the door sometimes. Right, right. You know, we'll see about this, because I'm inclined to think well over from what I've heard. I've never met her, don't know that much. But, well, that's the related question, was the recess appointment business. And, of course, that preceded the Gates appointment. He's Trump talked about that starting sometime last week. And, you know, he's being very demanding.

And and I think Charlie and I may have a slight difference. I think, Charlie, I think you are harshly critical of Trump's pushing the recess appointment loophole, so to speak. You know, I kind of think Trump is using his old real estate business tactics in politics, which people, I think, still haven't quite figured out, right? You ask for the moon and the stars, and maybe you get something what you want. And so, Andy, I know you're familiar with the problem that now goes back to the Watergate era. You know, after Watergate, we have the new Ethics Acts, the FBI background checks for everybody take so long, more delays in hearings, and getting not just cabinets, you usually get those through fairly quickly, but, you know, the Trump administration went two, three, almost through all four years

with certain senior sub-cabinet offices not confirmed because of controversies and delays and background checks. And people have talked for 20, 30 years now that this is a problem that has gotten out of hand. And all the good reform talk is just not going to change that. So here comes Trump, blustering as usual, saying, you give me resource appointments and I'll appoint 500 people and get things up and running. And it is an offense to the constitutional principle of advice and consent of the Senate. On the other hand, maybe this is going to shake things up and make the Senate and the FBI and all the other processes maybe behave themselves with a little more dispatch? Is that plausible? Is there a reason to think that might be an outcome from

this? I think that Trump doesn't have the same presumption of illegitimacy in some quarters this time than he had the last time. There have been reforms of the process i don't remember steve if it's um like what year they did it but they they lowered charlie may remember exactly when this was but they lowered the number of hours that the senate can hold up any one nominee from like 30 down to two it was 2019 and it was the brainchild and stewarded by that rhino squish, Mitch McConnell, who we're all supposed to hate, but was one of the most effective conservative figures in the last half century, and once again has improved things here. Yeah, so I think the other thing, Steve, is he's naming these people early in the hope of getting the benefit that

I think Obama got. You know, no one complains that these hurdles that you just described had any impact on Obama, right? He started to name people within days after being elected, and by the time he got in, they rat-tat-tat confirmed his guys. In fact, I remember this very well because I was ballistic over the Holder nomination. I had a personal reason to be ballistic over it. I was in the Southern District of New York as a prosecutor, not only during the Mark Rich debacle, but Susan Rosenberg, the former Weather Underground terrorist, was my defendant. I spent about a year and a half in a litigation to stop the trial judge in that case from releasing her from her, was it 60-year prison sentence.

This was one of my favorite litigations ever because she was represented by Williams & Connolly, which is like the sort of quasi-white-shoe criminal firm in Washington who represented Clinton. And their defense was that Susan wasn't a terrorist. And the explanation for that was that their firm didn't represent terrorists and they were representing her. Ergo, she wasn't a terrorist. So it took me a year and a half, but I did manage to talk the judge

out of that one. But as soon as we finally got them to rule in our favor, Clinton pardoned her on his way out the door. And he used the same offline pardon system that Holder had designed for Mark Rich so that that didn't go through the pardon office. And in a real skeevy way, they got that out the door. So anyway, I was ballistic over that. But the Mark Rich thing ended up not mattering. I think Holder got like he was confirmed something like 87 to 13 or something along those lines. So, you know, I expect that most of Trump's I just don't believe that he picked Gates because, like, he's obviously not going to make it, but that'll make it easier for, you know, for Todd Blanch or whoever else comes up behind him. I do think Todd Blanch is likely to end up being the AG, but I don't think it was a scheme that Gates would implode and that would make it easier for the next guy.

I think Trump actually wants Gates and will probably fight for him a little bit. Yeah, I thought there was maybe a game-through angle, but I want to back up a step. Because you prompted a big point of mine that maybe I'm a little out there on the edge. But you said that Obama managed to get a lot of people through fairly quickly. Here's the thing about appointments in the federal bureaucracy, is that there's an asymmetry between the two parties. By that I mean, and here's where I'm very direct and blunt, the federal bureaucracy is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party.

And that's been their intention for years. And I'm always frustrated that Republican candidates don't ever say that directly. We talk about the deep state and the swamp and all the rest of that, and you kind of know what they mean. But the point is obvious here, which is, you know, the permanent bureaucracy, they don't actually need a Democratic appointees to know what they want to do. They'll just keep doing it, right? I mean, I actually think it's almost literally true. A Democratic president wouldn't need to appoint anybody from the bureaucracy to do what Democrats want the bureaucracy to do. But for Republican administrations, it's crucial to have your appointees

in if you're going to have any point of resting on the bureaucracy and changing policy. And that's why, you know, this delay in appointments is, I think, so crucial and, as I say, has an asymmetric effect on Republican administrations. That's my point and that's just the response and healed your point look i i you know from another angle of looking at exactly the same thing you know i felt like i had to rationalize why i decided to vote for trump after uh after saying that i think he should have been impeached removed and and disqualified, which is something of a conundrum. And I'm you know, the the answer, the short answer is, I think, well, I think it's a binary choice. I respect people who don't think that. But like I come from a I come from a background where, you know, we put 12 people in the box and sometimes the government's case is really crappy.

But the defendant is a really bad guy. And we make the jury decide, you know, there's no choice. See, it's guilty or not guilty. So I didn't I don't feel comfortable not like making the choice that's in front of us. But this was like the worst choice in the history of choices but my my best argument for it and it may not be an argument that carries the day but it carried the day for me is that i think the system and in particular the system that you just described keeps republican presidents on the straight and narrow.

That is, those guardrails are real when a Republican is in power, whereas they're not when a Democrat is in power. And for that reason, I was a lot more worried about a Harris administration, which would be, you know, basically the administrative state would not keep them within the guardrails. In fact, they think it's like rock and roll when those guys are in, right? They can push through every single policy piety they want to push through. Whereas I think when a Republican's in, the deep state does its job in a very aggressive way. So do the courts tend to. Congress certainly does. The media,

business leaders, the whole array of what we think of when we talk about, you know, the deep state, which is not a term I love, but I think it's, we want to jump off what Steve said. I agree with your characterization of the federal bureaucracy, Steve. I agree with your description of what is different when a Republican is in power than when a Democrat is in power. Which is why I think Matt Gaetz is a disastrous choice. In my way of looking at this, this has the potential to be bad for Republicans,

and in particular, Trump, on both ends. And this is why I want Andy's feedback on this, because he knows so much more about this than I do. If you take Kavanaugh, for example, I thought the way he was treated was disgraceful, dishonest. I was vehemently in favor of his nomination and fought back against all of the lies. But I also understood that for certain Republican senators, it was a difficult vote. But that difficult vote was created purely because the nomination process had been turned

into a circus and allegations had been made that had to be dispensed with. Once Kavanaugh was on, unless you're Susan Collins and you made a show of being pro-choice, he was basically all upside for the Republican Party because they could go back to their constituents and say, look, we got an originalist adjacent judge on the court. With Gates, I see both sides of this process

being potentially deleterious for the right in that he is going to have, whether they're all true or not, all manner of personal peccadilloes brought up during his hearings. Sleeping with 17-year-olds, partying, taking drugs, all of the boasting about having sex and using drugs while he was doing it, and filming it and showing it to people in Congress and so forth. That's all going to come up. So if you are a Republican senator, you have to get past that if you want to get to yes. But also, he's then Attorney General. And this is the bit that I think is irritating me.

And I will ask my question in a second. But I keep being told, well, are you more in favor of the deep state than of Matt Gaetz? No, it's because I am bothered by the bureaucracy that I'm bothered by Matt Gaetz. And another one is that look at the last guy. Look at Merrick Garland and everything he did. I agree, but let's not do it again. So, Andy, my question is, isn't there a huge risk here? And maybe I'm just wrong, but isn't there a huge risk here

that Matt Gaetz being Attorney General, as somebody who's self-aggrandizing and ill-disciplined, frankly not that experienced or good, is going to by being attorney general cause trump problems for two years while he's president and he really only has two years until the democrats are likely to take back the house much more than someone who was really good at their job wanted to take on the bureaucracy and wasn't matt gates would be yeah i i think charlie the perfect comparison is the last attorney general that trump

actually had bill barr and gates barr could see the curveballs coming when they got out of the pitcher's hand before they exploded right gates is not that guy gates practiced law for about five minutes and then he dove into electoral politics in Florida. He's been running for either state legislature or Congress since 2010. There's no reason to believe he knows anything about the Justice Department. He knows some stuff about, like, for example, the Trump investigations, because he was on committees that looked at those. But he doesn't know the structure of the Justice Department. And look, there's a guy who was in the law for his whole career, Alberto Gonzalez. The Justice Department ate him alive when he got in there. And Alberto Gonzalez was about 10 times more prepared for what the Justice Department bureaucracy can do to somebody who's a novice and who doesn't know where all the levers are compared to Matt Gaetz. notorious positions he's ever taken were he joined the cockamamie brief in the Texas case

where the state of Texas was taking the position that other states state certified electoral votes shouldn't be counted which was such an absurd argument that the Supreme Court virtually didn't even entertain it and that's with three judges on the bench who Trump had put on the Supreme Court virtually didn't even entertain it. And that's with three judges on the bench who Trump had put on the Supreme Court. And then he took the position that Vice President Pence had the authority to invalidate or at least remand state-certified electoral votes, which, if he was correct about that, Kamala Harris could stop Trump from taking office on January 6th. So we have a guy who's never practiced law, who doesn't know anything that we can detect about how the Justice Department and the FBI are structured, who doesn't, to my

knowledge, have a vision of like what reform ought to happen at the Justice Department and the FBI, which is important because those two agencies, I think Charlie and I on his podcast have done at least two long discussions about the reform things that need to be done in connection with those two institutions. What's Gates' vision of that and how would you accomplish that? There's no reason to think he knows that. And the Justice Department, and I say this as somebody who was in it for a very long time, it's a very arrogant institution, but it has its ways and its history, and it has its ways of destroying people who come in and try to upset the apple cart.

And that's just a fact. You need someone like, I think it badly needs reform, but you need someone like Barr who knows where all the bodies are buried and where all the buttons are and knows how they're going to come at him and how to undermine him. Gates is going to be in there and he's going to go into, for example, the Civil Rights Division, which is the thing that most badly needs reform in the Justice Department. And he's going to face lawyers who've been at the Justice Department for between 10 and 20 years and have done nothing but civil rights law, which we have no reason to think Gates even knows anything about.

And he's going to have to go toe to toe with those people. And there's about a million ways they can undermine them. Yeah. And this to me is just a perfect example of how many people in Trump's orbit, they mistake drama for resolve. You want someone with resolve who doesn't cause drama because the press will cause drama. They're going to go after anyone who tries to reform the bureaucracy. You want somebody who is able to ignore that somebody who is more like ron de santis in

the way that they operate where they attract all the heat but they put ice on it so my follow-up question is leave aside who you think would be or you know would be good bill barr being an example of it. Who would you appoint if you were president of the United States to lead this project? I mean, if you had carte blanche, who would you pick? Well, I would want a Mukasey or a Barr. I don't know if they would, at this point in their lives, dispose to do something like that. With respect to the people who are on the table now, you know, for example, I think our own from National Review, Ed Whelan would be an excellent person at the Justice Department,

another guy who knows the Justice Department through and through and would have very developed ideas about things that were wrong, things that could be reformed, and people who could come in and help him to do that. I think George Terwilliger would be a perfect attorney general. Of the people who are on the table now, I don't put anybody in that category who I've heard Trump at least considered. I think Todd Blanch will be much better than Gates obviously would have been. Todd was a federal prosecutor for about 10 years before he became a defense lawyer, and I think he's a solid criminal practitioner. I don't think he's necessarily a star in like the bar or mucasey league but he'll be he'd be fine um he's uh i i thought watching the new york trial that he took a couple of dumb positions in the defense which only can be

explained by the fact that he did what trump wanted rather than what was good for the defense so you'll have to deal with that dynamic. You know, he's obviously going to serve the master. But I think he'd be fine. Let's remember, like 99 point something percent of what the attorney general does is not stuff that he needs day to day input from the president about. You know, there's a lot of a lot of stuff that I don't think Trump would have any interfere, any interest in interfering in. And some of the things I think Trump would want to interfere in would be helpful. Like, for example, to the extent that he wants to leverage federal prosecutorial authority in blue states, especially the big cities, where these progressive prosecutors aren't enforcing the law. I think Rudy's career in New York shows that that actually can be very helpful and can make a big difference in law enforcement.

That's the kind of thing I expect that Trump would want the Justice Department to do, and it would be beneficial if it were done. I think Matt Whitaker would probably be fine, Charlie, of all the people that I've heard mentioned in Trump's orbit. I think Whitaker is a former U.S. attorney. He was a chief of staff to an attorney general. He knows how federal prosecution works. He knows how the Justice Department works, and I think he'd be fine. And I also think he'd sail to confirmation. So I'm kind of puzzled, other than knowing Trump as we know Trump, why you wouldn't, you know, that would be a layup of a confirmation. Andy, let me introduce one last topic that doesn't involve Trump directly. Start with a news item a few days ago that a CIA

operative was arrested for having leaked Israeli battle plans overseas. There's been other examples of well, there's that guy at the State Department they suspended whose name escapes me right now, but evidence of Iranian penetration inside our government.

We know the Chinese spy like crazy at our universities and elsewhere. I think we should bring back the House and Senate committees on internal security that we abolished in the 70s in our fit of guilt and the post-Watergate period. And of course, the left will scream and the media will scream, McCarthyism. And I'll tell them, no, no, it's Andy McCarthyism. I like McCarthyism. Anyway, if they're going to scream, let's just call them the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Oh, yeah, let's go all the way. Right, I agree. Yes, right, right. What do you think, Andy? I think we've got to do something here, and I don't trust the standing committees or the CIA to investigate themselves. See, I think, Steve, that when you had Gallagher in the House and Barr at the Justice Department, you effectively had that without it being called that. Because remember, Barr had a China initiative. Actually, I think it predated Barr. I think it started with Sessions.

But Barr took it on. When Barr started his career in the government, he was a CIA guy and China was his concentration. So that's one of those things that he is riveted to. But I think between what Gallagher's committee was doing, which was like the only committee on Capitol Hill that was actually efficient and seemed to work the way it's supposed to work. We had something like that. And I don't care so much how they label it as that they do it, but I think it needs to be done. I also think with respect to that CIA case, I'm really concerned. I mean, I'm sure they have the goods on this guy. That's why they charged him. But I worry that that guy's a scapegoat in the sense that I think the Biden-Harris administration, beginning with, I think you're talking about Malley, the envoy. Right.

And his protege, Tabatabai, who, even though she was involved in this Iran initiative, those scholars who wrote apologetic pieces for the Iranian regime. Somehow she not only is in the government, but she has like the highest security clearance that you could have. And she was the chief of staff to the undersecretary at the Defense Department who handles special operations, which is counterterrorism. So to have her in a job like that, I just think it underscores that these guys, they're running rampant. You know, these Iranian, maybe calling them assets overstates it, but sympathizers.

They thread Obama and Biden's administration to the point that one of the co-authors of tabatabai in um the things that she wrote on behalf of the iranian regime was this guy phil what is this gordon is less than but he was kamala harris's national security advisor and it was predicted that if she got in he would have a major position there so i'm glad glad they got the CIA guy if they got him. But, I mean, he's like the tip of the iceberg of what we're dealing with. It has to get better. It really does. Because, I mean, we've been seeing things like Iranian penetration confirmed as this particular State Department employee has been giving details to the government.

And then the response seems to be, yeah, that's bad, but nothing we can do about that. There's plenty we can do about that, and I expect we're going to see it in the next couple of years. Andy, we know you've got to go. I mean, you're looking good. You're looking spiffy, and I've been informed that that's

because you're going on Fox soon. But to us, no, this is how you always look, with a good tie and a good shirt and you clean up well. So have fun on Fox. Andrew, you clean up well. So have fun. I wish it, Andrew, I wish it was going to be fun.

Apparently they're, they're covering this awful Lake and Riley case, which I just had to read up on in order to like, know what the hell I was talking about. It's like awful. Just tell me. Well, there's a day,

there's a day brightener. May, may it get better for you and may you have a fine weekend. We'll talk to you again. You too, guys. Thank you. See ya. Bye. Before we go, and we've got some time, I want to do one thing here, and that

is mention, because you're wondering, gosh, I love Ricochet. Love reading it, love reading all the comments, but if only there was a way to meet these people in person. Now, if you're expecting Rob Long to appear all of a sudden and do a meetup announcement, no, he's probably in a cell somewhere in a robe that is knotted with a rough rope doing what he's doing. So I will do what Robby is to do and tell you what the meetup's to come.

Now, the thing is about Ricochet, it's not just people typing anonymously behind a keyboard. There are people who get together in real life. And if you would like to meet them, for heaven's sakes, well, just join Ricochet and then put up a Ricochet meetup in your town and people will flock to you. Now, those of you who have social anxiety, of course, it sounds like an absolute nightmare for those of you who may be of an extroverted sort and wish in these cold months to get together and hoist a few and talk about things because that's the great thing about ricochet is how little when we get together in person we talk about politics culture society all the rest of it the member feed come to life but it's not boring people who have no life and can do only things but talk about politics anyway Anyway, Dave Carter, our old friend,

is hosting a meetup in Panama City. That's in Florida, of course. Yes, there's an airport nearby, and you can get there from anywhere. December 6th to the 8th, 2024. I assume when he says from the December 6th to the 8th that there are moments where you can step aside and use the restroom, perhaps,

or call home or something like that. Otherwise, it sounds like a 48-hour convocation, which could be fun. And Randy, our old friend Randy, is having a meetup in Chattanooga. Chattanooga. Chattanooga. Chattanooga. That's probably a Chattanooga somewhere else in the country. In Tennessee, Chattanooga, Tennessee, January 19, 2025.

So check Ricochet. Check the meetup. Pay and start your own. Meet people. It's always fun. We're a great bunch. I wish there was one closer to me at a date that I could go to. But if there is, I'll be there.

Now, gentlemen, one of the things that I love most about the administration that's going to unfold before us is the fact that what once was a meme of a Shiba Inu looking quizzically at the camera now is the acronym for a government agency that supposed or initiative that is going to reduce waste fraud waste and, and all the rest of those things. Doge, you love it as a coin. You love it as a meme.

And now, well, are you going to love it as a, as a enterprise? Do you it as a meme. And now, well, are you going to love it as a enterprise? Do you think it will do anything? Or is this going to be more like Proxmire's golden fleece? Proxmire always come up with something, you know, like the ridiculous amount of money we're spending on having shrimp run on treadmills underwater. I was somebody who would come out later, you know, come six months later and say, well, actually, that study led to the creation of a vaccine that reduced death by right out by by spotted elephant fever by 600 percent. You know, there's so many things that we can get rid of.

But, you know, you figure you cut the you cut the spending for this. You're not doing anything about the organization that commissioned the spending in the first place. And that seems to be maybe what Musk et al are after. Or is this just going to be another initiative at the end of which we are faced with a government as big as it was before? I'm just pretty skeptical. It's not that I have a problem with the program, which is a couple of smart guys looking through spending reports. It's just that the issue here is a total lack of desire on the part of the American people or Congress

to do anything about what's actually driving our deficits and therefore our debt. There's a very funny Australian TV commercial for, I think, Castlemane Forex beer from the 80s, where this guy shows up in the outback with a pickup truck and they load one crate of Castlemane Forex after another until they're comically stacked and eventually the guy comes out of the store and he says uh you want a sherry for the missus and he picks up the sherry and he puts the sherry on top these you know 7 000 beers and the pickup truck collapses and he says i guess it was the sherry that did it and i love this as a kid but this to me is is what we're doing here with the federal budget i would love to get rid of all

of those stupid spending uh initiatives that you hear about but the problem is entitlements and on top of that it's big organizations that would take political capital to abolish. The Department of Education, agricultural subsidies. If there were the will to use the power that the Republicans have been given to make substantive changes to the federal budget, then we wouldn't need this Doge organization. We might want to have it anyway, but we wouldn't need it as part of some effort to streamline and fix our fiscal problem. We know where our fiscal problems lie. I understand the political imperatives here. I understand that the public is not interested in making a change here, and that therefore it's somewhat futile for Republicans to lose elections by promising to make changes the public doesn't want but we know what the issue is

it's not like this is a secret and the last thing i'll say before i shut up is i think i'm right in saying that you know 90 of the waste that was identified in this initial report is interest on the debt now that's fine to point out that we're paying huge amounts of interest on the debt, but you can't stop paying that because you'll default. If you want to stop interest on the debt being the big problem that it is, you have to stop the spending that has caused the borrowing that has caused the interest on the debt.

So after a point, we're really just looking at things that are marginal instead of having an honest conversation about the core issue. Yeah, so I share a lot of Charlie's cynicism about this. And yeah, although I do think that, I think the figure, you might have even reported this, Charlie, is that over $100 billion a year now in fraudulent or improper payments. $200,000.

See, that starts to look like real money, but how you get at that, I don't know if it's enforcement or changing the rules, because that whole business is very opaque. My mind runs back to a previous effort to do this in the 80s, and I'm sure you'll remember, James, it was the Grace Commission under Reagan, which identified $300 billion in inefficiencies and savings. And of course, that was real money back in the 1980s. And almost none of that came about, in part because, and here I guess maybe the best guide is the old Yes Minister series, which bureaucracy will bamboozle you, that one famous episode of a hospital with 400 administrators and no doctors and no patients. That show was written by real economists who

understood public choice theory. But one of the things that Musk and his team will find is that some of the things you think are waste, and actually I agree it's a trivial amount, as Charlie says, but he went back in the 80s and some people who look hard at the Grace Commission pointed out, and actually this was a liberal myth, there really weren't any $600 hammers at the Pentagon or $2,000 coffee pots. That was a function of the peculiar accounting methods of the government. So to vastly simplify this, you order a hammer from one defense contractor and you order a jet plane from them, they'll apportion overhead in equal amounts to both units. So, you know, what's a trivial amount of overhead for a fighter plane ends up being, you know, $590 of overhead assigned to the cost of a $10 hammer. So there aren't really any real savings there if you just change the accounting around, right?

Or they had to devise a particular kind of hammer for a particular kind of job. And that, you know, the R&D costs were built into that cost. But on the other hand, so you may not have many $6,000 hammers, but what we do have and everybody's familiar with is a $47 aspirin because the government got into the business of health care and accountability was removed so that we don't pay out of our own pocket, but we pay to somebody who pays to somebody who pays to somebody depending on whether the code is right.

That is something that we'd like to take a look at too. But you're right. When the Grace Commission came out, I remember we were all talking about waste, fraud, and abuse for years, until the last two words became one German term to me, fraud and abuse. Waste, fraud, and abuse. So when I hear it, I reach for my, well, yeah, I'll wait to see what they come up with. But Charlie's right. It's entitlements.

And as somebody who owns agricultural land, of course, I don't believe that you should change the subsidies for that at all. And as somebody who's over retirement age, you'd better keep your hands off my Social Security. But as somebody who cares much about the country, I would love to see them do something about Social Security that keeps it there for the people who are going to need it and phases it out for the people who won't. And that may be some kind of privatization. That may be some sort of 401k thing where the government does a little investing. I don't know. I'm open to anything. But right now, the idea of 20-somethings, 30-somethings don't think they're going to get anything out of it. And to make them pay for the people who are getting something out of it is a generational

transfer that seems to be not right, not moral. So we got to figure out a way about that or it is going to consume us. And the doges are, you know, will go the way of the Venetian ones. And that's that. Hey, guys, let's get out of here. Let's go have some lunch. Thank you for joining. Thank you for going to Apple iTunes or music or whatever they call it right now or any place that you get your podcast, for that matter, and giving us high rankings, high votes, high positive comments. Because then people will say, hey, what is this thing?

I've heard about the Ricochet podcast for 716 episodes, but this is the one that finally makes me go check. Could be. Join. It's cheap. Join the conversation.