Best of the Program | Guests: Richard Staropoli & Ze’ev Orenstein | 12/10/24
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We talk.

We talk about pardons with Alan Dershowitz and Mike Lee. We talk about the dangers just ahead of our own president with Richard Starapoli. He's with Homeland, or was with Homeland Security and Secret Service. And we talk about the Ark of the Covenant, its location they may be getting close to with Zev Orenstein, all on the best of today's podcast.

Let me tell you about the Berna Launcher. It is great. Mainly because it can be a lot of fun. For instance, probably a little too close. Stu, I'm going to make the desk a little bigger. So he's maybe about, I don't know, 40 feet away. So it really doesn't, I mean, it'll leave a mark, but it won't, you know, really hurt him. So every time he says something stupid, I can take out my Berna Launcher and just go shoot him in the chest. The Berna Launcher is a great, great alternative. You know, when you shoot, you have to shoot to kill. Yeah.

That's just the way it is. You don't shoot to wound, you shoot to kill. And that's why you just don't ever want to pull your gun out unless you absolutely have to. But there are situations where less lethal is the way to go. And that's why people have tasers or they have pepper spray because they don't want to pull out a gun. The Berna launcher looks like a gun and its barrel looks like it's a cannon coming out at you.

It can fire rounds that will just hurt Stu really, really badly. But also tear gas. You hit anywhere, like five feet around this threat,

up to 60 feet away, and they'll be taken down by tear gas for about 40 minutes, incapacitated. It is great. It makes a great Christmas gift for every member of the family over 18. You don't need a license, nothing. It's Burna, B-Y-R-N-A dot com slash Glenn, Burna dot com slash Glenn. ♪♪

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. So Richard Scarpoli, he is a former U.S. Secret Service special agent, also former Department of Homeland Security chief. He was the chief information officer there. And I read an article by him the other day. He has extensive experience on matters involving intelligence gathering and emerging technologies.

But also, you know, security was with Secret Service. So not only forgery and bank fraud and fugitives, but also the security around the president of the United States. And he believes we are in for possibly a rough winter here. Richard, welcome to the program.

Well, thank you very much for having me, sir. You bet. You bet. Thank you so much. So can you give us the threat that you see coming?

Well, you know, Glenn, I don't think I said anything that most people hadn't surmised to begin with about the deficiencies and the shortcomings of the Secret Service and how they've allowed their political feelings to compromise the mission of the Secret Service and providing the adequate level of protection for President Trump. Right. Right. It is. It is. I think it's more than obvious to two real bad guys or evildoers, as W would have put it, that.

Every incident that's gone on that involved President Trump since he was shot in Butler, to include the incident with the guy on the golf course, the Chinese national walking onto the Mar-a-Lago property, other incidents, people are watching these things and they're viewing them as a test of the response of the Secret Service. And I've got to tell you, from a law enforcement, from a Secret Service perspective,

The Secret Service has not fulfilled their primary mission. They've simply allowed way too many things to happen that could have ended in total tragedy. And were it not but for a millimeter in Butler, we'd be having a much different conversation about who the next president is going to be. So, Richard, I have...

I've actually begged to testify against the Secret Service in Congress because I have firsthand knowledge of things that that I have done and how I've been able to approach the president without anybody, you know, looking into me and my team with guns. I mean, it's crazy. However, in the last few, well, probably the last two months, maybe.

The Secret Service is at least for a layman like me all over it. I've never seen security like what's happening right now with Donald Trump.

Never. And that's that's partly right. Right. The optics now has gotten a lot better. But the problem is and this is just by virtue of the acting director's most recent testimony where he continually says in full view of the public that they're lacking the adequate manpower and resources to do this job. So a real bad guy interprets that as, OK, let's take a look and see what's going on. And yes, yes.

The people that are around President Trump have been pulled much closer. It is more difficult to get closer to them. All that simply means that these organized groups need to pull back their perimeter. Look what happened at the event in Vegas before the election. A guy in a car or a truck was allowed to drive within a quarter of a mile. Turns out he was a Trump supporter, but he was stopped by the local sheriff's office.

hey, what if that truck had been loaded with explosives? He got close enough to cause tremendous damage to that building and bring the roof down. And yet, even at a quarter of a mile, he never encountered a federal agent, let alone a Secret Service agent. The Secret Service is not providing the presidential level of protection that they need to to President Trump. And they're masking that because they're saying, well, he was a former president. Now they're saying, well, he's not inaugurated yet.

So consequently, you left the guy who's target number one on everyone's hit list not as protected as he should be. Yet you're providing 40 or so protective details to members of the Biden crime family to include crackhead, non-taxpaying Hunter Biden. And this is a big problem. You don't have manpower. Why are you providing protective details to the Secretary of the Treasury?

the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Korean Jean-Pierre, Admiral Kirby, and I could go on and on for another 20 people. Korean Jean-Pierre has Secret Service protection?

oh this has been going on for for a long time there are almost 40 protective details that are being worked out of the white house not all of them are done by statute that involve the biden family right there are people that are being given one or two agents and are driven to work back and forth under the guise of well you know it's in the best interest of national security you can't tell me that isn't a conscious decision by the biden administration to

sucked resources away from where they should have been allocated to president Trump. Now, can I, can I push back again, Richard on this only because you're a pro at this. I'm a layman, but I have been around presidents, you know, since Reagan and I remember the secret service around Reagan. It was intense. When I was at Mar-a-Lago just, but last week,

I mean, I've never seen anything like it. And in fact, I said to my wife, I think all of the taxes that I will pay in my entire life will not cover the bill of all of this apparatus and all of these people protecting the president. And I pay a lot in taxes. I mean, I can't imagine that.

What real security would look like. So what is it you think they're missing? Well, what they're missing is the secret part of the Secret Service that you don't see, right? The fact that you've got to go through all these metal detectors and pass through this cordon of Secret Service agents, that's part of it. But the other part of it is things like, where's the air assets? Right.

Right. For years, the Secret Service has been using a helicopter airborne asset. Well, since Igor Sikorsky invented helicopters. Right. By doing that, you put people in the air. You've demonstrated the ability to have secure communications amongst the personnel on board that helicopter. And you've allowed the service to extend their perimeter.

out much, much further. What the service is doing now is nice. That'll stop the guy with the handgun. That'll stop the guy from getting in close, but that's not going to stop the organized threat. And it's the organized threat. That's a really, really big concern here today, right? Now with the nation state or the cartels, they don't need to get that close. They just need to know where he is and take a building down. And that's the concern. So there's two, there's two things that concern me. Um,

and you having experience with department of Homeland security would, would recognize this immediately. I am, I mean, I see the way his plane down in Florida, it was protected by rows of old school buses. Okay. They just park them all around his plane. That didn't seem, I mean, that seemed a little like, I don't know, like how Venezuela might do it. But yeah,

I know that it probably is not that hard for a cartel or someone to get a rocket launcher across the border. And the president's plane does not have what is it? Chaff or chaff countermeasures doesn't have any of that. So I'm worried about that. And I am worried that we do have.

really bad drug cartel people in the country and people from several countries who wish us death that could get those rocket launchers. So is Department of Homeland Security, are they working with the Secret Service at all to find that? Because I don't hear that. I heard that right after the first shooting and then I haven't heard anything about it since.

- No, and no one's heard anything from the Department of Homeland Security. This guy Alejandro Mayorkas has turned out to be the biggest empty suit I think I've ever seen in the federal government, right? The military assets that should be afforded President Trump, and I understand, listen, okay, he's not the inaugurated president yet, totally irrelevant. If something happens to President Trump, it has cataclysmic effects for the entire world, let alone the United States. The military assets need to be turned on. And who can turn them on?

President Joe Biden, but he's not going to do that. You cannot surround Trump Force One, which I know that's how he likes to refer to it, with school buses or dump trucks. You need jets. You

You need military jets, do you not? That's exactly right. There's military jets. There's countermeasures that can be put on the aircraft. There's classified programs that can be employed and are employed for the sitting president of the United States. They're designed to make sure that somebody doesn't lob a missile at the direction of that plane or fly a drone into the protected airspace and so on and so forth. And these assets are not being used.

because he's not the sitting president yet. This is total nonsense. They've left this guy wide open to something happening between now and the inauguration. And are you worried that that's what you're really worried about is these next 40 days?

Well, it's the next 40 days, but it's also the next four years, right? How can someone be a Secret Service agent and not go to work every day with the mindset, hey, I've got to stop the Mujahideen from coming over the wall today. I've got to be thinking about what is the biggest cataclysmic effect that can possibly happen and design my protective security net, my site, to thwart that.

Anything less than that and you're fooling yourself and you should not be a Secret Service agent. In the old days, that just wouldn't happen. So I know that Donald Trump, he's a guy who grew up going to church with Norman Vincent Peale. So he is a positive thinker. He doesn't like to speak things like this. And he has said to me, he said to the American people, and he has said to me privately that

I am very comfortable with the people who are around me, the Secret Service. They're doing their job, blah, blah, blah. And he won't talk about any of the security at all, ever, even privately. In fact, I brought it up and I said, hey, I'm really concerned. He said, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to. Don't speak things into existence.

So he is I don't know where he actually stands on this, but he seems to be happy with it. What is the one thing he who should he have in that could clean this thing up? I keep thinking Dan Bongino, but Bongino's I don't think going to do it. Who should he put in to clean this up?

Because it really needs to be cleaned up. The entire Secret Service. He needs somebody that has the one, the ability to walk into a room and command the respect of

of the field, right? This guy that's in there now certainly doesn't have that, right? And that became monumentally evident when that congressman during last week's hearing produced that photo of the acting director sitting behind President Biden at the September 11th events, right? That wasn't coincidence. Somebody sent him that picture. No, no, no, you know where that picture came from? You know where that picture came from? The guy's wife.

She was taking photographs of all of that, so she was the photographer on it. And everybody had their taped position, and his position was way behind. It wasn't even close. Yep. No, that's exactly right. And she's a Secret Service employee, by the way.

his wife. I don't know if that's commonly known, but the guy should not have been there. That was all about the optics of putting himself in the proverbial photo, right? So put that aside. But to answer your question, you need somebody that will have the respect of the rank and file, somebody that's been there and has done these things, right? You also need somebody, and this is where it gets a little more difficult, that has been out of the government, say, for a decade or so, that has the business acumen to

to be able to deal with an organization that has 7,000 employees. We're pretty sure it's got 7,000. No one can give me an exact number. And a budget of $3.5 billion. That is a huge number. You need someone that can appreciate how big of a number that is. And the current...

policy of the Secret Service continually promoting Secret Service agents that have backgrounds in sociology and police science into positions where they're managing that kind of a budget, that doesn't work. It's unacceptable.

The current director has asked for an additional $2 billion. You need $5.5 billion to do this job? You have one mission, and they can't get it done. So ultimately, hey, the guys, listen, I've been asked who I would recommend. I've given some names. They've got them. I've given a list of, hey, here's the things you need to do to get that agency back to where it was, to achieve that level of greatness. Right.

All this other stuff that they're... Go ahead, sir. No, no, no. I don't mean to cut you off. I have to hit a network break here. Understood. Let me just say this, Richard. Would you do me a favor? Would you stay in touch with us as you see the names being narrowed down and you see who is nominated?

Could you give us a heads up? I'd love to have you back on. And, of course, any time that you see, I'd love a list of what you think has to be done at the Secret Service. I mean, I think one of the biggest problems with the Secret Service is their budget. And what I mean by that is that's all they rely on. It's almost as if they don't put their brains in gear. They just are like, spend the money. We've got the equipment. Well, what about you?

What about you as an individual? That's right. There's no foresort or predictive way that they spend this money. If this were the private sector, I would fire every single one of them on positions. One last question, Richard, handling money. One last question. One last question. And I've got to I've got to run. But can the president ever hire additional security outside if he wanted security? Because I've said to him, you should get Gavin DeBecker. Can can he do that?

Is that allowed? He can't do that by by by statute back to 1901. Right. The Secret Service has to afford the president protection. But there's nothing that says he can't hire his additional protection. And the Secret Service is going to have to work with that, whether they like it or not. Yeah, that would change everything that would get their butts in gear.

I think. But they need somebody to go in there and just fire people. They do. And I'd start with the leadership and let's redo it. And I'd be more than happy to do that for them. Are you throwing your name in?

you know look i i've had this discussion with the president and with the trump family before i said i can come down there i will walk you through whoever you're most comfortable with making the director of the secret service i will clean house and get them back to where they need to be and get you started you'll have the most secure environment as possible i'm certainly not going to my answer is not going to be well i've got to put you behind glass like you're working the counter at white castle i know that's ridiculous this isn't venezuela

Richard, thank you so much. We'll talk again. Thank you. Richard Staropoli. Thank you. You bet. Former U.S. Secret Service special agent and former Department of Homeland Security chief information officer. Let me talk to you about pre-born. There is a new study out of Denmark that shows a year after abortion. I want you to listen to this carefully because compassion is the answer to abortion.

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Zev Orenstein is with us from the City of David Foundation. He's the Director of International Affairs. And we're going to talk a little bit about the archaeology of what's going on in the City of David. How are you? Great to be with you. Yeah, good to have you here. So how far...

out of the city wall is the city of David from most people don't, they've never been there. They don't realize how small all of Israel is, let alone Jerusalem. So can you give us some scale first of what we're talking about? So Israel itself is about the size of the okay state of New Jersey. It's, uh, it's, it's, we have about 10 million people living in, uh, in Israel. Uh, Jerusalem is the largest city, uh,

Probably about a million people living in Jerusalem. So Jerusalem, by U.S. standards, is probably not the biggest city. And yet, for billions of people, not millions, when they wake up in the morning, they look to Jerusalem as a source of meaning, faith, hope, identity, inspiration. I can tell you, I've said this a million times, and I don't know if people can even begin to understand this. My wife and I went the first time. We went to the Temple Mount.

And you could almost feel, you could feel it. And then we were all the way up at the border of Syria, past the Sea of Galilee. And I looked at my wife and I said, it's like it's pulsing. I said, can you feel the Temple Mount even here?

There's a reason. It honestly is like the polar, the pole goes right through the Temple Mount and the world actually revolves around that. 100%. It's wild to feel it. Now, if you ask the average Jewish person, Christian person, close your eyes and imagine biblical Jerusalem. Tell me what you see.

And you'll get answers like, I see the Western Wall. I see maybe the Stations of the Cross, maybe the Church of Holy Sepulchre, the Garden Tomb. I see the Old City of Jerusalem and all wonderful, good places, except none of them, at least when we're talking about the original Hebrew Bible, none of those places are in the Bible. When you think of the places where the kings of the Bible ruled,

And the prophets of the Bible preached. You're talking about the city of David. The city of David is today located just outside the walls of the old city. Now, most people think the walls of the old city, those iconic walls, they must be thousands of years old. They're only about 500 years old. Now, only... Wait, wait. The ancient walls around Jerusalem? That's right. 500 years? Built by Suleiman during the Ottoman period. And...

- No idea. - Right? - Wow. - Now most people will say 2000, 3000 years old. Now the walls of the Temple Mount, the Western Wall itself, the Southern Wall, the Southern Steps, all that's 2000 years old going back to the time of Jesus. But the wall around the old city of Jerusalem is only 500 years old. Now, if you're sitting here in America, you're like, "Wow, 500 years is a long time ago." Jerusalem, which is 4000 years old, 500 years ago is like last week. We don't get overly excited by anything 500 years old. So what happened? We lost Jerusalem.

Everyone thought it was the old city. Until about 150 years ago, 1867, Queen Victoria of England, she wants to discover the treasures of the Bible. Like the Ark of the Covenant, she sends a man by the name of Captain Charles Warren to the Holy Land to find those treasures. He comes to Jerusalem. He wants to excavate the Temple Mount, where the Temple of Solomon stood, the biblical Mount Moriah. Except in 1867, the Ottomans, the Muslims are there. And they say, Charles, we're sure you're a great guy.

But you're not digging up the Temple Mount. To this day, due to religious sensitivities, political sensitivities, the Temple Mount has had almost no archaeological activity. So now... Wait, wait, wait. Let me clarify this.

They have, Muslims, if I'm not mistaken, have been digging. - It's not archeology. - Right, they've been digging it and putting it into dump trucks and dumping it. - Yeah, they've been destroying. - Right. - But meaning in terms of archeology, with the goal of uncovering the heritage and history of Jerusalem, uncovering the biblical heritage of Jerusalem, that hasn't taken place.

The opposite, what the Islamic walk for the religious trust on the Temple Mount, what they've done is the opposite of archaeology with the goal of not uncovering and celebrating the heritage of Jerusalem, but actually destroying it. And there's actual archaeologists that sift through all of the stuff. To this day, you have archaeologists and volunteers who are able to go and sift through the hundreds and hundreds of truckloads of earth and

that were removed from the Temple Mount by the Islamic Religious Trust in the late 1990s, dumped in garbage dumps, and when you're sifting through this earth, you will find next to 2,000 year old coins, potato chip wrappers, Coke cans. Why?

Because it's all jumbled together now. They have no... What did they do? I mean, we have no idea what... So the pretense was they wanted to build an emergency exit on the Temple Mount. There is a very large subterranean mosque known as the Marwani Mosque beneath the Temple Mount, beneath the area known as Solomon Stables, one of the most beautiful parts of... Underneath that? Underneath that, the southern end of the Temple Mount. Wow. They hollowed it out.

and they built this subterranean mosque. And then they said, "Well, now we have this mosque there, we need to build an emergency exit." And they used the legitimacy of building an emergency exit to bring in bulldozers and dump trucks and massive machinery. One of the most famous Israeli archaeologists, he said, "If you use a toothbrush on the Temple Mount, that's probably heavy machinery." They used bulldozers and dump trucks. And they took tons and tons and tons of earth and just threw it in the garbage dump. And they said, "Why?" And the answer is very simple.

What they are trying to hide is that the Jewish people and by extension Christians have been in Jerusalem for thousands of years. And so if they can destroy that history, destroy that heritage, well, then they could go along with their claims that Israel's occupying colonizing power that has no history and no heritage in the land of Israel or in Jerusalem. They are seeking to rewrite history to erase the Judeo-Christian heritage from Jerusalem. In fact,

The United Nations passed a resolution a couple of years ago saying that the Temple Mount and Western Wall are exclusively Islamic holy places. What? And they go on to say and condemn all the archaeological excavations in Jerusalem. Now you might say, how on earth?

Could anyone say such a thing that Jews and Christians of no heritage in Jerusalem condemn the archaeology? Why would they say that? But the answer is very simple. If the story that you want to tell about Jerusalem is an exclusively Islamic story, then you will hate a place like the city of David, one of the most archaeologically excavated sites in the world, because every single day, we're unearthing antiquities, fancy word for old stuff, that show not simply as a matter of faith, but

But as a matter of fact, that Jerusalem's biblical heritage is true, that the connection that Jews and Christians have with Jerusalem, the foundations of the United States of America, that the Judeo-Christian heritage that it's built upon comes from Jerusalem, that it's real. And that is a nightmare to them. So last time you were on, I think we talked about the Pool of Bethesda. And this is where Jesus healed the man who had been crucified.

waiting for a miracle at the pool. - Right, the Pool of Siloam at the southern end of the City of David, right? Which up until 2004 was totally covered up. And then in 2004-- - Do we even know that that's kind of where it was? - We know 100% that's where it is today. - No, no, no, no, then. When we started the archeological dig, we didn't know. - So they say hindsight is 20/20.

And obviously now everyone's like, well of course we knew that's where it was. But back then, 2004, it's all covered up. There's a road above it, there's a sewage pipe below. And only because of a busted sewage pipe. We have a teaching in our faith that says God has many miracles. The reason we found one of the most significant biblical heritage sites in all of Jerusalem, the Pool of Siloam with deep significance to Christians and Jews alike was because of a busted sewage pipe.

And that, of course, leads then to another discovery because the Pool of Siloam was the place where before going up to the temple on Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, the pilgrimage festivals, you had to cleanse yourself. You had to wash, cleanse, bathe. In the Christian scriptures, the story of the healing of the blind man, also Pool of Siloam.

And so the archaeologists said, well, if we know where the pool is at the southern end of the city of David, the place where Jerusalem began, how did the millions of pilgrims get from the pool all the way up to the temple on the Temple Mount? They widen the excavation and they end up discovering what's known as the pilgrimage road.

the road that our ancestors, yours and mine, Jews and Christians alike, would have walked on 2,000 years ago when they went on pilgrimage up to the temple on the Temple Mount. So it goes that road would go right directly from that pool. That's right. Right to the temple. The temple. I call it the biblical superhighway. Anywhere you wanted to go in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, that road would take you there. And I've been asked many, many times, what are the chances Jesus walked on that road? That'd be 100%. Yeah, so I tell people, I say, look, conservatively speaking,

We're talking about 100%. So how do you know? Well, the answer is really very simple. If you believe that there was a historic Jesus 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, well, he was Jewish. He went with all the Jews down to cleanse at the Pool of Siloam at the southern end of the city of David. He would have then walked up from the pool along the pilgrimage road, along the half mile journey up to the temple on the Temple Mount.

"The Pool of Siloam that we're excavating as we speak "in the City of David today is 100% the same Pool of Siloam "from 2000 years ago, the time of Jesus. "The Pilgrimage Road that archeologists "from the Israel Antiquities Authority "are excavating as we speak today, "100% the same Pilgrimage Road, same Temple Mount, "same City of David, not simply a matter of faith, "but a matter of fact. "It's real, you could see it, you could touch it, "you could walk on it.

It is the most significant half mile on the planet. There is no half mile. That means more to more people anywhere in the world than the city of David. So when it comes to the temple, does it come to Solomon's stairs? And it's got to be below. I mean, you excavated how deep?

down did you have to dig to find the road? So the Pilgrimage Road itself runs up the length of the City of David. It comes out at the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount. So now what happens is it then splits off. When it gets to the southwestern corner, there is one branch that goes off to the east, which comes out by the southern steps. Again, another site with deep significance for Jews and Christians alike. And then the other part, when it gets to the southwest corner, keeps going north along the western wall.

And that became the main thoroughfare. In fact, when a person stands at the southwest corner of the Temple Mount, you could see the remnants of a massive staircase that would have taken the pilgrims up into the temple. It's still there. You can see the remnants of that staircase. So this was the main thoroughfare where everyone is gathering. Now today, the pilgrimage road,

or the vast majority of it is about 60 feet underground. Now, if this was the United States, what would happen? You know, if you go to Gettysburg today, how many people are buried on the battlefield? How many people live today on the battlefield of Gettysburg? Nobody, right? One of the most significant American heritage sites. So,

In Jerusalem, you would say, well, City of David, it's significant, not just for millions, but billions of people around the world. What should we do? Two words, eminent domain. Except in this part of Jerusalem, we don't do that. And so the challenge is, how do you, on the one hand, respect the modern day City of David and the people who live there today, and at the same time, uncover all the heritage with significance to billions of people around the world and give access to all those who want to see it themselves? And the answer is with a lot of sensitivity.

That's why the city of David is only 11 acres in size. We've only excavated one third of the site to date over the last 150 years. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So it's mainly with buildings and roads and everything above it? Above it, right. Holy cow. And so you're literally trying to have the best of both worlds. Respect the modern, uncover the ancient. And that's why so much of the work has to be done with the utmost care.

sensitivity and at the highest of standards because you can't afford any mistakes. You can't afford for some- You're not getting Elon Musk with his boring machine. No, everything has to be, you're talking about small tools, lots of engineering to support everything that's up above. But I had the privilege of hosting members of the Navy SEALs along the pilgrimage road. And they were based out of Coronado on the West Coast. And they said, well, how does all this get covered up?

So I said, well, you know, it's really simple. You know, you have one time period. Someone comes in and conquers it. They build on top of it. Another one conquers them, builds on top of that, throws some earthquakes in there, and you kind of get all these layers. And I said, well, you know, just to bring it closer to home, I said, well, you guys are out there in California. I said, if you dug down beneath your homes, you'd probably find that once upon a time there were some Native Americans living there. If you kept digging, you might find that once upon a time there were some Republicans living there. Yeah.

I doubt that. I doubt that. I don't think you'll ever find that evidence. It's Seattle. Seattle has a Seattle underground. Right? Yeah. So it's built on top. So in ancient times, it was under the sky. But today, we have to take into account that there is a modern day neighborhood. And so the neighborhood is preserved. But

but we are uncovering that heritage so i want to go into some of the things that you have found in that are possible i was just talking to somebody who did a documentary on the uh ark of the covenant and one of the places that he said it might be is right in that area where you're digging you're listening to the best of the glenn beck podcast hear more of this interview and others with the full show podcast available wherever you get podcasts welcome to the glenn beck program

Senator Mike Lee joins us now. Hello, Mike. How are you? Doing great. Good to be with you as always, Glenn. I have to tell you, we just got off the phone with Alan Dershowitz and I was teasing that you were coming up, you know, a few minutes and he said, wait, before we start, I just have to please tell Mike Lee. Hello. I'm going to send you a clip of it. It was amazing.

Please tell Mike Lee hello. I was a clerk with his father and we had lunch and he spoke so highly of your father and of his principles, etc., etc. And then it spiraled strangely into you. And he was like, and Mike is, you know, the apple doesn't fall from the tree, fall far from the tree. And I'm like, you don't know Mike personally. I do.

but he was so complimentary of you. And we both talked about, hopefully you will be a member on the Supreme court someday. It's pretty amazing. Well, that's kind of, I mean, just say years, years ago when I was working on the Supreme court, I was looking, found a list of lock works who served during October term, 1963, when my dad was a lock work to justice white. And I saw that another one of the lock works that year for a different justice

was Alan Dershowitz. So I was pleased to discover that. Years later, when I met him, I asked him if he remembered my dad, and he said, oh, yeah, we were great friends. Anyway. Yeah, he said he had lunch with your dad all the time because he couldn't drink coffee.

coffee and uh and he as a jew couldn't eat anything else so they had lunch together all the time they were a good pair yeah they were they were um mike i want to talk to you uh about all of these pardons um first of all as dershowitz said you know it is the only kingly power we grant um

Has it always been used like it's being used now? I mean, I remember the first time I heard about it really was with Nixon. And then it was used for maybe, you know, a few pals, et cetera, et cetera. But my gosh, now it's, you know, pardoning for future crimes. And it's is this is this what it's supposed to be? And why do we have it?

Okay, so as to the reason why we have it, Alexander Hamilton provides one of the best explanations for that in Federalist Paper.

paper number 74. Sure. Reddit. And he argues that, uh, it's, it's an absolutely essential tool for mitigating what he called the cruelty of the law. Remember that the federal prisoners, those who have been convicted of a federal offense, um, it's an executive authority that keeps them in prison. It's the president's job to execute the law. Uh,

And so it operates as kind of a natural extension of the president's power to oversee that process. But this one goes a step further and allows the president even to officiate the underlying conviction or in some cases through the clemency power, take the lesser included step of reducing a sentence.

The idea here is that even though it is subject to abuse, even though it can be abused and it has been abused at times in the past, as some would argue, it's nonetheless better to have it there as a backstop for abuses in the law and excesses in punishment such that if we took it away, I think their problems would be greater.

Yeah, there is. It's kind of the idea. I'd rather have, you know, one bad guy go free or 10 bad guys go free than one good guy, you know, unjustly in prison. So I guess I kind of I can kind of see it from that point of view, because I think there there is some, you know, injustice that happens from time to time. Dershowitz said that in granting his son blanket immunity to

He said he thinks that was a big mistake. It opens his son up to testify on a lot of stuff. Do you see it that way? Yes, absolutely. In fact, that was one of the first observations I made on X for my at-based Mike Lee account right after this happened. I pointed out that this makes it very easy for us now.

to issue a subpoena and hold hearings in the House and in the Senate in which we invite Hunter Biden to come and testify to tell us a lot of things, including things about his business operations and any business relationship he had with the big guy and have him named the big guy and identify him as such. But he'll say he'll just take the fifth, right?

Okay, so he takes the fifth. But what happens when he pleads the fifth and then we can point out that you're immune because he's pardoned you prospectively, not just for the crimes of which he's been charged and convicted, but of any and all other crimes that might arise out of any of his conduct since 2014. So when you say the fifth, you're like, who are you protecting besides your dad?

Right, right, exactly. So what is it exactly you're protecting? Because anything older than 2014 is almost certainly covered by the statute of limitations.

And anything since then, you're immune because you're pardoned prospectively. And so you can't plead the fifth if you don't have any sort of credible basis for arguing that it could lead to your criminal liability. So, Mike, I just don't think we're going to I don't think we're going to continue with the hearings on the Biden family. I think we should only because it should at least be exposed and people know that

If the president had sold his office and sold the American people out, that should be known because there has to be at least some shame attached to it. So we we we don't do it again. But are we really is anybody going to spend any time on that?

Well, I think someone should, because as you say, we need at a minimum to know what happened, regardless of what comes of it. We need to know for purposes of posterity, for purposes of knowing what to look out for in the future.

We need to have answers to that. And so I strongly suspect that you'll have at least one committee in the House and at least one committee in the Senate that will hold hearings on this and do some investigating and hopefully subpoena Hunter Biden to come and testify as a witness. So I talked to Kash Patel. Well, this is probably four or five months ago before he was, you know, before we it was before the assassination attempt. So it was still a time where you're like, I don't know. It's going to be close.

And he wasn't jockeying for anything. We were just talking about, for instance, the Epstein case. Where is that diary? And he said it's with the head of the FBI. And I said, it's got to it has to be released. That's too much power for one person or a group of people to even have. It should just be open. And he said, well, I think the Justice Department and.

and the FBI should start declassifying a lot of stuff that shouldn't be declassified, shouldn't be classified. And he said, well, you find the body that is buried. You don't really need to do much because it's already been done, but then all classified so nobody can see it. That's right. And I was just with cash yesterday. It was in my office. We had great conversation. I look forward to getting him confirmed. Yeah. I love pointing out that one of many reasons why they do this sort of thing.

They'll keep investigations open long after the investigation

There has ceased to be any meaningful possibility of moving on them just so that they can keep the files closed. And this is the very kind of thing in government that makes people curious. It's one of the reasons why you still have the JFK files. Right. That, you know, 60 years after the fact remained remained locked. This is absurd. The American people need and deserve justice.

to know what has gone on in their own government and what those files say. I don't want to get anything, you know,

and invade your private conversation. But tell me in the private conversation, do you think that he is, is going to be going down that road? Do you, do you foresee that from, uh, from all of the people that Trump is putting into office? I mean, we should know everything that you guys should know. Uh, I think the American people should know what happened with Fauci and everything else. You think we're going to release these investigations? Yeah.

I think he's going to be doing a lot of declassification. I don't want to speak for him, but I do believe that he will declassify a lot of things. I'll leave it up to him to decide how, when, and what circumstances to do that. But I know that his strong inclination is to declassify things that don't need to be classified anymore and that the American people have the right to know. It's one of the many reasons why we need to get cash to tell confirmed.

What about Hegseth? I also had Hegseth in my office last night. I'm very optimistic there. We're making huge progress. And look, with both of these guys, I have yet to hear any legitimate reason why we shouldn't confirm either one of them.

I believe that Pete Hegsath is somebody who is at the end of the day going to be our Secretary of Defense. He is going to get confirmed. And I don't know whether

or how many Republican senators might at the end of the day vote against it. But I think it's going to be a very small number. And I think it's going to be small enough that at a minimum, we'll get them confirmed, even if that means we have to bring in a vice president to break a tie. But I think they will both get through. And I think they should get through. Remember, when a president gets elected,

the president has a certain mandate and there's a time-honored practice of deferring in most instances uh to the president's choices particularly on very key uh positions like secretary of defense secretary of state attorney general and yes fbi director what about what about what about tulsi and rfk

Tulsi and RFK are going to get through as well. In each instance, you can find something that the leftist mainstream media and the uniparty fixtures in Washington will oppose. But in each case, they're opposing these people because they oppose Trump and because they don't want daylight showtime.

shed on the swamp. They want the swamp's secrets kept as a secret. So I'm running late and I'm up against a break, Mike, but let me just wrap it up with this. We were talking earlier today. If you release all of this information and you start going after deep, deep corruption, that is...

Like movie like dangerous, you're going against some of the most powerful and richest and and the Intel community. That's going to be really dangerous for people, isn't it? Less dangerous than keeping these secrets. Look, this is why we have elections. This is why we have a constitution.

So that the people remain in control of government and so that the people don't become pawns of the government. Yes. As if boasting as the ax that wields itself against he who made it. It's time to put the people back in charge of their own government to do that. They need information on what's been happening in their government. That's why we've got to get these people confirmed. Yeah, good, good. Mike, as always, great to talk to you.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much, man. You bet. Bye-bye. You can follow him on, um, what is it? Uh, based Mike Lee, his ex account is based. Mike Lee. It's very funny, very smart as well, but very funny.

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