Speaking of politics. It's always a pleasure to welcome Sarah Westwood, investigative reporter for The Washington Examiner, to the show. Sarah, how are you. I'm great, Thanks for having me. It's it's our pleasure. Thanks. I've read a couple of pieces that you've written, uh lately. In one in particular, really, we around here think it's one of the great under discussed stories in America, and that is, uh, people's trust in the voting system, people's belief in the fidelity of
the ballot. And you've written a piece recently about various states moving in different directions in terms of who votes. How can you give us kind of an overview of what's happening? Sure, you know, I think that this was a much bigger deal at the federal level last year and early this year in January, you know, President Biden gave a big speech about voting rights. Kamala Harris was focusing intently on this, and it's lost a lot of theme. At the national level, there was not enough traction to
get any sort of meaningful voting reforms through Congress. So now you're seeing these fights play out state by states, and New York and California in particular, have taken elements of what was then the HR one for the People Acts with John Lewis Voting Rights Access of legislation that had a lot of very um significant structural changes to voting laws and tried to implement them on the state level. And so you could see a lot of changes in
this midterm election come November. A lot of states have tried and some have even succeeded, in making permanent the type of temporary solutions that were put in place to accommodate public health concerns during the pandemic, like sending absolutee ballots to every voter, which is something that is going to be now a permanent feature of California voting right. I saw in your article that the Wisconsin Supreme Court
went in the other direction. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, this was a significant blow to the left wing agenda when it comes to voting. But the wiscon In Supreme Court looked out the way the state's law is currently written and said that the law as as it send does not allow for unattended ballot boxes, which means that if precincts want to have ballot drop boxes where someone can fill out their absentee ballot at home. Maybe they don't want to drop it in the mail for whatever reason,
they feel more comfortable leaving it at the box. They have to have a physical person they're monitoring the drop box if they want to have this option for voters. And that's a really expensive, logistically challenging way to to do drop boxes, while you typically see them being unmanned, because that that sort of manpower, full time manpower, Uh,
it's hard to come by in elections. You also have in with constant um a band now from the State Supreme Court on what critics call ballot harvesting, which is basically where any third party sometimes political operatives can collect absentee ballots ostensibly to help people who can't necessarily get to the polls. I dropped them off in bulk, you know, county clerk's offices or at these drop boxes. That also is not compatible with Wisconsin law as it stands. Now.
Voting rights advocates will say, you know this, this hurts elderly people, are disabled people who might not be able to get out of the house to submit their absentee ballot. But that's why the vote by mail system exists in the first place. It existed for people like you know, the disabled and the elderly who can't necessarily get to the polls, and so that option voting by mail is still available to people now that ballot harvesting is banned
in with consin right. I remember it was a couple of election cycles ago that a Republican was booted out of Congress and the election had to be reheld in North Carolina because the various operatives engaged in ballot harvesting, which is illegal. And roughly half the states I think, or it's like twenty two to twenty three or something
like that. Do you happen to know that number, off fan, I don't, but that sounds about or or you know, give or take a couple of states, right, right, And this is clearly editorializing, and you can join in or not depending on your your wishes. But um, what we've been saying around here is that people ought to be able to vote, certainly and mail and voting for old
folks are disabled or whatever. That's nobody is against that, but the idea of one guy showing up with fifteen ballots is it's damaging to the credibility of the electoral process, even if there are reasonable safeguards in place to make sure every one of those votes is legit and and honestly, I don't find the safeguards uh strong enough, but just that very idea of a guy with a stack of ballots,
it bothers people, it does. And I think you know a lot of these the liberalization of the vote by mail ruled in states like Pennsylvania, New York, and California. Those were done under the pretext of the pandemic, and they were all builled as temporary measures. And now any effort to go back to what the pre pandemic stand neard was is being decried as voter suppression. And so you know, this is sort of a bait and switch
that a lot of these Democrats did. When it comes to the voting law in Texas, for example, a lot of the changes that Texas made in their voting reforms that they passed last year was just stripping away some of those pandemic policies like twenty four hour voting or like drive through voting which occurred in sub prefings in
urban areas. That was attacked by Democrats, as you know, taking away people's right to vote, even though at the time Democrats insisted that those measures were never meant to be temporary. So there is a lot of sort of rhetorical deception around this voting issue that's no longer you know, in the national spotlight, because again, this is playing out in the States, but you know, those fights are still happening.
Sarah Westwood, investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, on the line in the a couple of minutes we have left, you did another piece on the House Republicans indeed take the I'm sorry. If Puplicans take the House, which is expected, that they are going to launch their own bunch of investigations into the Biden administration. I'm not sure how much I love this government by investigation that seems to be popular these days. But what will they be investigating and
who's going to do it? Yeah, so we are seeing outs Republicans start to lay the groundwork for what those investigations are going to look like and what committees are going to be the venue for those probes. Even though they're not in the majority, they don't have subpoena power necessarily the power to set the agenda and call witnesses they can't send letters and requests and inquiries, and so
we're starting to see that. For example, the House Oversight Committee uh Congress, and James Cohmer is the ranking member, largely expected to be the chairman if Republicans take the House in November. He's already started sending request to the Treasury Department for what's known as suspicious activity reports, or reports that are automatically generated when business transaction internationally. The potentially raise red flags all the suspicious activity reports related
to Hunter Biden. So he's sort of starting to lay the groundwork there for what will probably be a pretty robust investigation of Hunter Biden's business dealings. The House Administration Committee, which you know resees the sort of administrative staff associated with Congress, is already sort of gearing up to investigate why Capital police didn't have more security on January six,
why were they caught so flat footed? And you have Republicans sending request to the January six Committee asking them to preserve all their emails and documents because Republicans are gearing up to do a pretty aggressive investigation of the investigators of January six to see, you know, was any witness coerced or threatened with financial ruin, you know, if they didn't testify where people's rights trampled on by this aggressive,
you know, made for TV investigations. The Republicans really positioning themselves to do some some aggressive investigating if they do win in November. Well, and I understand the House Judicial Theory Committee might be looking at Anthony Fauci. That's right, as Congressman Jim Jordan's really interested in the Anthony Fauci sort of the space of this unpopular COVID response, the Republicans are interested in how and why he shifted so
dramatically his position on the lab leak theory. This theory that COVID nineteen escaped from a virology lab at Wuhan and that's how it starts spreading in China, which is a pretty now publicly accepted likely possibility for how the pandemic began. But Sauci hasn't not really explained why he went from totally dismissing this theory too reluctantly embracing it.
And there are a lot of questions about, you know, in i h's funding of grants that contributed to research at that virology lab in Wuhan, and so those are the sorts of things that Republicans are going to be looking into, and you know, that could be pretty uncomfortable for for Dr Fauci. Sarah Westwood of the Washington and Exam her follow her on Twitter, read her at the Washington Examiner dot com. Sarah, Hey, thanks very much for the time. Thanks for having me. Armstrong and Jetty