I got to wrap up in a few moments upstairs, but I expect that we will be proceeding forward. We will not have a government shutdown, and we will meet our obligations for our farmers who need aid, for the disaster victims all over the country, and for making sure that military and essential services and everyone who relies upon the federal government for a paycheck is paid over the holidays. I'll give you the more details here in just a few moments.
How do you talk?
This is Peter Schweitzer, that's Eric Eggers, and we were just listening to Speaker Johnson, who is saying that there is going to be no government shutdown. I guess the devil is going to be in the details. And we have a great guest to talk to us exactly about what's going on in Capitol Hill. Congresswoman Nancy Mace is joining us. She's on the House Oversight Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Veterans Affairs Committee. She's a
congresswoman from South Carolina. A Congressman Mace, thanks for joining us. Are you as optimistic as Speaker Johnson is on the fate of this bill.
Well, he has a better whip count than I do. It's hard to say at this point, but I think you'll need a number of Democrats to ensure that there is no government shutdown based on the way things are going this afternoon, we'll see. We don't have a time on when we are voting, and haven't seen the final language in the legislation.
So you've been very principled in that that you actually voted against a bill that President Trump wanted and voted on principle, which I think is great. What is your view of the debt ceiling? There has been this kind of weird sort of alliance almost between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren Democrats who say let's get rid of the debt ceiling, or at least suspend it. Do you think that's going to happen? And what's your view on the debt ceiling?
Well, you know, in terms of the debt seling, what that does was the way that they did it the other day, is suspending it where there was no limit on the debt for two years. I mean, it could be an extra one trillion, it could be an extra ten trillion dollars because there were no guardrails in place. I would only be willing to negotiate some type of measure on the debt ceiling if we have actual spending cuts.
We've been down this path before, we did a debt ceiling previously, where we had no limit on the debt, and you know this is going to fast track us. So over fifty two million dollars of debt, we're going to be robbing Social Security and other folks. It's money, taxpayers money to pay for the debt that we're incurring
right now. Because Republicans and Democrats alike can't be trusted on spending, which is why if we're going to lift the debt ceiling, we have to have real spending cuts, not just play money, not fuzzy math, but actual, real legitimate spending cuts. And so that's my take. And of course, looking at the first two CRS, the first R spending was the same level as the second CR spending. It was another myth that was sort of out there that because it was one hundred and sixteen page bill versus
sixteen hundred pages, but somehow it's spent less. So it wasn't about the pages. It was actually about what's actually in the bill on the pages. And I read both those, so I'm well versed in and what it actually did and did not do. And unfortunately, you know we're in this situation. I'm going to forego my pay if the government shuts down, I won't be taken a pay check.
You read both bills that put you in the profound minority, I think, unfortunately for members of Congress. And you were a leader, and thank you for just kind of being open and honest with the American people about going through the original bill that was fifteen hundred and forty seven pages, and you highlighted so many of the provisions that people found objectionable, including the pay raise for members of Congress and lots of other items of pork. I guess my question to you is this.
There was so much woke in that. But I don't know how that bill passed Republican muster. I mean, they literally renamed criminal offenders to justice individual. I'm sorry, but if you're a racist and murderer, pedophile, you're not a justice individual. You're a criminal and should be in jail.
So the question is, how did that happen? How does stuff like that get into a bill that anyone had with a Republican Speaker of the House, where there's a reasonable expectation that it will pass. And you know, the conversation we've had in the first hour was we kind of contrasted this very open and honest and transparent debate about this spending bill with the Wall Street journals reporting over the last three years about the effort to conceal Joe Biden and all of his kind of cognitive decline.
And so, you know, the American people have been lied to. Do you think that the elites that are in charge think they can just still lie to people? And if so, does the fact that we're having this debate now suggest that that time is over?
No?
One percent and the lies continue. I sat in meetings today with groups of Republicans where the lie was stated that if we do single subject bills tonight, do a claim CR, do a separate disaster relief fill, and a separate farm extension or farm type bill, that the Senate could only take up one bill. That is a lie. There is nothing limiting the Senate from taking up three bills.
We also as a House could do three separate single subject bills and then do what's called a MERV a erv And what the MERV would do is we would do this three separate boats and then combine the bills together as they were sent over to the Senate, so they only have one vote. So like, there are many options in vehicles, in ways that we can go about this.
But again, Republicans were lied to. Because they were lied to, they got scared, and so it sounds like we're going to do the CR again, the CR that we did last night, but no debt ceiling. So it's just the same thing a different year. And it's just like my frustration is that nothing has changed since November. This is the same we did before, and Republicans ran on being
conservative physically fiscally. Republicans ran on we're going to cut spending, and yet we're going to saddle President Trump and the new Trump administration with all of Joe Biden's spending agenda going into his first year in office. And I think that is a mistake on our part and we can do better. And if not, the promise we made to the American people, we promised them we would cut spending. That is not what we're doing today.
So Peter Schwiz and I do a podcast on kind of government corruption, and so I apologize for not being an expert on congressional procedures, But why could the Senate only take one vote? Are they like stuck in traffic? Is like, what's the problem with their schedule that they might not be allowed to take more than one vote?
But that was the lie. That was the lie to Republicans that they could only do the Senate can only take up one bill. That's not true. That's what I'm we were told. I was. I heard the lie in two meetings with people today and it scared them. Yeah's makeup.
Here's my concern, Congresswoman. And maybe I'm being too cynical, maybe I'm not optimistic enough. I'm wondering when we have the new Congress come in with a Republican majority in the House, which is going to be slender, but we now have a Republican majority in the Senate, is this actually going to be easier or are we going to
be having the same problems? I mean, is the problem not just the Democrats right now, but you have a certain group of Republicans who want to do the talk and get the political benefit about cutting spending, but who actually don't want to do it. So is it going to get better in a Trump administration? Or we're going to be lagging with the same problem.
I think that the President will have challenges with certain members of our party getting his agenda done, and that is in my worry from day one. I've been screaming about it for weeks now. I love the idea of Doge. I love Elon and the Beck and Trump weighing in on how we're going to turn our country around. But there are a subset of people within our parties, certainly aided by Democrats and people on the left, who will do everything in their power to stop the American First agenda.
And part of that agenda is to cut spending. But you know, what I've seen today was a time honored tradition of disinformation up here on the hill, you know, to trick House members into accepting a bad deal, to
accepting bad terms. And I think there are that powerful forces out there that are in the ear of people in leadership, and that will be in the administration not telling these people the truth, not telling them how it works and how we get this done, because this is not cutting spending, this is not putting the American people first. It's going to saddle us with more debt. And we have to take spending and the debt.
Seriously, we're talking with Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina Representative base. You're talking to the country right now, you're on national radio. I mean, be as honest as you want to be. Who are what are these forces that get in people's ears? I mean, how does this stuff happen? How is it that you know, lies can be embraced and then foisted upon the American people by the people those people elect to be in charge.
Well, I mean we heard. I mean I was in a meeting today and I said this is this isn't really true with the Senate. Another person came up behind me to say, that's correct. They can do more than one. I confirmed it with a senator as well. But there are people out there that it could be, fellow members of Congress within our party. It's also people who are on the staff of leadership, the offices of leadership that we have here. But this is just what they do.
You'll get lied to so that you get scared and you get forced into a corner. You take a deal you should have never negotiated with in the first place. And you know, I've seen a lot. I've been around a little bit, and I know how to call a spade a space, which is why I sometimes get, you know, get in trouble. But I also want to tell the American people the true It's why I dissected the fifteen hundred and forty seven page bill to show people what was actually in it and why it was so bad.
And when I said yesterday that the second CR spent the same exact amount of money as the first one, no one could believe it. But that's why you had to have someone read both bills and be able to do the addition, do the map to tell you what was actually in there and what was being it was being spent on.
So this new bill that is being offered, are you going to be voting for it? Are you going to be voting against it? And what do you think Speaker Johnson's fate is right now? Given the turmoil and the tumult that we're seeing in the House.
I think I think Johnson's safe as Speaker. I don't think that is up for grabs at this juncture. I'm still waiting on the final language of the bill. I will look through it if we have time. The other night we had about an hour and so we were, you know, scanning it very quickly. I hope we have more time than that. I'm alee know on this thing. I have not ever voted for a continuing resolution. I've never voted for a CR. I've never voted for an
omnibus or a minibus. But I have always supported the law that says the nineteen seventy four Budget and Control Act, which said Congress needs to have a budget and you've got to have twelve appropriations bills to fund that budget, which is something we have not done in decades, and back to last time we did anything like that, Democrats were in charge. The last time we balanced the budget was a ninety editor Bill Clinton when Newt Gingrich was
a Speaker. So we've got a lot of work to do as a party to tell the American people that you have stopped selling them a bed of lies, a bill of goods that isn't true. We need to have meaningful reform if we're going to do debt feeling, have spending cuts, and make sure that we're cutting all of the waste. And I hope that dose has a big say in what we do in the next six months, because it's going to matter. We have very little time and we have to get to work as soon as
Trump is sworn into office. There's no time to waste.
Donald Trump has not been sworn yet, as you noted, but he did seem to endorse the bill last night that you voted against. When you vote no on something, obviously it's a brand new era, it's an unprecedented time this way. Are you hearing from the president. Are you hearing from any of his staff when you vote no on this? And is that? Are they lobbying you on this?
No, No, not at all. I haven't heard from from anyone in that candid. In fact, our leadership on the hill, we're not whipping votes last night for that bill. Last night, nobody whipped my Interesting far as I know, no one was zipping anyone's votes last night, which I found interesting.
Yeah, that is very interesting. We're talking with Congresswoman Nancy Mace. We appreciate the principled stance that you take in Washington, d C. We know it's a tumultuous time. We appreciate you tracking with us what is going on, and we will look forward to the vote that is coming up. Thank you a congresswoman for joining us Thank you so much, and thank you for listening to the Sean Handerity Show. We're going to be back after this break. We've got more guests, we've got more comments.
Well, and we have a guest that is actually a current member of the United States Senate. So when she's saying what they're hearing about what the Senate can or cannot do, we will hear from rand Paul in the next hour. We'll ask him directly. So, Hey, you know this is what it is, the public form. We're trying to figure this out together America. He's Peter Schweizer. I'm Eric Egers. This is the Sean Handy Show. We'll be right back.
This is Peter Schweizer. I'm here with Eric Eggers. We're filling in on the Sean Hannerty Show. We have asked you to come in to the program and talk about your theory of drones. And we have a caller from Tallahassee, Florida. John, tell us your theory about what's going on with the drones. It's Chris. Sorry, Chris, tell me your theory about the drones.
You got it, it's Chris.
Well. Listen, I got a friend who lives on a little farm in Montana, and she's been documenting UFO sightings for the last several weeks. And these are not the same as what everybody's talking about in New Jersey. She's got him on iPhone, she's got him on go pro, and she went out and got a high powered telescope and put it on him. And she described I did with as looking like the gravitron from the State Fair. Now what's really interesting is there, just in that same direction,
there's an Air Force base. She also called everybody she could think of to tell them. Nobody was interested, and just a couple of days ago, finally a government agency gave her a call. She's pretty smooth, but.
I know your theory is that this is this is not something from an adversarial power, This is not something that our government is doing. Your theory is that this may be extraterrestrial. Right, That's one of the theories that's out there.
That's what I'm thinking, And I will say this. After she got the call. The next night, she saw what she described as an Air Force drone probing the area where she's been seeing these things for weeks. So I'm of the mind that it could be extra trust or some crazy technology that we just aren't aware of yet, and it seems like maybe even our military not quite sure what it is either.
Yeah, Chris, thank you very much for the phone calls. It's one of two things. Obviously, it could be something that we don't know what it is, or it could be a thing that the military and our government decides not to tell us about. If one of the common themes of this program is you know, what do we know about Nancy Mace, which is very honest with us about the negotiations happening in Congress.
It's transparency, and we also.
It's being juxtaposed with the fact that Biden administration lied to us about how healthy the president is. If my wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility, they also lied to us about these things. So what concerns me is there's actually a quote from Nancy Mace on the drone topic, and she says, my concern is if it's not a craft from outer space, because it has to be on the table. Is it technologies at ours? Is it brushes at China? But the point is that the
Department of Defense needs to answer questions from Congress. So it sounds like even they don't know, and so I think, you know, it's a viable question, right, Hey, what do we know about this and what don't we know? I think you're the when it told me that the FAA just banned drones in New Jersey.
That's right, the fa band after saying that this was nothing, nothing to see, now they've banned it. And look, this is the problem. When you don't actually give honest answers to people, all kinds of theories can develop. That's the nature of it. So truth abhorrors a vacuum. You've got to let people know what's going on. I can't think of any reason why they can't tell us what's going on. So we're gonna have to see how this all plays out.
But I think people are gonna get more suspicious, and this is why they're distrustive of their government.
Well, who's not distrustive is Peter Schweitzer's happy because he finally got to take a call on drones and the trying to do it for an hour and a half. When we come back, we're going to talk about a different conspiracy. They're gonna talk to Gerald Posner about what we know and don't know about the person that took a shot at Donald Trump this summer. Some interesting questions remain. We'll be right back after this on the Sean Handy radio shows.
Peter Schweizer, Eric Eggers. We're filling in for Sean hannerity. We do the Drill Down podcast. You can subscribe to it on any podcast platform that's out there, and we are going to be talking next. I think about a topic that's been ignored frankly quite a bit. I mean, remember I remember where I was when the Donald Trump assassination attempt took place, the first one, the one where he was wounded in the ear, and it was huge, massive news in July, and it seems to have kind
of disappeared from the national conscience. But also we don't seem to be getting a lot of updates of what actually happened.
No, it's a great point. And at the time I thought that the coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, because like you, I also remember where I was. It was massive news. But there was a lot happening because then you know, Joe Biden was still in the race, and then he got out of the race, and that seemed to shift it and it felt like covering the Trump assassination, which was a largely positive story for Donald Trump, seemed
like the media helping the Trump campaign. It was a positive story, so almost like that you can't cover real news because it's good for Donald Trump, and we know firsthand how much the meat is not into doing that, and so that I thought that was one reason that went away. But then when the United Healthcare shooting happened and we instantly within forty eight hours, knew everything about the dude that did that, and we still know so little about the person that took a shot at the
next president of the United States. I think it puts it, to quote Kamala Harris, into a different context.
Exactly exactly. Well, we have a great guest now to talk about this. He's literally one of my favorite writers, Gerald Posner. He's an investigative journalist. He's written sort of the definitive books, I would argue on a series of high profile assassinations. He's the author of Case Closed, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, which came out in nineteen ninety three, and also Killing the Dream, James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.
And what's interesting about Gerald is we had him on our podcast after the Trump assassination attempt, and Gerald, who's very level headed, very detailed and focused on facts, who's not a conspiracy theorist. He was kind of surprised at the ineptness in which the Secret Service and the federal authorities we're investigating the Trump assassination. So we want to have Gerald back again to get an update. Where are we what do we know, what don't we know? How
things might be going awry? Gerald? Are you there? Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, I am Peter, Eric. Thanks so much for talking about this, because you're right, it's sort of like it fell off the shelf in terms of focus from the media, and there are so many other subjects that jumped ahead of it, and that of course, you know, it's the greatest dereliction of duty I've ever seen from the Secret Service, and is that first assassination attempt, especially so when it came so close to Trump actually being hit by the assassin a bullet just a fraction of an inch away
from his head. And afterwards, who loves the fact that it's fallen off the radar more than the Secret Service and the federal agencies, no one, because they'd rather be
talking about just about anything. But and one of the things I hope the new administration does is in terms of oversight, is demanding the full follow up that the American public deserves to know, not just about the things we already have out there and the mistakes that were made, but the much deeper concerns about how security was held back at times from the Trump rallies, what the politics were behind that, and the aptitude that's not just on the local police but on the FEDS in particular.
Yeah, and it seems to me Gerald that they're going to have to go in there. It's probably going to be kind of like trench warfare.
Right.
It's not like the Secret Service or any government agency for that matter, likes being embarrassed, likes to have their dirty laundry air, but it needs to be aired. So my first question to do to you would be how do you actually go about doing that? The second question though, is, and again I try to follow these things, but it seems to me there's kind of an information black hole
about the you know, would be assassin himself. We don't really know that much more about his motive is that because he's a mystery man, or do you think that's because it's maybe being held back or or you know, might be embarrassing, or might you know, be construed as serving some kind of political agenda.
So so exactly that question we can't answer because the information is not being put out there. What we need is we need the full information about him. So right now, the attempted you know, assassin is like a rorshock test. You can put into them whatever you want. You want to think that he was just a loan nutter who was out there to shoot Trump. You want to think that he was part of the you know, a secret agency that sent him out there to try to shoot Trump.
There's all types of things you can fit in. Because the government's its own worth enemy in not providing us to full information about what they know about him, the social apps that he used, the information that he had, the private security material around him. We need to see it so that we can independently draw conclusions about what motivated them. We don't always get a final nane. Not
everybody needs a manifesto. Not everybody is like the unibomber, you know, and giving your forty thousand words about why they did it. So I get it that, you know, people like to have it wrapped up in a neat little bow and to know exactly why somebody ended up on a roof twenty three years of bay shooting at the former president the next president of the United States.
And we may not get it as neatly wrapped up, but we certainly need to see the information in the public domain and have a transparent and that we're not getting at all.
So speaking of transparency, Gerald, and that's a word we've used a decent amount today because you know, that's kind of a common theme between all the different stories that we're covering. This debate in the House and in Congress
over how to fund the government. It's now actually happening in a transparent way, mostly because it's happening through social media and we can see the stuff that they put in the first bill, the pay raises and like all the other the DEI zoo and all these crazy things that can be rightly rejected because we know that they exist.
We talked about the coverage about Joe Biden, and the more we learned about the steps that his staff and the people that we pay with tax dollars took to hide what should have been another massive story in the country, which is the fact that the president of the United States is having to be told by AIDS when and where to exit stages that, to quote the Wall Street Journal, would have been obvious to an average person. I mean,
that's who was in charge of the country. And the point is this is that have the elites and the government gotten so used to just being in their minds allowed to lie to the American people that this is another thing that they just don't feel like we deserve to know. And is that unusual? I mean, you have looked into the jfk assassination, You've studied American history. Where would you put what the government feels like we should
and deserve to know in a historical context? Because it seems like it might be at an all time low.
Yeah, you know, it might be an all time low, Eric, But I think that the government has always had this elite view, which is we're going to give the people as little as possible. We're going to give them just what we need to give them to get to do what we want to do. It's just that it's more visible now because, like you said, we can go on X, and we can see called out almost in real time the list of items in the fifteen hundred pages of
the original bill. That's just pure pork. In the old days, you would have had to wait a few days for a newspaper article, you know, thirty years ago, to do a story about Wasport. They would have picked up one tenth of it after the bill was already passed. So I think the elite got used to figuring out they
didn't have to say much. And the story, by the way in the Wall Street Journal about how Biden's aids and the officials in government had to work isolate him, cut out negative news, sort of handle him in a way to hide his you know, the cognitive decline that
he had from really almost right in office. That story is pretty infuriating on its own, but what really makes seem kind of out of my head is the idea that they were not just trying to wrap up a four year presidency and say hey, we got away with it. They were trying to get another four years out of it.
They tended to run the government themselves. They just needed the figurehead Biden to be able to do well enough in the election to be Trump and then of course it all fell apart in that first debate, but if it had not. When I was reading that article in the Journal, I kept thinking to myself, they weren't just lying to us and holding back the facts and saying, let's run out the clock. It's over in November. They were saying, let's get another four out of it. And
that to me. You talk about threat to democracy, the thing that was used all the time by the left. You know, Trump's going to be a threat to democracy. Forget about that. You lost your democracy under the Biden administration, would have lost it for another four because a secret cabal of aids and officials that held different degrees of power, who were never elected to any office at all, were running the presidency with a figurehead up there.
And by the way, that's not conspiracy. That's like a real thing. We all sort of just now like know that's what happened.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. We're talking with Jerald Posner, who is really a premier investigative journalist, really one of my favorite writers. He has written a number of books that you want to look into, and we're talking to them about the Trump assassination and about government sort of hiding information in secrets. I have two questions for you, Jerald.
The first one on the Trump assassination, that the sort of black hole of information, and this may be a speculative question, I understand that, but do you believe that the withholding of information is incompetence or is it actually by design? And my second question is on a totally different subject, but it's related. I want you to comment. I want to get your thoughts on the drones, because it seems to me the same thing is going on
with the drones, where there's this lack of information. They seem to lie to us to say, oh, there's nothing to see here. People don't believe it, so it leads to all kinds of speculative attitudes. Could you comment also on the drones, but first give us your thoughts on the assassination attempt, the lack of information and what you think the motivation is or what's going on there.
Yeah, so I think that they tie in in an odd way. I mean that may seem strange when at first say that the lack of information on the assassination and the drones sigh in, but meaning the way the government responds they pass off. It's intentional. Almost all the time, when they're withholding information, it is with malice of forethought. Is that we used to say as a lawyer, I'm not a practicing lawyer any longer. I don't practice, But that's what we used to call it, when you had intent.
They have intent to withhold it. They know exactly what they're doing, but they want to cover it under the umbrella of incompetence so that people think, oh, yeah, you know, maybe the drones really belong to them. Maybe they just you know, didn't have somebody looking at the roof, at the at the site. They were spread too thin and
they just haven't gotten around to it. The right part of the bureaucracy hasn't yet released the information, and so therefore you think that's government bundling and inefficient, which it often is. But the inefficient part of it gets to cover the more nefarious parts of withholding information and keeping people from giving you to the truth.
No, it's a great point. We're talking with Gerald Posner, and I guess final question for me, Jerald, talking about transparency, it does seem to be a sea change, and one reason why, clearly is because of the role that social media and I think Twitter or x specifically seems to be playing in it. You seemed to You commented on Twitter recently that Rand Paul gets the award for the most out of the box suggestion. When I think he suggested that the Speaker of the House could be Elon Musk?
Is is that something not that Elon Musk would be Speaker of the House. But it's an interesting time if you've studied previously a lack of information, the way the government controls information. It's kind of amazing in the area that we live in now where you can actually see through this lens the mechanisms of government at work in real time.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely it has. It's a sea change for those of us who have been investigati journalists and covered the government in years past. Now you have the major puplic square social media platform in terms of
Twitter for news. You know, every organization is on there, heads of State, all the political groups, every police organization that and now you have the person who owns Twitter essentially as a confidant and close to and having played a key role in the re election of President Trump, having a voice in this administration running doge and having a say and so you see he pushes a lever and people respond, and there are a lot of people
doing it on there. The rampaulse suggestion was I thought, you know when I saw it, and I know there'd been talk a year or two ago about Trump posted me being the Speaker of the House right if he took a seat in Florida. But the idea of you know, somebody coming in as Speaker of the House who wasn't a member of the House is pretty extraordinary. We all
forget that that's possible. The idea that could be must have set people's hair on fire on MSNBC and other platforms just at the very one in ten thousand possibility. So I do love to see those things play out. But there's real news there. You see developments take place,
and it's much harder. I love this or politicians and public officials to hide the truth for a very long time because they keep getting hammered in the public square and eventually they have to either go silent, you know, and cancel their account, or they have to come up with the goods.
We've been talking to Gerald Posner, who's one of my favorite investigator journalists. He's the author of Case closed. He's the author of Dream, which is about the assassination Martin Luther King Junior also has a newer book out called Pharma About Pharma, I would encourage anybody that's looking for a great read as a Christmas gift pick up a
book by Gerald Posler. Gerald, thanks for joining us. And we hope that the transparency revolution is going to continue because this it seems to be a good time for transparency.
Yeah, I mean it's overdue. We're not going to get everything we want. We're not going to learn all the secrets at once, I guarantee you that, but we're certainly going to push in a disruptive way, and disruptive being good in this sense because the old way of doing it, which is just to sort of eat the public at a distance and tell them only what they need to know, they need to know actually everything the government is doing.
It's because the only way that people can eventually determine who they want to put into political office, the people who are really serving public good and those who are just serving their own good.
Well, the jail poser. We're going to do our best to continue to try to tell you the American people as much as we know about what your government's doing, will continue doing that. Right after this, he's Peter Schweizer. I'm Eric Eggers. This is the Sean Handy Radio show.