Center. Nice to be with you today. Let's just start so we know if either of us are going to get sued. This is maybe the first I've ever wanted to be sued. I think it'd be hysterical to get sued by Hunter Biden. But unfortunately, I never took a piece of that laptop with me anywhere. No one gave it to me. Actually someone tried to, and I said I didn't want it. I've kind of regretting that. Now, do you do you have the copy of the hard drive? I do not. I do not have Hunter's laptop. I've
never seen it. I have seen some of the images on it that have been put on on Twitter and on the internet, but but but always secondhand, not first. So I don't need to pass you a dollar to be my official lawyer for this one. I'm in the clear. Well, I didn't say whether you. You just asked to be sued. I mean, don't blame anyone if they follow with your requests. That's very true. So Hunter comes out, the media goes nuts. They say they love the fact that he's playing offense.
I just do want to go back to the Hunter Biden who said he wasn't sure it was his laptop back in the day when he did that big sit down interview. Take a look, was that your laptop for real? I don't know. I know, but you don't know, yes or no? If the laptop, I don't know, But now he does know, and he's gonna sue everybody, and he's
going on offense. He sent a series of letters, yeah, including he sent a fourteen page letter to the Department of Justice addressed to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and he's asking the Department of Justice to prosecute um everyone who had access to the laptop. And so it says, for example, John Paul Maciaac, and it says, mister Maciaac is admitted to gaining access to our client's personal computer data without mister Biden's consent. Therefore, prosecute him. So he
wants the laptop repairman prosecuted. And then he also wants he says he shared it with third party, So he wants Steve Bannon prosecuted. He wants Rudy Giuliani prosecuted. Now there are a couple of things that are interesting. It's a whole list of people that he wants, please begin criminal and this is from a very high priced lawyer. This is a lawyer who charges probably a couple of thousand dollars an hour to write this letter. Several points
worth noting. Number one, this is the son of the president writing a letter to an individual appointed by the president, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, who reports to the Deputy Attorney General appointed by President Biden, who reports to the Attorney General appointed by President Biden. So this is the president's son saying, hey, everyone who got their jobs from my dad, I'm asking you, through a high
priced lawyer, please bring these criminal cases. Now. I got to say, if you're dealing with accusations of partisan bias at DJ and a political double standard between Democrats and Republicans, it may not be the best idea in the world to start publicly calling for a political prosecution of the people that are your partisan enemies. That's point number one. Point number two, as you noted, the letter explicitly admits finally that this is Hunter's laptop, except then they walked
it back. So after they sent the letter and everyone said, well, wait a second, you just admitted it was his laptop, they put out a statement his lawyer that says these letters do not confirm mac Isaac's or other versions of a so called laptop. They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating, dissemmining what they allege to be mister Biden's personal data wherever they have claimed to god, I have gotten it. So they've gone back to Hunter's answer, Oh, I don't know.
I don't know if it's real, except for the fact that they wrote a whole series of letters all predicated on the claim you harmed my client by handing his laptop over well, and everybody in the media was covering this as okay, he's admitting it's his laptop. But then they also went back to this idea. They wanted you to feel sorry for him because he's a kid of the present. Leave malone, he's a drug addict, leave him alone. And look, I have the same mentality that kids of
politicians should be off limits. But this is a fifty four year old man. This is someone who is trading off his father's name, who wouldn't have a business without his father's name. I don't think you can go there. And I want to play one of the clips the media again going back out there today and telling everybody feel sorry for Hunter Biden, be nice to Hunter Biden. Leave Hunter Biden alone. Now, before I do that, I want to tell you about our good friends over at
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slash verdict center. Let's let's play this for everybody that's watching. This is MSNBC again saying feel sorry for Hunter Biden. He should be off limits because he's a kid of the president. I don't think if you're going to buy the bs, but take a look how they spend this. The political thing is is more opaque to me, and Hunter Biden is of singular obsessive, I mean than the big lie about losing in twenty twenty. I don't know if there's anything more obsessive for Trump helped me understand.
I mean, I think that if people are being honest, not many people aren't touched by or not many people don't have some window into the disease of addiction, which has afflicted Hunter Biden at various points in his life. Most people understand the president's kids are not They're not a president. They haven't stepped into the arena. You know. Look, this is actually typical of the talking points that are being used to defend Joe Biden and Nicole Wallace, the
host there. She used to be the communications director at a white House, in the George W. Bush White House. Yeah, and now Nicole Wallace, whatever she used to believe is gone is no longer operative. She went to MSNBC, they pay her paycheck, and now she is a hard left flak every day. And what's interesting is what she's doing there. She's opera rating right there as Joe Biden's communications director.
Those are their talking points. And we've talked about this on this podcast quite a bit that the issue is not Hunter Biden's addiction. I agree, addiction is a terrible disease. She's rice right. Most people, most families have loved ones who have wrestled with the demons of addiction. If that was all that was going on, this would not be a matter of publican concern. And I'll say also, I very strongly agree with the principle that kids are off limits. Hunter Biden is not a kid. He's a grown man.
If he were a child, this would be very different. But he is not a child. But the key point, when you are making the defense feel sorry for Hunter Biden because of addiction, you are trying to shift the topic. The reason this matters is because of Joe's potential corruption. Hunter Biden for years made a living, made millions of dollars.
This wasn't a small, little little thing. This was an ongoing operation selling access to Daddy made millions of dollars from very shady characters, from Ukrainian oligarchs and the Communist Chinese government, not to mention the Russians too. And the reason this is significant is it implicates Joe Biden in that corruption. It's the connections between the two. We've talked about the tell. What is the tell? If you're trying to be a political flack, you want to draw a
line and separate Hunter and Joe. If you're following the facts, you want to look at the connections between Hunter and Joe. She's being a flack right there. She's saying, it's all about Hunter and his addiction. Leave him alone. She says, I don't even understand why anyone's concerned about this. She does understand, that's why she's doing the whole segment on it.
And she even said earlier in that same conversation, she said, well, there's nothing on this laptop that is incriminating to the president. That may be one of the most absurd statements. We have him talking about the money. We have voicemails, we talk about the big guy. We have flights, we have
conversations in Mexico, we have conversations in China. We have billions of dollars in loans, we have millions of dollars to defend the people who are being actually charged with crimes in America from China that was doing business with We have conversations between the Russian oligarch and the wife of the Moscow mayor, who's tight with Vladimir Putin. We have conversations, and we've seen this come out the straw. You don't have the laptop, Yeah, I don't. I don't
have the laptop. I just read a lot about it. But even you look at Barisma, we now know a lot more about that timeline and this document and this email that had these twenty two points in it of everything about what was going to happen in Ukraine. Many people believe it could be tied, as you and I talked about last podcast, to classified docu. By the way, did you see this The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, their fact checker, fact checked us, and they gave us three pinocchios.
Why because they said we could not prove that Hunter Biden's email about Ukraine, the twenty two point email that we walked through in the earlier pod, we couldn't prove it came from a vice presidential briefing or classified materials. Now, mind you, we didn't assert that it came from classified materials. We said, it has a level of scholarship and air udition that is markedly atypical from anything else. Hunter Biden wrote, It reads in the same style, with the same level
of analysis one typically sees in these briefings. And I said, from having read a great many of these briefings that much of this could easily have been classified. All of those are true. Glenn Kessler said, well, where the Washington postamt And it is our job to be the Press secretary of the White House. So because you asked, and I actually laid out a way to test it, I said,
how do you find this out? Well? Joe Biden's briefings from this week, the week that Hunter Biden was writing the email, the week before he was Joe Biden was going to Ukraine, two weeks before his son got the big job eighty thousand hours a month from Barisma. So it's it's a limited time. There are briefings. They are in the National Archives, at least they should be. They
may be in the Corvette. I don't know. But what we called for on this podcast was for the Special Council to pull those briefings and compare them to Hunter Biden's email. I can't do that. I don't have those briefings. By the way, the Washington Post can't do that. They don't have those, So they're three pinocchios. I'll tell you this, Ben, if it ends up being proven that they did come from those briefings, I look forward to the Washington Post
formal retraction, which they won't do. Yes, because these people kept the pullets or for reporting on the bogus Russian corruption story, and they happily display their pullets, are saying, look,
we spread misinformation as well as the Yes. You look at this White House now, and it does seem that they are at least starting to lose some of the media because either they's self preservation for them because they don't want to keep looking like total morons, or they're mad at the White House for just misleading them and
lying to them. As they scream they're being transparent when there's a new raid or new documents found every other day CBS News and you gotta listen carefully here they're covering this, They're going to the beach house, and Gail King kind of just knocks them off the bus a little bit here, is like, hey, let's not let them keep getting away with claiming they're transparent. Here it is, they were very public. When the FBI searched the Wilmington home,
his private residence in Delaware. That happened on January twentieth. The search we're talking about that we learned about from two sources. That happened back in November, and now we're just learning about it right now. And in terms of the timeline, early on November second was when this all started, this entire ordeal. Roughly ten documents were found in the Penn Biden Center. When President Biden's lawyers were packing things up,
they alerted the National Archives. National Archives alerted the Department of Justice. And we now know that the Department of Justice took this seriously enough to have the FBI go in search. We keep hearing about transparency, but then you hear stories like this, so it does raise even more questions. Did the FBI find anything else? And what does it mean? That's what we don't know. We don't know if they found anything else. They may have found items that were
classified or not classified. Because remember, any records from a vice president or president should all be at the National Archives. I mean they should all be at the National Archives. Gail King says what she said, You've called for them to go look at the documents in Delaware at the University of Delaware. You've also said you should be looking
at Hunter Biden's office. I don't think there's any way now the White House can separate these two stories well, and you can see the instincts to try to defend the White House saying things like, you know, they've been through this ordeal, and you know the raid on January twentieth, they were they were very clear about and let us know. But even while they're trying to spend forth, the Justice
Department took it very seriously. You see the CBS reporters saying, well, we just heard from two sources there was another raid back in November that they didn't tell us about on the Penn Biden Center and that the FBI went in search. And you saw when the reporter repeats, well, this all started when the lawyers were packing up the boxes. Ben some lousy lawyers in my day, but I've never seen lawyers whose billing rates are cheap enough that you use
them to pack boxes. You only send in the lawyers when you realize, oh, crap, we got a problem. So she's of course not skeptical of any of that, but you're right. Gail King comes in and says, wait a second here, they ain't being transparent. Yeah, And you can see, even as shameless as the corporate media is in defending this White House, they are getting irritated at the constantly changing story every single day where they keep hiding the truth and then new facts come out, and they hide
the truth and new facts come out. But at the same time they're telling everyone how transparent they're being. Take a listen. Yeah, look at the White House. Yeah, I think we've been pretty transparent from the very beginning with
providing information as it occurs throughout this process. You know, we have released probably thousands of words of statements from the President's personal attorney in the White House Council's Office about the process that has been undertaken here, that process that has been fully coordinated with the Justice Department as they conduct an ongoing investigation, and we want to be very careful to be respectful of the integrity of that ongoing investigation, and so and so, I think that it's
important to understand that as these things develop and as information developed throughout an investigation. We're trying to get you guys access to as much information as we can. I don't buy it. I don't believe it. I don't think you do either. And I think the majority of the American people are starting to lose trust this administration. We saw that in the poe from you Gov last week. Look,
his claim is that they've been quote fairly transparent. Now that's they've shifted back from very transparent, which is what Karen Jean Pierre kept saying, but even fairly transparent. They claim that the first batch of documents was discovered November second, a week before election day. You know what they didn't do, tell it of the American people, tell any reporters, let it be published before the election. So that certainly they
weren't fairly transparent. They weren't a little transparent. They were zero transparent. They hid it from the American people before the election. We're just learning now about about the FBI searching the Penn Biden Center back in November. Again, they hid that November, December, January, and it just now is
becoming public. You know, they're spokesperson there says, well, we're coordinating closely with the Justice Department that I actually believe that's part of the problem, because the Justice Department didn't leak a word of this during any of that period either. They leaked like crazy against Donald Trump, but when it comes to protecting this White House, suddenly that they are perfect. They view their job tragically as political and that's not
what DJ should be. Last question on this, there was a very interesting timeline that we now know a lot more about that when they were looking at his house in Delaware, he happened to be at the beach House for three days. Then all of a sudden they go to the beach House. They say it was planned and coordinated with the DOJ. They keep saying there was no you know, warrant needed, We've planned this and courted. And then they can't say, well, they didn't find me classified
documents of the beach House. And there's a lot of people ask the question, well, no, crap, they didn't find any there. They just went there for three days knowing apparently they were going to come and search the dead gun place. Anyway, I saw a lot of people talking that way. Do you think they'd be dumb enough to do that? No, I don't think Joe Biden went and like hid or destroyed classified documents. That would be spectacularly foolish.
That would be to use the old Watergate addage, it's it's not the crime, it's the cover up, right, you know? That would be like, you know, a racing what was it eighteen minutes of audio tape from the Oval office that ultimately played the pivotal role in bringing Nixon down. I don't think the Bidens did that. I think they're sloppy. I think they're messy, and I think they got caught and then then I think there's an awful lot of incompetence that they just keep getting caught again and again
and again and again. There's two other major issues that I want to talk about, and they deal with China. One deals in strategical reserves, and I certainly want to deal with that. Another one deals in an issue that I'm going to ask all of our listeners and viewers to get involved in because it is something that's not been covered by the media. You have been really pushing this issue over the last several days because there's an important meeting coming up in China with an American hostage
from Texas. Let's lead off with that because people, and I'll say this because I think it's important, people need to be calling their congressmen and their senators and the White House, begging and getting the same out there telling this story, posting articles on social media. He needs our help. Yeah. There's a Texan an American named Mark Swidan who has been unjustly imprisoned in China for more than ten years now,
and it is a horrific story. It began in twenty twelve where Mark traveled to China on a business trip and on November thirteenth of twenty twelve, he was abducted by China's Public Security Bureau, and a witness to the abduction said that he was abducted because the Chinese government wanted to view the contents of his cell phone. He was accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy to manufacture and sell drugs. They tried to coerce him into confessing,
He refused to confess. He pleaded not guilty. They had a trial in twenty thirteen. He was found guilty. The prosecution at the trial produced no forensic evidence to back up their allegations. They never found drugs on Mark. They never found drugs in his hotel room. The records in his passport show that he wasn't even in China during the time of the Edge Defenses, and the eleven other
people they indicted, none of them could identify Mark. Nevertheless, he spent ten years in jail, and in twenty nineteen, a Chinese court formally sentenced him to death. His time in jail has been horrific. Horrific. They confiscated his Bible, they confiscated his rosary because they want to do everything they can to damp in and undermine faith. His cell is exposed to extreme heat and extreme cold. He's been deprived of sleep, He's been subjected to really serious physical abuse.
He's lost more than a hundred pounds in jail and throughout all of this, by the way, he also has been denied access to American diplomats and so they haven't been able to go go see him his mother. I've spoken with his mother a couple of times. She is a wonderful woman. Katherine Sweden is her name. She lives in Luling, Texas, which is where Mark was born, and Catherine has been fighting for her son for a decade, trying to get him free. The Communist government won't let
her speak to him. It's been years since she's been able to speak to him, but she's been praying for him, she's been speaking out, she's been trying to draw attention to get him out. And so this week I introduced in the Senate a resolution formally calling on the Chinese government to release Mark Swedan and also calling on the Biden administration to use every tool at its disposal to
secure his release. And the Secretary of State Tony Blincoln is going to Beijing, is going to China in the next couple of days and is going to be meeting with senior Chinese officials, and my resolution formally calls on the administration to use those meetings to try to get Mark released. My resolution was co sponsored with John Cornyn, the other senator from Texas. There was an identical resolution introduced in the House by Congressman Cloud who introduced it there.
And I spoke this week on the Senate floor telling Mark's story. And you know, one of the points that I made, China tells people they aspire to be a great nation. Great nations don't behave this way. Yeah, great nations don't hold hostages. Third world dictators take hostages and their treatment of Mark Sweden has been shameful. And so it is my hope that when Tony Blincoln is there that he makes it a priority to press for Mark's release. People need to call their congressmen, they need to call
their centers, they need to call the White House. That you need to get the articles online about him and start posting these on social media, because this goes back to what I refer to as what we saw with Russia recently and the w NBA player. And when the name is out there and people start to talk about it, it gets more pressure and it can grow. That's why I tell people take our podcasts, share it, promote it,
tell everybody you know. But there's also a question that people are gonna ask, and I'm going to ask you this. In certain situations like this, sometimes media attention can be a bad thing early on, and there's a strategic nature to this, and depending on which country you're dealing with,
there's different protocol that usually are followed. There's gonna be people they're gonna say, why have we not heard about this over the last decade, Why did it take so long for us to get to this point that we're at now, walk us through how this kind of works, because it's got to be confusing. So the approach you take in a hostage case actually varies quite a bit based on the circumstances. And I've been very active in fighting for the release of a significant number of American
hostages held abroad. It's it's a deep passion of mind, and so I've spent ten years fighting for the release of hostages. In some cases, you make the decision that to do so publicly. In other cases, and I'd say probably even the majority of cases, you make the decision to do so privately, And it depends upon an assessment of Okay, would the public attention help or hurt in
some instances. So there have been instances where, you know, I've talked with the US ambassador in the in the country, or senior State Department officials, and their judgment is, you know, we're negotiating this, we're making progress, and putting public heat and attention on it right now would be counter productive.
There are other times where you just make the individual judgment, okay, public attention would move the ball forward here and and so, and many times I'll make those determinations or my staff will talking with the families of the hostages, and it's you know, you certainly hope what you say doesn't make things worse. I mean, that would be a terrible outcome. There's a reason why. And my floor speech on the Senate floor, what I said was carefully calibrated what I
said on this podcast. There's a reason why I pulled out and use the same language, because when you're dealing with an active negotiation, you don't want to say anything up that screws it up, and so that balance can change. You know, I can tell you if you go back to the Obama administration, there was a woman in Sudan, Miriam Ibrahem, who had been who was imprisoned and sentenced
to death for the crime of being a Christian. And Miriam had had two children, a little boy and then actually a little girl that she gave birth to in jail in leg irons Wow. And she was sentenced to receive a hundred lashes and then hang by the neck until dead. And she could avoid that sentence if she renounced Jesus. And it was horrific, it was evil, it was indefensible. I spoke out on her behalf repeatedly. I spoke about her on the Senate floor, as I just
did about Mark Swaddan. I also tried desperately to get President Obama to engage, and I couldn't do it. He would not say her name. Samantha Power, who was in his administration, she would say his name. And I tried to get her help to get Obama to say his name, and Obama would not do it. But ultimately there was enough heat and light and attention put on the case that the government of Sudan caved and they released her.
They released her, and she came came to New Hampshire and is living in America, and I had a chance to meet her. And Miriam Abraham is this small woman. She was in her twenty's, She's quite young, and she's slight. And I remember asking her, I said, when you were in that jail, when you were with your children, when you we're facing death, torture and death, how did you
not give up? How did you not lose hope? And she looked at me with this profound sense of peace, and she just said to me, Jesus was with me. It's incredible. I got to say, it was a wow. Moment. So there are times when public attention can be very helpful. There are other times where I've been advised, based on the circumstances here, you're engaging in public would be counterproductive, and so I don't do it. If the judgment is made that in that circumstance it would be it would
be harmful talk about you. And very quickly, they're also speaking loud about this right now, speaking up, and that I think tells you that obviously the calculus and the timing has changed here, and there seems to be kind of a unity right now that we're seeing on this for this opportunity to say to China head, we're all acknowledging what you've done here is wrong, and we're all saying it's time to release this individual. Now. That's exactly right.
The United Nations has what's called a Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which is a UN group of human rights experts who investigate cases of arbitrary detention all around the world. And they found that Mark was being held in violation of customary international law and international norms and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So you've got the United Nations that has come out for this and
said it is unjust and unlawful. And I'll tell you I have raised Mark Swedan's case directly with very senior Chinese government officials and have leaned in very hard, one on one pressing the case. I hope that Tony B. Lincoln, when he's there, does the same thing, and I have some reason to be optimistic that he will. But I think the more public encouragement, the more forceful it may be.
It's amazing when you think about ten years, your entire time in the Senate yea and for end to be in jail in these conditions with the heat and the cold, and having a jail so that's in that climate at those times is just so shocking and sad. So I'm glad that we're getting this out there. People call your senators, call your congressman, grab articles about him. Let's make his name well known, and that's going to be what can
make a difference here. Let's talk about this other issue, and this is something that a lot of people may not realize happening right now, that deals with strategical reserves. Obviously, there was a lot of news earlier in the last year where strategical reserves are released right before the election
to artificially over the price of gas. We also saw that some of that oil went directly on a ship to Chinese communist individuals that had direct ties to Hunter Biden his business dealings and the big guy we would assume that would be Joe Biden. Now there's some movement on the Senate on this type of issue. Well, this week I authored and introduced legislation on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and it's bipartisan legislation. So I teamed up with
Joe Mansion, Democrat from West Virginia. The bill is the Cruise Mansion Bill. Awesome. And what the bill will do if it's passed is make it illegal for the federal government to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to communist China. So it just takes China off the table. And what's interesting, so there are a bunch of Republicans who co sponsored it with me, but there were also a total of five Democrats who are on board. Why
is that? I mean, that's kind of shocking. We haven't seen this type of, you know, kind of cohesion here between Republicans and Democrats on this type of ission a long time. Well, we haven't the Democrats who joined me. We've got Joe Mansion, we have Kirsten Cinema. We have Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire. We have Angus King from Maine, and then we have Michael Bennett from Colorado. So those are the five that have joined it. And so look, Mansion and Cinema are they're too most likely to break
and do bipartisan legislation. But to get Hassan and King and Bennett is encouraging. And I don't know, but you'll take it. This is awesome well and end listen. Mansion was helpful in that, and so I rounded up a bunch of Republicans coordinated closely with Mansion, who helped round up a bunch of Democrats. My hope is that we'll get a vote on this and pass it. And I
don't think it's impossible that this bill gets passed. That it may well be the fact that you have five Democrats signing onto this right now is an encouraging sign. I'm certainly going to press for it, and if we could actually get it past that that would be a very good outcome. If this does happen, Is this a blow to the White House at all? Is that how they're going to spend this is that this takes away their power to manipulate prices when they need it, right
for elections. Well no, not really, because they'd still have the ability to deplete the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And I am supportive of additional legislation that would limit the president's ability to engage in political manipulations like Biden did so shamelessly. But I think the piece of selling to China was particularly indefensible. There's other other legislation, Republican legislation that's broader,
and in fact I've co sponsored that broader legislation. But if we can get China taken off the table, that's worth passing into law. And if it's a bipartisan vote, it will be a result of Democrats saying, Okay, what the White House did here we can't defend and we want to get some distance from Lastly, there was a letter sent and oa N was kicked off direct TV now Newsmax they say, oh we had a fight over fees.
They're now gone. There's been a letter that you've been a part of now that is saying, hey, this looks like you're just trying to cancel conservative media. And of course they claim, well, we're going to fight back and show you guys transparently that it's this is Newsmax's fault that you can't watch them anymore, not our fault. Give everybody a recap of that letter. Yep. So this is a letter I wrote, and I am as of this week,
the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee. Congratulations. By the way, well thank you. That's a really big deal and that's great for conservative values to have this position. It is the top Republican spot on the Senate Commerce Committee. The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over roughly half of the US economy and so, and we also have a very significant staff that I'm in the process of hiring upright now,
who prepared this letter, who wrote this letter. The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over agencies like the Federal Communications Commission the FTC. When it comes to media and censorship, the Commerce Committee has that falls directly under our authority. The other committee that has major authority on that is the Judiciary Committee. I serve on that committee as well. The ranking member on the Judiciary Committee is Lindsay Graham. Yeah, So I went to Lindsay, and Lindsay and I co
authored this letter together. So it's from the ranking Member of Commerce and the ranking Member of Judiciary, and that's significant. Any company that gets this letter, they're going to take it seriously. Yes. And then also Mike Lee and Tom Cotton both signed the letter as well. They were both very interested in the issue and what happened so direct TV.
All right, let's let's back up a year ago. The three biggest cable news networks that were right of center were Fox News, Newsmax, and One American News, and in that order in terms of ratings. A year ago, Democrat members of Congress wrote to AT and T, which owns Direct TV owned seventy percent of Direct TV Texas specific owns the other thirty percent. Democrat members of Congress wrote to the CEO of AT and T and said, please throw off air Fox News, Newsmax and One American News.
We don't like what they're saying. We call it misinformation, which is the Democrat code word for seeking censorship. So they asked the CEO of AT and T to throw them off. And this wasn't a hidden letter. People need to understand This was very out in the open, transparently put out press releases. Yeah they were, they were warning this fight. Yes, in the year that followed, Direct TV has now thrown off the air two of the three. So about a year ago they threw one what America
News off I thought that was a terrible decision. I spoke out against it. Then. I think in many ways that may have been a trial balloon for what they just did last week, which was to throw Newsmax off the air. And so now two of the three have been d platform And so what my letter does is it lays out those facts that, in particular, there was a negotiation between Newsmax and Direct TV where Newsmax was trying to get paid for its content. And not a
crazy idea, by the way. Well, although I will say in the cable and satellite world, some channels get paid and some don't, and it depends on how big your market is. In fact, there are some channels that pay the carrier to carry those that channels. So it's not crazy, but it's not necessarily damning. Newsmax was making the case they wanted to be paid because their ratings were high
enough that it merited it. Direct TV said no. Newsmax has made the allegation that Direct TV pays a number of other channels that are left of center and have much lower ratings than Newsmax. So what this letter does is it asks a whole series of questions. It asked them number one, to preserve all their documents, and then it walks through very specific questions about why they terminated Newsmax. Is it true they said they were not going to
pay them a penny? Is it true that they pay liberal stations that have lower ratings money but they won't pay them, And so it walks them through systematically. I will say I have subsequently had had a long phone conversation with the CEO of Direct TV. He disputed the facts. He said, the facts that Newsmax had conveyed, we're not accurate. And I'll tell you what I told him. I said, look, I understand and appreciate that I've been before I was in the Senate. I was a practicing litigator for a
long time. I've handled a lot of cases, and I understand that any dispute there's always at least two sides to it. So I told him, listen, there's a reason we ask these questions. I'm interested in what the facts are, and if the facts as they've been conveyed or not accurate, I'm interested in seeing that. And I will say Direct TV committed to giving full and candid and real answers to the questions, and so we'll see what those answers are.
But the goal is transparency at this point. Know how they got from point A to point B. And this is about silencing conservatives or it was this just really about business, and listen, the goal is also a couple of other things. The goal is also one of the things I ask for is any communication they've had or their corporate owners have had with Democrat members of Congress, or with the White House or with the administration. We know from the Twitter files this White House is quite
eager to silence people. I want to see any communications that have happened with Democrats. But I also told them straight out, I said, look the outcome I'd like to see. I'd like to see Newsmax back on the air. And they are on other carriers, but Direct TV is a pretty big carrier, and they lost a whole bunch of households when they got pulled down from Direct TV, and I said, listen, there are millions of Texans and millions of Americans who would like the choice, who would like
the option to be able to watch Newsmax. There are a ton of choices left of center. They're only a handful right of center. But one of the things I made very clear also, I said, listen, if you disagree with what Newsmax says, or o An says, or Fox News says, there's a remedy for that. You can say you disagree with it. You can The best cure for bad speech is more speech. Look, we played MSNBC. I think most of what MSNBC he says is utter nonsense. But I don't want them censored. I don't want them
pulled down. They have a right to spew their nonsense. If nothing else, they help support podcasts like this because they give us easy pinions material. Yeah. So the answer if you disagree is engage on the substance and actually present the argument. It's not use corporate power and money to silence the voices you disagree with. And so, what I hope comes from this is that we learn more what happened. We learn the extent to which Democrat politicians
were involved. We know of the opening letter that at the beginning of this we don't know if there were subsequent communications. But I also hope that this scrutiny, and it's our intention to drill down and investigate what happens here. We hope that this scrutiny causes them to revisit the decision and say, you know what, our viewers are better off having the choice to watch Newsmax if they want than they are are not having that choice. That's the outcome,
that's the goal. It's fun to get to hear what's going on in DC. This is exactly why we do this podcast For all of you that are watching, Thank you don't forget. We have two audio versions of the show that come out each week. We published Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So make sure you download our podcasts and that subscribe button. Tell your family and friends don't forget to make those phone calls this week, especially on behalf of this American hostage in China, and let's make sure
that everybody knows that story. So share our podcasts as well to let other people know that. Right it's a five storry view and we'll see you back here in a couple of days.