October 29, 2025 • 42 mins
President doing trade deals in Asia. Shutdown day 29. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates as expected 1/4%. Climate change benefactor Bill Gates changing his mind. Sen Grassley investigating another weaponization of the FBI toward republicans.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Hi, How are you Welcome to the Big Podcast. It
is Wednesday. Today is the twenty ninth day of October,
year of Our Lord, twenty twenty five. My name is
Tom Sullivan. Welcome to the podcast. We have we have
a lot to go over today. We've got a big
(00:43):
unveiling of what looks like political games that were being
played by by the prosecutors at the US Department of
Justice and the Biden administration. They called it Arctic frost.
Chuck Grassley is all over that. We've got the president
doing trade deals. I mean, he goes off to the
(01:06):
Middle East, he does a bunch of trade deals. He
goes off to Asia. He's doing a bunch of trade deals.
And tonight he is tonight our time tomorrow in Asia
he is meeting with President she. But we'll go over
some of the trade deals that were cut today. The
shut down continues. Day twenty nine. The Fed cut interest
(01:26):
rates exactly as expected, by a quarter of one percent,
and all of a sudden, climate change is becoming a
big deal because Bill Gates, who has yesterday I was
talking about Gates spent over one point three billion dollars, no,
three and a half billion dollars and I don't want
(01:49):
to say down the tubes, but kind of and I
think he's throwing in the towel and saying no, actually,
mankind is not going to be wiped out, and if so,
it was. I mean, if you think about it, you
go back to some of the climate change people that
have been out from King Charles, who was Prince Charles
at the time. But this has been going on for
(02:11):
thirty years about the demise of Mother Earth and that
we're all going to die and within five years, ten years,
and we're still here. So there's a lot to talk
about that as well. And the economy. Of course, we'll
go over the economy. Let me start. Let me start
with some of the trade deals that have been done.
(02:33):
The President was still in South Korea, but he met
with the South Korean leader and they they're all doing
the same thing. He got like the crown jewels as
a gift. I mean they're massive, amazing jewelry and also
(02:56):
a crown, so they say there's no king. Well, he
got himself gold crown from South Korea. But Korea said
that they were going to invest three hundred and fifty
billion dollars in the United States. We then turned around
and lowered the auto tariffs for cars coming from South
(03:21):
Korea to fifteen percent. They were twenty five percent, so
that gives a better deal. And the semiconductors that they
make in South Korea are going to have a teriff
on them similar to the to the to the electronic
goods that we buy from Taiwan in Japan. Toyota already
(03:47):
has invested fifty billion dollars in the US with Toyo.
There's factories in a number of places around the United States,
fifty billion dollars worth of investments and forty nine dollars
and employees worked for Toyota here in the US. But
they're going to add to that. Toyota is going to
(04:08):
build another ten billion dollars worth of auto plants. And
let's see, we're going to have a thirty billion dollar
partnership with Mitsubishi, and we've cut some sort of framework.
We don't have the agreement, but we've got a framework
with Japan on rare earth minerals, critical minerals that we want,
(04:31):
and believe it or not, little old Japan, which is
not that big, they apparently have some minerals that we want.
So that is owing on the plane going from Japan
to South Korea. One of the reporters asked him, so,
are you going to run for that third term or not?
And he said no. He said no, I'm not allowed to.
(04:54):
So I think the whole Steve Bannon thing and present
Trump they love the dizzyank the chain of people in
the media. I want to play a clip from an
interview that Senator Chris Kuns, the Democrat from Delaware, said today.
(05:20):
He was very concerned about the fact that it looks
like and he's worried that the president is going to
allow China to buy and Vidia's super duper latest greatest
chip called the Blackstone Chip. And well, let me play
here's Senator Chris kuons.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Sid and Trump did that interview while he's flying to
a meeting in Korea where he now is soon with Jijingping.
And I am alarmed by reports in that press conference
from President Trump that he is considering allowing in video
to sell China their most advanced it's called the Blackwell
(06:02):
and it's twenty times more powerful than the chips he's
recently allowed China access to. John the defining fight of
the twenty first century will be who controls artificial intelligence,
whether it's written and controlled and played out on the
guidelines of the Chinese Communist Party, which will use it
to attack our systems through cyber attacks, our military, to
(06:26):
challenge our economic role and our system or whether artificial
intelligence reinforces free and open societies. I think it would
be a tragic mistake for President Trump, in order to
get some soybean orders out of China to sell them
these critical cutting edge AI chips.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So that's Chris Coon's argument, and he's not alone. There's
been others. Did I say black student's Blackwell Blackwell chip?
What happened? Go back a few months and the President
put the kabash on one of and Vidia's best chips
and then later changed his mind. And the reason why
(07:07):
was because a lot of people in the world of trade,
more importantly in the tech world of trade, said, you
want them to be able to buy in Vidia's best chip,
don't keep it from them, because if you keep it
from them, they will steal the technology, they will create
a chip that is as good, if not better, They
(07:30):
will figure out how to do it. So instead do
like what Intel used to do when they were the kingpins.
Is that Intel became the chip to own. Nothing else
quite measured up. AMD and all the others tried, but
as a result, all the competition basically was thwarted by Intel.
(07:56):
And that's what they're rolling the dice on is that
if we can let Nvidia just flood the world markets
with their best equipment, there's nobody else is going to
be able to compete with them. Nobody's going to take
the time. Everybody that will want to do anything in
technology will want the and video chip, not some knockoff
(08:20):
made by some Chinese tech center, but it would be.
So that's the reason why I'm assuming that the president
is going to allow this chip to be sold to
other people in China. But that's the theory behind it,
and we'll see how it turns out if in fact
it is approved. Shut Down day twenty nine. So there's
(08:48):
a lot of bills floating around, a lot of ideas
trying to figure out how to stop this. And there's
a bunch of people in Washington that are saying, well,
why don't we have a bill to pay the military? Okay,
then why don't we have a bill uh to put
the money up for the food stamps. Then somebody else well,
(09:10):
why don't we have a bill to pay the air
traffic controllers and they're going through these piecemeal bills, and
Senator John Kennedy explained why he's opposed to that.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
If you start taking the pressure off senators, then then
that leaves of they shut down will last that much longer.
And once you start picking and choosing helping this group
versus that group, I'm willing to consider each on the marriage.
But you enter a sliper slope.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
The other side of the aisle, Senator John Fetterman, I
guess he's on the other side of the aisle. He
also waited on that idea.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
When you have world kitchen feeding you no government workers.
I mean that that's the absurdity of this, and that's
why like pay these people open things up. I don't
know why we're in this doing in this situation.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So he really didn't have an answer about it other
than it's a shame. Of course, it's a shame. Senator
John Thune, who is the leader, the majority leader in
the Senate, had a long speech that he gave on
the floor of the Senate today. I wanted to pull
a little bit of it for you because I thought
(10:28):
he was very he was very thoughtful about where we
are with the shutdown.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
What about the forty million Americans that are going to
not get snap benefits starting on Saturday if the government
doesn't open up, But every day gets better Corey center Schumer.
And then of course this last week there was the
House Democrat whip who said, of course there will be
families that are going to suffer, but it is one
of the few leverage times we have. Of course there
(10:58):
are families that are going to up for.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
True, but it doesn't matter because we got leverage. Then,
of course we have a third one here one of
our colleagues here in the Senate, the senator from Delaware,
who said this in an interview, frankly, this is our
only moment of leverage. And although a very unpleasant tool
to use, Yeah, yeah, it's unpleasant. It's unpleasant unless you're
(11:27):
a Democrat who thinks that this gives you a moment
of leverage. So unless there be any question about who
is responsible for shutting the government down, make no mistake
about it, these guys are the ones who are out
there bragging about it getting better for us every single day,
(11:49):
or we have more leverage now.
Speaker 6 (11:53):
This President.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
This has gone on long enough.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
We made it abundantly clear that this is not about
what the Democrats say it's about it's about the president
in the White House. This is TDS, this is Trump
Derangement syndrome on steroids, and they are asking the American
(12:19):
people to pay the price for that. Thirteen times when
Biden was present, they had no issues with funding the
federal government with a clean CR. Now we bring a
clean non partisan CR. No partisan writers, no policies, Republican
policies attacked, just funds. The government comes over from the
(12:40):
House a month ago. Now we put it here just
asking a handful of Democrats to join us, because as
we know, it takes sixty in the Senate, and most
people understand that, I mean, they're trying to ignore the
fact now that the Republicans have control of Washington, they
have the House, the Senate, the White House. Anybody who
follows this knows then in the United States Senate, the rules,
(13:03):
the procedures, and the Senate by which we operate and
are governed require sixty vote threshold. So it takes more
than fifty one, meaning since we have fifty three Republicans,
it's going to take a handful of Democrats. We've been
able to generate fifty five votes consistently now thirteen different
times for funding the government, opening up the government, but
(13:23):
we need five more.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Well, I think they're not going to get them until
after election day, election days next Tuesday, So I don't
I truly believe that John Thune was right. There is
an element of Trump arrangements syndrome. They do not want
to look to their base, the Democrat base, that they
(13:45):
are cooperating or doing anything that would make Trump be happy.
So that's part of it. The other part of it,
and that's going to play a big part on We're
not going to do anything until after election day because
we don't want Democrats turning on us like they did
the last time that Chuck Schumer went along with an
(14:06):
increase in the debt limit and they excoriated him, and
he doesn't want that again. Democrats are afraid that Democrats
are going to turn on them if they do anything
before election day. So I suspect after next Tuesday, all
of a sudden presto changeol there will be a solution.
But meantime, there's forty two million people that are on
(14:30):
food stamps I've railed about this the last couple of days.
There's a lot of people of that forty two million
who don't need to be on those food stamps. But
let's just look at who that is. Of the forty
two million, seventy three percent are at or below the
poverty level. And you want to know what the poverty
(14:52):
level is, Well, the national poverty level is. For someone,
an individual that makes fifteen thousand, in six hundred and
fifty dollars or less is at the poverty level or below.
That's one single individual. If it's a family of two,
it goes up a little bit up to twenty one thousand,
(15:13):
one hundred and fifty dollars at or below is the
poverty level. Family of three, twenty six thousand, six hundred
and fifty dollars, family of four to thirty two thousand,
one hundred and fifty dollars. So those are the poverty levels.
And seventy three percent of the people that are of
the forty two million that are on food stamps are
(15:35):
added below the poverty level. Okay, we can dig into why,
but regardless, seventy three percent of them are below adder
below the poverty level. What about the other twenty seven percent,
Who were they and why are they on this? The
average benefit, the foodstamp benefit, The average is three hundred
(15:59):
and three thirty two dollars a month. Well, I don't
know how much you spend on groceries. Groceries certainly are
more expensive. That doesn't go very far. But we are
now at the point in this country where one out
of every eight people are on food stamps. One out
(16:20):
of eight. Look around, if you see seven other people,
one of you is on food stamps, and it's not
a Republican versus Democrat. There's a lot of food stamps
in red states. So we'll see what happens. But I
don't think it's going to break before our election day.
(16:41):
That's just my wild guess. On all of this climate.
I told you there's a lot of talk about climate.
That's because Bill Gates all of a sudden is talking
about the fact that we're going to be just fine,
and he's taking his money and focusing on helping people
(17:01):
that are hurting or maybe hungry instead of on we
have We're going to fix the climate when it comes,
you know, one hundred years down the road. So let
me play a montage of a number of people, Al
Gore and Bernie Sanders a bunch of people in this
montage about how the climate is so critical. Here's what
(17:24):
they had to say. Certainly, climate change, we'll make entire
ecosystems die off. It'll make parts of the world you know,
impossibly live in.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
It is rushing at us with such speed and force.
It's completely unprecedented.
Speaker 7 (17:47):
The world is going to end in twelve years if
we don't address climate change.
Speaker 8 (17:50):
The world that you will be bringing your children up
in and your grandchildren up in will be increasingly unhealthy
and un inhabitable.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
It is what we decide now. It will define the
rest of humanity's future.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
So Kennedy, who will sing, you'll handily save the world,
she always says, had this reaction to the montage.
Speaker 9 (18:15):
Yes, the sugar Daddy is a little bit fickle on
this issue, and he is going to be diverting his
assets to where he sees they are most needed, which
is essentially preserving life from things like hunger and pests
and disease. And that was originally the focus of his foundation,
and then he got hypnotized by these climate hysterics. Unfortunately,
(18:39):
the rest of the world and for those of us
who will have to pay higher taxes because of climate
policy that is driven by these hysterics. People have gotten
hysteria fatigue, and they've been told since the mid nineties
the world is going to end. It's like that was
thirty years ago and we are still here. Our technology
is getting better, cars are greener, more people have solar
(19:02):
panels of their own choosing. So when are they going
to actually admit that things are better now than they were.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
A few decades after.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
So speaking of hunger and food stamps and all these
other topics about food, I know we've all seen the
videos of people starving in some god forsaken part of
the world, Sudan or some other part, But seriously, do
you see reports about people that are dying in the
(19:30):
streets of America from hunger. I know there are probably
people that go to bed at night with that are hungry,
but we do have food and we do have food programs.
So again, the pressure is going to ramp up after
this weekend. But as far as the climate and the
world's going to come to an end, there's even Bill
(19:54):
Gates is going I used to think that, but I
don't anymore. There's Noah Rothmuan from National Review.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Yeah, this is just background radiation.
Speaker 10 (20:02):
As Kennedy said, I was reading up on something that
had to do with Gaza and you just came across
this little statement from a United Nations institution that said
Gaza will be uninhabitable in twenty twenty. It's just like,
just throw this sort of thing out there, and they
have no compunction about it and no interest in revisiting
these claims because no one will ever call them out
to it. That distant shriek you hear from Bill Gates's
(20:22):
report is the sound of the activist groups screaming for
their fundraising. There's been a subrosa schism I think within
the climate movement that you kind of only know it
if you're deep within it. There are those who are philanthropists,
who are anthropocentric, who think that we should seek better
outcomes for people, and there are misanthropes who advocate the industrialization,
who say that humanity is really the problem and we
(20:43):
should be pairing back human comforts and our productivity generally
in order to save the environment. This really puts the
thumb on the scale in favor of the philanthropists and
the altruists and saying, listen, we got to seek better outcome.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Well, Mannon, who has devoted his life to studying about
junk science. You're in lomboard. He runs the Copenhagen Consensus,
and his view of Bill Gates and everybody all of
a sudden kind of waking up to the fact that
the Earth is not going to be in peril. Well,
he has been on that opposition to that for a
(21:16):
long long time.
Speaker 11 (21:17):
You all the time here whenever there's a hurricane, oh
see global warming. But that's not how science work. You
actually have to look at the totality of all the
hurricanes that have hit the world, and actually we have
a good measure for that. That's what science does, and
it tells us right now we have seen activity of
about eighty two percent of what we normally have. So
(21:40):
in fact, we've seen less hurricane activity this year than
we normally see. This is not an extreme year. This
is just simply NGO's pointing at whatever they can find
on TV and saying, see, global warning doesn't work here,
it doesn't work everywhere else. When they point to places
at burn, but forget that the global statistics say there's
(22:01):
less burn. We need to look at the global statistics,
not just whatever is fashionable right now?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
All right, but what about Bill Gates? So he's not
doing what's fashionable, he's changing his investments completely.
Speaker 11 (22:15):
Well, I think, I mean, I don't know, you have
to ask him, but I think what he's really doing
is he's saying, if you look at the science, namely
the climate economics, they've been telling us for many years
that yes, there is a problem with climate, but you
also need to look at what's the cost and what's
the benefit. And that's exactly what Bill is now saying.
(22:38):
He's saying, for every dollars back, you need to look
at where can you do the most good for human welfare.
And unfortunately, many of the climate policies that people suggest
will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and do very
little good. Only one hundred years from now, there's so
much more good we can do. You know, in Africa,
not only are they telling us it's what they want
(23:00):
to focus on, but it's where you can do a
lot more good on education and nutrition, on disease. These
are places where you can spend a little dollar, little
amount of dollars and do an incredible amount of good.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And that's what Bill Gates was doing on nutrition and
education and diseased trying to find cures. Spent billions of
dollars on that too, But he's wasted over three and
a half a billion dollars of his own individual money.
And you add up all the money's been spent on
climate change. Trillions of dollars have been spent on that
(23:36):
instead of focusing on things like education and disease. One
group that has spent a huge amount of money is
the World Bank, and Beyorn talked about that a little bit.
Speaker 11 (23:49):
So they actually say forty four percent of their money
goes to climate and they're very proud of this. And
of course, remember the World Bank was instituted to help
poor people. Instead, we're spending forty four percent on this,
on things that the poor themselves is saying, this is.
Speaker 6 (24:07):
Not what we want.
Speaker 11 (24:08):
First, we're essentially saying, yeah, I know that your problems
with poverty, that I know that your kids might be
dying tonight from easily curable infectious diseases. But you know what,
We're going to cut carbon emissions instead, which will help
you a tiny bit in one hundred years. It's really
really wrong, and we need to stop this. We need
to get the World Bank and everybody else back to
(24:28):
basics and back to doing what really works.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Our old friend Harrietton heard all about this climate story
and he jumped on it. This is his the results
of his opponing.
Speaker 8 (24:39):
Really, yeah, I think a lot of people will agree
with Bill Gates that maybe this wouldn't be the end
of humanity. And I think, you know, we've been talking
about climate change now for decades upon decades upon decades,
and the worry in terms of climate change, simply put,
hasn't shifted. It has not reached the majority of Americans.
What are we talking about greatly worried about climate change?
You go all the way back to nineteen hundred and
(24:59):
eighty nine, thirty five percent, two forty percent, twenty twenty
forty six percent, and in twenty twenty five, look at that,
it's forty percent, the same number as we had twenty
five years ago, back in twenty two thousand, and then
only just five points higher than we had back in
nineteen hundred and eighty nine.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
Really, we've just seen consistency on this issue.
Speaker 8 (25:17):
The bottom line is that the climate change message that
folks who of course believe that climate change is real
and is quite worrisome. Simply put, has not really worked
with the American people. Yeah, it is not anywhere close
to being the biggest thing that people are worried about.
What are we talking about here, Well, why don't we
just talk about top issue facing the US climate change?
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Well?
Speaker 6 (25:35):
I got some numbers for you on the screen right here.
Speaker 8 (25:37):
You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know
that these numbers are not particularly high. Top issue facing
Knit States climate change it was three percent and twenty
twenty one, two percent in average polls in twenty twenty three,
and this year the average poles two one two. It
is very very low on the list of priorities. I
was trying to count it down the Gallup pole, and
basically it was so low down, you know, I was
(25:59):
counting all the different iss almost lost trackers like fifteenth
or twentieth.
Speaker 6 (26:03):
It was just very very low down.
Speaker 8 (26:05):
So the bottom line is, not only are we seeing
that the number has not really moved over the last
thirty six years, but in terms of being the top issue,
it's simply put, has not broken through two percent. There
are just a ton of things that rank way higher
in the list of him, look at this climate change
effect on my home area will be harder to stay here.
Look in twenty twenty three, it was twenty three percent.
(26:26):
Look at where we are now seventeen percent. Now, you know,
these numbers are pretty comparable, but they're pretty comparable on
the low side. Is what we're talking about here, as
Americans simply put, just don't think we'll have the type
of impact that will really change their lives, which again
goes back to the message that Bill Gates was saying, Right,
this is not something that's going to be devastating for humanity.
It's something we can work our way out of a
lot of Americans agree. And even on this, we're talking
(26:48):
about just twenty seven percent of Democrats who believe that
climate change effect to my home area would be harder
to stay here. So, even on the left wing, where
you'd expect the climate change message to hit most home,
it's simply put, is not reaching that type of level
in terms of the doomsday scenario that Bill Gates is talking.
Speaker 11 (27:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Literally, over the decades, I've watched pauling and you look
down to what are America's priorities, what are people most
concerned about? It's always been at or near the bottom.
So Bill Gates getting I guess, finally getting the message
that that's not worth his money anymore. He's going elsewhere.
So the FED held their meeting today and yesterday and today,
(27:27):
and they came out this afternoon and said exactly what
people thought they would do. They lowered interest rates by
a quarter of one percent. So the Fed funds rate
is now three and three quarters to four percent range.
I made a few notes from the news conference, but
(27:49):
basically what j Powell. The news conference was held half
an hour after they made their announcement always is Jay
Powell came out and basically what he was talking about
is that the Federal Reserve. He didn't say this, This
is my impression the Federal Reserve. Eight major economic reports
(28:10):
have not been produced this past month, and the FED
has been basically working blind. Let me go through some
of the I made notes about what Powell said. So
they're going to stop doing quantitative tightening, and what that
(28:31):
means is along with that, that's a way to lower
interest rates to basically allow the banks to have more
funds that they can use to lend to people who
want to command and borrow. There were two members of
the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee that dissented. One of
them was the new guy Miriam who Donald Trump just appointed.
(28:52):
He wanted a half a percent cut, not a quarter
of a percent cut. The thing about him, this is
his second meeting, and so far, even though President Trump
put him in there to try to be get the
FED to be more aggressive, he's not getting anybody else
signing up with his views. Second meeting, second time, he's
(29:13):
voted for a half percent cut and nobody else went
along with it. The other person that descended about the
quarter percent cut was the president of the Kansas City
Federal Reserve Bank. Schmid wanted no cut whatsoever. So Pale said,
both hiring and layoffs remain low. The downside risk to
(29:37):
employment appears to have been increasing in recent months. That
housing services inflation has been coming down. That inflation from
other than tariffs is not far away from their two
percent goal, but that's for things that are not being
(29:59):
affected by the t tariffs. That the policy that the
FED has come up with is still fairly restrictive. That
the modestly restrictive are the words that he used. That
he brought up twice, the lack of data, the fact, yeah,
they're blown. They're flying line. They and besides that, some
of the unemployment reports, remember how they were major revisions.
(30:22):
This is before the government shut down. He also mentioned
that a rate cut at their next meeting, which is
coming up in December, is far from a foregone conclusion,
though he's not saying we're going to jump on that.
That higher tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories
(30:43):
of goods, that there's no risk free path for them
because they got at tension between their goals of keeping
the employment strong and keeping in the cost of money low.
He doesn't think that spending to build data centers is
especially intrasensitive because there's a lot of money going into that,
(31:06):
billions of dollars. That the unemployment rate remained low through August,
and it's consistent, he says, with recent data. That the
downside risk to employment appears to have been going up
in recent months, and that job gains have slowed. That
the economy is expanding at a moderate pace, and this
is the fascinating part that most economists are scratching their
(31:30):
head on. The economy is growing, but we're doing it
with fewer people. The labor market is softening, it the
economy is expanding. He talked about business investment and equipment
has continued to expand. He said the activity in the
housing sector remains weak. People are locked into their low
(31:52):
mortgages and they're not moving. That the government shut down
will weigh on the economy if it continues to cyst
that the rates of treasuries have remained basically unchanged over
the last couple of months. And it's interesting because a
lot of headlines lately about big layoffs. Who did we
(32:13):
get yesterday? Was it? That they're keeping an eye on it,
But it really comes down to the big companies. It's
all headline grabbers because the numbers are so big, But
the smaller companies in this country create eighty percent of
the jobs. And small business needs lower rates than big
(32:36):
business does, especially right now. That's at least what every
survey of small business owners says, we want lower interest rates.
Speaker 6 (32:42):
So J.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Powell has four more meetings before he is out, and
so far he's sticking with economic principles to the best
way that he could possibly do it. But he is
very cautious, I think overly cautious, but that's him. And
then what looks like a stink is starting to grow
(33:04):
from Charles Chuck Rashley, the senior Senator from Iowa. He
has the trust of whistleblowers, and whistleblowers have come to him.
We talked about this. He mentioned it about a week
or two ago something that there was a government program
(33:25):
in the Department of Justice in the Biden administration called
Arctic Frost, and what they were doing was they were
spying on eight different senators, all Republicans, and so Grasty
uncovered just a little bit more about it today. But
he's digging into this and I don't know where this
(33:47):
is going to go.
Speaker 7 (33:49):
A little bit of history before I get to what
we're releasing today. I started the investigation into Arctic Fraud
July twenty twenty two based on whistleblower disclosures. Based on
these disclosures, we know that weaponized taxpayer funded agents and
(34:15):
prosecutors advanced the investigation. As Arctic Frost advanced, ninety two
Republican organizations or individuals were targeted, not just Trump, and
they were added to its scope. And author of that
(34:39):
targeting list was Special Agent Washin Walder Jareddino. He's the
same weaponized agent who was involved in other cases against Republicans,
including Peter Navarro. We've learned Jack Smith secretly obtained phone
(35:04):
record data from at least eight senators and one congressman.
I've recently been informed by Verizon that at least eleven
members with Verizon accounts were affected. That includes a hardline
for Senator Cruz's office and a staffer sell phone for
(35:27):
former Senator Leffler At and T inform me. They challenged
the legal basis for Jack Smith's efforts, and Smith back down.
So today we're making public new records that I've attained
(35:49):
through legally protected whistleblower disclosures. One hundred and ninety seven
subpoenas were issued by Jack Smith and his team. These
subpoenas were issued to thirty four individuals and one hundred
and sixty three businesses, including financial institutions, and one of
(36:16):
the points of contact on many of these subpoenas was
that person I previously named special Agent Walter gear Dino.
The subpoena requested records and communications related to over four
hundred and thirty individual and organizations, all of them appeared
(36:39):
to be aimed at Republicans. A subpoena to event strategies,
requested records relating to Turning Point USA and the Republican
Attorney General's Association. One subpoena to Apple sought records relating
(37:00):
to Trump and the January sixth prison choir. Earlier this year,
I obtained emails between and among JP Cooney, one of
Jack Smith's prosecutors. That email exchange was March twenty twenty
three about a partisan news article on January six And
(37:24):
this is what Cooney said in the email. Can we
do some work to nail down Trump's role in this,
perhaps with the same process on Ed Henry's LLC just
the next month, April twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
So he's sniffing out a political weaponization of the FBI
again again. I know that there was corruption back when
Jay Edgar Hoover was running things, but this popped up
when Obama administration they were going after Donald Trump on Russia,
Russia and Russia. I would have thought that they would
(38:06):
have learned since then that that obviously blew up in
their face. And now here we are again. So where
this is going. Mollie Hemingway from the Federalist has been
all over this story.
Speaker 12 (38:20):
Yeah, what's so interesting about this is we had in
the first Trump administration that whole investigation, the Russia collusion hoax,
where we saw the FBI and members of the DOJ
acting inappropriately and in a highly political fashion. A lot
of people have looked at this and said that was
inappropriate what they did, and it seems like because nobody
was ever held accountable for that, they did not learn
their lesson at all, and they went after the Trump
(38:41):
administration or Trump and people who supported him vociferously post
twenty twenty election. This is a massive number of people
that they're looking into here, and a lot of them
are like the infrastructure of the Republican Party, and so
it's interesting to learn about this. Attorney General Bill Barr
had tried to put in protection so that people wouldn't
engage in these type of overtly political investigations, and it
(39:03):
appears that they just ran right over those protections and
decided to do it again. So this is interesting. I
think we should pay attention to what Senator Grassley is doing.
He always has the goods. He has a very good
relationship with whistleblowers, and so when he says something, you
can kind of take it. And again, this is about
legally protected activity. They were going after people for their
own speech on challenging elections, for doing legally protected challenges
(39:28):
to elections. It was a political cause of one political party,
the Democrat Party, to fight that type of thing. That's
an inappropriate thing for the FBI and DOJ to be
involved in. And so unless something happens to these people, though,
it will continue the moment they're able to continue. My
sources inside the FBI say that among the politically politically
motivated agents, they felt that Walter Giardina was the worst
(39:51):
of the bunch. He was someone who prosecuted other people
involved with Trump, like Peter Navarro, and he's frequently showing
up in council stuff. But just people who know him
say that he was highly motivated politically.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah, it's perfectly legal for Democrats to go after Republicans
for their views, that the Republicans can go after Democrats
for their views, but to have the FBI or the
DOJ involved in it is dirty. Pool Jason Shave's former congressman,
he's pretty much shocked by it.
Speaker 13 (40:24):
The size and scope of this is just on parallel
to one hundred and fifty six people that we know of.
There is a separation of powers in this country. And
yet what Jack Smith is allegedly doing was just a dragnet.
What was the predicate to justify such a wide array
to such a net out there? That is absolutely stunnying.
(40:45):
I'm glad Senator Grassley's on top of this. He's one
of the best in the business, best there's ever been
in terms of oversight. I think the numbers and the
gravity of what we're going to see are going to
be absolutely stunning. And how they did this, why they
did this, It's just not justified. You can't go after
that many people with what and what charges were there?
(41:09):
Relatively nothing?
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah, those are those were wire taps on one hundred
and fifty six Republicans, one hundred and ninety six. The
penis going after their bank records, going to financial institutions
and getting bank records for the senators and others that
are active in the Republican Party. I mean, this smells
pretty bad. So that's what we got for today. Let's
(41:32):
check Wall Street and see what happened there. So the
Fed did it expected as expected, and the lowered rates
by a quarter of a percent. But Wall Street, you know,
it's the old buy on the rumor, sell on the news. Well,
they kind of went ho home. The Dow down seventy
four points off their record high. The Dow at forty
seven and six thirty two s and P basically flat,
(41:56):
NASDACK up one hundred and thirty. The price of gold
it was down sixty nine dollars to below four thousand,
thirty nine twenty nine for an ounce of gold, and
oil also pretty much unchanged at sixty dollars for a
barrel of oil. That's it for today. Thank you for
coming by. We will be back tomorrow. Hope to see
(42:17):
you then
Hi, How are you Welcome to the Big Podcast. It
is Wednesday. Today is the twenty ninth day of October,
year of Our Lord, twenty twenty five. My name is
Tom Sullivan. Welcome to the podcast. We have we have
a lot to go over today. We've got a big
(00:43):
unveiling of what looks like political games that were being
played by by the prosecutors at the US Department of
Justice and the Biden administration. They called it Arctic frost.
Chuck Grassley is all over that. We've got the president
doing trade deals. I mean, he goes off to the
(01:06):
Middle East, he does a bunch of trade deals. He
goes off to Asia. He's doing a bunch of trade deals.
And tonight he is tonight our time tomorrow in Asia
he is meeting with President she. But we'll go over
some of the trade deals that were cut today. The
shut down continues. Day twenty nine. The Fed cut interest
(01:26):
rates exactly as expected, by a quarter of one percent,
and all of a sudden, climate change is becoming a
big deal because Bill Gates, who has yesterday I was
talking about Gates spent over one point three billion dollars, no,
three and a half billion dollars and I don't want
(01:49):
to say down the tubes, but kind of and I
think he's throwing in the towel and saying no, actually,
mankind is not going to be wiped out, and if so,
it was. I mean, if you think about it, you
go back to some of the climate change people that
have been out from King Charles, who was Prince Charles
at the time. But this has been going on for
(02:11):
thirty years about the demise of Mother Earth and that
we're all going to die and within five years, ten years,
and we're still here. So there's a lot to talk
about that as well. And the economy. Of course, we'll
go over the economy. Let me start. Let me start
with some of the trade deals that have been done.
(02:33):
The President was still in South Korea, but he met
with the South Korean leader and they they're all doing
the same thing. He got like the crown jewels as
a gift. I mean they're massive, amazing jewelry and also
(02:56):
a crown, so they say there's no king. Well, he
got himself gold crown from South Korea. But Korea said
that they were going to invest three hundred and fifty
billion dollars in the United States. We then turned around
and lowered the auto tariffs for cars coming from South
(03:21):
Korea to fifteen percent. They were twenty five percent, so
that gives a better deal. And the semiconductors that they
make in South Korea are going to have a teriff
on them similar to the to the to the electronic
goods that we buy from Taiwan in Japan. Toyota already
(03:47):
has invested fifty billion dollars in the US with Toyo.
There's factories in a number of places around the United States,
fifty billion dollars worth of investments and forty nine dollars
and employees worked for Toyota here in the US. But
they're going to add to that. Toyota is going to
(04:08):
build another ten billion dollars worth of auto plants. And
let's see, we're going to have a thirty billion dollar
partnership with Mitsubishi, and we've cut some sort of framework.
We don't have the agreement, but we've got a framework
with Japan on rare earth minerals, critical minerals that we want,
(04:31):
and believe it or not, little old Japan, which is
not that big, they apparently have some minerals that we want.
So that is owing on the plane going from Japan
to South Korea. One of the reporters asked him, so,
are you going to run for that third term or not?
And he said no. He said no, I'm not allowed to.
(04:54):
So I think the whole Steve Bannon thing and present
Trump they love the dizzyank the chain of people in
the media. I want to play a clip from an
interview that Senator Chris Kuns, the Democrat from Delaware, said today.
(05:20):
He was very concerned about the fact that it looks
like and he's worried that the president is going to
allow China to buy and Vidia's super duper latest greatest
chip called the Blackstone Chip. And well, let me play
here's Senator Chris kuons.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Sid and Trump did that interview while he's flying to
a meeting in Korea where he now is soon with Jijingping.
And I am alarmed by reports in that press conference
from President Trump that he is considering allowing in video
to sell China their most advanced it's called the Blackwell
(06:02):
and it's twenty times more powerful than the chips he's
recently allowed China access to. John the defining fight of
the twenty first century will be who controls artificial intelligence,
whether it's written and controlled and played out on the
guidelines of the Chinese Communist Party, which will use it
to attack our systems through cyber attacks, our military, to
(06:26):
challenge our economic role and our system or whether artificial
intelligence reinforces free and open societies. I think it would
be a tragic mistake for President Trump, in order to
get some soybean orders out of China to sell them
these critical cutting edge AI chips.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So that's Chris Coon's argument, and he's not alone. There's
been others. Did I say black student's Blackwell Blackwell chip?
What happened? Go back a few months and the President
put the kabash on one of and Vidia's best chips
and then later changed his mind. And the reason why
(07:07):
was because a lot of people in the world of trade,
more importantly in the tech world of trade, said, you
want them to be able to buy in Vidia's best chip,
don't keep it from them, because if you keep it
from them, they will steal the technology, they will create
a chip that is as good, if not better, They
(07:30):
will figure out how to do it. So instead do
like what Intel used to do when they were the kingpins.
Is that Intel became the chip to own. Nothing else
quite measured up. AMD and all the others tried, but
as a result, all the competition basically was thwarted by Intel.
(07:56):
And that's what they're rolling the dice on is that
if we can let Nvidia just flood the world markets
with their best equipment, there's nobody else is going to
be able to compete with them. Nobody's going to take
the time. Everybody that will want to do anything in
technology will want the and video chip, not some knockoff
(08:20):
made by some Chinese tech center, but it would be.
So that's the reason why I'm assuming that the president
is going to allow this chip to be sold to
other people in China. But that's the theory behind it,
and we'll see how it turns out if in fact
it is approved. Shut Down day twenty nine. So there's
(08:48):
a lot of bills floating around, a lot of ideas
trying to figure out how to stop this. And there's
a bunch of people in Washington that are saying, well,
why don't we have a bill to pay the military? Okay,
then why don't we have a bill uh to put
the money up for the food stamps. Then somebody else well,
(09:10):
why don't we have a bill to pay the air
traffic controllers and they're going through these piecemeal bills, and
Senator John Kennedy explained why he's opposed to that.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
If you start taking the pressure off senators, then then
that leaves of they shut down will last that much longer.
And once you start picking and choosing helping this group
versus that group, I'm willing to consider each on the marriage.
But you enter a sliper slope.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
The other side of the aisle, Senator John Fetterman, I
guess he's on the other side of the aisle. He
also waited on that idea.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
When you have world kitchen feeding you no government workers.
I mean that that's the absurdity of this, and that's
why like pay these people open things up. I don't
know why we're in this doing in this situation.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So he really didn't have an answer about it other
than it's a shame. Of course, it's a shame. Senator
John Thune, who is the leader, the majority leader in
the Senate, had a long speech that he gave on
the floor of the Senate today. I wanted to pull
a little bit of it for you because I thought
(10:28):
he was very he was very thoughtful about where we
are with the shutdown.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
What about the forty million Americans that are going to
not get snap benefits starting on Saturday if the government
doesn't open up, But every day gets better Corey center Schumer.
And then of course this last week there was the
House Democrat whip who said, of course there will be
families that are going to suffer, but it is one
of the few leverage times we have. Of course there
(10:58):
are families that are going to up for.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
True, but it doesn't matter because we got leverage. Then,
of course we have a third one here one of
our colleagues here in the Senate, the senator from Delaware,
who said this in an interview, frankly, this is our
only moment of leverage. And although a very unpleasant tool
to use, Yeah, yeah, it's unpleasant. It's unpleasant unless you're
(11:27):
a Democrat who thinks that this gives you a moment
of leverage. So unless there be any question about who
is responsible for shutting the government down, make no mistake
about it, these guys are the ones who are out
there bragging about it getting better for us every single day,
(11:49):
or we have more leverage now.
Speaker 6 (11:53):
This President.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
This has gone on long enough.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
We made it abundantly clear that this is not about
what the Democrats say it's about it's about the president
in the White House. This is TDS, this is Trump
Derangement syndrome on steroids, and they are asking the American
(12:19):
people to pay the price for that. Thirteen times when
Biden was present, they had no issues with funding the
federal government with a clean CR. Now we bring a
clean non partisan CR. No partisan writers, no policies, Republican
policies attacked, just funds. The government comes over from the
(12:40):
House a month ago. Now we put it here just
asking a handful of Democrats to join us, because as
we know, it takes sixty in the Senate, and most
people understand that, I mean, they're trying to ignore the
fact now that the Republicans have control of Washington, they
have the House, the Senate, the White House. Anybody who
follows this knows then in the United States Senate, the rules,
(13:03):
the procedures, and the Senate by which we operate and
are governed require sixty vote threshold. So it takes more
than fifty one, meaning since we have fifty three Republicans,
it's going to take a handful of Democrats. We've been
able to generate fifty five votes consistently now thirteen different
times for funding the government, opening up the government, but
(13:23):
we need five more.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Well, I think they're not going to get them until
after election day, election days next Tuesday, So I don't
I truly believe that John Thune was right. There is
an element of Trump arrangements syndrome. They do not want
to look to their base, the Democrat base, that they
(13:45):
are cooperating or doing anything that would make Trump be happy.
So that's part of it. The other part of it,
and that's going to play a big part on We're
not going to do anything until after election day because
we don't want Democrats turning on us like they did
the last time that Chuck Schumer went along with an
(14:06):
increase in the debt limit and they excoriated him, and
he doesn't want that again. Democrats are afraid that Democrats
are going to turn on them if they do anything
before election day. So I suspect after next Tuesday, all
of a sudden presto changeol there will be a solution.
But meantime, there's forty two million people that are on
(14:30):
food stamps I've railed about this the last couple of days.
There's a lot of people of that forty two million
who don't need to be on those food stamps. But
let's just look at who that is. Of the forty
two million, seventy three percent are at or below the
poverty level. And you want to know what the poverty
(14:52):
level is, Well, the national poverty level is. For someone,
an individual that makes fifteen thousand, in six hundred and
fifty dollars or less is at the poverty level or below.
That's one single individual. If it's a family of two,
it goes up a little bit up to twenty one thousand,
(15:13):
one hundred and fifty dollars at or below is the
poverty level. Family of three, twenty six thousand, six hundred
and fifty dollars, family of four to thirty two thousand,
one hundred and fifty dollars. So those are the poverty levels.
And seventy three percent of the people that are of
the forty two million that are on food stamps are
(15:35):
added below the poverty level. Okay, we can dig into why,
but regardless, seventy three percent of them are below adder
below the poverty level. What about the other twenty seven percent,
Who were they and why are they on this? The
average benefit, the foodstamp benefit, The average is three hundred
(15:59):
and three thirty two dollars a month. Well, I don't
know how much you spend on groceries. Groceries certainly are
more expensive. That doesn't go very far. But we are
now at the point in this country where one out
of every eight people are on food stamps. One out
(16:20):
of eight. Look around, if you see seven other people,
one of you is on food stamps, and it's not
a Republican versus Democrat. There's a lot of food stamps
in red states. So we'll see what happens. But I
don't think it's going to break before our election day.
(16:41):
That's just my wild guess. On all of this climate.
I told you there's a lot of talk about climate.
That's because Bill Gates all of a sudden is talking
about the fact that we're going to be just fine,
and he's taking his money and focusing on helping people
(17:01):
that are hurting or maybe hungry instead of on we
have We're going to fix the climate when it comes,
you know, one hundred years down the road. So let
me play a montage of a number of people, Al
Gore and Bernie Sanders a bunch of people in this
montage about how the climate is so critical. Here's what
(17:24):
they had to say. Certainly, climate change, we'll make entire
ecosystems die off. It'll make parts of the world you know,
impossibly live in.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
It is rushing at us with such speed and force.
It's completely unprecedented.
Speaker 7 (17:47):
The world is going to end in twelve years if
we don't address climate change.
Speaker 8 (17:50):
The world that you will be bringing your children up
in and your grandchildren up in will be increasingly unhealthy
and un inhabitable.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
It is what we decide now. It will define the
rest of humanity's future.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
So Kennedy, who will sing, you'll handily save the world,
she always says, had this reaction to the montage.
Speaker 9 (18:15):
Yes, the sugar Daddy is a little bit fickle on
this issue, and he is going to be diverting his
assets to where he sees they are most needed, which
is essentially preserving life from things like hunger and pests
and disease. And that was originally the focus of his foundation,
and then he got hypnotized by these climate hysterics. Unfortunately,
(18:39):
the rest of the world and for those of us
who will have to pay higher taxes because of climate
policy that is driven by these hysterics. People have gotten
hysteria fatigue, and they've been told since the mid nineties
the world is going to end. It's like that was
thirty years ago and we are still here. Our technology
is getting better, cars are greener, more people have solar
(19:02):
panels of their own choosing. So when are they going
to actually admit that things are better now than they were.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
A few decades after.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
So speaking of hunger and food stamps and all these
other topics about food, I know we've all seen the
videos of people starving in some god forsaken part of
the world, Sudan or some other part, But seriously, do
you see reports about people that are dying in the
(19:30):
streets of America from hunger. I know there are probably
people that go to bed at night with that are hungry,
but we do have food and we do have food programs.
So again, the pressure is going to ramp up after
this weekend. But as far as the climate and the
world's going to come to an end, there's even Bill
(19:54):
Gates is going I used to think that, but I
don't anymore. There's Noah Rothmuan from National Review.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Yeah, this is just background radiation.
Speaker 10 (20:02):
As Kennedy said, I was reading up on something that
had to do with Gaza and you just came across
this little statement from a United Nations institution that said
Gaza will be uninhabitable in twenty twenty. It's just like,
just throw this sort of thing out there, and they
have no compunction about it and no interest in revisiting
these claims because no one will ever call them out
to it. That distant shriek you hear from Bill Gates's
(20:22):
report is the sound of the activist groups screaming for
their fundraising. There's been a subrosa schism I think within
the climate movement that you kind of only know it
if you're deep within it. There are those who are philanthropists,
who are anthropocentric, who think that we should seek better
outcomes for people, and there are misanthropes who advocate the industrialization,
who say that humanity is really the problem and we
(20:43):
should be pairing back human comforts and our productivity generally
in order to save the environment. This really puts the
thumb on the scale in favor of the philanthropists and
the altruists and saying, listen, we got to seek better outcome.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Well, Mannon, who has devoted his life to studying about
junk science. You're in lomboard. He runs the Copenhagen Consensus,
and his view of Bill Gates and everybody all of
a sudden kind of waking up to the fact that
the Earth is not going to be in peril. Well,
he has been on that opposition to that for a
(21:16):
long long time.
Speaker 11 (21:17):
You all the time here whenever there's a hurricane, oh
see global warming. But that's not how science work. You
actually have to look at the totality of all the
hurricanes that have hit the world, and actually we have
a good measure for that. That's what science does, and
it tells us right now we have seen activity of
about eighty two percent of what we normally have. So
(21:40):
in fact, we've seen less hurricane activity this year than
we normally see. This is not an extreme year. This
is just simply NGO's pointing at whatever they can find
on TV and saying, see, global warning doesn't work here,
it doesn't work everywhere else. When they point to places
at burn, but forget that the global statistics say there's
(22:01):
less burn. We need to look at the global statistics,
not just whatever is fashionable right now?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
All right, but what about Bill Gates? So he's not
doing what's fashionable, he's changing his investments completely.
Speaker 11 (22:15):
Well, I think, I mean, I don't know, you have
to ask him, but I think what he's really doing
is he's saying, if you look at the science, namely
the climate economics, they've been telling us for many years
that yes, there is a problem with climate, but you
also need to look at what's the cost and what's
the benefit. And that's exactly what Bill is now saying.
(22:38):
He's saying, for every dollars back, you need to look
at where can you do the most good for human welfare.
And unfortunately, many of the climate policies that people suggest
will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and do very
little good. Only one hundred years from now, there's so
much more good we can do. You know, in Africa,
not only are they telling us it's what they want
(23:00):
to focus on, but it's where you can do a
lot more good on education and nutrition, on disease. These
are places where you can spend a little dollar, little
amount of dollars and do an incredible amount of good.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And that's what Bill Gates was doing on nutrition and
education and diseased trying to find cures. Spent billions of
dollars on that too, But he's wasted over three and
a half a billion dollars of his own individual money.
And you add up all the money's been spent on
climate change. Trillions of dollars have been spent on that
(23:36):
instead of focusing on things like education and disease. One
group that has spent a huge amount of money is
the World Bank, and Beyorn talked about that a little bit.
Speaker 11 (23:49):
So they actually say forty four percent of their money
goes to climate and they're very proud of this. And
of course, remember the World Bank was instituted to help
poor people. Instead, we're spending forty four percent on this,
on things that the poor themselves is saying, this is.
Speaker 6 (24:07):
Not what we want.
Speaker 11 (24:08):
First, we're essentially saying, yeah, I know that your problems
with poverty, that I know that your kids might be
dying tonight from easily curable infectious diseases. But you know what,
We're going to cut carbon emissions instead, which will help
you a tiny bit in one hundred years. It's really
really wrong, and we need to stop this. We need
to get the World Bank and everybody else back to
(24:28):
basics and back to doing what really works.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Our old friend Harrietton heard all about this climate story
and he jumped on it. This is his the results
of his opponing.
Speaker 8 (24:39):
Really, yeah, I think a lot of people will agree
with Bill Gates that maybe this wouldn't be the end
of humanity. And I think, you know, we've been talking
about climate change now for decades upon decades upon decades,
and the worry in terms of climate change, simply put,
hasn't shifted. It has not reached the majority of Americans.
What are we talking about greatly worried about climate change?
You go all the way back to nineteen hundred and
(24:59):
eighty nine, thirty five percent, two forty percent, twenty twenty
forty six percent, and in twenty twenty five, look at that,
it's forty percent, the same number as we had twenty
five years ago, back in twenty two thousand, and then
only just five points higher than we had back in
nineteen hundred and eighty nine.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
Really, we've just seen consistency on this issue.
Speaker 8 (25:17):
The bottom line is that the climate change message that
folks who of course believe that climate change is real
and is quite worrisome. Simply put, has not really worked
with the American people. Yeah, it is not anywhere close
to being the biggest thing that people are worried about.
What are we talking about here, Well, why don't we
just talk about top issue facing the US climate change?
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Well?
Speaker 6 (25:35):
I got some numbers for you on the screen right here.
Speaker 8 (25:37):
You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know
that these numbers are not particularly high. Top issue facing
Knit States climate change it was three percent and twenty
twenty one, two percent in average polls in twenty twenty three,
and this year the average poles two one two. It
is very very low on the list of priorities. I
was trying to count it down the Gallup pole, and
basically it was so low down, you know, I was
(25:59):
counting all the different iss almost lost trackers like fifteenth
or twentieth.
Speaker 6 (26:03):
It was just very very low down.
Speaker 8 (26:05):
So the bottom line is, not only are we seeing
that the number has not really moved over the last
thirty six years, but in terms of being the top issue,
it's simply put, has not broken through two percent. There
are just a ton of things that rank way higher
in the list of him, look at this climate change
effect on my home area will be harder to stay here.
Look in twenty twenty three, it was twenty three percent.
(26:26):
Look at where we are now seventeen percent. Now, you know,
these numbers are pretty comparable, but they're pretty comparable on
the low side. Is what we're talking about here, as
Americans simply put, just don't think we'll have the type
of impact that will really change their lives, which again
goes back to the message that Bill Gates was saying, Right,
this is not something that's going to be devastating for humanity.
It's something we can work our way out of a
lot of Americans agree. And even on this, we're talking
(26:48):
about just twenty seven percent of Democrats who believe that
climate change effect to my home area would be harder
to stay here. So, even on the left wing, where
you'd expect the climate change message to hit most home,
it's simply put, is not reaching that type of level
in terms of the doomsday scenario that Bill Gates is talking.
Speaker 11 (27:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Literally, over the decades, I've watched pauling and you look
down to what are America's priorities, what are people most
concerned about? It's always been at or near the bottom.
So Bill Gates getting I guess, finally getting the message
that that's not worth his money anymore. He's going elsewhere.
So the FED held their meeting today and yesterday and today,
(27:27):
and they came out this afternoon and said exactly what
people thought they would do. They lowered interest rates by
a quarter of one percent. So the Fed funds rate
is now three and three quarters to four percent range.
I made a few notes from the news conference, but
(27:49):
basically what j Powell. The news conference was held half
an hour after they made their announcement always is Jay
Powell came out and basically what he was talking about
is that the Federal Reserve. He didn't say this, This
is my impression the Federal Reserve. Eight major economic reports
(28:10):
have not been produced this past month, and the FED
has been basically working blind. Let me go through some
of the I made notes about what Powell said. So
they're going to stop doing quantitative tightening, and what that
(28:31):
means is along with that, that's a way to lower
interest rates to basically allow the banks to have more
funds that they can use to lend to people who
want to command and borrow. There were two members of
the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee that dissented. One of
them was the new guy Miriam who Donald Trump just appointed.
(28:52):
He wanted a half a percent cut, not a quarter
of a percent cut. The thing about him, this is
his second meeting, and so far, even though President Trump
put him in there to try to be get the
FED to be more aggressive, he's not getting anybody else
signing up with his views. Second meeting, second time, he's
(29:13):
voted for a half percent cut and nobody else went
along with it. The other person that descended about the
quarter percent cut was the president of the Kansas City
Federal Reserve Bank. Schmid wanted no cut whatsoever. So Pale said,
both hiring and layoffs remain low. The downside risk to
(29:37):
employment appears to have been increasing in recent months. That
housing services inflation has been coming down. That inflation from
other than tariffs is not far away from their two
percent goal, but that's for things that are not being
(29:59):
affected by the t tariffs. That the policy that the
FED has come up with is still fairly restrictive. That
the modestly restrictive are the words that he used. That
he brought up twice, the lack of data, the fact, yeah,
they're blown. They're flying line. They and besides that, some
of the unemployment reports, remember how they were major revisions.
(30:22):
This is before the government shut down. He also mentioned
that a rate cut at their next meeting, which is
coming up in December, is far from a foregone conclusion,
though he's not saying we're going to jump on that.
That higher tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories
(30:43):
of goods, that there's no risk free path for them
because they got at tension between their goals of keeping
the employment strong and keeping in the cost of money low.
He doesn't think that spending to build data centers is
especially intrasensitive because there's a lot of money going into that,
(31:06):
billions of dollars. That the unemployment rate remained low through August,
and it's consistent, he says, with recent data. That the
downside risk to employment appears to have been going up
in recent months, and that job gains have slowed. That
the economy is expanding at a moderate pace, and this
is the fascinating part that most economists are scratching their
(31:30):
head on. The economy is growing, but we're doing it
with fewer people. The labor market is softening, it the
economy is expanding. He talked about business investment and equipment
has continued to expand. He said the activity in the
housing sector remains weak. People are locked into their low
(31:52):
mortgages and they're not moving. That the government shut down
will weigh on the economy if it continues to cyst
that the rates of treasuries have remained basically unchanged over
the last couple of months. And it's interesting because a
lot of headlines lately about big layoffs. Who did we
(32:13):
get yesterday? Was it? That they're keeping an eye on it,
But it really comes down to the big companies. It's
all headline grabbers because the numbers are so big, But
the smaller companies in this country create eighty percent of
the jobs. And small business needs lower rates than big
(32:36):
business does, especially right now. That's at least what every
survey of small business owners says, we want lower interest rates.
Speaker 6 (32:42):
So J.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Powell has four more meetings before he is out, and
so far he's sticking with economic principles to the best
way that he could possibly do it. But he is
very cautious, I think overly cautious, but that's him. And
then what looks like a stink is starting to grow
(33:04):
from Charles Chuck Rashley, the senior Senator from Iowa. He
has the trust of whistleblowers, and whistleblowers have come to him.
We talked about this. He mentioned it about a week
or two ago something that there was a government program
(33:25):
in the Department of Justice in the Biden administration called
Arctic Frost, and what they were doing was they were
spying on eight different senators, all Republicans, and so Grasty
uncovered just a little bit more about it today. But
he's digging into this and I don't know where this
(33:47):
is going to go.
Speaker 7 (33:49):
A little bit of history before I get to what
we're releasing today. I started the investigation into Arctic Fraud
July twenty twenty two based on whistleblower disclosures. Based on
these disclosures, we know that weaponized taxpayer funded agents and
(34:15):
prosecutors advanced the investigation. As Arctic Frost advanced, ninety two
Republican organizations or individuals were targeted, not just Trump, and
they were added to its scope. And author of that
(34:39):
targeting list was Special Agent Washin Walder Jareddino. He's the
same weaponized agent who was involved in other cases against Republicans,
including Peter Navarro. We've learned Jack Smith secretly obtained phone
(35:04):
record data from at least eight senators and one congressman.
I've recently been informed by Verizon that at least eleven
members with Verizon accounts were affected. That includes a hardline
for Senator Cruz's office and a staffer sell phone for
(35:27):
former Senator Leffler At and T inform me. They challenged
the legal basis for Jack Smith's efforts, and Smith back down.
So today we're making public new records that I've attained
(35:49):
through legally protected whistleblower disclosures. One hundred and ninety seven
subpoenas were issued by Jack Smith and his team. These
subpoenas were issued to thirty four individuals and one hundred
and sixty three businesses, including financial institutions, and one of
(36:16):
the points of contact on many of these subpoenas was
that person I previously named special Agent Walter gear Dino.
The subpoena requested records and communications related to over four
hundred and thirty individual and organizations, all of them appeared
(36:39):
to be aimed at Republicans. A subpoena to event strategies,
requested records relating to Turning Point USA and the Republican
Attorney General's Association. One subpoena to Apple sought records relating
(37:00):
to Trump and the January sixth prison choir. Earlier this year,
I obtained emails between and among JP Cooney, one of
Jack Smith's prosecutors. That email exchange was March twenty twenty
three about a partisan news article on January six And
(37:24):
this is what Cooney said in the email. Can we
do some work to nail down Trump's role in this,
perhaps with the same process on Ed Henry's LLC just
the next month, April twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
So he's sniffing out a political weaponization of the FBI
again again. I know that there was corruption back when
Jay Edgar Hoover was running things, but this popped up
when Obama administration they were going after Donald Trump on Russia,
Russia and Russia. I would have thought that they would
(38:06):
have learned since then that that obviously blew up in
their face. And now here we are again. So where
this is going. Mollie Hemingway from the Federalist has been
all over this story.
Speaker 12 (38:20):
Yeah, what's so interesting about this is we had in
the first Trump administration that whole investigation, the Russia collusion hoax,
where we saw the FBI and members of the DOJ
acting inappropriately and in a highly political fashion. A lot
of people have looked at this and said that was
inappropriate what they did, and it seems like because nobody
was ever held accountable for that, they did not learn
their lesson at all, and they went after the Trump
(38:41):
administration or Trump and people who supported him vociferously post
twenty twenty election. This is a massive number of people
that they're looking into here, and a lot of them
are like the infrastructure of the Republican Party, and so
it's interesting to learn about this. Attorney General Bill Barr
had tried to put in protection so that people wouldn't
engage in these type of overtly political investigations, and it
(39:03):
appears that they just ran right over those protections and
decided to do it again. So this is interesting. I
think we should pay attention to what Senator Grassley is doing.
He always has the goods. He has a very good
relationship with whistleblowers, and so when he says something, you
can kind of take it. And again, this is about
legally protected activity. They were going after people for their
own speech on challenging elections, for doing legally protected challenges
(39:28):
to elections. It was a political cause of one political party,
the Democrat Party, to fight that type of thing. That's
an inappropriate thing for the FBI and DOJ to be
involved in. And so unless something happens to these people, though,
it will continue the moment they're able to continue. My
sources inside the FBI say that among the politically politically
motivated agents, they felt that Walter Giardina was the worst
(39:51):
of the bunch. He was someone who prosecuted other people
involved with Trump, like Peter Navarro, and he's frequently showing
up in council stuff. But just people who know him
say that he was highly motivated politically.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah, it's perfectly legal for Democrats to go after Republicans
for their views, that the Republicans can go after Democrats
for their views, but to have the FBI or the
DOJ involved in it is dirty. Pool Jason Shave's former congressman,
he's pretty much shocked by it.
Speaker 13 (40:24):
The size and scope of this is just on parallel
to one hundred and fifty six people that we know of.
There is a separation of powers in this country. And
yet what Jack Smith is allegedly doing was just a dragnet.
What was the predicate to justify such a wide array
to such a net out there? That is absolutely stunnying.
(40:45):
I'm glad Senator Grassley's on top of this. He's one
of the best in the business, best there's ever been
in terms of oversight. I think the numbers and the
gravity of what we're going to see are going to
be absolutely stunning. And how they did this, why they
did this, It's just not justified. You can't go after
that many people with what and what charges were there?
(41:09):
Relatively nothing?
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah, those are those were wire taps on one hundred
and fifty six Republicans, one hundred and ninety six. The
penis going after their bank records, going to financial institutions
and getting bank records for the senators and others that
are active in the Republican Party. I mean, this smells
pretty bad. So that's what we got for today. Let's
(41:32):
check Wall Street and see what happened there. So the
Fed did it expected as expected, and the lowered rates
by a quarter of a percent. But Wall Street, you know,
it's the old buy on the rumor, sell on the news. Well,
they kind of went ho home. The Dow down seventy
four points off their record high. The Dow at forty
seven and six thirty two s and P basically flat,
(41:56):
NASDACK up one hundred and thirty. The price of gold
it was down sixty nine dollars to below four thousand,
thirty nine twenty nine for an ounce of gold, and
oil also pretty much unchanged at sixty dollars for a
barrel of oil. That's it for today. Thank you for
coming by. We will be back tomorrow. Hope to see
(42:17):
you then
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