Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed creator of the Huey Report and direct mail expert, Craig Huey, in-studio to explain ballot harvesting and the threat facing states and individuals in defense of election integrity.
Leahy: In studio, digital marketing expert, California refugee now living in state income tax-free Tennessee. Brought your businesses. Doing great here. Craig Huey.
You know Craig, Clay, Travis, and Buck Sexton have their show on here now from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. They have been great in promoting The Tennessee Star Report. We really appreciate that.
Huey: Awesome.
Leahy: You’re talking about the possibility of voter fraud in the California recall election.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: I’ve got a story for you kind of related to it. Since you were last here. You can’t stay away from us for too long, Craig, (Huey chuckles) because we’re opening up state-based conservative newspapers.
Huey: I’m so excited about that. That’s great.
Leahy: At a rapid pace. We launched The Arizona Sun Times on June 24.
Huey: Perfect.
Leahy: Headline by Rachel Alexander, our state house reporter in Phoenix. Twitter Bans Official Arizona Audit Account and Other Audit Accounts.
Huey: Not shocked. Not shocked.
Leahy: Do you have a story to tell us?
Huey: I do. Because what has happened is this, the Democrats are running scared because voter fraud is going to be recognized because of the audit in Arizona and hopefully in other states.
Leahy: Various levels of audits are currently undergoing. There is the Fulton County, Georgia audits with absentee ballots going on now.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: And the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Joe Biden was certified the winner in Arizona by less than 11,000 votes out of 3 million cast. Certified the winner in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Fulton County – there’s so many problems there.
It looks like you can’t rely upon Fulton County results. Arizona, they’re doing this audit. The Arizona State Senate has the authority to subpoena county records because in our constitutional government of the United States of America, we have two entities that have sovereignty. The national federal government and the state government.
Huey: Correct. Federalism.
Leahy: The state government, the state legislature have sovereignty over the counties which have been created by the state government.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: So they started this audit of the Maricopa County election results. Maricopa County, two million votes cast in Maricopa County, as Phoenix. It’s the biggest county in the state. Three million total cast.
They started the audit on April 23. Everything you see in the establishment media and Democrats since even before that has been nonstop criticism of the audit for spurious reasons. They don’t want the results to come out.
And you’ve got a little story to tell us about how far the Democrats and basically the highly partisan U.S. “Department of Justice.” I say that in quotes with Merrick Garland and Joe Biden. It’s the Department of Injustice as far as I can tell.
So tell us what’s going on there. Let’s put the big picture first. The Democrats’ number one thing is to be able to have mail-in ballots and be able to have ballot harvesting so that they can do voter fraud.
Leahy: Remember that 2005 bipartisan commission I talked about, it was headed up by Jimmy Carter, the Democratic President in 1977-1989, and by former Secretary of State James Baker in the George H.W. Bush administration. That bipartisan commission said, don’t do mail-in ballots because it’s prone to fraud.
Huey: That’s correct. Here in Tennessee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett has said, we’re not going to do any of that stuff. And our elections are pretty solid.
Huey: They’re pretty solid. So here’s the thing. You’ve got 19 states who have outlawed ballot harvesting, and you’ve got 28 states that allow it.
Leahy: Briefly describe ballot harvesting for our listeners.
Huey: Ballot harvesting is not voter fraud, but it leads the voter fraud. Ballot harvesting, usually for the Democrats and the unions is a paid person, can get data of who their voters are and go to that door multiple times until they find the person at home.
Talk to them about getting their ballot. They hand them the ballot. They give them a voter guide as to who to fill out. And then they take that ballot from them and take it to the poll. Now, they can do this to 100, 500, a 1000 different homes.
One person can bring those ballots in, and there’s no audit trail. There’s nothing to say who brought those ballots in. That person can throw away Republican ballots and nobody would know it.
That person can alter the ballot and nobody would know it. And get this, Michael, they can go to a nursing home, what’s called granny farming, go bed to bed, pick up the ballots, fill them out and nobody would know the difference.
If you’ve been to an apartment complex, people when they get their ballots by mail, if they do not want that ballot, they just leave it there. People can pick it up.
Leahy: It’s just prone to fraud all over the place.
Huey: Everywhere. I could go on and on about this. SB1 and HR1 is the first bill in Congress that the Democrats had that they thought they could have passed, which would have nationalized ballot harvesting. And basically, the Republicans could never win ever again.
Huey: And they failed in that attempt, though they’re still trying. They failed in that attempt. In Arizona, they outlawed ballot harvesting. The Democrats did what the Democrats do. They took the Republicans to court to try to overthrow that bill. It went up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court just a couple of months ago said Arizona has the right to outlaw ballot harvesting. Democrats lost a major, major court case that affects everything in the United States.
Leahy: And that’s a very important case. I wrote a story about it at a Breitbart, Brnovich, the attorney general, the Democratic National Committee. In that six to three decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the following.
He wrote that states have the right to limit fraud in their states and simply by limiting fraud according to their own rules, they are not violating Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which is the entire basis of the Department of Justice’s attack on the state of Georgia.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: The Merrick Garland highly partisan Department of Injustice.
Huey: You’re being too nice.
Leahy: I know. I’m being too nice.
Huey: Michael, what we have right now is a war on election integrity. Right now we have Merrick Garland, the attorney general, directing an army of ideological left-wing Democrats who have unlimited time, unlimited money, and unlimited resources.
They have an army of people going after to intimidate any state that questions the last election and that will try to put into place voter ID or anything to protect the ballots.
Leahy: Not just any state but any private individual who participates in that. You’ve got some stories on that.
Huey: I do. So what happened is about three weeks ago, the attorney general made the announcement that they were going to investigate the states like Arizona.
Leahy: By the way, mercifully, I don’t always say many things about Mitch McConnell, the current Senate minority leader. But when he was a majority leader and in the last year of the Obama administration, they nominated – when Justice Scalia passed away, they nominated Merrick Garland to be on the Supreme Court. And Mitch McConnell because he knows the rules and said, I’m not doing it. I’m not going to hold the hearing. Mercifully.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: Mercifully, instead we got Neil Gorsuch.
Huey: That’s exactly right. And going back to that Arizona decision that upheld the outlawing about harvesting, if Garland was on the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court would have decided against Arizona.
Leahy: So you know what would have happened? Let me tell you. See, if you see this is the case. So Garland would have voted against Arizona.
Huey: Correct.
Leahy: That would have been five four before they announced the decision.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: You know what I’m going to say next.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: In their conferences, the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, because Crom was in here yesterday talking about a Kimberley Strassel article who said, basically, Justice Thomas, Chief Justice Thomas is fretting about Democrats attacked on the legitimacy of the court.
He’s making political decisions and has for some time since the 2012 NFIB Sebelius decision that allowed Congress to unconstitutionally pass Obamacare tax versus no tax. In that conference committee, old fretting Chief Justice Roberts would have flipped his vote.
Huey: That’s right.
Leahy: Do you agree with that?
Huey: I totally agree with that.
Leahy: So, by the way, thank you, Senator Mitch McConnell, thank you.
Huey: I can’t believe you are saying that.
Leahy: You give everyone their due.
Huey: – Everyone their due. But going back to Garland here he has unleashed an army against election integrity. It’s a war on these states and individuals. And here’s the thing in Arizona, they’re going to prove fraud. There are so many ballots that are questionable. So what they have done is they have written threatening a lawsuit, but not only a lawsuit, Michael, one year in jail.
And they had threatened a thousand dollar fines to the people who basically are like you and me. We don’t have lawyers to back us up and to intimidate them. And they’re saying, you are violating the Voters Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and intimidating the voters by checking on the last election and ballot integrity. So the opinion of the Department of Justice is the stop the audits in Arizona, Georgia, any other state.
Leahy: Contravene justice.
Huey: Yes.
Leahy: This is Orwellian. War is peace, peace is war.
Huey: Authoritarian. I can’t believe it. And not only this, the individuals who are involved in the audit have received a letter from the Department of Justice.
Leahy: Arizona.
Huey: Yes, Arizona. If you get a letter from an attorney, man, you get scared.
Leahy: What if it comes from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Huey: You’re doubly scared cause, you know, you can’t fight them.
Leahy: Well, you can, asterisk. Okay, what does it take to fight them?
Huey: Money?
Leahy: Huge amounts of money.
Huey: And here’s what they’ve asked. Get this. This makes me so upset. I think it’s going to make you upset, Michael. They have written to them and saying, were you part of the January sixth insurrection? Were you at the capital? Are you part of any domestic terrorist groups? Are you affiliated with any voter fraud?
Leahy: When did you stop beating your wife? Are you a Communist? This is McCarthyism.
Huey: Yes. They’re asking for text, telephone numbers, voicemails, emails, and every correspondence from these individuals.
Leahy: It’s none of their business.
Huey: No.
Leahy: They’re using this as an excuse.
Huey: Yes.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed gubernatorial candidate for Arizona Kari Lake to the newsmakers line to discuss her grassroots pro-Trump campaign for governor and what motivated her to leave her media job.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, Kari Lake, who’s running for governor of Arizona and is also a former TV news anchor out in Phoenix.
We’ve written about her at our new site in Arizona, The Arizona Sun Times. Kari, welcome to The Tennessee Star Report. Thanks for joining us this morning.
Lake: Michael, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. Tennessee is a great state, and I love to talk to the people there as well because I think what happens in Arizona is truly a national race.
Leahy: That’s why we opened up The Arizona Sun Times and have covered a lot of your events out there, Kari. And you’ve been very gracious in granting us interviews. You made some news on Sunday. Tell us what you’ve called for.
Lake: You know what? I just want fairness in this next election. We saw the debacle of 2020 and we saw last Thursday what the Arizona Senate that learned in that hearing.
They put a lot of information about the 2020 election, which was disturbing, to say the least. And I want the 2022 election to be fair.
And we have right now Katie Hobbs, who’s the secretary of state. She is a leftist and frankly, she’s socialist, and she’s running to be the next governor of Arizona.
And she happens to be in charge of the election because she’s secretary of state. So we saw what a debacle 2020 was. I am calling for her to recuse herself from the next election because she’s in charge of the statewide election.
And we need fairness. Conservatives need fairness. We’re on the ballot as well. And she’s already had many tweets and posts about us. Called us things from Nazis on down.
So she has a disdain for Republicans and she’s running the next election. And she has proven from the 2020 election that she’s not competent.
Leahy: That is just common sense, Kari, and I think it makes an awful lot of sense. We’re going to report on that, of course, at The Arizona Sun Times.
Our in-studio all-star panelist Crom Carmichael wants to join in on this. You were an anchor in Phoenix at the Fox television affiliate there. For what? How long was it? 23 years?
Lake: I’ve been covering news for 27 years, but 22 at the Fox affiliate.
Leahy: Wow. And now tell us about what made you decide to resign?
Lake: We know that the news is always kind of tilted to the left, right? That’s not been a big secret. But when Donald Trump came on the scene, it went full bore, slanted to the left, and people lost their minds.
And I remember looking around at my colleagues and all of the media thinking, what happened? Why are they so opposed to this guy?
He was an outsider in politics and he was going to not only tip over the apple cart, but set it on fire and really wake us up to what’s been happening in our government.
And the media just lost their minds. So I sat there and kind of watched that happening around me. And then when COVID hit, we went to a whole new level of pushing fear, division, and in my opinion, the media was pushing downright misinformation and lies.
And I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I didn’t want to put information out that was dividing our community, hurting our community, and actually scaring them when we had information that was truthful and could have been more helpful and maybe save some lives.
There didn’t seem to be an appetite to put that information out. So I made the decision that the job has become not only unethical but immoral. And I didn’t want to take part in it anymore.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael has a question for you, Kari. This is very interesting. Who was making the decisions on what you would report and also on how you would report it?
When I say who, I don’t need a name. What was their position at either the station or above the station?
Lake: I don’t want to get into the particulars because I still have personal relationships with people at that station and just for the sake of keeping relationships as they are.
But I will tell you, I believe that in media, in all of the media, these decisions were coming from very high up. And I did a PragerU video. I’m sure you’ve heard of PragerU.
Carmichael: Oh yes.
Lake: We talked a little bit about the manipulation and the propaganda the media puts out. And a lot of it, when I first started in the early 90s, you’d walk into a newsroom and it was seasoned reporters.
These are people who were in their 50s and 60s. They’ve been covering that community, that area for decades. Now the seasoned reporters have left, and you have a lot of people fresh out of journalism school, which is teaching these kids not journalism, but activism.
And that’s who is kind of running the newsroom and deciding what news goes into your newscast. And this is widespread. This isn’t just one station.
This is happening all over in corporate media. It’s being run by people who were not taught journalism but were taught activism.
We’ve lost those seasoned reporters, unfortunately. And that’s been to the detriment of the communities that these newspapers and television stations are supposed to be serving.
So I believe that the decision on how COVID was covered by pushing fear and pushing division was coming from very high up and not necessarily from the young producers and such.
Leahy: When you were the anchor at Fox 10 in Phoenix, I’m presuming you were making an awful lot of money or a lot of money. (Lake chuckles)
And when you decided to leave and resign, that must have been a very, very difficult decision for you at a personal and financial level, I would imagine.
Lake: (Sighs) I was probably the highest-paid or one of the highest-paid people in broadcasting and definitely in Arizona and maybe in the country.
But, you know, I started looking at my country, where it was going in my state and my community, and thought, how can I collect a paycheck and do something that I now know to be immoral?
And I didn’t always feel that way about television and broadcasting. I always felt like if things are written in a weird way, I could always kind of right the ship as I was reading.
But when it got to the point where I realized that this was that all of media was pushing to divide and push fear and keep us divided as a community and as a people, I just realized it was immoral.
And I am guided by the Bible. I’m guided by the 10 Commandments. Thou shalt not lie is very important to me. I believe in the truth.
And when I realized that the truth wasn’t the most important thing, that was – they were trying to get out. It was not the truth that they were trying to get out.
I realized no amount of money in the world could keep me doing that job. And yes, I do miss the paycheck. I do miss the paycheck.
Carmichael: Kari, tell us about your campaign. How many people are running against you in the Republican primary? If people want to support your campaign, how do they do that?
Lake: I think it’s about five of us now. We have a group of people. And one of the reasons I’m running is I don’t feel that any of them would truly represent the people as I could.
My special interest group is massive. It’s the people of Arizona. And we have a lobbyist lawyer running and a career politician. I don’t want to bash my fellow Republicans, but the people who are running, I don’t believe can win in the general election.
One of the people running already ran against Katie Hobbs for secretary of state. Spent twice as much money and lost to her in the general election.
Another person running ran for governor about 20 years ago back when we were a very deep red state and won the nomination and then lost in the general election to Janet Napolitano.
So I want to make sure that we win in the general election. I want to make sure we have a true conservative in. And I’m a Trump Republican, and I’m not ashamed to say it.
And Arizona is Trump country, despite what the election results may have shown and the ones that were reported. This is Trump’s country and people.
I’m out there every day, guys. I crisscrossed Arizona over the past week and people love President Trump. They are worried about the direction the state is going and they’re very interested in my candidacy.
Every town we went to we were overwhelmed with people coming up saying, we’re supporting you. We’re so excited. Thank you for running.
So I believe we have a grassroots movement. It only took us three weeks to get on the ballot with the petition signatures that we needed.
Usually, with candidates, it takes them right up until March of next year. And we had that in three weeks. We didn’t pay for a single signature.
This is a grassroots candidacy, and people are excited about it because they know that I’m for them. I care about Arizona and I’m not bought and paid for.
And I owe zero political favors to anyone. So they can look me up and see where I stand on the issues. My webpage is Karilake.com. And I’m just a mom with teenagers.
I have a small business with my husband, and I care about Arizona. I don’t want us turning into California, and I fear that in 2022 if we do not get a true conservative in office, we will become California two-point zero.
Listen to the third hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss Arizona and Georgia State Legislature in regard to HB2023, absentee ballots, voter harvesting, and drop boxes.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original All-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom good morning.
Carmichael: Good morning, Michael.
Leahy: Well, you told me you were listening.
Carmichael: I was listening as I was driving in.
Leahy: How I spent my Thursday morning.
Carmichael: Dive a little deeper because right at the end, you were talking about what you thought was the key phrase in the 5,000-word opinion. And there are in all Supreme Court cases, there are always in the rulings key phrases. I think Breyer wrote the descent. Is that correct?
Leahy: Kagan wrote the decent. But Breyer dissented along with Kagan. And you know who the other one was.
Carmichael: Sotomayor.
Leahy: What a surprise.
Carmichael: And now you see with Merrick Garland, he’s really showing himself to be a political hack.
Leahy: Total political hack.
Carmichael: The Supreme Court, it’s amazing how often times they do vote nine to nothing or eight to one. It really is. It’s over a majority of the time that they vote either nine to nothing or eight to one.
But there are a few cases where they tend to divide along with ideological lives. I’m not going to necessarily say political lines, but in this case, when I say finally, I’m not saying that in a good way or a bad way.
But this is the first time where the lines break where you have Democrat-appointed judges and you have Republican-appointed judges who regularly broke and voted with the Democrat-appointed judges.
Leahy: Let’s elaborate on this. There were two issues that the court decided in favor of the state of Arizona. One had to do with a statute called HB 2023 which banned ballot harvesting.
In other words, if there was an absentee ballot it had to be delivered in almost every case by the individual who had the ballot not collected by a friend.
Carmichael: Who voted. Not who just had it, but who voted.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carmichael: The legislature in Arizona voted or ruled and created legislation that said that it’s Arizona that said that if you have an absentee ballot, you have to deliver it yourself. You can’t let somebody else gather up a bunch of them and bring them in. And Arizona voted to outlaw the harvesting process. Arizona did. So the Supreme Court didn’t outlaw harvesting.
Leahy: It was the state of Arizona. It was actually a bill called HB 2023. It was a past in 2016, as it turns out, the state Senator did. Last night I spoke with the state Senator who was the primary sponsor of that bill, wrote a story about that at Breitbart as well. And her name is Michelle Ugenti-Rita. That’s her name.
And she basically said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart with me last night, she said, ‘the Supreme Court found the exact opposite of what Democrats have claimed. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling in Brnovich v. Democrat National Committee affirms that. As the primary sponsor of HB 2023, that’s state Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita and my colleagues in the legislature who voted for it, did not do it with discriminatory intent. That’s what Democrats have been saying for five years. Democrats owe Arizona voters an apology.’
Carmichael: Let me ask you a question. So that bill passed that you could not do vote harvesting in Arizona in 2,016, right. Did they do vote harvesting in 2020?
Leahy: You know, that’s a little bit of what this audit is Maricopa County is attempting to find out. I don’t think so. I think they’re looking into whether that law was violated.
Carmichael: Okay. So what you’re saying is, let me be sure I’m clear here to give a comparison. The Secretary of State of Georgia, in his capacity, believed that he had the authority to settle lawsuits and give the Democrats and Zuckerberg the right to do things that the legislature of Georgia did not authorize?
Leahy: Specifically, it was the state election board that he chairs that put an election code rule in that allowed the use of drop boxes for the deposit of absentee ballots which was not statutorily authorized, as it should be by the state legislature.
Carmichael: And they were private drop boxes. In other words, they weren’t Post Office boxes controlled by the post office.
Leahy: No.
Carmichael: They were private drop boxes.
Leahy: Controlled by the county election administration.
Carmichael: Which you’d have to assume is a form of vote harvesting because anybody who wants to could bring a pile of ballots and dump them in one of those private drop boxes correct? There’s nothing that would keep somebody from doing that.
Leahy: Supposedly Crom, that’s what all of our reporting has been. Supposedly they had 24/7 cameras on that. Nobody looked at it and it’s a massive task to look at it. Nobody’s really taken all those records. But in Georgia now the chain of custody has not been established for more than half of those ballots placed in drop boxes. We’ve shown that at the Georgia Star News.
Carmichael: But if you did that with a post office box, if you dumped a bunch of illegal ballots into a post office box, that would be federal mail fraud.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: And that would be a big deal. But if you drop it in a Zuckerberg box, that’s not federal mail fraud because you didn’t use the U.S. Postal Service.
Leahy: You’re exactly right.
Carmichael: And the Secretary of state in Georgia did something that he had no legal right to do, but he did it and got away with it.
Leahy: The state election board of which he chairs did that.
Carmichael: Did that. Thank you for the clarification. So in Arizona, you have a law that was passed in 2,016. That law has been passed. It was 2,016. And it’s taken this long to get to the Supreme Court.
Leahy: Correct. It took five years to get to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, it’s supposed to have been enforced in Arizona. They have a different dropbox mechanism. In Georgia, the drop boxes are all over the place. You could go miles and miles and miles from the collection center. In Arizona, I think they just placed drop boxes outside of election offices. So it’s a little different. And I think they had a number of them, but they were right inside of voting locations.
Carmichael: Okay. Now, according to this ruling then, if a state wants to allow vote harvesting and the legislature passes legislation for vote harvesting within that state, vote harvesting would be legal correct?
Leahy: Well, I don’t know the answer to that question because that wasn’t exactly the issue that was tried here. The issue wasn’t can any state pass vote harvesting? The issue is the ban on harvesting legal. Is a ban a violation of section two of the Voting Rights Act? According to them, it wasn’t.
Carmichael: So Alito ruled in favor of the States of Arizona’s right as a state to pass election laws under the Constitution that are non-discriminatory.
Leahy: Yeah, exactly.
Carmichael: But Alito didn’t rule one way or the other on whether or not vote harvesting itself is discriminatory one way or the other or legal. Aren’t there some states that have passed laws that allow for vote harvesting?
Leahy: Actually, there are a total right now when you talk about there are two elements to vote harvest. You talk about depositing absentee ballots and drop boxes. That’s one thing. But there’s also in North Carolina, which is very controversial.
It has been common practice not to vote harvest in a different way. In other words, what the Democrats did for many, many years there. They would send absentee ballots off to nursing homes and various places like that.
Then they would put their operatives and that’s a kind word. And they would go to the nursing homes, and they would go to people and make sure that they had signed them. They would collect them and they’d take hundreds at a time and place them back.
Carmichael: Now, in North Carolina, there was a Democrat who did that for many elections, who got mad at the Democrat Party.
Leahy: Yes. Exactly.
Carmichael: And then did exactly what he had been doing for the Democrat Party, he did it for the Republican Party and got somebody elected by doing it. And then that person, the election was overturned.
And that individual, I don’t remember his name, but that individual was then arrested and ended up indicted and convicted.
Leahy: I think he’s serving a little time for them. It was a common practice, but it was often violated in practice by usually Democratic operatives. But in one case, when a Republican operative got caught doing it he was indicted.
Carmichael: Now because of that case, it must now be in North Carolina, must be illegal because the person was criminally convicted for doing it for the Republican Party.
Leahy: It was illegal before they just got away with it. (Chuckles)
Carmichael: All right, well, now the question is whether or not if the Democrats go back to doing it again, whether or not the authorities…
Leahy: You mean selective prosecution might be a possibility? Just ask Donald Trump’s, CFO, if the idea of selective prosecution is a possibility.
Carmichael: When we get back, I want to talk about that and compare it to Bill Cosby.
Leahy: Let’s do that.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Voting Booths” by Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed TN (R) U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty to the newsmakers line to answer the questions of why he voted the opposite of what he initially said in an interview of January of this year, Big Tech, S1, and his position on the conflict between Hamas and ally Israel.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line, our good friend, United States Senator Bill Hagerty back to The Tennessee Star Report. Welcome, Senator Hagerty.
Hagerty: Good morning.
Leahy: Well, good morning now, senator. And let me begin with this question for you. It’ll take me about a minute to set it up. The last time you were here on this program was January fifth of this year. And right here on this program, you told me how you were going to vote the following day.
It was January sixth during the joint session of Congress when it convened to accept or reject the Electoral College vote. And here’s exactly what you said. I’m quoting. “I could not Michael, in good conscience, vote to accept the results of this election when I have such deep doubts about what happened here.” That’s exactly what you said.
But then less than 40 hours later, you voted to accept and certify all the Electoral College votes, even those from Georgia and Arizona. Here’s my question. Can you please tell me and our audience why you voted exactly the opposite of how you told us you would vote?
Hagerty: What I did on January the six was I objected to the Arizona results. I did that because my aim was to create a commission Mike that would put the constitutional violations that we all know occurred back to the state legislatures which is where this belongs to get it fixed.
I was never going to vote to nationalize the elections. What I want to do is uphold the Constitution and basically put this back to the state legislatures who are the ones that are constitutionally embodied to set the rules for state election laws for our federal election laws in their state.
After the riot broke out we lost all momentum to get this done. It wasn’t going to happen. And what I did is I turned my attention to the legislation that I put forward. President Trump loves the legislation called the Protect the Electoral College Act.
And what it requires is an audit of what took place in the 2020 elections. And every state where there is a constitutional violation will not get federal funds for their elections until they fix those problems. That’s the way we’re going to address this going forward. And I’m working through the process of getting it supported right now.
Leahy: But in the end, you voted to accept Arizona’s Electoral College votes and Georgia votes.
Hagerty: I voted to shut the arguments down. There are only two states raised and that was not enough to make a difference. We needed to bring that to an end and find another venue to fix this problem.
Leahy: That was a disappointing vote to me. But thank you for answering the question. Tell me now, you’ve been critical of the Biden administration on its efforts to get Israel to stop defending itself. Tell us about that.
Hagerty: The Biden administration is simply tone-deaf on how we should treat our allies and our foes. It seems that they want to criticize our allies to remove support for our allies and embolden our foes. If you think about the momentum that President Trump created with the Abraham Accords, what we were doing in the Middle East was creating a huge movement toward peace.
He brought four nations into normalization agreements with Israel. What we had was real momentum to finally established peaceful relationships, economic relationships, travel relationships between these nations in the Middle East.
And what the Biden administration has done in the past four months is they’ve wasted all that momentum. Instead, they’ve done the exact wrong thing to do. They’ve talked about re-entering the tragic Iran deal that President Trump thankfully got us out of.
And by moving to appease Iran, they’ve just emboldened the Iranians and their proxies Hamas. Hamas are the Iranian proxies that are working out of guys launching rockets at Israel. You know, where every one of those rockets is coming from?
They’re coming from Iran. These are Iranian rockets being launched on Israelis of civilians. Israel is entitled to defend itself. It should defend itself. It’s been surgical in its defense. And it’s just amazing how the European and the U.S. news media want to paint this in a different way.
We should be standing with our ally Israel and not emboldening Hamas. And you look at the Democrat Party. There was legislation that was put forward just a couple of days ago, the sanction, those who finance the Hamas those who support terrorism.
You had a party-line vote by the Democrats not to do that. In essence, to support terrorism. Two years ago, they all voted unanimously with the Republicans for just a sort of legislation. The Democrat Party has moved so far left it’s unrecognizable at this point.
Leahy: Now you serve President Trump as ambassador to Japan. And there you worked with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The current Secretary of State is Tony Blinken. Compare Mike Pompeo’s service as Secretary of State with Tony Blinken’s first four months as Secretary of State.
Hagerty: Well, it’s still quite early to say. Tony Blinken said the right things to me when we talked about the Abraham Accords. He said he thought they were a great breakthrough, that we should continue the momentum.
But his voice isn’t being heard in the Biden White House and certainly not among the Democrat representatives up in the Congress. I hope that Secretary Blinken will be emboldened to step up and do the right thing here. Secretary Pompeo had no trouble doing that.
And Mike Pompeo is a very clear-eyed, deliberate, and thoughtful diplomat. He did, I think, a terrific job serving President Trump. I enjoyed serving with Mike Pompeo and President Trump. We got a lot accomplished for America and a lot accomplished for our allies. And I think that Secretary Blinken has some big shoes to fill and I’m going to be pushing them hard to do just that.
Leahy: Senator Bill Hagerty, you’re a big critic of Big Tech, the oligopoly of Facebook and Google and Twitter and that crowd. What do you see should be done to control their uncontrolled power right now?
Hagerty: What I’ve done to address this is put forward legislation that would take down Section 230, which is the clause that they use. The large Internet platform providers like Facebook, like Google, like Twitter, use this as a means to censor.
What I think we should do is treat them like a common carrier. Justice Thomas did a great job, in one of his opinions laying this logic out. I read that I thought this makes complete sense to me. And what we did is we translated this into legislation.
What we would do is we would take these large carriers and acknowledge the fact that they really are more than just private companies. They have become the modern-day marketplace for ideas and the public square. We would regulate them the same way we regulate other common carriers, like telephone companies, telegraphs, and railroad companies.
And require them to provide non-discriminatory access to their platforms. That is the way to approach this and to do away with this. And to do away with this Section 230, to be clear, 230 provided that platforms like this could police the content on their platforms to make certain that they were family-friendly.
Not allowing obscenity, not allowing extreme violence. Those were clear definitions, but they also had a clause, both material that’s otherwise objectionable. And that otherwise objectionable language is what these Big Tech companies have used to just drive through that loophole like a Mack truck and use that as their reason, that is their excuse.
That is their lever to censor conservative voices. We need to bring that to an end. And this is the way to do it with this legislation.
Leahy: Last question for you today, Senator Hagerty. The Democrats are pushing through this S1. It passed in the House as H1. This is an attempt to nationalize all elections, to get rid of state election laws, and nationalize them. Will this pass in the 50/50 Senate? What’s your prognosis there?
Hagerty: I seriously hope not. And I’ll encourage your listeners to go to my website to see my statements in the committee fighting back on that. But I pushed back very hard on this. What the Democrats are trying to do is resurrect a lot of their old wish list of federalized elections. They tried this after the 2016 election.
Again they’re coming back and trying to create a crisis now, pointing to the situation in Georgia and the Georgia legislatures’ attempt to strengthen their election laws. Pointing to that is an excuse to come back and essentially nationalize the elections and create an advantage that would make their party the only party in power for decades to come.
They want to come in and do the things that would absolutely weaken the integrity of our elections. In fact, Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State James Baker put together a commission to look at election integrity a number of years ago. And the two things that they cited as the greatest vulnerabilities were mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting. That’s what the Democrats are trying to put into legislation right now.
Leahy: Absolutely. Senator Bill Haggerty, thank you so much for joining us today. Come back again and make it less than four months next time.
Hagerty: Good to be with you.
Listen to the full third hour:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
