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 senior editor-at-large at The Epoch Times Roger Simon in studio to discuss his latest column citing the immediate need for Conservative governor leadership in Tennessee and Georgia.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by our newest all-star panelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, my former boss at PJTV, a great novelist, and also now an editor-at-large for The Epoch Times, Roger Simon. Good morning, Roger.
Simon: Good morning.
Leahy: Yes, it is a good morning for America. And you had a terrific column yesterday at The Epoch Times. I want you to talk about it.
I’ll read the headline. You fill in the details. Headline. Tennessee and Georgia Need Real Republican (Conservative) Governors ASAP. Tell us about that column.
Simon: Well they sure do. I’ve been spending has been a part of last year, back and forth between here and Atlanta, sitting there in the State Farm Arena, watching them count the votes and all that stuff.
So I’ve been sort of into this. Who’s the governor in both states since I live here in Nashville? Anyway, I arrived in Nashville from LA exactly when the last governor gubernatorial primary was going June of 2018.
I was invited almost immediately to some swanky house in Belle Meade or Green Hills, and I have forgotten where it was exactly, but to listen to some of the principal candidates, among whom were Governor Lee, Beth Hartwell, and Diane Black.
Leahy: Randy Boyd perhaps?
Simon: I don’t think Randy Boyd was there that night.
Leahy: He’s an East Tennessee guy.
Simon: And aside from the front door of the house, just inside the front door was a big cut out of Trump. It’s a cardboard cutout and a foot higher than everybody else.
That signaled that there was trouble ahead here. And the three candidates also had paid him an obeisance as we say in the French way.
Leahy: Obeisance. Homage.
Simon: Homage.
Leahy: A little French here this morning.
Simon: Because he was fairly popular in the state and is fairly popular in the state. As people will recall, I think 67 percent of them.
Leahy: And among Republican primary voters, we’ve polled this for multiple years. He’s at an 89.5 percent approval rating. Trump is recently among Republican primary voters.
Simon: So we elect Governor Lee. My reaction was to him that time, and I was pretty close self listening and was 15 feet away was kind of meh. (Leahy laughs)
But frankly, I’ve been around politicians a lot because I’m a writer. I’ve seen Bobby Kennedy speak the day before he was shot.
Leahy: A long time ago. ’68.
Simon: A long time ago. He was a pretty electric speaker. He and Trump are the best political speakers I’ve ever seen. My meh reaction didn’t mean that he’d be a bad governor it just means he wasn’t very electric as a speaker in a small group.
Okay, that’s a minor part of being a governor, really. But since then, it’s all been downhill. What’s interesting about Tennessee and also Georgia is interesting in this regard because the electorate, the rank, and file, is way, way more committed to Conservatives than the politicians themselves.
Leahy: By a long shot.
Simon: By a long shot. And that is something that I have now and Mr. Leahy here and a lot of people of good spirit are now are on a crusade to bring them together like a magnet.
(Leahy laughs) And that’s what’s got to happen. My column talks about that, and I think it is happening. I mean, a lot of the things that are going on I’ve seen sometimes through my wife, who is getting very active among the women here in both Davidson and Williamson counties.
They’re really up in arms about the educational thing, CRT, and all that stuff. And they have a right to be. And this is radicalizing them in a good way. It’s making them committed. And I think the times they are a-changing as someone once said.
Leahy: Yeah, I think you’re quite right. And it’s very interesting to have this disconnect between Conservatives like the Moms for Liberty.
They’re very strong in Williamson County, and they’re not putting up with basically this claim that we’re really not teaching critical race theory except, yes, they are. And Bill Lee is doing nothing. Zero zip on that agenda.
Listen to the third hour here:
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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 “Roger Simon” by Roger Simon
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 and all-star panelist Crom Carmichael discuss breaking news as Fulton County, Georgia refuses to provide chain of custody documents now under seal to The Georgia Star News.
Leahy: Crom, we have some breaking news from the Star News Network. As you know, we own and operate eight state-based news sites including The Tennessee Star. One of them is The Georgia Star News.
The Georgia Star News has been requesting in open records request information from Fulton County, which is the big County down there in Georgia, that had all sorts of election problems in 2020.
I’m just going to read this request that we sent to Fulton County officials on June 20 and then I’m going to read you the official response we got back from them about 15 minutes ago.
And I’d like to get your reaction. The setup is a little bit long but just hang with me here. We wrote to the Fulton County officials on June 20th.
Georgia Public Broadcasting report Wednesday, June 16, 2021. “After GPB News asked Fulton County on Monday about the forms not included in The Georgia Star New’s request for records, election staff located all about eight of the more than 1,500 forms. Provided them to Georgia Public Broadcasting on a flash drive.” The Georgia Star News requests your response to the following request.
A, provide to The Georgia Star News the absentee ballot dropbox transfer forms that were provided to Georgia Public Broadcasting that have not yet been provided to The Georgia Star News.
B, an explanation as to why the previously ‘missing absentee ballot dropbox transfer forms were provided to Georgia Public Broadcasting within 48 hours of the request, but not to The Georgia Star News despite the incomplete responses to our three open records request dating back to December of 2020. That sounds like a reasonable request doesn’t it?
Carmichael: Sure. Oh yeah.
Leahy: Remember, we reported that Fulton County was missing 24 percent of the critical chain of custody documents documenting absentee ballots, which represented about 18,901 absentee ballots cast in the presidential election in a state where the margin of victory for Biden was less than 12,000 votes.
Okay, so here is a response. We just got this about 15 minutes ago from the open records custodian for Fulton County by the name of Steve Rosenberg.
I’m gonna read this exactly to you. And then you tell me what you think this means.
“The records you seek have been transferred to the clerk of court and are currently being held under seal. They are therefore exempt from public disclosure pursuant to Georgia Law 21-2-500 A-C.”
Carmichael: So let me be sure I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying that the documents that have been placed under seal that was not delivered to The Georgia Star News were previously delivered to the Georgia Public Broadcasting?
Leahy: That’s what Georgia Public Broadcasting claims. And they’ve published those documents. They claim they got them from Fulton County.
Fulton County is now three weeks later telling us we can’t get those same documents because they’ve been transferred to the clerk of court and are currently under seal.
Carmichael: Well, as you and I have been discussing, there are six cities in the country where the way that the votes were collected and how they were counted is suspicious.
Leahy: Atlanta is one of them. Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia.
Carmichael: In other words, not normal. And in every one of those cases, the officials up there have fought disclosure. So you have to just ask, what are they trying to hide?
Obviously, it is important if half the population is concerned that the presidential election was stolen. But for those on the left who say that those who are concerned about that shouldn’t be.
I just merely point to the mayor’s race in New York City, which was 100 percent, Democrat, because it’s the Democrat primary. And three of the candidates up there are suing because they said the election up there was irregular.
To claim that Republicans have no right to question the results of elections where there are facts that are known. For example, all six of those cities stop counting votes at the same time.
For hours they didn’t count or they claimed they weren’t counting. And then when they opened back up to count again, then they went from there.
And we have no idea what happened during the hours that those places were shut down and where the people who would have been on the Republican side observing were thrown out of the room.
And that happened in those six cities. So there are issues that should be addressed. One good thing is that the legislature of Arizona and the governor have passed laws that will fix a lot of their problems.
And Georgia has done the same thing. I think other states are still in the process of passing laws to fix the irregularities in the election.
What’s interesting is even 62 percent of Democrats think that voter ID should be required. 87 percent of Independents think that voter ID should be required.
Voter ID is required to do virtually anything that matters. And voting is one of those things that “matters.” To ask people to identify themselves and to be sure that they are who they say they are is a very reasonable thing to do for those who want honest elections. Fulton County is clearly trying to cover something up.
Leahy: They’re covering something up because let’s just reiterate what they’ve done. We had a story on June 14 written by Laura Baigert that said, we have not received the required chain of custody documents to track the movement of absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in Fulton County.
We are missing 385 out of 1,500 of those transfer forms that Fulton County is supposed to have. That’s 24 percent that no chain of custody document for 24 percent of the absentee ballots placed in drop boxes.
Now, here we are today on July the seventh and Fulton County still has not produced those chain of custody documents, although purportedly Georgia Public Broadcasting claims that they receive those and published those documents on June 16. Fulton isn’t giving those documents to us. Why is that Crom?
Carmichael: It seems to me to be obvious that there’s something untoward and that the Fulton County officials don’t want to provide. Michael, you guys follow this very closely.
Leahy: Yes. We relentlessly track this.
Carmichael: Has the Georgia law been changed so that the issues that you are trying to learn more about will be much more difficult?
In other words, drop boxes that are sent there by private citizens, they’re not going to be allowed. Is that correct?
Leahy: No, they will be allowed. There were 300 authorized not by the state legislature, so not legally authorized but authorized in 2020 by this election code rule of the state election board.
The legislature has ruled that, yes, they will allow a much lesser number of drop boxes, but they can be only located right next to voting centers.
They can’t be out all over the community, which is part of the problem. So we’ll address it partially. But I am very, very troubled here.
If Georgia Public Broadcasting is telling the truth, then records that Fulton County allegedly gave them on June 16 have subsequently been transferred to the clerk of court and are being held under seal and not being transferred to us.
Carmichael: Somebody does not seem to be being honest. Somebody is not acting in an honest way. Let’s put it that way.
Leahy: You are the king of understanding. (Laughter) I agree. This is breaking news everybody. And I think this is central to the issue of credibility of our elections here and why I call the Biden administration legal, but not legitimate.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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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:
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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 Wednesday 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 questions related to his January 6 vote as new election irregularity evidence mounts in Georgia, S1, and the continuing border crisis.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line our friend, Senator Bill Hagerty. Good morning, Senator Hagerty.
Hagerty: Good morning, Michael.
Leahy: I want to talk about a couple of things in this segment. Georgia, S1, and the border. So in Georgia, the light of the ongoing evidence that no chain of custody documents exist for more than 300,000 absentee ballots cast in Georgia in November 2020 and reports of massive regularities in Fulton County, it appears to me that Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger’s decision to certify those results were, in fact, as a Georgia GOP convention recently found a dereliction of his constitutional duty.
Here’s my question for you. If you knew on January 6, what we know now about Georgia, would you have joined Jodi Hice in objecting to those Electoral College votes?
Hagerty: Michael, let me take both parts of your question. First, Georgia, because we haven’t talked about it. Then we’ll come back to January 6. You and I have talked about that in the past.
I didn’t need to see this latest evidence on the chain of custody in Georgia to know that there are serious problems there. In fact, I was down in Mar-a-Lago in April with President Trump reviewing the Fulton County data.
We were going through it in 15-minute increments at that point. There are major irregularities in Georgia and those are regularities that need to be addressed by those people responsible for them. And that’s the states.
And you and I’ve talked about this. The states are the ones that are given the responsibility and the authority to set the rules. They should be addressing this. And that’s the reason that President Trump loves the legislation I put for one of the first pieces of legislation I put forward as a sitting senator which is to protect the Electoral College Act.
And what that requires is an audit of the 2020 election to find out every state where the Constitution was violated and in any state that violated the Constitution. And I believe there were a number of them.
Those states will not receive any federal funding for their elections until they rectify that. That’s related to the conversations that we’ve had in the past about January 6. You recall, I said I would, and I objected to the Arizona results.
It was the first state that was objected to. I did that because I wanted to debate the formation of a commission. A commission that would identify those places where the Constitution was violated and put it back to the states to fix that before the inauguration.
That is the right way to fix it. I was never going to vote to federalize the election. I was never going to vote to give Congress the authority and take it away from the states. That would be the first step if Congress were to take control of the elections and we allowed Congress to change the result every time you’ve got the legislature in control of a different party than the incoming President.
That’s just the first step toward doing away with the Electoral College, in my view. And that’s not something that we would ever support. I don’t think you would, either. That conversation about forming a Commission completely changed when the capital was breached.
When the riots broke out, we were sequestered, put away and the conversation changed very quickly from debating a Commission to invoking the 25th amendment against our President to be impeaching him. The best thing to do at that point was to shut this thing down and focus on fixing it in a different manner.
And that’s why I put the legislation together that I brought forward to require an audit of all the states that violated the Constitution and again deprive them of funding until they repaired it.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael is in studio and he has a question for you on that, Senator Hagerty.
Carmichael: Senator, I have a question in regard to January 6. There’s evidence that now comes out that the FBI had people inserted in these groups. And some of the reports I’ve read is that the FBI was actually helping to insight the riot. Do you all have any information that the riot that happened was contrived?
Hagerty: Crom, this is very disturbing. I’ve heard the same reports that you have. I would actually be meeting with FBI Director Wray today. We have very, very strong reason to be concerned as a nation when we find out how the intelligence community has been abused, how law enforcement has been abused, and we need to get to the bottom of this.
Do we know the answers to this with certainty today? No. But are these serious serious questions? Absolutely, Crom.
Leahy: Well, that’s breaking some news that we didn’t know – that you’re meeting with the FBI director today.
Let’s talk about what happened last night in Washington. S1 came up with a 50 50 vote, didn’t get the 60. They needed to break a filibuster on it. What’s your take on what happened last night?
Hagerty: What happened last night, I think, was very predictable. What you had underway with this S1 was a blatant power grab by the Democrats in the most narrow, narrow majorities.
It’s a 50, 50 Senate right now. And the only way they controlled is because of who’s occupying the White House. They’ve tried to push through one of the most blatant power grabs ever.
And this is legislation that’s been lying around. The components of it have been lying around at Democratic smoke-built backrooms for years. They tried this right after the 2016 election.
They brought this up in the first part of 2017. The emergency, then and the crisis then that they brought forth was the fact that Trump was elected. Of course, that was wholly unacceptable to them.
So if you look back at what they brought back in 2017 essentially the same sort of thing, they tried it again in 2018, even in 2020. Nancy Pelosi tried to put this through, using the pandemic as the excuse in her effort to again rewrite all the election laws under the guise of a pandemic emergency.
And now the latest emergency that they’re siding, again this was their excuse, is the crisis that’s being caused by states trying to come in and impose some election integrity after the 2020 election.
It’s ridiculous. It’s nothing but a blatant power grab. And as I said, if we allow them to federalize elections, which is exactly what they were trying to do, they are going to use this as the first step, I think, to do away with the Electoral College and completely take control.
Carmichael: Senator, Michael, earlier in the show where I maintained that a lot of what’s going on by the Democrats in Washington right now essentially a head fake because what the Democrats are not being able to accomplish through the legislative process they’re accomplishing through the administrative process.
For example, the Secretary of Defense kind of unilaterally just came out and said that the Code of Military Justice will no longer apply to cases of sexual harassment and that they will be referred to the Justice Department, which I think is a huge change in the military. What are your comments on what’s going on in the administration?
Hagerty: I’m very concerned about this type of activity is something that I’m looking into right now. In fact, you had an extensive meeting on it yesterday utilizing the Congressional Review Act to come back and take these executive body administrative decisions like you described, apart and subject them to congressional review.
Because something like this would not pass congressional muster. What they’re trying to do again is just a blatant power grab. They’ve swung so far to the left I think they’re trying to reshape America into something that most of us can’t even comprehend.
And we’ve got to push back at every turn, and Congress has an important role to play. And so I’m looking into utilizing the Congressional Review Act to go after misuses and abuses just like you described.
Carmichael: So if we retake the House and the Senate, the Congressional Review Act, does that require 60 votes?
Hagerty: 50 plus one.
Carmichael: 50 plus one on the Congressional Review Act. So there’s a lot of authority to push back against administrative overreach if we can retake the House and have control of the Senate.
Hagerty: Absolutely. And there’s no reason to stop right now because you’ve got Democrats that I do not believe are as far left as the outspoken minority that seems to get all of the media amplification.
You think about leaders like Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema, who will have a very hard time supporting or voting with some of these extremist policies that the Biden administration is putting forward.
There’s no reason to wait 18 months. I think we should start right now. And that’s what I’m going to put in motion because we cannot wait another day. We can get this. We’ve got to start pushing back on this immediately.
Leahy: Senator Hagerty, let’s talk about the other big issue out there, the border here. It appears to me that the Biden administration is absolutely failing to enforce our immigration laws and the border is entirely open. What in Congress can you do about that?
Hagerty: Well, one of the first things that I did is I took the absolute first official congressional trip done by the Senate of the pandemic. I’m the only member of the United States Senate that actually has diplomatic experience.
I served as U.S. ambassador to Japan, the third-largest economy in the world, after the United States and China. I’ve had experience doing this sort of thing, and I went to Guatemala, into Mexico, just like Vice President Harris did all be it a full month before she did.
I met with the President of Guatemala. I met with his Foreign Minister. I explained to them the urgency of the situation. We need to stop the crisis at the border right now. The talk about root causes, they were very clear to me.
The President of Guatemala was very clear to me what the root cause actually is. The root causes are the messages coming out of the White House. It’s Joe Biden in his campaign saying, hey, if I win my election, I’m going to treat you better.
It’s Joe Biden saying, we’re going to reunite families again? The President of Guatemala said to me, the Coyotes immediately began marketing and collecting children, getting their parents to give them their life savings to undertake one of the most treacherous journeys imaginable.
They are praying on the most vulnerable in their society. Using again, messages coming out of Washington, D.C. Messages like a $15 an hour minimum wage, $1,400 of free money going to illegal immigrants.
These messages are being marketed by Coyotes. They’re enriching the cartels, and they’re creating this massive illegal movement that’s destroying nuclear families in their countries. They don’t like this one bit.
They’re very upset about it. And they made it clear to me that we have a lot to do with this. We mean, the Biden administration being the most important and significant root cause and causing our border to collapse has really made something else happen as well.
And this is where the leadership of Mexico made very clear to me. The Mexican Foreign Minister when I met with him, said, look, China is moving in. They’ve stepped up their fentanyl operations in my country.
In Mexico, they’re shipping more precursor chemicals, more fentanyl in. They’ve got Chinese lab technicians working with the cartels making fentanyl in Mexico and shipping it across this porous border.
Our Customs and Border Patrol agents are all tied up dealing with these families, dealing with these unattended minors. Meanwhile, the cartels are shoving more and more drugs across our borders.
And as I talk with sheriffs in law enforcement in Tennessee every day, they told me since January, since the border collapsed, they’ve seen a dramatic rise and overdoses and death from Fentanyl and Methamphetamines. Where is it coming from? Mexico? Who’s manufacturing it? The Chinese.
Leahy: Senator Bill Hagerty. Thanks so much for joining us. I know sometimes we ask you questions that are a little tougher than maybe you get from some folks. But you always step up. You always come on. You always answer the questions. We really appreciate that.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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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 Tuesday 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 Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in the studio to discuss the potential for the 2020 election results to be decertified and the consequences of unelected bureaucrats.
Leahy: I’m always glad to have that great, steady, calming influence of that find Southern gentleman Andy Ogles, the Mayor of Maury County.
Ogles: Good morning. Because, you know, it’s good to have that calm, thoughtful, responsiveness to the hot energy I bring when we’re looking at these election issues. I would love to get your reaction to this.
And we have a story at The Tennessee Star. I’ll read the headline and the first two paragraphs and then get your reaction. This is a national story, but it does have state impact because we’ve got the problem here of illegal aliens coming into Tennessee. And it’s causing difficulties and expenses from the state.
We’ll get to that in a bit. Let me look at this story. I want to get your reaction. Headline. Former Trump Campaign Advisor Boris Epshteyn Predicts States Will Decertify 2020 Election Results.
Boris Epshteyn, attorney and former strategic advisor to the 2020 Trump campaign predicted many states will decertify their election results for the November 2020 election. In an interview with Gina Loudon, our friend, Epshteyn said the series of audits that may occur could lead to the reversal.
Additionally, this is what he says. There is no language in the Constitution that prevents such a move. “The further we go on this freight train of audits from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania, and the more deeply horrifying information is uncovered. Ballots missing. Databases missing in Arizona. Fulton County, chain of custody documents missing in Georgia and Atlanta. Pennsylvania, a total cesspool of disaster. The more that information comes out, the more Americans believe this was a fraudulent election,” Epshteyn said.
What do you make of this claim that states will decertify their election results?
Ogles: I think that the last statement is key. We’re in unprecedented waters here constitutionally. The question is, there is no mechanism. So what happens next? And so ultimately, you think, well, it’s going to get kicked to the Supreme Court.
Well, the Supreme Court has already dodged this bullet. They wouldn’t hear it. You only had two dissenting votes in that case, and it was Alido and Thomas. So if they decertify and there’s a case to decertify and it goes to the Supreme Court, What’s the standing? How do you get standing before the Supreme Court?
Leahy: Neither of us are attorneys. But I think you’ve asked a critical question. I do think that it’s entirely possible that Georgia and Arizona, and in particular, Arizona because the state Senate is Republican.
The state House is Republican, same as in Georgia, although they’ve been a little weak in Georgia, they’re controlled by Republicans. I think it is possible that a special session could be held or even a regular session in January.
And reviewing all this evidence, I think they could say we vote to decertify the election. Okay. What’s the impact of that? And the answer is in terms of legal mechanism, nothing. Now in terms of public opinion, however, and I think this is the angle they’re going at.
I think a growing belief that this was an unlawful election and in many cases, and we’re looking in Georgia more and more that they can’t produce chain of custody documents as we speak today, seven and a half months after the election, there are no chain of custody documents for more than 300,000 absentee ballots cast in that election where the margin of victory was less than 12,000.
Ogles: Wow. At what point does this one become criminal? But, you know, I’ve had the opportunity kind of here as COVID’s been waning to speak, quite frequently across the state. And I can tell you, overwhelmingly, as I go around and I’m talking to these various groups from Jackson to Knoxville and everywhere in between that people think this election was stolen.
And I think more and more of these audits are showing that there’s a whole lot of monkey business or incompetence that took place. But at the end of the day, we were defrauded out of a true and honest election.
Leahy: Well, that’s the mantra now from the Secretary of State in Georgia. Sloppy but not fraudulent.
Ogles: Yeah, right.
Leahy: Sloppy, but not fraudulent. And it’s not just The Georgia Star News our site in Georgia. Just the News. Did you see what they got? John Solomon’s group. They got a 29 page memo from this guy by name of Carter Jones, who observed what happened in Fulton County from November second to November seventh.
And it is just a litany of a massive chain of custody problems. We’ve only reported on the movement of absentee ballots, which, by the way, they still haven’t produced the 385 missing transfer forms for 18,000 ballots to us at The Georgia Star News.
Fulton County claims to provided or Georgia Public Broadcasting complains that they provided all the missing documentation to them on Wednesday in 48 hours of receiving a request from them.
Six and seven months after we’ve requested it. We don’t have any of that data yet. They still haven’t provided it to us. And by the way of the ones we looked at, five percent of those absentee ballots were delivered to the registrar before they were collected at the dropbox. (Ogles chuckles) Time travel. If you believe in time travel, you believe in the certification of that election.
Ogles: I mean, that’s like Pulitzer Prize-winning. You just proved time travel.
Leahy: Time travel!
Ogles: But, you know, Laura Baigert who was on this story for The Georgia Star News, she got a shout out from our former President Trump. That has to be an amazing accomplishment from a journalist’s perspective.
I mean, Trump is Trump. Whether you like, like Trump or dislike Trump, he’s in his own kind of stratosphere. And to be given a shout-out by the former President is pretty amazing.
Leahy: Well, he’s tracking this, and it’s important stuff. And what’s interesting is you get in the weeds on this stuff. But in an election where you have absentee ballots placed in drop boxes, what a formula for fraud that is.
By the way, the Georgia state legislature did not authorize the use of drop boxes. There were 300 around Georgia. 37 in Fulton County not authorized. It was an emergency election code rule passed by the Georgia State Election Board that put them in place.
They had a rule about how you track them. So it’s very complicated. But the chain of custody was broken on so many levels there. The way they worked it is you would put these ballots in a dropbox.
And then these election workers, some of them who worked for apparently, this attempt service called Happy Faces, who got the contract with Fulton County because they were represented by wait for it…Stacey Abrams. (Ogles chuckles)
Gee, what could go wrong there? But what we can trace is they took these ballots, apparently, to a warehouse. And they held them there until they were going to count them in the election. Supposedly they tracked the movement of absentee ballots from 37 drop boxes to the warehouses.
They’re also supposed to, although it’s not an election code rule, apparently, there were some instructions that there’s a mechanism for tracking the movement of absentee ballots from the warehouse a couple of days before the election to four miles away to the counting center at the State Farm Arena, and then back.
You’re supposed to put them in a box. Number the boxes and track all that. They haven’t done that at all.
Ogles: So you’re saying an unelected bureaucrat change election law under the nose of the legislature, kind of like CRT in Tennessee.
Leahy: Exactly like it. This is why this is kind of circling back to what is making people so angry.
Ogles: That’s right. Because our bureaucrats are doing things that they’re not authorized to do by law, and we’re being forced to live with it. And not just on the consequences of this election, but in everyday life and in everyday life here in Tennessee.
Ogles: That’s right.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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.
