We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Jordan Boyd,
to staff writer here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR
LST, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of our website as well. I'm joined today by Matt
Kittle, our senior elections correspondent at The Federalist and a voice loyal listeners will
get well acquainted with in upcoming weeks. Matt, welcome to the program.
Well, thank you for having me. And I've enjoyed this podcast for a
long time because I think it embodies everything that is the Federalist. Yes,
we're so glad you're here, and it's so fun to see the evolution of
people who listened to the podcast now becoming what is going to be our temporary
host of the podcast. So, and if I'm not mistaken, you officially
joined the Federalist Elections team at the beginning of this year, but you had
been writing for us for quite a time before that as a contributor. Is
that right? That is absolutely right. Yes, I've been a Federalist loiter
for some time, and then had the great opportunity very blessed to have been
able to join the Federalist at the first of the year in what I think
is just an outstanding and absolutely vital team of reporters election coverage, election integrity
coverage, more so particularly going into this critical election year. But yeah,
I wrote for The Federalist for years in different capacities at different news organizations as
a freelance reporter, and good fortune to get to know a lot of the
folks of the Federalists before I joined in January. Yes, and we got
the great pleasure of getting to know you even better when we all went to
staff retreat about a month ago. So it's just been a fun time.
I think your official bio on our website both thirty years of what is said
to be award winning print, broadcast and online media experience. Can you tell
us a little bit more about how you joined the chaotic world of political journalism.
Yes, like me, that bio is a little old. I guess
I've been doing it longer than that, I'm afraid at this point. I
started out as a sixteen year old snot nosed kid in a log cabin radio
station, just as Lincoln did back in the latter nineteen eighties. That's really
dating me. I think I started in radio when Dookie Houser was on the
air, if that puts things in perspective. But yeah, I started out
doing news and obituaries and sports reporting and all kinds of different things at my
local radio station. From there, I guess at that point what I really
wanted to be sixteen seventeen years old. I wanted to be the next Rush
Limbaugh, and Rush had no worries of me being his doppel ganger, that's
for sure. But I have enjoyed a very long radio and a journalistic career.
I got involved in radio reporting, of course, very early on.
That transitioned over to the world of newspapers, and so I served as an
investigative reporter for a long time in print and then as the world. Of
course, as you know, Jordan as well as anybody, the world of
journalism has changed dramatically over the last twenty five years with the advent of the
device that al Gore claims that he invented the Internet, and so everything has
become digital. Everything has become so much more diversified, and there are so
many different ways of getting information out there, and that leads us right back
to the Federalist and the important role that the Federalist plays in terms of making,
investigating, and going after in particular government agencies that want to suppress that
information. That's the brave new world in which we live now. Absolutely,
and you are just really intimately familiar with all of these suppression campaigns, especially
with your work election integrity. And I know you're based in the Midwest and
do it a lot of reporting out of one of our favorite states here at
the Federalist, and that is Wisconsin. So i'd love to hear Matt what
kind of projects you've been working on for the Federalist and why our listeners should
care. I mean, election integrity is a huge thing, but it became
even bigger in twenty twenty, you know, after all of that chaos,
and I just love to hear from you sort of how you approached that world
and then what kind of news has been stunning you as of late. Well,
it's interesting, Jordan, because life is full circle. I remember more
than a decade ago reporting in Wisconsin as a bureau chief in Madison on what
was at that time known as the infamous John Doe investigations. And for those
unfamiliar with this very dark chapter in Wisconsin history, basically we had is Democrat,
very highly partisan Democrat prosecutors in Milwaukee County in particular, but also Dane
County where Madison is located, and they were working alongside a very crooked and
corrupt government accountability board. They were the regulators of state election and campaign finance
law, and what they did is just still breathtaking to this day. They
raided the homes of conservative activists, even conservatives who really weren't that active,
if you will, all in the name of going after then Governor Scott Walker,
who might remember, was very instrumental in taking on the public sector unions
in Wisconsin when he was first elected in twenty eleven and reforming collective bargaining laws
at the public sector level that really put taxpayers at a disadvantage. And if
you know anything about big labor, particularly public sector big labor, they don't
like that kind of thing. And so they threw everything they had at Scott
Walker and the conservatives in the legislature who reformed the laws that included everything from
recalls and what have you, but it also included these massive spying operations by
these bureaucracies and these prosecutors, and pre dawn armed raids on the homes of
conservatives. In one case, I can tell you one of the raids involved
police knocking on the door before sunrise at the home of one of their targets.
But the targets were not home at the time. Their sixteen year old
son was and he was forced to open the door and told that if he
said anything about the raid, he would go to jail. His parents would
go to jail. It was just absolutely awful, and it was eventually shut
down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Is unconstituted a perfect storm of wrongs,
is how the judge in that case, the justice in that case, had
written the ruling. But it's interesting I just wrote a piece for The Federalist
about all of that, because what happened in Wisconsin. As US Representative Tom
Tiffany from Wisconsin seventh Congressional District told me all the way back in twenty seventeen,
when Donald Trump became the President of the United States, he said,
Matt, what you saw in the John Doe investigations in Wisconsin is about to
be writ large nationally, and there has been no more prescient statement from a
lawmaker, certainly than what Tom Tiffany told me at that time in twenty seventeen.
And obviously the Federalist over the last several years has been reporting on the
government abuse of power to weaponize the government to go after political enemies. Started
in Wisconsin, and interestingly enough, as a swing state, it's coming back
to Wisconsin. That's so fascinating to me. I'm not gonna lie. Before
I came to the Federalist, I did not put a brain cell to Wisconsin.
I didn't live. Yeah, I didn't know anyone from Wisconsin. I
didn't really know anything about Wisconsin other than the stereotypical cheese thing. And I
come to the Federalist and half of our staff is from Wisconsin, and all
of a sudden, a ton of our reporting is concentrated in this very,
very important state. And like I said, in twenty twenty, things just
intensified greatly. And one of the biggest explosions I think on our site,
and some of the most important reporting that we've done and that you've continued,
has been on Biden Bucks. So I'd love to just hear your overview for
our listeners. Maybe you haven't tuned in as of late. What are biden
Bucks? Why did they matter in twenty twenty and what's happening with them in
twenty twenty four. Yeah, it's very biden Bucks if you take a look
back. And the reason it's called biden Bucks is it is a nod to
what is commonly referred to as zucker or Zuckbucks. And you remember how that
played a significant role the hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder and conservative
suppressor, conservative speech suppressor Mark Zuckerberg, total of something like four hundred million
dollars that he dropped in on so called election administration grants. But basically what
it turned out to be was money that was targeted for get out the vote
efforts, particularly in the swing states, to elect Joe Biden at that time.
So when Joe Biden first got into office, one of his first orders
of business was to take Zuckerbucks and how successful that was and transform that into
an entire federal operation. And so basically what you have is an executive order
that ordered the federal agencies, and we believe all of them, not all
of them, most of them to run voter registration operations to work with state
agencies on this, and groups that were approved by the White House, third
party left wing groups clearly approved by the White House, and that they would
run get out the vote efforts basically to help re elect Joe Biden. That's
where we're at right now. There have been some very dedicated election integrity organizations
trying to get to the bottom of this. Federalist has extensively reported on it.
But really what it is is, I believe star At Whitson from the
Foundation for Government Accountability has called this Zuckerbucks zuck Bucks on steroids. Biden Bucks
does basically, you have your tax dollars untold amounts. Congress doesn't even know
how much money is involved that have been directed to operate voter registration activities that
is not the domain of the federal government. And now there is a lawsuit
that is before the Supreme Court that challenges biden Bucks, and of course the
Federalist has reported on that and will continue to report on those efforts as well
as biden Bucks in general moving forward. This is Pastor Matthew Harrison, President
of the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate, the LCMS operates the second largest parochial school
system in the United States. What can you expect from a Lutheran Church Missouri
Senate School. There's one race, the human, and Jesus died for the
sins of every man, woman, and child from every land and every nation.
Life begins a conception. All life is precious, from womb to tomb,
and every student, parent and teacher is created in the very image of
God. There's right and wrong, and we know which is which from the
Ten Commandments. There are only two sexes, male and female. He created
them. Marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman. There's
such a thing as objective, absolute truth, and it's found in the person
and work of Jesus Christ and his word. To find a Lutheran Church Missouri
Sentis School near you, visit LCMS dot org slash schools. It's so crazy
to me, and it's it's insane that you have an administration and a president
that came in and boasted unity and transparency and then pulls the craziest stunts that
this need has ever seen. And one of those, obviously this last week
was the law fair conviction of former President Donald Trump, and we had a
piece from our legal correspondent Margot Cleveland talking about how Biden's fingers were all over
that pie. And I think it just goes to show that there are not
many people out there who are doing the work on exposing the corruption that has
clinched our country. You had a hilarious piece this last week called you might
be living in a Banana Republic if and I'd love to just hear some of
your satirical but also serious takes on what that conviction and what the ongoing law
fair and the attempts to weaponize the government against Americans has had on our country.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know about you, but after Thursday,
the verdict on that dark Thursday came in where the Manhattan Kangaroo Court,
the jury came down with thirty four counts, all guilty against former President Donald
Trump and the GOP's nominee for president by the way, going up against Joe
Biden. All of those counts came down as guilty in a massively what was
it called, I think Jonathan Turley called it Frankensteinian charges. They had to
manipulate and massage the state book keeping error, so to speak, into a
federal campaign and election interference charge, which of course is the phrase that pays
for the militant left out there, the Trump hating militant left. But I
couldn't help after knowing what I know what the Federalist has reported, and other
news organizations that aren't asleep at the wheel or really care about this country have
reported on, you know, just how conflicted this judge was, and you
know, the process was, and the fact that we had you know,
Biden DOJ officials, you know, leaving their post to work on this case.
I mean, it's just absolutely amazing. And I couldn't help but think,
did I just wake up in a Banana Republic? And so I thought
I put together a top ten piece, if you will, top ten signs
that you are now living in a Banana Republic? And I kind of looked
at it as well through the old Jeff Foxworthy lens. You know, you
might be a redneck if, but in this case, it was you might
be living in a Banana Republic if And some of those top ten you can
of course find the piece on the Federalist, but you know, at one
of the top ten, perhaps my favorite is I think it was maybe number
three on the list and it said you might be a sign that you might
be living in a Banana Republic is the judge instructs you to point to where
Donald Trump hurt your feelings. I think that really underscores what the left drive
in America is all about. You also might be living in a Banana Republic
if the prosecutor has Act Blue tattooed on his backside. Again, you can
find the complete list at the Federalist. That's great. I think you can
see it, not just in the law fair, but I'm sure you saw
the news from Merrick Garland testifying in a congressional hearing about how you know he's
the victim. No one that he's politically targeted, or that the uj R
FBI has gone after like pro lifers or Grandma's who had to set foot near
the Capitol on January sixth. You know he's the victim. The DOJ and
FBI employees receiving threat are the victims. And of course there hasn't been a
whole lot of actual evidence that the DOJ is hurting because they've started launching political
campaigns on people other than public trust in that institution has completely waned, I
mean just tanked and I think we're seeing that across the board and Americans trust
in our institutions as we know them has completely floundered. And this is going
to be a huge question for you, Matt, But is there any way
that you think that that trust can be restored? And if so, what
is the solution. The solution is transparency. I mean it's election integrity.
I mean real election integrity and not just you know, this phony stuff that's
coming out of the left, in particular in Washington, DC. And let's
face it, there are some on the right who have cooperated with this bogus
narrative of election deniers. Most people I know, and we see the polling,
the vast majority of Americans do have concerns about the integrity of the elections
and their right to have concerns. You can't have election integrity if you are
running a nationalized, federalized get out the vote effort that is using leftist activists.
That's going to erode election integrity, a confidence in elections, that's for
sure. And even if you can't point to this is voter fraud over here
or you know, something tangible, the perception is really the big problem.
Now, there are definitely there's definitely acts of fraud going on out there,
don't get me wrong, But you can't stand up and say, you know,
we run perfect elections and you shouldn't be worried about election integrity in America.
We've got this. Don't worry when you have leftist organizations, as we
reported on it, the federalist that were embedded in election administration offices in major
cities in swing states that ultimately decide the election. That's exactly what happened with
Zuckerbucks in twenty twenty. I reported extensively for this publication on what was happening
in Green Bay where you had a longtime Democrat activist who was working in the
election administration office, the clerk's office in Green Bay, Wisconsin. According to
emails that we have obtained, this is someone who had offered to and we
don't know, we're pretty confident that it was fully elle out, but offered
to correct or cure ballot envelopes. This is a guy who had keys to
the absentee ballot boxes, to the room where the absentee ballot boxes were stored.
You know, you can't scream election denier and then pull stuff like this.
No wonder Americans have so little faith in their the integrity of their elections.
So to your point, and to answer your question fully, it's going
to take complete transparency. It is going to take election integrity laws, voter
id making sure that non citizens are not voting in our elections. That's not
too much to ask, you know, basic things like cleaning up our voter
roles. We have so many problems with that. That's just an open door
to election fraud. They're basic things that have to happen. But unfortunately,
there's so much resistance from the left in this country because election integrity to them
equals a denial of access to people they want to vote but who are not
eligible to vote, and therein lies the problem. Your point about the election
denialism quote unquote reminds me of another big push of propaganda by corporate media and
even, like you said, some Democrats and Republicans, and that's this fake
elector's scheme which we heard a lot about in the days following November twenty twenty,
but it's sort of resurrected or really never gone away. Could you tell
us a little bit more about this fake elector's scheme? What Democrats or how
Democrats are weaponizing it to advance their attack on the twenty twenty four election,
and how it can be stopped, how you know, it can be curbed
to where we're not concerned about this rampant election propaganda from the left. Yeah,
the scheme really is the narrative that this was a fake elector scheme.
That's really what it boils down to. And you have leftist prosecutors in that
can that are in control in swing states doing this in particular Wisconsin was the
latest report, and we reported on that at the Federalist this week. And
what it boils down to is in twenty twenty, there were a lot of
legitimate questions about the vote tallies in these states in particular, and Donald Trump's
campaign, along with conservative legal officials, conservative attorneys, and conservative activists came
up with a plan that involved alternate electors. They wanted to be available if
changes occurred, for instance, in Wisconsin, if a recount in both Madison
and Milwaukee came back to show that Donald Trump actually won the election. If
lawsuits, and there were many came back and they sided with Donald Trump saying
yes, indeed, you won this number of votes, or you won this
state they wanted to make sure that they had in place electors just in case.
And so that has been crafted by the lawfair left and their friends in
the accomplice media as some kind of attempt to overthrow the twenty twenty election and
the rightful winner of that election, Joe Biden. But what it really is
is it is again more lawfare, more ways to go after Donald Trump directly
and indirectly by targeting the people who supported him and said, wait a minute,
there are all kinds of irregularities in this election. We want to make
sure if courts find that Donald Trump actually won, we want to make sure
that we preserve his electors as part of the constitutional process. And so what
we have here in the state of Wisconsin, I'll tell you specifically we have.
I mean it is there is no doubt about the political ramifications from this.
You have a far left attorney general in Josh call whose very own Department
of Justice several months ago said there was no crime here as they made a
recommendation. The Wisconsin Elections Commission said on two different cases, two different times,
they had said that this was not a crime. And yet the Department
of Justice, the head of the Wisconsin Department of Justice in Josh Call comes
back months later, right after the Manhattan Kangaroo Court comes down with a guilty
verdict in the trumped up charges there against Donald Trump and files counts of election
fraud in this case. I mean, if that doesn't tell you what's going
on in America with the law fair left, I don't know what does.
And it's even more ironic when you know, we all have short term memories
because so much has happened in the last four years, six years, you
know whatever. But Hillary Clinton and Democrats urged electors to vote against Trump in
the twenty sixteen election. They were like, they pushed the Russian inclusion hoax
as the reason for these electors to do exactly what they've been criticizing Republicans for
not even accomplishing in the twenty twenty election. It's just massively hypocritical, or,
as we like to say at the Federalist, there's no such thing as
hypocrisy. There's hierarchy, and the people who control the systems are the ones
who are making these decisions. So it's all very interesting. What's interesting,
too, is that Hillary Clinton's campaign advised doing that in sixteen. The Kennedy
campaign in nineteen sixty actually did that in Hawaii. They did exactly what these
electors who are charged with election fraud and insurrection and trying to overturn an election,
they did exactly that in the nineteen sixty election Nixon versus Kennedy, to
make sure that they had their electors in place in Hawaii just in case it
was such a narrow election. So point back to the past. This is
not something that came out of thin air. This is something that Democrats have
done. And yet we have all kinds of people in this country who were
trying to do the right thing with the information that they had at the time,
and now you know they are insurrectionist in the eyes of the lawfair Left.
I love that you keep calling them the lawfair left. I love alliteration,
and so it just flows so well and it's so accurate. As I
teased at the beginning of this episode, Matt, you're going to be recording
quite a few episodes for Federalist Radio Hour in the coming weeks, and i'd
love to hear from you what kind of guests you're thinking about having on what
your vision is, and maybe what listeners can expect from your conversations. Well,
I'm an election integrity geek, as you know Jordan by now, and
so you can expect more of these kinds of conversations with experts in the field,
people who are doing yeomen's work every day to make sure indeed that our
elections have integrity. But you know, this podcast is filled with all kinds
of different voices. That's why I love it so much. So we will
have just a s'morgus bort of guests from all different walks of life and perspectives
in the liberty movement, of course, and we will get to the bottom
of some stories with some very interesting perspectives. I'm looking forward because of exactly
what we talked about a conversation we have scheduled with Brian Shimming, who is
the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party. He is responsible for putting together the
biggest party of twenty twenty four that Republicans will have for four years, and
it all takes place in Milwaukee. Of course, it's the Republican National commit
National Convention. That's where Donald Trump will be nominated, of course, if
he's not in prison before then, because as we know, Judge Juan Murshan,
the Manhattan Kangaroo Court efficient has decided he is going to hold sentencing for
the guilty charges guilty counts against Donald Trump, four days before this convention begins,
So we will talk about that. What it takes to put on a
convention and the security surrounding it. That's another I think a huge concern,
not only for Milwaukee and for Republicans, but in particular in Chicago for the
Democrats for their convention coming up a little bit later in the summer. Well,
I know we're all looking forward to it, and Matt, it's been
great to chat with you. We can't wait to hear more from you in
the coming weeks, and I think this has been a great conversation. So
we're really looking forward to the future with you as our temporary host. Well,
I am honored to fill in that role. As you know, we
do a lot of different things at the Federalist because there's always something that needs
to be reported on. There's always something that we need to engage our readers
or alert our readers to, So this is a great vehicle to do that
and I am exceptionally proud that I've been tapped to fill in here. For
a while. Well, like I said, Matt is our senior elections correspondent
and will be the voice of Federalist Radio Hour going forward. You've been listening
to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Jordan Boyd. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious but afraid right