Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. So, Paramount Global and CBS agreed to pay
President Donald Trump a sum of money that could reach
north of thirty million dollars in order to settle Trump's
election interference lawsuit against the CBS network. He's going to
get sixteen million dollars up front. This will cover legal
costs of the case and make contributions to his future
presidential library or charitable causes to be determined at Trump's discretion.
There is something just ironically rich about these media outlets
funding his presidential library. Right, they have so besmirched themselves
with all of the smirch that they're going to fund
a museum to him, right? They he should You know,
when you go into the museums and stuff and they
have like, you know, this piece is like thank you
to our patron, you know, so and so whatever. They
should put little plaques on things, like you know, oh,
here is a pair of the gold sneakers that he
was selling, and like they'll put one. You know, it'll
be under a glass case, be lights on it and stuff,
and it'll have like the Maga shoe or whatever it is.
And I'll say, this exhibit made possible by CBS. They
should put those little placards everywhere. There is an anticipation
that so the sixteen million dollars is up front, and
then another allocation, maybe in the same amount or pretty
close to it, will be set aside then for advertisements,
public service announcements, or other similar transmissions in support of
conservative causes by the network in the future. So you
are going to get a conservative voice on CBS. Yeah,
it just took them losing a lawsuit. Fox News Digital
reports with these considerations, CBS would pay well in excess
of the fifteen million dollars that ABC paid Trump to
settle a defamation lawsuit last year. Current Paramount Management disputes
the additional allocation. Okay, so Paramount, the parent company of CBS,
They're like, no, no, that's not accurate. Don't know. I
don't know all of the terms, like this is obviously
these things are you know, kept under wraps. I guess.
But Paramount says they dispute the additional allocation. I don't
know if they're disputing the amount of the money or
they're saying we're not going to be spending it on
those things. Sources close to the situation told Fox News
Digital that CBS has agreed to update also its editorial
standards to install a mandatory new rule which puts their
rule count now at one. Going forward, the network will
promptly release full, unedited transcripts of future presidential candidates interviews,
but not the video see I would want and this
is one of those things. Look, I came up in
an age of journalism when you know, we did not
have all of the digital platforms, and so when I
would go out and I would cover a city council meeting,
I would walk away from that meeting with three to
four hours of audio on a good night, and I
would pull sound bites out of that meeting and I
would put them into a news story in a new story.
We were told at the time had to be no
more than like forty seconds forty five if you were
pushing it, So you shot for thirty five to forty
seconds package, and then I would I would record two
versions with different soundbites. I would write them up differently,
and then I would leave extra sound bites with text
so the anchors could read those two. So I was
basically creating four versions of every story. Okay, that was,
and that's if the city council just did one story,
like if they had three or four items on their
agenda that were newsworthy, I would end up doing four
versions of all three or four of those stories. Anyway,
I say all of that to say that I am
well acquainted and have actually I'm going to tell on
myself here, I have participated in I have committed acts
of selective editing. I am guilty of selectively editing things
because you always have to selectively edit when you have
a time constraint. Right, I had thirty five to forty
seconds when I worked in televison. The package is over.
In TV they run about ninety seconds, so we have
a little bit more time to tell the story. Show
video have more soundbites, longer soundbites, but you were capped
at ninety seconds, minute and a half, that's what you had.
So you can't if you sit down and do an
interview with somebody in the interview runs ten minutes, you
cannot post the whole thing, or you can't use all
of the ten minutes in a ninety second TV package. However,
nowadays with the interweb, you are now able to post
up like the entire interview, which you should do. It's
one of the things that actually podcasting does very well
with its long format, long form interviews that are not edited, right,
They're authentic, it's a full conversation. You're getting the whole
conversation with your guest. And no some podcasts do editing, obviously,
but if you're sitting down to interview Kamala Harris or
Donald Trump in the last election cycle, and your CBS
and you have a platform, you know, not just on
the on the TV side, but you also have your
your digital products, there really isn't a reason to not
make the full interview available for anybody wants to see it.
Why wouldn't you do it. It's just going to get
you clicks, right, just say, here's the full story, and
if you want to watch the or here's the story
and if you want to watch the full interview, here's
the link to that, and then you get an extra click.
But they didn't do that for Kamala Harris's interview with
sixty Minutes. Remember they edited. They said, well, they sent
out a promo you know, this week on sixty Minutes,
and they you know, show a clip of the question
and her answer. But then when they ran the story,
same question, different answer, And so the accusation was that
they edited, they selectively edited her answer to make her
seem more competent, I mean, as competent as one can
with the word salad that she speaks in. And so
the allegation. So then they asked like, can we have
the full transcript? Can we get the full video? And
CBS refused to release the transcript or the video. They
didn't want to get. They didn't want to give it up. Now,
why would you do that. You're a news organization. You
had the Democrat nominee for president, who's the nominee because
of a coup against her boss? Right, you have this
ten minute, twenty minute interview. Why would you not want
voters to see the whole interview? Why would you not
want clicks for your website? Why would you not want
people to be informed? It answered the question answers itself
right going forward, now the network will promptly release the
full unedited transcripts. And see, I don't think this is enough.
They're calling it Trump the Trump rule. Okay, but I
don't think that's enough. I think you should willingly, voluntarily
do the transcripts and release the full video. Why not? Seriously,
why not? What possible argument is there for you not
to release the full raw tape, especially if it's of
the candidate to be the leader of the free world.
Why wouldn't you do that unless you're trying to hide
their poor performance. And the only reason you would do
that is because you want them to win. You think
it would help their opponent by releasing the full transcript
and the video. And here's the thing we learned with
Joe Biden's interview that he sat for his deposition whatever
with the what was his name or or her Robert Hurr,
right when he sat with her for that whole interview,
and they released the transcript and they're like, okay, can
we get the audio? Can we get the video? And
they're like, no, DJ would not release the audio why
because reading the cold transcript you don't get the extent
of the damage that the interview actually conveys when you
hear it, which is, you know, on a transcript, it's like, oh, okay,
you know, Joe Biden starts talking and then there's a
dot dot dot and then he says what uh hmm,
huh whatever. But what you lose is the amount of
time in between all of those grunts, and in some
cases it was like ten seconds and it's just dead
air and you just hear the clock in the background
as he's searching for the memory or the words. It's
way worse to hear it than to just simply read
the transcript. So I would say, just release the whole thing.
Why did you even need to go through all of this?
Just release the video, And especially after the election, it's over.
Just release the video. You guys could have avoided all
of this, all right. If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, and
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Speaker 2: Why.
Speaker 1: Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is
why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app,
and it's a website, and it combines news from around
the world in one place, so you can compare coverage
and verify information. You could check it out at check
dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link
in the podcast description too. I started using ground News
a few months ago and more recently chose to work
with them as an affiliate because it lets me see
clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind
spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the
left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground,
dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll
get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage
plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription
then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports
ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent.
Let's head over and chat with David. Welcome to the show, David,
How are you good?
Speaker 2: Good? Thank you here. I'm calling because it's a little
confusing to me what the problem with the Medicaid cuts
really is. As I understand that those cuts were denominated
by how much had been measured as fraudulent, or people
were not working, not even agreeing to work, but receiving benefits,
or by some frauden of activity sucking money out of Medicaid.
So I don't understand why is upset or why he
thinks North Carolina is going to be terribly terribly impacted
by that unless we've got a whole lot of fraud
going on or a whole lot of people that are
willing to work.
Speaker 1: So Number one, there isn't there isn't a work requirement.
The Senate bill puts in this work requirement for the
Medicaid Expansion cohort. That's the group that we're talking about.
Did you hear so last hour? I did a deep
dive on all of this and the mechanism that Tillis
is trying to protect, and what in short form, what
it is is that you've got the expansion that occurred
in twenty twenty three in North Carolina. The Feds were
offering ninety percent matching for every for those expansion population,
ninety percent federal match And so what the North Carolina
legislature did was they put a tax on hospitals and providers.
But then when they get the federal money, they do
a rebate essentially back to those providers in this same amount.
So it's basically offloading the cost through this what they
called the provider tax. They offload the cost to the
rest of the country. And the North Carolina law was
written in such a way that if the reimbursements ever
dropped from a ninety ten split, if they went down,
then it would trigger basically a kill switch on the
entire Medicaid Expansion cohort. And so what the Senate bill
does triggers that kill switch. So the entire six hundred
thousand plus population under the expansion cohort would now lose
access because the state law is written in such a way.
So that's what Tillis was trying to protect was this
mechanism that had been developed not just by North Carolina
Republicans but other state bodies. They had devised this way
to offload the full cost off of the state taxpayers
and spread that cost around for the rest of the country.
And they basically do this sort of money laundering deal
through the hospitals and the providers.
Speaker 2: That sounds exactly like what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, yes, sir, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's yeah,
and that's why people outside of North Carolina are pretty
hacked off about it. And I guess I totally understand why. Yeah, David,
I appreciate the call, sir, thank you. Take care. Yeah,
I mean it's there was a piece that I read
through this in the last hour, a National Review, a
piece called Tom Tillis defends a medicaid scam, and so
we covered that in the last hour. You can get
the the podcast at the peatpod dot com, WBT dot com,
at any of your podcasting platforms, and so you can
read how the mechanism actually works. It's broken down very
very well by Michael Cannon. All Right, so Trump Donald
Trump was seeking twenty billion in a lawsuit against CBS
over its handling of the sixty minutes interview last year
with Kamala Harris, and Trump accused the network of election
interference leading up to the November election. CBS does not
acknowledge as part of this settlement, they do not acknowledge
any journalistic wrongdoing. I thought it said for a minute
there are any journalism, but now they are like, we
didn't do anything wrong. The lawsuit alleged CBS deceitfully edited
in exchange that she Harris had with Bill Whittaker from
Sixty Minutes, who asked her why Israeli Prime Minister Benjaminintennaho
wasn't listening to the Biden administration. Harris was widely mocked
for the word salad answer that aired in a preview
clip of the interview on CBS's Face the Nation. However,
when the same question aired during a prime time special
on CBS, Harris had a different, more concise response. Critics
at the time accused CBS News of deceitfully editing Harris's
word salad answer to shield the Democratic nominee from further
backlash leading up to election day. The raw transcript and
footage released earlier this year by the FCC because the
FCC had to get involved. The raw transcript and footage
showed that both sets of Harris's comments came in the
same response, but CBS had aired only the first half
of her response in the Face the Nation preview and
then aired the second half during the primetime special. So
I think the assumption there is that the primetime special
has way more viewers, and so they were trying to
protect her from a larger audience. CBS has denied any wrongdoing,
stood by the broadcast and the key for me, much
like the ABC News set up, which was a fifteen
million dollars settlement after George Stephanopolis repeatedly and then correctly
asserted that Trump had been found liable for rape he wasn't.
ABC additionally paid a million dollars for President Trump's legal
fees as well. The reason why these outlets settle is
because they don't want discovery, right CNN right, same thing.
They don't want the discovery, which is where the lawyers
get access to all of the internal records, all the emails,
correspondents and stuff. Can you imagine how bad that stuff was?
When CBS lawyers looked at what they would have to
turn over to the Trump team as part of discovery
that they said, you know what, We'll just write you
a check for thirty million dollars. Here's a great idea.
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Welcome to the program. Hello Jim, Hey, Pete Hey, what's up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a couple of general comments till Us. I
mean it looks to me like he's using the medicaid
or funding all those arguments as kind of an excuse
in the BBB. But I think he was also thinking
about his competition and a proposed upcoming Senate race.
Speaker 1: And who do you think that Who do you think
that competition would be that's so scared him?
Speaker 3: Well, there's I mean you just had it on your news.
I mean three or four different people. It's gonna be
some real competition on the Republican side.
Speaker 1: But well but think about it. If you've got Pat Harrigan.
If you got Pat Harrigan, you got Tim More. First off,
I don't even think any of them would actually challenge
him in a primary. We had Andy Nilson who had announced,
and we we have Don Brown who announced. I don't
think you get any elected members of Congress to try
to leave their seats as a member of Congress to
run for the Senate seat against an incumbent Republican, right,
So I think that they're.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was specifically thinking about Whatley. And then of
course Laura Trump, I mean just could be a king maker.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think so I don't think Wattley would
have done it. He said his focus is on the
mid terms. I think Trump wants to keep him where
he is because he's been successful doing it, and for
the same reason. I don't think Wattley leaves a post
in order to challenge an incumbent like Tillis in a primary.
And as far as Laura Trump goes, I think yes,
like she is sort of like we have, we been
using this term right of first refusal for her, Like
I think if she says she's going to run that
and I think everybody else clears the field for her
and she walks in, well maybe not all that. You
probably still would have a couple of the candidates still running,
but I don't think you get any congress members that
run against her. But I don't know if she actually
wants to do it. She's got her gig at Fox News, right,
She's got young kids at home and what to go
to go to the US Senate where you're not going
to be able to actually do anything. She'd have to,
you know, change your residency to North Carolina again. So
I don't know if she wants to do it, but
I don't think she would have challenged Tillis in a primary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, Tillis never has really impressed me. It was
some of his other decisions through his career. I didn't
have any choice, so I went ahead and voted for him,
because I surely didn't want to vote for a Democrat
and the last sentate race and or the Democrat that
was at least a posed him at the time. But
you just reported a few days ago he had only
had four million dollars in his campaign bank account. I
mean that there won't even be It could easily turn
out to be a fifty to one hundred million dollar race,
and so he that would put him back in and
he's a little bit old too, and that would put
him back into basically an eight year commitment if he
were to win. First of all, he still got another
what eighteen twenty months to go, Yeah, be nothing but
pure fundraising, wall the wall, and then if he won,
another six years. And he pretty much spelled it out
about his grandkids. But I think age is a key
factor because they really long term successful senators. I'm thinking
of the Thurmon's, the Frintz Hollings, was it Sam Irvin
in North Carolina? And then Graham. Now in South Carolina,
these guys get up there and they split the rail,
the political rail, all the time. And one of the
reasons is they it's going to keep him in the
Senate for thirty or forty years, just like Thurman did
in South Carolina. He was a Democrat at one time,
So that's what And then you and then Tillis his age,
you put all that into a pot and stew and
you started around a little bit. I think the excuse
about the Medicaid and everything kind of became a good
arguing point for Tillos to get out. That's that's kind
of my theory about that.
Speaker 1: I don't think it was a I don't think and
he had well. I went over this Monday. There was
a report from Ruben Jones at Spectrum News. I don't
think the medicaid argument that Tillis was making was the
reason for him to get out. I think he had well.
Speaker 3: I don't either. I just think it was a good excuse,
an argument that he was using at the time.
Speaker 1: But that's not but he hasn't used the Medicaid thing
as an excuse to get out he so he has.
Speaker 3: I have a general comment about that too. I mean,
there is no free market in healthcare in this country.
There is no industry in this country that occupies I
keep hearing the economists say it's roughly a sixth to
maybe even a fifth of our economies wholly associated medical
expense and everything. And there's fabulous medical campuses everywhere you
go in this country, especially in this state. I mean,
they're just fabulous, and I don't think twenty to forty
percent of them would even be built or so push
if it wasn't for the governments guaranteed seventy to eighty
cents on the dollar of literally every patient that comes
in the door. There is no other industry like that
anywhere in this country. So that that's part of the
lack of what's the world I'm looking for business competition.
It's just it's not a free system. It'll be an
ongoing issue for the rest of our lives until the
government gets out of it. The other types of.
Speaker 1: Jim and the government's not getting out of a jim.
And that's the whole point of the medicaid expansion was
to get more people on the rolls to then we
pave the path to make government in charge of all
of it.
Speaker 3: There'll never be any control of medical calls or delivery
services in the country. Boom, the debate's over.
Speaker 1: Jim, I got to run. Jim, I appreciate the call.
I recommend go check out Spectrum One's tweet by Ruben Jones.
He lays out till US's decision making process and why
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dot Com. The sharing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck
Grassley issued a press release after internal FBI emails revealed
that the FBI suppressed intelligence of alleged Chinese interference in
the twenty twenty election. So not the last election, although
I'm sure China was messing around there too, But this
is from twenty twenty, right when Biden beat Trump in
twenty twenty. There was Chinese interference in that election. The
FBI was informed about it, and they suppressed it. Why,
according to Grassley's office, to insulate then FBI Director Christopher
Ray from criticism after Ray had provided inaccurate and contradictory
testimony to Congress. So Ray had gone before Congress said
one thing, and that was not true, So they suppressed
the intelligence. The FBI dclassed and provided the requested records
to Chuck Grassley, along with an accompanying cover letter. After
Grassley initially received information from whistleblower disclosures. The FBI emails
offer an inside look at the bureau's decision to recall
and suppress what's called an intelligence information report, or an IIR.
They suppressed it, they recalled it. This IR came from
the FBI's Albany Field office in Upstate New York, on
September twenty fifth, twenty twenty, so like not even two
months before the election. The IR contained information from an
FBI confidential human source alleging that the Chinese government was
producing quote tens of thousands of fraudulent driver's licenses to
manufacture mail in votes for then presidential candidate Joe Bi
in the twenty twenty election. H According to the FBI,
these allegations, despite showing signs initial signs of credibility, were
allegedly never fully investigated due to the FBI's sudden and
quote abnormal decision to halt the investigation and bury the
IR's existence, preventing any additional FBI field offices as well
as other intelligence community elements from accessing or studying the document.
This is similar to the story we talked about a
couple of weeks ago, right where they had created in
the FBI database right of all of their files and stuff,
and they created like a special designation that blinded every
other field office an agent from the existence of cases
that were opened. I believe the cases were about Hunter
Biden's laptop, if I recall correctly, but I don't recall
exactly what it was, or maybe it was Stele dossier something,
I forget what, But they they blinded everybody in the agency.
So like you could go to this database, you can
type in some key search words or case numbers or whatever,
and it would flag stuff and would pull it back
in the search results, and it would say, yes, there's
a case. You know, it's about Pete calendar, but that's
a top secret case. You can't look at it. But
at least you would know that there was a case.
But they had created this other classification where if you
ran a search term for my name, it wouldn't even
show up. So while there were documents, there were cases
and information and reports about me, you would not know that.
So you would not know if there's a large investigation
going on, and you might very well have benefited from
that information while you're investigating some other case. That's what
this sounds like, that they buried it the FBI stated
reason for doing this was because quote the reporting will
contradict Director Ray's testimony. Quote, these records smack of political
decision making. Improved the Christopher Ray led FBI to be
a deeply broken institution ahead of a high stake selection
happening amid an unprecedented global pandemic, the FBI turned its
back on its national security mission. He said, Grassley said, yeah,
just remember, you needed the driver's licenses in order to
do the mail in ballots, and we needed all the
mail in ballots because everybody was going to die of COVID. Well,
the people who didn't die from net neutrality, obviously. According
to the Assistant Section chief in the FBI's Counterintelligence Division,
the IR immediately generated a lot of attention from headquarters.
Upon receiving this report the IR, the FBI Albany officials said, quote,
we have no reason to recall at this point, like,
why are you recalling this report? Minutes later, the Albany
Field Office was commanded to recall the IR at the
direct request of headquarters officials, including a person named Nicky Flores,
then Deputy Assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Months
before dismissing the IR. Flores provided an unnecessary briefing to
Chuck Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson regarding the FBI's investigation
into the Biden family. The briefing was supposedly classified, but
it was then leaked to the press in an effort
to falsely smear Grassy and Johnson investigation as Russian disinformation.
Following the IRS recall, FBI Headquarters informed field offices that quote,
all raw reporting concerning the election will now require HQ coordination.
Everything runs through DC. Because Christopher Ray had testified before
Congress we have not seen historically any kind of coordinated
national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it
is by mail or otherwise. That's what Ray had said
that was not true. I will say also that the
Foreign Influenced Task Force has since been disbanded under Trump.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
without your support and the support of the businesses that
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them too and tell them you heard it here. You
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