Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
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my daily show prep with all of the links, become
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to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so
much for your support. I want to welcome back to
the program. Senior writer for The Washington Examiner, syndicated columnist.
He's the author of a bunch of books as well.
He's a co host for a podcast. He's got a substack.
It's David Harsani. You welcome, David.
Speaker 2: How are you. I'm well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Yes, sir, absolutely so. Were you one of the media
types that got fooled that Joe Biden's cognitive decline was
actually happening or were you able to see through the
elaborate cover up?
Speaker 2: I think I thought through it, but I wouldn't give
myself too much credit. I don't think you have to
be immediate t I think most people saw it, so
I was not fooled, and I don't think maybe anyone
was actually fooled in the entire world.
Speaker 1: So this is one of the things that is most
offensive to me. I was a reporter, and I think
you were a reporter at one point as well. Right, yeah, so,
and we've talked about some of the trade stuff.
Speaker 2: But I.
Speaker 1: Thought part of the job of being a journalist was
to report on the things that you see. Like when
I would go cover a car crash or an apartment fire,
I was the witness. I was telling people what I saw.
I don't know why Tapper and Thompson now in their
book they're saying, well, we couldn't get this stuff confirmed.
But I thought confirmation would be your own eyes, the
witnessing of the events.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, I mean the very idea. I think one
of the best tools a person has being a journalist,
and many people who are journalists shouldn't be journalists, at
least in my view, is skepticism, which someone tells you
something that seems untrue. It's literally your job to try
to find out what is true, or to question what
the people in power are telling you. I noted this elsewhere,
but the book Original Sin by Jake Tapper to me,
it's like I compare it to someone writing all the
president's men but not naming any of the men. And
then it was written by John Erlickman. You know what
I'm saying. I mean, they were part of the cover up.
You know. Charlie Cook, who works at National View, made
a good point. You know, Jake Tapper says, we all
need to, you know, to really look into ourselves, even
he needs to do it. You know this, and that, Well,
why isn't a person who actually saw what was happening
writing this book from the conservative media? You know, if
a conservative had written this book, no one would be
interviewing them. They wouldn't be on any of the big shows.
So nothing really changes. They get to participate in these things,
then they get to make money off these things. There's
no reckoning, there's no names. He's you know, he's not
told us who who are the people who did this?
This is, in my be one of the biggest scandals
in presidential history, maybe since you know, Woodrow Wilson couldn't
perform his duties as president. So I don't know, I mean,
I agree it's a lot to cover.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I've been calling it that for the better
part of two years. It's the biggest political scandal maybe
in American history, definitely within my lifetime. And I you know,
when I went to journalism school, I thought, man, that's
crazy that like the media helped cover up Woodrow Wilson
and de FDR's infirmities and and you know John F.
Kennedy and all of this stuff that that could never
happen now, right, And then I'm watching this unfold over
the last five years and it's like, oh my god,
it is happening again. And you know that have you read,
as you guess I should ask, have you read their book?
Do you intend to read their book?
Speaker 2: I have it, and I have kind of perused it.
I can't say I've given it like a thorough read
or anything. And you know what I've read. You know,
if a normal reporter had written this, maybe it would
be an okay book. But when you're reading, you just
can't escape the looming fact that the person who wrote
it participated in it, you know. And and also that
it's kind of like a triangulation. You know, it's like
being brave when being brave doesn't matter. The moment that
Joe Biden debated Donald Trump. In that first debate, all
the media turned against Joe Biden. They didn't turn against
Joe Biden because they had some kind of ethical journalistic
imperative to do it. They did it because they saw
he couldn't win, or they thought he couldn't win. And
so I don't even buy that they ever came around
really for any good reason. They you know, if he
hadn't done that debate, they would have if he hadn't
debated Donald Trump, they would have continued the sham all
the way to election day, and if he had one,
they would have continued it into a second term, including
Jake Tapper in my view, And until he actually comes
out on some other issue against you know, in a
way that hurts the left, but you know, you know,
propels the truth, then I'll believe that he's changed. Or
until then I just think he's you know, it's just
a fraudulent position he's taking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, he just wishes he had covered it quote
more aggressively, that's it more aggressively. Yeah, it's it is
pretty amazing. And then on top of all of that,
then we get the news that Joe Biden has cancer,
and I got into a little bit of trouble on
Monday when I said this, but I believe it, like
I don't trust the Bidens to tell me the truth
about their medical conditions. I'm sorry, but you don't get
my default setting of, oh my gosh, that's awful, you know,
because I don't know if this is actually true, and
I don't know if it's been true for a longer
period of time than just what last Friday.
Speaker 2: It's difficult to believe. Now, Listen, I think it's plausible
that a person after seventy doesn't get checked for this
sort of thing for various reasons. But here's the thing.
I agree with you. I would consider myself anti conspiratorial,
right right, And I would say that if you don't
look into this and you believe what they say, you
are totally advocating a responsibility as a journalist. I mean,
they have lied to you about everything. Everything that was
supposed to be a conspiracy theory, from Hunter's laptop to
his mental acuity and on and on. It all turned
out to be true. So we don't need to trust
a word that they're saying. We should never really trust
the word that they're saying. We should verify all these things.
We don't get complete medical records from the presence. You
get summaries, and they have their own doctors, and there's
no reason for me to trust them. I don't trust
anyone in government, and I think that's how every journalist
should act. You know, I'm trying to a journalism professor
or anything, but that's how I viewed the job.
Speaker 1: That's how I viewed the job as well, and I
don't think there are enough people that do anymore. And
one of the things that you talked about naming names,
one of the things that struck me was the examples
that I've seen the book. I do not own it,
I've not read it, I do not intend to read it,
but I don't want to give them any any money.
But one of the stories was about this fake town
hall that they set up that Biden could not perform
well enough over the course of ninety minutes or so,
and so they never used any of the video from
the town hall. So okay, well, where are all of
those people, the people that were in that town hall.
They had to have seen how poorly Biden performed, and
nobody ever leaked anything. This makes me rethink all conspiracies Now,
like all of the conspiracy theories that I have dismissed,
now I'm wondering, Okay, maybe maybe a lot of people
can keep a secret, how about you.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's pretty incredible, right, And I thought
about this as well, that we never got any leaks
of any of this stuff. In fact, when Robert Herr
very very politely called him an elderly man with a
poor memory and let him off the hook for something
that the Biden administration was at that moment going out
to Donald Trump on classified document documents, he was completely
smeared across the media, across the White House, not one person.
And then the attorney general, the corrupt attorney general Biden's
was the name, Merrick Garland. Yeah, suppress the people from
hearing the audio of that first track, I think, to
even suppress the transcript. So yeah, I mean it's crazy
everyone was in it because that's what they do for Democrats.
And listen, I've never I've never had a huge problem
with people going aggressively after Donald Trump if they're telling
the truth. The problem for me has always been that
they don't go aggressively against Democrats. That's the that's the
real problem. I think with journalists, and yeah, I think
this is obviously maybe the best example that's ever existed
of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you write in this piece at the Washington Examiner headline,
the Biden cover up is one of the greatest scandals
in history. You say, yet not one person in the
White House thought it was important enough to blow the whistle.
And this really is the problem, right, Like somebody is
using the auto pen, somebody is signing this stuff on
which policies or executive orders, what bills? What was Joe
Biden actually signing? What was he competent enough to sign?
And if he wasn't doing it, then who was? And
it means you have all these people around the president
that did not think anything of doing this kind of activity,
and that's shocking to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they care about power more than their country. I mean,
that's the truth of it. And I know there's a
lot of partisanship out there and everyone protects their own
and all of that, but there comes a time where
it becomes something so corrupt that it's mind boggling that
no one would would blow the whistle. I mean, think
about those pardons. There are retroactive ten year blanket pardons
for a bunch of people in his family, a bunch
of his political allies. Maybe they came up with their
own pardons. We don't even know. I mean, there's not
gonna be any way to sit in that cause you
could never really prove those things. I don't even know
how you go about it. But that is corruption on
an incredible scale. And I think we're just a newer
to it because there's so much of it goes on.
But you know, this makes I hate saying these words,
but it's so much worse than Watergate. It's not even funny,
you know, right. I hate the people always say that,
but it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think right now what we are
seeing is this effort to just move on. Okay, everybody,
do your maya culpis now, get them all in and then,
you know, launder the reputation and we're just going to
proceed right now. We're really going to hold you know,
the president accountable, truth to power because it's the Orange Man,
and I think people see through it, and the media
gets everything that they deserve on this one. David, I
appreciate your time as always. David Harsani is the senior
writer over at The Washington Examiner and you can read
the latest piece. The Biden cover up is one of
the greatest scandals in history. Thanks David, I appreciate it.
Good to talk with you again.
Speaker 2: You too, anytime. All right, take care. That's David Harsani.
All right.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
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only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News
as they make the media lands gate more transparent. A
great point that David Arsania made in this uh. In
this piece at the Washington Examiner, if Joe Biden had
skipped the presidential debate with Donald Trump, which he was
urged to do by many Democrats, they said, Oh, it's
because you know, you shouldn't be platforming a convicted felon.
Donald Trump is so terrible, you shouldn't be on a
stage with him in all of this. But Biden had
you know, they'd come out and issued this challenge, is
not even fit to care my golf clubs or whatever,
like they had. They had laid down the gauntlet. Trump
immediately agreed, and so it was on Nancy Pelosi urged
him not to do the debate. Why would they urge
him not to do the debate? Was it for the
cover story reason? I'm not buying that. I think they
were urging him not to do the debate because they
knew the problems that he had.
Speaker 2: Had.
Speaker 1: He skipped that debate, right, he would have run again.
I mean, think about that. We would not have seen
what we saw the night of the debate. They no
doubt would have done the cover up throughout the next
election campaign cycle, and had he won, they would have
continued it into his second term. Right, this would not
have stopped but for that fateful debate performance and really
his agreement to do it, because remember they were like, oh,
he did the State of the Union speech and he
was so awesome and all of that, high on their
own supply. Get this now, this was Alex Thompson appearing
on News Nation the other day. I think when you
were reporting this, did people in his inner circle? Did
those that you talked to acknowledge that the media where
they suppor by how complicit the media was.
Speaker 2: It was interesting.
Speaker 3: I had one conversation with someone, this was after the election,
while we were reporting this book, and this person said, listen, yes,
we deserve.
Speaker 2: Blame for X y Z.
Speaker 3: We were hiding him, we were, But this person also
sort of got on my face and they said, listen,
the media deserves some blame too. Like we were sort
of amazed at some of the stuff we were able
to spin went on, They in some way like the
bank Robert complaining safe, wasn't they're just like you guys,
You guys should not have believed us so easily. And
I thought that was like a really interesting But I
also think that's true. I think I think the media
in a lot of ways just was not skeptical enough
and did not remember the lesson that they do it
to different degrees.
Speaker 2: But every White House lies.
Speaker 1: Right, Every White House lies. That is true. By the way,
every White House lies. They all are doing stuff that
they don't want people to know about. It's government, okay,
no matter who's in office. If you think that the
Trump administration that people aren't lying in that White House,
you're crazy. Of course they are. And again, this was
my argument in the last election campaign cycle, where I said,
for the first time in my adult life, I will
vote for a major party candidate for president. I had
always used that race as a protest vote, and I
had never voted for a Democrat or Republican. And I
voted for Trump precisely because of this, that the media
is unable or unwilling to hold Democrat presidents accountable. They
do not have skepticism for Democrats in that White House
or anywhere really, but they do not have this level
of skepticism, and the Biden people basically mocking them. We
couldn't believe how stupid you are, Like, that's what they said.
I can't believe we got away with this stuff. We
said these really stupid things to you guys, and you
were like, oh okay. Meanwhile, As Reclined, New York Times
columnist claimed during a podcast that mainstream media outlets could
not get sources to verify whether President Joe Biden's health
was in decline during his presidency. He defended the press,
saying sources reluctance to speak out prevented coverage. Quote, there
are a lot of failures in this book, and certainly
the news media. It's hard to argue that we were
on top of this, Jake Tapper said, and as Recline replied,
it was harder to get people to say anything, and
it's hard to get I mean, you need evidence for stories,
but we're trying to crack this. Oh that's what it was.
Speaker 2: They were.
Speaker 1: Oh they were so close. They just couldn't get it
verified that Joe Biden wandered off while on camera, right.
They I just couldn't get that verified. I mean I
saw it happen, but nobody in the White House would
tell me, Yes, that did happen, and so I just
can't do the story. It's man so difficult. News Nation
host Chris Cuomo of All People said that the book itself,
Original Sin, is a cover up of the media's political
bias in favor of Biden over Trump. He said the
former president's decline was clear, and the media's reluctance to
report on it was not due to ignorance but its
desire for Biden to beat Trump. And he's exactly right.
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I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Charlotte City
Council member that just got indicted. Gary says Pete. I
am thinking that Jake Tapper or Alex Thompson. They said
something in that Megan Kelly interview that the mainstream media
viewed Trump as such an existential threat to democracy that
they didn't want to question any of this stuff. About
Biden that one of Biden's top people said he had
to run because he's the only one that could beat Trump. Yeah,
they did say that. They talked about how they had
the Biden world had created this, this image or this
narrative in their own minds that only Joe Biden saved
America from Trump and only Joe could do it. Again,
we should view Trump's media coverage through the same lens.
What they what they won't or what won't they do
against Donald Trump? Right, they viewed him, they viewed the media.
So many in the media viewed Donald Trump as this
existential threat that anything is excusable. Right when and I've
been saying this for years, as long as they've been
calling Trump Hitler worse than Hitler. Like, if you're calling
somebody that, then it opens the door for any amount
of actions, illegal or legal that you can mount because
you're trying to save America from Hitler. Right, This was
the whole problem with the punch a Nazi thing that
the leftists were doing. Right, and a Nazi is defined
as anybody that disagrees with me as a leftist. Let
me see here, I have some emails, Philip says, subject
zombie Joe. On top of all the confirmation of Joe
Biden's mental decline is the fact that for the debate,
he had been given the questions in advance.
Speaker 2: Was he.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was true. Little wonder that Clooney, Pelosi,
Obama at al. Went mollistic over Biden's performance, like how
do you mess it up when you practiced and rehearsed
the script? So yeah, I don't know if that was true.
He did get questions and answers before his press conferences,
the like two that he held in the entire term.
And by the way, nobody in the media in this
moment of reckoning, nobody has has copped to that yet.
There aren't any reporters out there saying, yeah, I submitted
my question ahead of time so I would be able
to ask the question and be on TV at this
press conference. And look how important I am. You know,
we have the still shots from over the shoulder where
you can see he's got the card with the reporter's name,
their outlet, a picture of the reporter and the question
and then his answer. He had note cards about it,
and he would talk about it. Give me the list
of people to call on here. I don't want to
get in trouble. Right, Bill says, did you notice the
obvious absence of those two prolific yet magic words and
Jake Tapper's reporting on the robust Joe Biden quote without evidence?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: They throw that without evidence all the time into news
stories about Donald Trump. Donald Trump said without evidence, blah
blah blah, and they never say it. They never do
that with Joe Biden. This is why nobody believes the
purpose of this book is to find out what really happened. No,
it's reputational laundering. Rich says, Pete enjoy the show. Tapper's
claim that he did not know only leaves two conclusions.
Either he is stupid and lazy, or he is a liar. Well, now, Rich,
he could be both. I don't think that's I don't
think it's an either, or he could be all of
the above. Tim says, I'm now calling Tapper joke Tapper
or Jake the fake fake. Jake Tapper heard that his
credibility is all shot, as if he had any to
start with. Here's one from DG who says the only
way Jake Tapper would have been able to redeem himself
would be to expose with evidence and names of who
was actually running things on a daily basis, who made
each major decision in the Biden White House, and who
should be held accountable by facing charges. We know that
people involved know the answer, and a real reporter would
find out. He will never do that because he is
still a Democrat Party shill and his book is just
an attempt to cover up that fact. That's too long,
I can't read it. I agree one hundred percent that
the Biden cover up of his mental state was by
far the biggest cover up. Ever, I have to add
that the second biggest cover up, simultaneously occurred and perpetuated
by the same pool of liars, was that the border
was always secure. Combined, we get a two or one
on the worst cover ups, should get some sort of
special award at GITMO. Well, you know, I just I
roll it all together, right, It's just it's just amazing
and to watch it be perpetuated, and as David Harsani
said at the beginning of the hour, that you know,
where are the book deals for the conservative reporters that
were actually covering this. Peter Deucey didn't get a he
didn't get a book deal, and Deucey was asking these
questions for the entire term. He didn't get a book deal.
Nobody that's written about this stuff has gotten a book deal.
Jake Tapper gets the book deal. And even if a
conservative writer had gotten a book deal and published a book,
none of these media outlets would be putting that writer
on their show. They would not be giving any oxygen
to that story or the book. We all know this,
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Alrighty so. Charlotte City Council Member Juanna Brown and her
two daughters adults, were indicted today on federal charges for
allegedly defrauding COVID nineteen relief programs to obtain more than
one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars in pandemic aid.
Story by Nate Morabito at WCNC dot Com WCNC Television.
According to a release provided by the DOJ, Councilwoman Brown
and her two daughters are charged with conspiracy to commit
wire fraud and wirefraud. So they did not just conspire
to do it, but they did it as well. I
mean according to a grand jury. And a grand jury.
You know, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich in a
grand jury setting because the defense is not present, right,
they call in the grand jury, they present them with
this evidence, and then the grand jury says, yeah, we
think there's enough to prosecute them with. And so that's
what has happened. She has held a news conference where
she said she didn't do anything wrong except maybe she
didn't like look at the documents, the applications or whatever
closely enough, but I don't know. The evidence looks pretty bad.
You've got multiple applications being filed within like well two
of them were filed within minutes of each other. Identical
gross revenue numbers were used, and yeah, yeah filing with
was it to schedule see tax documents that actually were
not real. Brown's released a statement this morning saying the
alleged events happened years ago. Yes, during the pandemic. I
remember I was alive during that pandemic. I survived the pandemic,
So yes, I remember that. It was only like it
was only five years ago, four five years ago. So
she says it has nothing to do with her time
on city council because she was only elected this past election,
so two years ago, a year and a half ago,
and she is running for reelection. She says this is
a deliberate effort to interfere with her reelection, which no,
it would. It would be a deliberate attempt to prosecute
you for crimes that the federal government believes you committed
in trying to defraud us taxpayers, right to the tune
of like one hundred and twenty something thousand dollars. She
says that she had repaid like twenty something thousand dollars
and that's all that was her part of it. That's
all she was required to pay back. So she settled
all of this already. But yeah, no, they're like, it's
over one hundred and twenty k. She says that she
is to keep running for reelection, but we'll see what
happens there. We'll see if anybody jumps into a primary
against her, and if she survives through that primary, then
I guess we'll find out whether the voters of District
III would prefer to have an indicted council member representing them,
And given what I have seen over the recent history
of Charlotte, the answer might very well be yes. She
called it a deliberate effort to interfere with the election.
Brown served four years in federal prison for a felony
fraud conviction. Back in the nineteen nineties. It's never the
ones you suspect. You know, who could have predicted that
somebody who went to federal prison for fraud for four
years might engage in fraud at some other point in
the future. Yeah, it's a it's just a shock. The
indictment claims the group filed at least fifteen fraudulent loan
applications between April twenty twenty and September twenty twenty one,
using fake tax forms and false documentation. I think the
kids call those receipts. Federal prosecutors say the money was
used for personal spending, including fifteen thousand dollars for a
birthday party for herself. I don't even know how you
spend fifteen thousand dollars on a birthday party. Luckily they
outline how that happened. She apparently rented like a horse
and carriage, a throne. Yeah, thirty five hundred dollars for
the venue, five grand on catering, twenty three one hundred
dollars on balloons, a rose wall, a throne, and a
strong carriage Like this is you know what? This reminds
me of the Loomis Fargo heist. Happened right around the
corner the we had the Loomis shop or whatever right
around the corner from the station here, like I could
see it from the studio window. And yeah, they stole
all of this money from the from the armored vehicle.
They had a man on the inside. They stole all
of the money and then they just started spending it
over there in Cramerton, right, They started just spending it.
They bought all sorts of crazy stuff, buying cash, using
cash for cars and mansions and stuff. And it was
kind of a dead giveaway that they had come into
a lot of money. Like I said, it's never the
ones you suspect. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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