our next speaker is becoming a regular at Hillsdale College events kimberly's Drossel is a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal where she writes editorials as well as the weekly Potomac watch column she began her career in the news department at the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal Europe first in Brussels and then in London later in New York she joined the journals editorial page assuming her current position in 2005 a recipient of the 2014 Bradley prize she is I think it's safe to say often a lone voice of reason on the Sunday morning news shows as president Arne mentioned she spent two weeks in residence on the Hillsdale campus in the fall of 2013 as a Pulliam journalism fellow in addition to her top-notch journalism she is the author of the national bestseller the intimidation game how the left is silencing free speech she gave a talk on that subject last year at the college's Kirby Center which we were pleased to publishing and Primus she's been writing a lot lately about the subject of her talk tonight the need to drain the swamp at the swamp in Washington DC that is not here in Florida all I can say is all I can say to that is keep it up we're delighted she is able to be with us once again please welcome Kimberly's Drossel [Applause] good evening Hillsdale we already well first of all I want to thank Tim and dr. Arnn for such a nice introduction I particularly like Larry's Felicity with words when Larry says great with child what he means is that I looked like the USS Enterprise giving a speech in front of Hillsdale that time and it was funny when he mentioned that I remembered he just brought to mind another funny moment because I've actually had a number of children and have been great with child in a number of other situations and one time when my second was due I got invited in to george w bush's White House for an off-the-record press briefing that he was doing with some conservative journalists and I was still 10 days out from delivery but looking pretty large with child and I got sat right next to the president and you could tell he was nervous and he looked at me and he said stressful when you do and I looked at him you know he's a jokester and he deserves to get a little bit of it back sometimes and I just looked at him straight in the eye and I said oh it was a week ago and he asked if the White House doctor was in residence but even better was that Charles Krauthammer was there and he looked across the table and said don't worry I'm a doctor so I always feel so honored when Hillsdale does ask me to speak and it's because while I have not spent an enormous amount of time on campus it is a place that has become very dear to my heart I was asked a few years back to come and be a Pulliam fellow and by John Miller who is the amazing guy who runs the journalism Center there at school and it was two weeks that was absolutely transformative to me because prior to that moment I could never understand why anyone on God's earth would ever choose to educate children I have three of my own I spend most of my time trying to hide from them I don't know why you would do it but being there seeing the institution seeing the quality of the staff seeing the extraordinary level of the curriculum and most of all seeing the students it was awe-inspiring to me and within a week I had totally thrown John Miller under the bus I was sideling up to Larry telling him why he needed to fire his current journalism director and keep me there luckily Larry with all of his writing about Churchill and World War 2 he's very wise to the dark arts of saboteurs so Hillsdale was saved from that but this is a way of saying that all of you who either work for the school or support the school you are doing God's work training the next generation and I applaud all of you [Applause] when I saw what Hillsdale actually wanted me to speak about tonight that one sentence political corruption this won't be drained I did have a brief internal giggle and thought that I could make this a very short evening come up here with the one-word answer that everyone is expecting and then head straight to cocktails but one of the problems of course with being a conservative is that you are a born optimist and that it is our job to solve problems and so the answer is yes the swamp can be drained but I think what everyone needs to understand is that this is not something that's going to be a small or inconsequential endeavor it's going to take a long time and to do it we first have to define what we mean by the swamp and what we mean by corruption because I think one of the problems that we have these days is that the definition of that has been defined by two extremes on one side we have a group of people that still have a dictionary definition of public corruption and when we think of it in that terms we tend to think of fraud usually perpetrated for some sort of self benefit either for power or for money and well I wouldn't say that that things those things don't happen anymore these days they're pretty rare only in that we've actually come up with a lot of laws anti-bribery laws and campaign finance laws transparency laws that are designed to guard against such obvious things like the teapot dome stamp scandal or Tammany Hall or even some of the excesses of the Nixon administration that is unless your name is Hillary Clinton but that's an entirely different speech and then on the other end we tend to have people mostly commentators whose definition of corruption is anything that they don't like in politics whatsoever which of course isn't really the way the world really works they're going to be things in politics that none of us like and so that's not really a fair definition of corruption either but I think we do need to talk about it because what we're seeing in DC is a new type of everyday and pernicious corruption and it comes in my mind from as many things do the new partisan environment that we live in and DC in which all that matters to people is that they win and so all of the norms all of the rules all the regulations all of the things that you think ought to have applied to you they don't think apply to them anymore all that matters is coming out on top and that's the kind of corruption that now pervades Washington on a regular basis it's what I call regular corruption and nowhere did this corruption flourish more than in the past administration which infused the federal government with a whole new level of partisanship and moreover managed to make a whole tens of thousands of career bureaucrats who we know from polls that we've done in surveys we've done tend to share the ideological inclinations of the past administration brought them along with it and we did have a new level of everyday corruption so let's go through what actually counts is that in my mind one of the most common forms of corruption we have seen especially over the past eight years as blatant regulatory excess and I'm not talking here about rules with which we disagree the executive branch is charged with significant powers of interpreting laws coming up with regulations many of which people on the conservative side or the liberal side might not always support but if they're done within the general outlines of the law it's something you live with it's a consequence of an election what I'm talking about here are rule that the people who put out outright new contravened federal law outright had admitted that they did not have the power to put together and nonetheless went ahead forward with it to me in my mind knowingly breaking the law is a form of corruption when Barack Obama ran for the presidency in 2008 he put out a list of the top things he wanted to accomplish legislatively and on those lists was a carbon cap and trade program and he acknowledged that to do this he would need to put it through Congress and they tried in 2009 Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey actually passed a bill through the house that would have done that it never made it through the Senate and it never had a chance of making it through the Senate I wrote about carbon policy for a long time there were never more than maybe 40 or 42 votes to ever get something like this through the Senate and yet rather than admit defeat the president turned to his EPA and instructed them to create the exact same program that he was trying to put through legislatively they knew that they didn't have the authority to do so and by the way to show how little authority they did do to have that it wasn't within a few months of it being passed that the courts had already halted it and ultimately the Supreme Court put a stop on it Supreme Court was actually pretty busy during the Obama administration it overruled him on major portions of Obamacare it overruled among key portions of his immigration policy it overruled him on search and seizure rules on the first amendment on public corruption cases some of you may know the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro he's a scholar there in an article in 2016 he noted that the Obama administration had lost more times in front of the Supreme Court than any other modern president by 2016 he had a collective win rate in from the Supreme Court of 45% now some of you might think well you know you win one you lose one but that's the standard we hold for personal injury lawyers okay the President of the United States we hold them to a higher level it is after all their duty they put their hand up and promise to faithfully execute the office of the presidency which includes faithfully executing our laws Ronald Reagan Reagan's win rate was 75 percent George HW Bush's was 70 george w bush's was 60 percent and by the way that was only because he was stuck by tradition having to defend some of the things that the Clinton administration had stuck him with at the end of their term which by the way their final term was a win rate of 35 percent in front of the Supreme Court now at least some of the things that the Supreme Court were overruling were just regulatory actions there the other form of corruption another form of corruption in Washington that we all have to be on guard against which is of course executive orders and again the White House has vast discretion to put these out and as long as they are within the general contours of the law they should stand but what I'm talking about here again are executive orders that obviously blatantly cut across established law right now this country is having a debate Washington did over the last few weeks over the status of dreamers this came about because the President Obama decided to put forward his daca program which suspended the law for this entire category of people 1.8 million people at least he had already come out at least two occasions and said that he didn't have the authority to do this that he needed Congress to move in order to make it happen and yet nonetheless when Congress didn't move he issued an executive order and that's just the beginning of some of the executive orders here's one of my favorite ones and again it gives you a sense of what we're talking about in terms of corruption at the highest levels in January 2012 the Senate was taking a three-day break between sessions they were not recess President Obama nonetheless unilaterally declared that a separate branch of government was in recess and used that period to appoint three individuals to the National Labor relation board these were people that the unions had wanted him to appoint they had been as biggest supporters during the campaign and in keeping as I said with the win at any cost mentality he decided that he would intervene on a separate branch of government and declare when they were in and out of recess he was sued ultimately and in 2014 the Supreme Court on a nine zero decision called null canning unanimously by the way he lost even his own Supreme Court appointees overruled him in a scathing decision the essence of which was essentially you knew better than to do this what are you thinking and I think that's the point it's one thing for scholars for academics to have a debate about fuzzy points of the law it's an entirely different thing for an administration to abduct the mindset that you're gonna put forward executive orders that you know are illegal and then wait for the Supreme Court to police you because that was one of the great innovations of the Obama administration is that they understood that you could go ahead and do these things and it would take a long time for anyone to catch up with you there's no immediate remedy when a president issues an executive order that's patently illegal when his administration issues regulations that are patently illegal you have to wait for the courts to catch up and by the way even when they do catch up you've already accomplished your goal and I think that's a really good example the one I just told you about the National Labor Relations Board it was three years later when the Supreme Court finally ruled again unanimously that the President had incontrovertibly and unconstitutionally appointed people to an agency and even though the court was willing at that time to come out and stop and say that had to be removed it did not prove willing to reverse any of the thousands of decisions that that unconstitutional board had issued in the three years before it took for the Supreme Court to catch up with it and again I call that a form of corruption here's another common form of corruption you see in Washington these days regulators who abuse their authority and who abuse the law to inflict punitive measures on political rivals that same NLRB that I was talking about for a while had an acting general counsel named lief Solomon again never confirmed by the Senate he couldn't get enough votes but he managed to run the joint for an entire year and at one point Boeing some of you may remember this intended to move in a major part of its manufacturing facilities from it's very unionized regulated state down to South Carolina which was a right-to-work state leave Salomon penned an opinion all on his own that it invented out of whole cloth a theory saying that somehow it was illegal for Boeing to start a factory in a different state think about how you come up with that but he managed to do it I remembered on McGann some of you may recognize the name he's currently the general counsel to the Trump administration telling me about his own time as a federal election commissioner and he said he watched this year after year he watched the career staff there whose job it is to make the first evaluation on any complaints that came in about political campaigning and then decide whether or not to move those complaints on to the commissioner sit for months and develop novel legal theories about how they could bring down Republican groups even though Democratic groups who've been accused of the same thing we're led off these are the kind of disparity in the way law is applied in Washington that happened routinely we have a Justice Department speaking of corruption that became ace at actually going after other politicians on public corruption charges the prosecutors who brought suit against former Alaska senator had Stevens and by the way a suit that cost him his 2008 election and handed Democrats a filibuster-proof majority that they then used to pass Obamacare and other things like the stimulus they were abound later to have engaged in quote reckless professional misconduct for actions that included withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense the Supreme Court recently overturned the Justice Department's conviction against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell noting it that if the Justice Department have been allowed to get away with a standard that it used to convict him of corruption that pretty much every politician in the United States would be subject to such charges a US District Court Judge and this is one of my favorite I've gotta love this two years ago ordered more than 1,000 attorneys and I'm not making that up 1,000 in the Justice Department's Civil Division to undergo remedial ethics training and it came after members of that division were found to have deliberately misled the judge about the president's policies deliberately that isn't a mistake its corruption and of course we have the IRS targeting scandal in which career officials at the prodding of Democrats and the President of the United States targeted and attacked hundreds of conservative nonprofit groups representing tens of thousands of Americans they sent them harassing letters they frightened them into thinking that they could be sent to jail they refused to grant them their constitutional right to operate and speak not just in the 2010 midterm elections but in the 2012 presidential elections we know from emails and congressional investigations that Lois Lerner who headed up this effort knew exactly what she was doing knew it likely violated the law knew we know from those emails too that she was a virulent partisan in line with many of the policies that were being presented by the administration who hated conservatives and their growing influence intellect and she knew too that she had to hide all of this from the public and despite knowing all of this by the way not one single person has yet to be held account in that targeting scandal Lois Lerner retired with full retirement benefits from the federal government and that brings me to talk what I think now is the most nefarious form of everyday corruption that we see and we're seeing it happen right now even with a change of administration and that is the nonstop effort to shield government officials from any accountability and to enable and continue to enable all the behavior that I just described you go back and look through the past year eight years we had a fast and furious gun walking scandal that by most estimates has cost hundreds of Mexicans their lives potentially at least one American border agent it took years to get the bottom of it because the Department of Justice refused to hand over its documents and to be clear there was no question that this was a case of government dereliction a finer Inspector General report ultimately were Mehcad recommended that no less than 14 individuals be subject to discipline and yet Attorney General Eric Holder was so determined to make sure that nobody found out about this that he ended up becoming the first cabinet official in the history of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress we had a veteran's of fair administration that sat for years on the news of waiting lists and of people dying only after the news broke did we find out how long this had been going on and to what links the department had gone hide it from congressional overseers if you want to know why miss Lerner has never been held to account I'll give you one reason in 2014 the Congress the House passed a resolution of contempt against her for lying to them and they sent it over the Justice Department which under the statute and it is very clearly written shall refer it to a US Attorney who then shall bring it in front of a grand jury it was duly sent to a US attorney for the District of Columbia a man named Machin who was an Obama appointment point II he sat on it for 11 months and on the day he resigned he sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner saying that he was refusing to take any action the exact same thing happened when the house sent their contempt resolution to the Justice Department against Eric Holder no action was ever taken we have a former Secretary of State who set up a private server and she knew it was against the rules in order to shield any of her communications while she was in office from the public and she then deleted all of those communications and told us to just trust her that she would retained all it mattered we know the inner drive to keep secret the way she had intersected her foundation work whether government works she allowed classified information to flow over those unsecured lines and yet we also know from recent text messages have come out that the investigation in her was absolutely politically tainted we have FBI agents pointing out to each other that the FBI ought to be careful not to put too many people on her case because they wouldn't want to offend the future President of the United States of America and of course we have the most worrying situation of all which is an FBI department that looks to have been used as a pawn for a political campaign this is an FBI that for months defied congressional subpoenas in order to keep quiet any of the information into its probe the House Intelligence Committee sent it a subpoena a duly sworn subpoena all the way back in August it was January before it responded to it and only then because both House Intelligence Committee devan newness and speaker Paul Ryan had said that FBI director Christopher Rea and Deputy Attorney General rod Rosenstein would be held in personal contempt if they didn't finally hand over the goods everyone should understand what's happened here the media Democrats have done a very good job of muddying the waters on this issue but what we have here is very very clear we had one presidential campaign gin up opposition research which was funneled to the FBI and then used as an excuse and a justification to spy on a rival presidential campaign and if you don't think that is as scary as it gets in terms of law enforcement and misuse of power it is and there is no wonder that they didn't want all this to come out what we have learned since it did come out is that not only that we had a campaigns opposition research as the basis for a FISA warrant there was a Justice Department employee who was white was working for that opposition research fern the main source behind the opposition research document was a former spy who has now been accused of lying to the FBI and his sources for that document included Clinton political operatives so these are some of the examples of the problem what it is that we're dealing with and what counts as public corruption these days I think the other thing that we have to ask ourselves is what's the environment that has allowed this to happen how did we get to this point that this has become routine and every day I think there's two things in particular and that when they're combined they create this open field for this kind of corruption one and it's one of these things that we all know in our mind but we don't necessarily realize the full implication of and it's simply the size of government now if you go and you talk to the media and they put out their stories they will point out that there hasn't been an enormous shift in the size of government over the last thirty years they point out that back when Reagan was president there was 1.7 million employees and today there are only two million employees now I would like to think that an additional 300,000 people in any environment is significant I'm glad I'm not speaking tonight to 300,000 people by the way slightly different than the size of this room but the important thing here the difficulty of keeping track of just an additional 300,000 people because that's your job when you're trying to look after the swamp and to give you an idea of what these 300,000 people can get up to this is one of my favorite stories of all time from government over the past eight years in 2012 the Department of Justice announced a plea agreement with a guy named John Beale anybody remember this name see I think that's significant that nobody even remembers this because it's so common and happened so often this was a 64 year old guy he had a 23 year career at the Environmental Protection Agency turns out that when he first applied to the EPA in 1989 he claimed to have a career as an assistant in the Senate later turns out that that was entirely fictitious and he'd never worked for government before five years later he came to the EPA as a dual employee saying that in fact he was also a CIA agent and this is why he needed to not show up to work for months at time because he was on secret missions for the CIA okay nobody ever checked up on that for 23 years okay well it was low 13 years between 2000 and 2013 bill was absent from work for a total of 2.5 years on secret Langley missions okay he spent $60,000 on undercover trips that turned out to be visited visits to his relatives in Los Angeles he spent another 18 thousand dollars to get a handicapped spa in Washington for the illness he claimed he contracted while he was serving in Vietnam of course he had no illness and he'd never served in Vietnam here's my favorite part in May of 2011 Beale said he was retiring and the entire department held a big goodbye party for him and then nobody noticed that he was still on the payroll for the next 18 months while he did not show up for work okay these are some of the 300,000 extra additional people you have to keep track of in Washington by the way he was one of the most highly paid at the EPA because he'd worked there for so long and done such good work not showing up for two and a half years on his spy missions that nobody noticed and nobody noticed when he was gone so there's a lot of people to keep track of and a lot of ability for them to do mischief the second part of this is that we also live in an US government the size and scope of which is now unparalleled to anything we've seen in the past I think it's fair to say that we today live and what is increasingly an administrative state there used to be a time when those who are appointed at the top those who were politically accountable actually had a shot at keeping track of everything that their departments are trying to do and holding some people to account but in a day when the EPA is trying to regulate every lawnmower for its carbon emissions and regulate every puddle in the country and when the IRS is responsible for administering 80 thousand pages of federal tax code and when the Health and Human Services Department is running health care for practically everyone in the country the bureaucrats are going to be in charge it's impossible for you to have any oversight and moreover they're in charge of programs and I think this is important that precisely because they are so big and so sweeping they are designed to fail they cannot possibly succeed you cannot have a Veterans Affairs administration that with government-run health care can be expected to take care of the number of veterans that they have promised to take care of and do it well and so of course there are going to be waiting lists and of course because we live in a country that does not accept such things you're gonna have bureaucrats that are lying and cheating and trying to cover it up so in a way we've also allowed government to grow to such a size that we're almost guaranteeing these kind of scandals come down the pike so you take these two things to million federal employees with sweeping discretion over what they can do and limitless programs that are beyond the size of anything we've ever done which are beyond accountability by those in charge and then you add to this what I mentioned at the beginning this partisan approach this when at every cost and you put that attitude at the top of these federal bureaucracies and you let it filter down through the administration and of course you're gonna get all the corruption just listed because they take their cue from the top if Hillary Clinton can set up her own email server why can't every federal employee talk off the grid and by the way they do I have written more about government scandals than I care to admit and one of the central features of every single one is a number of government employees that were hiding their communications from FOIA requests and from transparency which by the way ought to be your first sign that something's going on because if you're not willing to do what you do in the open it's probably because you're doing something wrong we still don't know by the way to this day everything that Lois Lerner did at the IRS and you want to know why because we know from her email records that she went out of her way to conduct almost all of her internal conversations on a special IRS instant messaging system that she went and found out and made sure was not tracked by the federal government there's a great email when she says is any of this recorded someone said no and she said perfect [Music] again if the EPA is going to concoct an entire carbon regulation program outside the legislation why shouldn't every bureaucrat go beyond what's allowed by law that's how you get officials issuing arbitrary regulations and fines that's how you get a thousand Justice Department officials that need remedial ethics training and why you get entire units of the IRS that didn't even blink an eye when they received orders to target thousands of Americans on the basis of their political affiliation just think about that dozens of career IRS officials were involved in this scheme and nobody blew the whistle for four years they all thought it was an okay thing to do so that's your swamp people we've now defined the problem and knowing all that you might think I might have been justified in coming up here and just moving straight to drinks but here's the good news the good news is that I'm not alone and having realized some of these problems out there far from it this is a growing conversation in Washington growing understanding that this is something we have to focus on specific in and of itself that it's not going to fix itself that there needs to be deliberate actions taken to change what's going on there now president Trump's way of summing this up in a kind of Twitter like sentences we need to drain the swamp which is a good overarching theory but we actually have a lot of people around him and in Congress and an outside watchdog groups and in grassroots organizations that have been thinking far more deeply about how you actually go about doing that and we're starting to get some really good proposals I think the quickest way you can do it problem is that it isn't long term the quickest way is you get leaders into the White House and around the president in the White House and in these departments that are absolutely determined to give the swamp less to work with and to reset the rules of the road because by the way the best way you can cut down on this is to have fewer regulations have fewer things that they can cause mischief with and on this specific question with just a few exceptions I give the Trump administration not just an a but in a plus plus plus plus they have been amazing we are currently witnessing the greatest era of deregulation ever hey and I don't make that comparison to Reagan or anyone else it's ever and part of that is because Trump administration had a great amount to work with when it came into office given its predecessors but you may remember in his first State of the Union the president promised that he would eliminate two regulations for any new one that was created by the latest statistics which I just got from the OMB before I showed up here that ratio currently stands at 22 eliminated to one they have already got rid of 68 major regulations which is no small feat and they have a list of 450 that are on the Block in the coming year now some of this has been agency action but some of it and I think Congress deserves its fair share of applause here too via the very aggressive use of something called the Congressional review Act which allows Congress with a simple majority in both houses to overrule regulations that were put into effect in the last six months this Republican Congress to its credit use that authority than credible alacrity to get rid of some of the worst final rulemaking of the Obama era you've also had some incredible folks that have come from the outside that are all about reining in these bureaucracies just last week I wrote a piece about Mick Mulvaney at the Office of Management and Budget who is a rock star the rock star he is in a fight at the moment and this may seem like a little thing but it's actually enormous he's in a fight right now with the Treasury Department to require the IRS for the first time in 40 years to submit its rulemaking to White House review it has never had to do that before and think about how important that is this is an IRS that doesn't like this president isn't exactly huge fans of a Republican Congress that's been beating on it for the last six months and is about to be in charge of implementing the entire Republican tax reform I think a little bit of oversight would be a good thing this is the say mr. Mulvaney another one of my favorite recent stories who's currently acting administrator the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau they're not very happy about that by the way you know but if you haven't followed this fight the woman that his predecessor installed in that job as he was on the way out the door is still pretending that she's the Acting Administrator she's still sending emails out to people just no one's listening to her but she's camped out at a building down the street it really is a bizarre situation anyway the CFPB has these extraordinary powers they're called examination powers where they can go choose any company out there and then go in and look through any of its records and continue fishing through until they find a charge to bring which isn't exactly how most of us think we go about justice mr. Mulvaney is one of his first acts informed the CFPB regulators that before they could go ask a company for all of its records they actually had to develop a theory of wrongdoing this is considered revolutionary in modern Washington you've got Scott Pruett at the EPA he's redirecting his employees to go to the top and most basic obligation of the EPA to clean up Superfund sites the Environmental Protection Agency might actually start to voting its resources to cleaning up the 1,300 Superfund sites across the country significant numbers of which have been on the list for 30 years but they all got put to the side because it was much more important to come up with a carbon agenda I recently had a great conversation with interior secretary Ryan Zinke he told me that when he showed up he found out it had been come a routine at the Interior Department under his predecessors to demand enormous mitigation fees every time a company applied for a basic permit so you want a basic drilling permit it's allowed under federal law and regulation but you go to interior and Terry says we're only going to give you that permit if you give us like a bajillion dollars to do this restoration project over here and I remember Zinke said to me if you have that transactional demand in any other forum outside of government the word we would use for it is extortion and as I'm not going to engage in government extortion that practice is now at an end so all this is encouraging but of course the problem is its administration specific you can reduce these roles you can set these new guidelines but the minute a new administration comes in they can reverse it so of course the most long-lasting thing we can do to change all this is the hardest and that's permanently reducing the size and scope of government legislatively Swallow smaller the swamp the fewer the scandals I can remember very well a congressman calling me up in the wake of the IRS scandal and asking me running by all these potential rules and regulations he said do you think any of this will help and I said you really want to fix this come up with a flat tax because when you have 80,000 IRS employees and they have 74,000 pages of a federal tax code that they have discretion over you are going to have a repeat of this at some point take away their discretion to do it take away the size of government and you take away a lot of the swamp the recent tax form is a good step in that direction dramatically simplifies the codes reduces the subsidies gets rid of the deductions that are all the things that allow the IRS to call up those audits we've been now also passed a Veterans Administration in the reform that's a step toward introducing more market forces into veteran's health care and reducing federal management we've gotten rid of the individual mandate and Obamacare and other small parts of Obamacare that give the state too much control but these are still baby steps we've got a long way to go these other things that people are contemplating legislatively that could also restore some accountability one is legislation that would require far more aggressive transparency among federal officials and real penalties for non-compliance we currently and this is an astonishing idea relay rely on the word of federal employees that they are actually setting forth and sending forth all of their government communications or all of the communications that they do on private devices to their government accounts we know that's not happening we know everyone's hiding things we've got the technology today to allow people to have both a private account and government account on their phone no one should be allowed anymore to conduct a business offline outside of the people's views there's also ideas to move certain bureaucratic decision-making back under the control of accountable officials why on earth was the IRS ever in charge of deciding what was politically acceptable among nonprofit groups we have a body called the Federal Election Commission that was specifically set up to do that it's got three Republicans three Democrats it takes four votes to move on it and we did that specifically to make sure that there was no political mischief we don't want the IRS or the Securities and Exchange Commission the Federal Communications Commission telling companies nonprofits or broadcasters what they're allowed to do politically we need to make sure that people who are accountable are taking there again but to me the most exciting part of the swamp training project that's going on is something that has gotten almost no attention but I think in the long term is going to be the most important if you go out right now there's been a lot of attention the White House has got for its judicial pics and they deserve it because these are very good pics but when you look all of these pics have two things in common it hasn't got much attention one is that they rock star juris but the other is that they are every single one of them experts in administrative law because there's been an entire generation of judges that have come up and they have understood the threat from over-regulation from the abuse of executive orders all the things that I have mentioned so when you look at Neal Gorsuch the Supreme Court Steve grats on the 8th circuit done will it on the per the piste circuit this is the most notable aspect of them judge Gorsuch one of the most remarkable things about all of his jurisprudence over all of his years was his outright opposition to what's known as Chevron deference and I know a lot of you out there know what that means the Chevron is a 1984 Supreme Court decision and it holds that judges must defer to agency interpretations of federal law in any case where the law seems ambiguous this is why we have the event straight up state that we have today judge Gorsuch has ruled again and again that this is an abdication of judicial duty and he is right and I think what you're going to begin seeing is in the judiciary that is not going to take a lot of the nonsense that's coming out of the swamp anymore [Applause] so smaller government accountability transparency check some balancing balances there is something very encouraging about knowing that the very mechanisms our founders created to take care of everything else could also drain the swamp our task is to call out the corruption as we see it label it correctly and to think more creatively about how we apply those fixes to make sure we get rid of it in the end thank you so much for your patience tonight and I'm happy to have questions we have some students with microphone [Applause] thank you case you're thinking that I'm a really nice person by the way I went out on my deck last night and took a picture of the water tubes and sent it and my kids and said haha you're not here I think they're coming around with microphones so I'm gonna wait excuse me Tim am I meant to call on people or are they just gonna go web do i okay all right very thank you for that very informative encouraging information you're speaking of basically securing America and there's one issue that you didn't touch on criminal Sharia that is seditious that's something that you must talk about the people in this country do not know about it we have a group that is trying to inform the public and train our law enforcement people about that issue because as you know Mueller purged all the information about the Muslim in the Sharia Investigations that have been going on thank you yeah there has been a lot of talk about this especially in wake of the shooting here in Florida very tragic shooting here in Florida but as we all know Christopher Rae came out and admitted that the FBI failed to pass on tips and this isn't just the first time the FBI has failed to do that there's been other situations not just in terms of mentally ill shooters but terrorist attacks where the FBI looks to have dropped the ball they were alerted to people the tsarnaev brothers for instance up in Boston and did not act on it and I think there are growing questions about whether or not there is a political correctness these days that is influencing the bureau and somehow undermining its ability to do its job so that is something that definitely matters oh I have a very simple question what do you expect from mr. Muller's investigation in the next 6 to 12 months that it will still be here I find it very hard to believe with all of the investigations that are going on in Congress and with all of the leaks that have come out of both his investigation and those congressional probes that if there was anything that suggested any collusion between Donald Trump and Russians we would know about it it also just doesn't make a great deal of sense I always laugh people it's you can't have it both ways especially those on the left you either think the guys the biggest loser in the world that can't even manage to stumble through a campaign but you can't think that and then also think that he's a criminal mastermind that pulled off a Russian collusion thing and no one's found out about it for 18 months like take your pick okay but don't present him as both within the same breath on CNN it's ludicrous so you know will he go down the road of obstruction I think that's the interesting question the fact that he came out on Friday with these indictments of 13 Russians in these groups I think a lot of people are hoping that this was the kind of crescendo of his investigation and that he's gonna wrap things up it would be good for the country if he did so and if we could move on I know there were some Democrats out there and said well you know this indictment did not absolve the Trump administration well go back and read any of the two bajillion indictments that the Justice Department they never absolved someone indictments are about I didn't have need to convict someone the fact that they put the word unwitting in there the fact that rod Rosenstein went out of his way in his press conference to say that it's important to know what wasn't in this allegation that there was no American that has been accused of knowing anything about Russian collusion suggests that there isn't much there there so we can hope that in the coming months he closes it up because we just don't have I think any evidence that the basis of this probe was I mean look in fairness he was given order to look into Russian interference in the election he's now come out with indictments laying out the scheme and how that happened I think we're a long way from collusion or obstruction charges and it would be best for the country if we could move on a question in a comment yes sir question is I really admire tom Fitton what he's doing what Judicial Watch and maybe you would comment on that and then the comment would be you represent the new George Washington of America thank you well I have hair dye tom Fitton does amazing work in Washington and I think the reason everyone yeah he's extraordinary judicial watch is extraordinary and I'll tell you why because he can do things this is amazing he told this to me himself and a lot of people don't appreciate this congressional investigators can because as you can see from the subpoenas that came out that I was describing you can send a subpoena to an agency of government and they can ignore you and until you go and and threaten them with contempt nothing can be done and then you know even then you can hold them in contempt and then what do you do if the Justice Department isn't even going to enforce your contempt citation which it has a habit of not doing or you can believe it or not and I'm an advocate of this it turns out did you know Congress has its own police force and they can jail you we haven't ever done it in the history of the public but I'm all for trying it at least once and so but the great thing about Judicial Watch is it gets to use Freedom of Information Act laws and you put a request in to an agency and if they do not respond to you within a certain amount of time you file a lawsuit and then in court is involved and they can compel the agencies to provide you information so we're in this completely bizarre situation where tom Fitton is more capable of getting information about what the government did then our congressional overseers and that should tell you something about how wrong everything is in d.c these days but he is dogged at any one time they have something like 300 lawsuits on the go and they have individually pulled out more information about the Clinton Foundation Clinton email servers what's been happening with the Trump event ocation the IRS scandal and every other scandal combined than any other organization in Washington and that guy deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom this will be our last question good evening one of the first things President Reagan did during his first term in no offense was to appoint jp2 Grace who organized the Grace Commission in the last book he wrote before he died he said had Congress implemented all 2,000 plus regulations in our recommendations we could have saved four hundred and fifty billion dollars over a five year period my question is isn't that the fastest way to drain the swamp so I think Commission's are good ideas if their recommendations are followed and that's one of the problems look the quickest way to drain the swamp would be for this Congress to pass president Trump's budget which calls for 30 to 40 percent reductions in some of the worst agencies in Washington but they lack the political will to do that and they lack the political will to tackle entitlements to tackle welfare reform and to tackle some of the biggest programs out there that is what gives a swamp their ability to continue growing and causing so many problems so I think there's even faster ways than to do it was a commission my worry about Blue Ribbon panels I think that it's always great to have outside eyes do something like that but the sad reality is is that often their recommendations are not taken on board and do not happen and so much of what we need to have done if we want to fix this from a long-term perspective is legislative and that's gonna require a class of House and senators that is a lot more willing to take chances than we have had and seen in recent years but I think it's a good idea I just would like to see it actually get done thank you all [Applause]
