Sen. Paul Reacts to the Special Counsel News

CLAY: Peter Doocy asked Joe Biden how he could be so reckless as to be saving/storing classified documents in his garage. Here is what that sounded like.

DOOCY: Classified material next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?

BIDEN: Let me, uh… the… (sputters) I’m gonna get a chance to speak on all this, God willing, soon. But as I said earlier this week, people — and, by the way, my Corvette’s in a locked garage. Okay? So it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street, but at any rate —

DOOCY: (unintelligible) in a locked garage?

BIDEN: Yes, as well as my Corvette. But, as I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.

CLAY: Okay. So, Senator Rand Paul, I don’t know if you’d heard that clip yet. I’m sure you’re running around busy. But when you hear that, your reaction is what?

SEN. PAUL: You know, I think I do not like hypocrisy. I don’t like it. The American people don’t like it. They don’t like one standard for one fellow and another for Biden. You know, the Trump derangement syndrome got them all hopped up. They were ready to lynch him and put him in jail and lock him up forever because he “mishandled classified information.” It’ll be interesting to see if we get the same. I’m actually of the opinion that rather than treat them both as if they need to go to prison, I think they need to be both treated the same.

But what we should treat them as is that we’ve got a real problem with over classifying everything. I mean, the menu for the White House, I think, is classified. So, I mean, there’s a lot of problems with everything being classified. Right now, I’m investigating the origins of the covid virus, and there is information — it’s classified — that basically goes a long way towards proving or putting forth the hypothesis that this came from the lab. And yet I’m not allowed to say it because it’s classified. Half of it’s been printed already in books.

But I think we have a problem on our hands of overclassifying things. So I’m not in the position of saying, “Oh, yeah, we need to throw the book at Biden.” We probably need to not throw the book at either one of them and look at the problem of stamping “classified” on everything. The intelligence community, I think, does this because they’re largely protecting their turf, and this isn’t like the secrets to the nuclear bomb. You know, they’re like, “Ohhhh, Trump has top secret!” Well, the thing is, do you think someone in the White House is saying, “Mr. President, this is the technical diagrams of how we make a nuclear weapon — and by the way, here, just keep a copy.

You know, it’s kind of ridiculous. None of it is that and a lot of the information we have to figure out ways to get it to the American public. I’ll give you an example. Recently, the Republican minority put out an unclassified version of a classified document on the origins of the covid virus. Well, they went to painstaking detail to go ahead and tell us what’s in the classified document by calling it a hypothesis. “A hypothesis exists that so-and-so made a virus that was trying to experiment on a vaccine that probably leaked in November of 2019,” and so, really, this is a problem of overclassification. But I think ultimately people are very angry and right to be upset about two standards of justice, and I think people ought to be treated the same whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

BUCK: Senator Paul, do you think that this could affect…? I know I’m asking you to just look into the crystal ball here of politics, and there’s a lot that’s still going to be coming out. But do you think that the appointment of a special counsel today or the announcement of that appointment could affect, will affect, Joe Biden’s decision to run or not run in 2024?

SEN. PAUL: I don’t know if it does, actually. I think the one thing that will be for certain is we’ll spend a ton of money trying to prosecute Trump over classified documents. Now we’re going to spend tens of millions more on Biden, and in the end — because they know they have both of them on this and both of them are guilty of probably not obeying the letter of the law — both will be dismissed. But I predict 10 to $20 million worth of expenditures to the taxpayer. They’ll investigate it and then they’ll say, “Well, gosh, if we convict Biden, we’re going to have to…? If we convict Trump, we have to convict Biden. So let’s not convict either one.”

And really, I think they’ll both be reprimanded. Will it affect the election? I think hypocrisy is never a good thing and it makes him look a little bit like, “Oh, well, yeah, I had ‘em locked up. You know, there were the nuclear secrets, but I had ’em locked up with my Corvette, so they must be okay. No one’s ever stolen my Corvette!” But, you know, when Trump made the same argument that his documents were locked in a secure room, they completely lampooned it, and we’ll se. Do you think any of the nightly comics will be lampooning Biden for saying, “Oh, yeah, the nuclear secrets are locked up with my Corvette. They’re safe.”

CLAY: What do you think about the FBI needing to be called into Mar-a-Lago to conduct a raid? And it appears that essentially Joe Biden and his employees and associates were allowed to conduct their own search over these documents for months, basically. Based on the timeline laid out by Attorney General Merrick Garland. November 2nd was the initial discovery. They made an additional document discovery on December 20th and an additional one on January 11. That’s over two months where the Biden team would have had access to his documents, theoretically, without the FBI involved.

SEN. PAUL: Once again, independents, the American people, they don’t like to see a double standard. And this is why it’s really important that the conservatives who held out initially against Kevin McCarthy did get a committee. There’s going to be a special committee on the weaponization of government. And so when the FBI is able to move forward and, you know, do the perp walk for Roger Stone or for anybody in the Trump world, they all get the perp walk. They arrested, I think, a pro-life protester in front of his seven kids, handcuffed him at 7 in the morning to make sure all his kids would see him walked out to a police car.

You know, this is infuriating. I don’t know if, you know, only having one body of Congress how much we’re going to be able to do, but we need to expose it to sunlight. And then if we can ever get a president again that has any kind of sense of fairness, we need to absolutely take the FBI out of political games. And one of the things I’m proposing in a bill that I’ll be putting forward in the next couple weeks is preventing the FBI from meeting to collude or discuss protected speech. There’s a long history of Supreme Court cases saying what is protected, what isn’t protected.

So the government will say, “Oh, well, don’t you want to stop ISIS from recruiting?” Well, yeah, that’s fine. If you want to talk to Twitter about some guy who you think is ISIS, that’s fine. But you can’t go talk to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. You can’t go to talk to them to say, “Well, the government doesn’t want anybody saying masks don’t work or saying the vaccines aren’t necessary for children.” Those are debatable protected speech, and we absolutely have to get the government out of that.

BUCK: Senator Paul, also today, there’s been the latest Twitter Files released, this one having to do with the Russian bot armies. What has just been your overall takeaway about these Twitter releases? And do you have any thoughts on the latest that the Russian bot armies were exaggerated?

SEN. PAUL: (chuckles) Yeah, I can’t help but think about when everybody said the Russians elected Donald Trump. One of my favorites was one of his lines. He was in, I think, West Virginia and West Virginians like, you know, from the mountain area, a lot like Kentuckyians: Hardworking people that have worked hard in the coal mines. And Trump would say to them, he said, “Are there any Russians here? I’m getting 75% of the vote. Are there any Russians in the audience?” You know, it was crazy to ever think, somehow, he was elected or supported by Russia, you know, getting him elected. But I think the truth helps.

And the fact that Elon Musk is doing this, it’s an extraordinary thing because you rarely get to see behind the veil. And you know, what we saw yesterday with board members of Pfizer, the vaccine maker, actually trying to tamp down anybody who even had questions. This was a former assistant secretary of HHS saying that, you know, look, natural immunity does work and is protective. And Scott Gottlieb, you know, a board member of Pfizer trying to get that censored. So this is a big problem. What we’re awaiting to fix it is for people on the left who used to be champions of the First Amendment to wake up and join the fight.

CLAY: Senator Rand Paul with us right now, breaking down the latest news. But also, I’m sure you read the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve talked a lot about the Twitter Files, but Facebook, Instagram — heck, even WhatsApp — YouTube, the degree of basically censorship that was coming out of the White House is frankly unprecedented and unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I bet you would agree. They seem to be clear unconstitutional violations. What was your reaction to those documents coming out?

SEN. PAUL: I agree. But I think we have to be careful what we think the solution is. So if people think the solution is that we should regulate speech at Twitter or regulate speech at Facebook or YouTube, I’m not there. I think we can regulate government’s interaction with those platforms, but I don’t necessarily want to regulate their speech as much. As the people at YouTube despise me and I despise them, or Facebook for that matter, or any of these other social media networks that take me down or take down my opinions, I don’t want to enforce my ability to say what I want to say on their platform. I will go somewhere else. And I think the big danger is we have to realize that if we open the door for government to regulate Big Tech and the speech on Big Tech , we’re also opening the door to regulate radio and radio waves, right now, probably talk radio is 90% from the right wing. And that’s a great thing because it shows a lot of Americans want to listen to that point of view (crosstalk) —

BUCK: We agree it is a beautiful thing, Senator.

SEN. PAUL: — and I certainly don’t want the government regulating radio content. What’s that?

CLAY: (laughing) Well, and I’m glad you brought that up. (crosstalk)

BUCK: I just said this is you’re right. It’s among the most beautiful things for anyone’s ears, talk radio.

CLAY: It’s why our audience keeps exploding, Senator, and I was just going to mention to your point, I agree with you on the regulation issue. You may recall this because we shared an interview with you on this program. YouTube refused to allow us to share that interview.

SEN. PAUL: (laughing)

CLAY: And I just am still boggled by the idea that — and this is as you are running for reelection — regardless of what people might think about you, why in the world would your opinions not deserve to be as widely distributed as possible to allow people to react to them positively or negatively at the ballot box?

SEN. PAUL: And as I recall, the discussion was over whether masks work, and I was saying adamantly, the cloth masks don’t work.

CLAY: Yep.

SEN. PAUL: In fact, they might encourage you to have risky contacts with people who have covid. If using a cloth mask is helping you. At about three weeks after YouTube took me down and banned us discussing it on your program, then the CNN doctor — who’d been a big fan of Dr. Fauci — she finally said on air that cloth masks are nothing more than facial decoration —

CLAY: Leana Wen.

SEN. PAUL: — and then, all of a sudden, it’s okay. It’s okay to (crosstalk) cloth masks.

BUCK: We just want you, Dr. Paul, to know that the Clay and Buck Show will always be a safe space for science and truth. So you don’t worry about that. We got you here.

SEN. PAUL: We love it. And talk radio is something that is an amazing niche. You meet so many people who work for a living that are in the car all the time — traveling salesman, truckers, UPS drivers, you name it. They’re in the car all day long. These are the real backbone of our country. These are the working people. And they are, by and large, unsympathetic to those who don’t want to work and want to sit on their butt and get money. And if you want to probably meet the people who are least tolerant of those who choose not to work, go anywhere where a bunch of guys have grease on their hands and have big, strong forearms because they work every day, and you’ll find, you know what? Almost no tolerance for these people sitting on their butt not working.

BUCK: Senator Paul, one more for you. The FDA no longer requires drugs to be tested on animals before human trials. Tell us about it. This is a big win.

SEN. PAUL: Yeah, this is a bipartisan bill I did with Senator Booker, Cory Booker from New Jersey. So we have a progressive Democrat, conservative Republican. We came together and we basically changed a law from the 1940s that said you cannot approve any drug for humans unless it’s first tested on animals. And what we did is change it. We didn’t forbid testing on animals. We just said that you don’t have to do it. It’s no longer mandatory. If they can prove safety without doing animal testing, they can. And our hope is over time that this will change because we found that some drugs that are unsafe in animals are actually safe for humans and vice versa.

Some drugs that are unsafe in animals are actually fine for humans, and so really we have the ability to do less of the animal testing. It won’t be forbidden, but we’re hoping there will be less. And there’s a lot of frivolous stuff, too. And, frankly, Dr. Fauci has been the lead in a lot of this. We farm out a lot of this grotesque and gruesome and torturous research to foreign countries. You know, the beagles in Tunisia having their eyelids sewn open and their larynx cut out so the scientists don’t have to hear them whimpering and crying as we, you know, inject sand fleas into their eyes. That kind of stuff is gratuitous and not necessary. Over decades, people became more conscious of this — and actually voluntarily, the cosmetic industry, you know, will advertise “not tested on animals.” And it turned out that there was a huge market of people buying cosmetics who actually prefer to have it not tested on animals.

CLAY: Senator Rand Paul, keep up the good fight. We can’t wait to see what you’re going to be able to do to help get the truth out about covid, Fauci, and more. And also, we want to say hi to your wife, Kelley, who we know is a big fan. Thank you for coming on the show and all you’re doing.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

BUCK: Thank you.