The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

On this week’s show, Peter and Eric discuss the recent prisoner swap of basketball player Brittney Griner for a Russian arms dealer known as “The Merchant of Death.” Is a former Olympic medal-winner and LGBTQ activist worth unleashing one of Russia’s most notorious weapons purchasers? And when American citizens choose to travel to dangerous parts of the world and get in trouble overseas, do they have a right to expect help from America?

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Peter and Eric draw a parallel between stories you wouldn’t ordinarily put together: Hunter Biden’s laptop and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s doubletalk. Connections await on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. The online world is abuzz over journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter revelations. Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, turned over thousands of internal documents to Taibbi to show what happened at the social media giant in 2020 when Twitter took extraordinary steps to censor any mention or links to the New York Post’s devastating expose on the contents of an abandoned laptop computer previously belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

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As the nation awakes from its turkey-induced tryptophan coma, Americans remain a thankful and forgiving people. The mood and the time are right to forgive those bad decisions – but on the most recent Drill Down episode, Peter and Eric reflect on what went wrong in America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the first step to granting forgiveness.

Take Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for example. In February of 2020, early in the outbreak, he first urged people not to mask unless they had symptoms. Two months later, he reversed himself and issued general masking orders regardless of any symptoms. Why?

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“A massive crash and burn.” That is how Peter Schweizer describes the collapse of crypto-currency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his ill-fated company, FTX. The company has filed for bankruptcy, and reports indicate it owes its fifty largest creditors $3.1 billion dollars. Quite a cautionary business story. But here on The Drill Down, we explore the political side of this story – the corruption and “regulatory capture” that allowed Sam Bankman-Fried to create such a house of cards. In the latest episode of the podcast, Peter and co-host Eric Eggers dig in on the Washington side of this.

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Former congressman Jason Chaffetz joins Peter and Eric to talk about what might happen next year if Republicans take over the House of Representatives. Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which investigates what the executive branch does with the money Congress appropriates. And if the GOP takes over control of the House, as most observers expect, offers a sneak peek of what House Republicans might do with control of that committee. It will all come down to what insider’s call the “rules package.”

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Doesn’t the Department of Homeland Security have better things to do than police lies posted by users of Twitter? After 9/11, DHS was created to better coordinate America’s defenses against terrorist attacks on the homeland – to promote cooperation among law enforcement agencies and fill in the gaps in domestic security. Yet, today as those threats have receded, the department is in search of a new mission. It has gotten into the business of being “speech police.” On the latest episode of The Drill Down podcast, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers take a look at the Biden administration’s efforts to clamp down on speech they call either “misinformation,” or “disinformation,” or even “malinformation.”

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Last year the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) collected approximately $575 million in dues from their members. How did they spend these funds?

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While American politicians are pushing the Covid vaccine for American children, other countries are warning against it. In Denmark, the government has actually made it impossible for those under 18 to receive a COVID-19 vaccination without a doctor’s recommendation since children are at such a low risk of symptoms. The Swedish government no longer recommends the vaccine for those under 17 years old. Since September 1, the British government has limited COVID-19 vaccination to children under 12 to just those at high risk.

Why the difference?

On the most recent episode, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers explain there are two key motivations guiding this: profits and liability protections.

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Insider trading by members of Congress and senior officials of the executive branch demonstrate the sort of corruption that enrages voters. Co-host Eric Eggers starts this week’s episode of the Drill Down off with a fitting observation: “Behind every powerful and successful woman… is a husband with incredibly well-timed stock trades.”

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As more US states and European countries commit themselves to pushing electric cars, the nagging questions about mining become more pressing. Electric cars need lots of rare-earth minerals. As demand for EVs grows, so does the need to find, mine, and refine these minerals into service. And this leaves a lot of questions, and a lot of room for America’s adversaries to exploit the demand. On the latest episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers talk sense about the problems this creates.

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