Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy and co-host Roger Simon welcomed TN-5 congressional candidate Jeff Beierlein in-studio to talk about going from an unknown to a political candidate and turning America around.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by a good friend, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and my former boss at PJTV, founder of Pajamas Media, and the senior editor at The Epoch Times, Roger Simon, all-star panelist.
Simon: Good morning. And you’re hired again.
Leahy: Thank you, Roger. Also in-studio, in the hot seat, a candidate for the GOP nomination in the 5th Congressional District, West Point graduate, combat veteran, Black Hawk pilot, healthcare executive, Owen Graduate School of Management MBA, Mr. Jeff Beierlein.
Beierlein: Hey, good morning, Michael. How are you?
Leahy: I’m doing great. Thank you for coming into the hot seat.
Beierlein: It’s my pleasure.
Leahy: It’s an invitation we have extended to four candidates, the leading candidates in that race, as we come towards the last two weeks of the campaign.
Jeff, you are the first to show up, and you’ve accepted it. There’s only one other person who has accepted our invitation.
Simon: Who is that?
Leahy: Beth Harwell has accepted our invitation, even though she didn’t accept your invitation.
Simon: I’m very jealous. (Laughter)
Leahy: I know. But we have also invited retired Brigadier General Kurt Winstead because Crom Carmichael wants to have some face-to-face conversations with him, as you hear in his campaign ads, from Kurt Winstead.
They have not confirmed yet, although we’ve talked with his campaign and they said they’ll try to make it happen. We have not heard a word from Andy Ogles, who had spent about a year here before he announced, coming in every Tuesday morning from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.
Simon: I was there with him.
Leahy: But we’ve not heard anything from him in three weeks. And obviously, I will point out that Andy Ogles is the only one of the nine qualified candidates who has failed to file his second-quarter financial report as required by law. And he’s currently a late filer. It was due on Friday, July 15th. Now it’s Thursday. It’s the 6th day that he hasn’t filed.
Simon: Is there a fine?
Leahy: There is a fine. He’s incurred a fine, but it looks like, the concern is he’s not filed any financial statements, and it is highly unusual for a major top-tier candidate not to file a financial …
Simon: It sounds like an embarrassment to me.
Leahy: Well, the speculation is that he hasn’t raised the $433,000 he said he raised back in May. But now you [speaking to Jeff Beierlein] have filed your report. I looked at it.
Beierlein: It’s a requirement.
Leahy: I looked at it. And you raised, this second quarter, you raised $30,000. You spent $50,000. You’ve loaned the campaign $100,000. As of June 30th you had a little less than $80,000 in your bank account.
Beierlein: Sure, we’ll be fine through the end of the campaign. To your question earlier, Roger, yes, there is a fine. It’s about $5,000 for missing the deadline and almost $350 a day.
And I will say the mayor’s campaign is extremely sophisticated. They know what’s going on. They know what the fine would be. And ultimately, I think it’s just a sacrifice in lieu of reporting and the transparency that we espouse as conservatives.
Simon: Interestingly, he’s wasting other people’s money there.
Beierlein: That’s his decision. We’ve got to run our race, but at the end of the day, it is disappointing to many of us.
Leahy: Now, let’s talk about your campaign. You told me, off-air, this has been one of the greatest experiences of your life. Expand on that a little bit.
Beierlein: Absolutely. Just for the fact that a person can serve their country in many ways. And I look at this as just an extension of that. My uniform is different, but the passion is still the same.
But when I look at how far we’ve slid downhill since the Biden administration and what it really inspired me [to do]in just a matter of months, I can go from essentially a nobody on the political stage to being a viable candidate here.
And people have remarked to me, like, they say, you’re so vibrant. You’re so excited about this. And I said, you know why?
Because we have an opportunity to take back our country. And I’m walking the walk instead of just talking the talk like so many.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Jeff Beierlein” by Jeff Beierlein.Â
