Live from Music Row, Tuesday 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 welcomed Tea Party Patriots Action Honorary Chairman Jenny Beth Martin to the newsmaker line to comment upon the Biden classified documents scandal, a Republican House, and the Tea Party Patriots Action Fund 2023 agenda.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, my very good friend with Tea Party Patriots Action Fund, the Honorary Chairman, Jenny Beth Martin. Good morning Jenny Beth.
Martin: Good morning. It’s so good to be with you, Michael.
Leahy: It’s always great to be with you. And, of course, you and I have known each other since early 2009 when together we were some of the early organizers of the Tea Party movement. That’s been 14 years. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?
Martin: It really has been a long time. And it was about this time of the year when we got to know each other because we first interacted through Top Conservatives on Twitter and then with the Tea Party movement.
Leahy: 14 years later, I have to tell you, I look at the state of the country and you have been toiling tirelessly along with hundreds of thousands of constitutional conservative activists. It looks like we are in greater danger today than we’ve ever been.
In particular, we have, as the President of the United States, been for two years now. I call them the legal but not legitimate Joe Biden. And now we have all of these classified documents that just appeared at the Penn Biden Center and his house.
It looks to me like there’s a cover-up going on, and the Department of Justice is refusing to provide documents to the House Oversight Committee on this. What are your thoughts on the ongoing Hunter Biden-Joe Biden classified documents scandal?
Martin: Of course, there is so much hypocrisy going on because the Biden administration went after President Trump when he had classified documents. Yet a lot of the situation is not legally the same. The President of the United States single-handedly has the power to classify and declassify documents.
The vice president does not have that same power. The fact that classified papers wound up after the presidency was over and the vice presidency was over in the garage, and the center at the University of Pennsylvania for then-former Vice President Biden is quite alarming.
And it wasn’t something that had been known, whereas we knew from President Trump’s documents his attorneys were negotiating with the National Archives about what he could keep versus what needed to be turned back in.
And oftentimes, those papers are kept for the presidential library and for historic purposes. The former vice president now sitting in the White House, didn’t even know he had the papers for six years. And that’s quite alarming that a man who claimed that he cared about classified documents did not even know he had them in his possession.
Leahy: What struck me is this of course, you talk about the alleged cover-up going on with the FBI and the Department of Justice. They’ve had the Hunter Biden laptop in their possession since I think, what, December of 2019.
There was an article at the New York Post a couple of weeks ago by Miranda Devine, a terrific reporter, in which she documented on that laptop a very detailed 22-point email from Hunter Biden to his business partner Devon Archer. I guess this was like about a month before they got the $ 83,000-a-month bereavement deal in Ukraine. It was on Ukraine. I read that.
And what struck me about that email, it doesn’t sound like something that a drug-addicted guy like Hunter Biden was at that time could have written. It looked a lot more like, I don’t know, a classified document on Ukraine that he just happened to be replicating that I found very troubling. Your thoughts?
Martin: Yes, it is very troubling. And the fact that the documents were not where they were supposed to be, we don’t know what kind of security protections were around them. It seems that there were no security protections around them is very, very alarming.
The fact that it is possible, we don’t know for certain one way or the other, that Hunter Biden was financially benefiting from those documents and from that kind of information because of the access he had to his father is very alarming.
It’s actually part of what President Trump was trying to understand when he asked what was going on with Hunter Biden in Ukraine, and that led to the impeachment trial of President Trump. It sure seems like he had every reason to be asking what was going on, trying to understand from a national security perspective if there was a reason to be alarmed or not.
Leahy: You have been one of the founders of the Tea Party Patriots group and the related Tea Party Patriots Action Fund and have been a major player on the national scene since early 2009. What is the agenda of the Tea Party Patriots Action Fund going forward in 2023?
Martin: In 2023, we are working with members in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to work to get spending cuts related and tie those spending cuts to what’s called must-pass legislation like the debt ceiling increase and the beginning of the next fiscal year.
So funding the government from October first of this year all the way through October first of next year. In those spending cuts, we’re looking at things like defunding those 87,000 IRS agents, and ending the COVID emergency, although President Biden has now announced he will end that four months from now.
Why he can’t go ahead and end that today is beyond me. And other types of things that we want to see, such as stopping funding for Critical Race Theory that goes to the public school systems or to colleges around the country looking for pieces that we can defund that will make an impact and improve our country, improve our education system and also help reduce that government spending so we can work towards a balanced budget.
Leahy: You know all the players in the House of Representatives now that the Republicans have a very slim majority. Are you optimistic or pessimistic that under the Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy that Republicans will follow through on this conservative agenda you’ve outlined right now?
Martin: I can tell you that I am optimistic. We’ll see what happens, Michael. But here’s the thing that people may not realize, that I only realized last week or the week before in the rules package change that the 20 people who are voting against McCarthy negotiated in order to make McCarthy speaker changed the House Rules Committee substantially and re-empowered that committee and took power away from the Speaker of the House.
The power that they gave back to the Rules Committee we have not seen since the 1960s in this country. That was before I was born, and I’m in my 50s, so that is a long time ago. And then looking at who he put on that House Rules Committee Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, and Thomas Massey gives me a lot of encouragement that he’s keeping his promises.
So he’s rebuilding the trust that he had lost prior to becoming speaker. And the entire conference, the entire Republican conference is making a good faith effort to keep the deal that they negotiated with one another and to communicate and to try to advance Republican Republican agenda instead of giving the necessary vote to pass Democrat bills.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this 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 “Jenny Beth Martin” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
