Sen. Mike Lee urges action on US debt: 'If we don't get ahead of this now, it's going to get ahead of us'
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, weighs in on the possibility of the debt ceiling rising again after Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., called for bipartisan talks to cut spending.
SEN MIKE LEE (R-UT) TELLS MARIA BARTIROMO THAT HE WILL REACH OUT TO PFIZER OVER NEW REPORTS THEY MUTATED COVID-19 STRAINS
MARIA BARTIROMO: Real quick, Senator, before you go, you tweeted about Pfizer. We have a comment from Pfizer after that Project Veritas report where they interviewed someone from Pfizer who made the suggestion that they were mutating COVID. Your thoughts on this story? Here's the statement from Pfizer In the ongoing development of the Pfizer biontech COVID 19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research in a limited number of cases where a full virus does not contain any known. We are looking at any known gain of function mutation. Such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. Are you comfortable with this statement from Pfizer? I know you tweeted about this story.
MIKE LEE: I'm about as comfortable and persuaded by that statement as I would be by the statements of the Pinocchio character in in Shrek the third, Shrek three, as some call it, looked at it in that movie, Pinocchio avoids getting in trouble by adding so many caveats to the sentence. You can't really tell what the sentence means anymore if you read that very same statement that you just read and you read it in its entirety, it's very difficult to tell what Phaser is saying. What I don't see Viser saying is we never did gain of function research uncovered anywhere ever, ever in connection with anything. You take away the qualifiers. It becomes a little disturbing, and we need more direct answers than this.
MARIA BARTIROMO: Will you be reaching out to Pfizer?
MIKE LEE: Absolutely.
'OZEMPIC FACE?' DR. SIEGEL WARNS OF POPULAR DIABETES DRUG'S BIZARRE SIDE EFFECT
MARIA BARTIROMO: What do you mean? You're going to have them come in and speak to your committee.
MIKE LEE: So we can either have them come in and speak to any of the committees I serve on or any of the other Senate committees, or if they flake, they can issue a more public statement. They can come and brief all of us. I'll take their answers in whatever form they want to submit them, but they need to be answers, and they need to be simple and accurate.
SEN TED CRUZ (R-TX) DEMANDS ANSWERS ON WHO HAS HAD ACCESS TO BIDEN’S CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
MARIA BARTIROMO: So it's very concerning that we have no idea what these documents are. So I want you to talk to us about what these documents could be. Your you and your colleagues have been asking to get access to these documents. Certainly every member of the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to see these documents. They say enough is enough. But the DNI said no. She just basically said no. And what we have here is a letter to Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, from the lawyers investigating this. And they are telling us that there's 1850 boxes of the documents, enough to fill a tractor trailer and the 415 gigabytes of electronic records. But the University of Delaware will not release who paid, who funded the archival and the maintenance of these documents. Was it communist China?
PENCE SPEAKS OUT FOR FIRST TIME AFTER CLASSIFIED DOCS FOUND IN INDIANA HOME: 'MISTAKES WERE MADE'
SENATOR TED CRUZ: Well, that's certainly a reasonable inference, it seems. Joe Biden certainly when Joe Biden went to pan communist China, paid millions of dollars to fund what he was doing. Communist China, we also know, paid Hunter Biden and the Biden family millions of dollars. And so there's a long history of communist China writing checks. The fact that University of Delaware has tried to keep these documents secret. In fact, it said it's not going to release any of them until two years after Biden leaves public office. I think that's unacceptable. And let me say, the content of these documents. Last week, the administration briefed the Intelligence Committee. And I got to tell you, the members of the Intelligence Committee that I spoke to were really frustrated. Both Republicans and Democrats were ticked off because essentially the administration said, go jump in the lake. We're not going to tell you anything. And that is thoroughly unacceptable. Look, there's a range of classified documents. I've read a lot of classified documents. Some are just general geopolitical observations. The consequences of that are not terribly significant. But there are other classified documents that involve sources and methods that implicate how we gather secret information. And some of the most delicate are those that can endanger the lives of covert operatives. We don't know if any of these documents fall into that category. There's an entirely different level that we need to know, which is whether any of these classified documents that Joe Biden had illegally in multiple locations involve his own family's business activities and potential corruption, whether they involve Burisma and Ukraine, whether they involve communist China and the entities that were paying the Biden family millions of dollars if he, in fact, had classified documents that implicate his own financial well-being. That raises the potential of very serious criminal liability.
HARMEET DHILLON REACTS TO THE OUTCOME OF THE RNC RACE
MARIA BARTIROMO: I mean, you've been talking about this need for new leadership now for the last two months, pretty actively. Walk us through what's most important and where you see the major mistakes within the Republican Party. What's the biggest problem?
RNC'S RONNA MCDANIEL DECLARES 'THIS IS MY LAST TERM AS CHAIR'
HARMEET DHILLON: Right. Well, you know, not to focus on anything personal, just, you know, mechanically, for several years, I feel like we've been behind the eight ball with respect to Democrats. So I'm a Republican election lawyer. And over the last decades, Democrats have downgraded the integrity of our elections and made it much easier for people to vote with ballots that are sent out, like shopping mailers on our side. What we have failed to do is really look at the fact that we're losing. Would that early voting be it mail, boat, voting, absentee voting or voting early in person? And my top campaign plank was that in order for us to win, we must simply mechanically beat the Democrats at hustling the ballots for our voters into the ballot boxes as early as possible. That doesn't mean you ignore election integrity. No, I mean, that's that's my bread and butter of what I do. It means that you've got to do both things and do them very well and mechanically inside the party. I've asked that we set up a separate department of election operations. The party was under a consent decree for several years, for decades, in fact, that prevented us from doing that work. But that expired four years ago. And so now we really need to ramp up and make sure that as we start voting in 2024, that we are able to beat the Democrats at getting our ballots in early. And if we're able to do that, all these other excuses about candidate quality and who endorsed whom and ticket splitting and, you know, whatever excuse you have, it just doesn't matter. When you look at how Democrats were able to elect John Fetterman, Joe Biden, the biggest liar in DC and Katie Hobbs. And so I know we can do it. We have to commit resources and energy and as a policy pull together to do that. Maria.
MARIA BARTIROMO: So you're saying that the Democrats embrace early voting, they push for it, the Republicans don't.
HARMEET DHILLON: Oh, absolutely. I mean, in fact, our activists are a bit upset still about the 2020 election. I'm upset about it. Yeah, but the fact is that it is a fact and a law. And if you are not complying with and in fact, embracing and really beating the Democrats under the existing laws, even as you try to change them, we lose. We've seen it time and again. I've seen it with my own two eyes. In Arizona, 70% of the voters on Election Day there were there were malfunctioning scanners and tabulators vis a vis the machines. They were Republicans. So we're sitting ducks for that kind of.
MIKE POMPEO SLAMS ADAM SCHIFF FOR RUNNING FOR SENATE IN CALIFORNIA
MIKE POMPEO: We have someone who is in the House of Representatives, Adam Schiff, now announcing he's going to run for the United States Senate on Tik Tok, a Chinese propaganda arm, and something a tool, a tech tool that they're using to steal secrets from the United States and our kids. This is crazy. We ought to ban Tik Tok and we should get serious at every dimension that the risk of these classified documents. We need to find out the relationship between Hunter Biden and China and President Biden. All of these things are connected. And it's not about people. This isn't about being punitive. This is about doing the fundamental things that protect the American people.
MARIA BARTIROMO: I mean, we know that Adam Schiff lied for four years, telling us that there was Russia collusion with Trump in plain sight. Now he wants to run for the Senate. Should this guy get another chance in a law making leading position after misleading the American people, dividing the country so much?
DEMOCRATIC DARLINGS SCHIFF AND PORTER KICK OFF AN UGLY, EXPENSIVE FIGHT FOR CALIFORNIA'S SENATE SEAT
MIKE POMPEO: Wow. So, Maria, I served with Adam Schiff in the House of Representatives on the Intelligence Committee, and then I had to deal with him when he was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when I was a CIA director. Right. Adam Schiff lied to the American people. He kept promising there'll be Russian collusion. Just wait. There's documents. There's stuff. I know this because I occupy this special place. I'm a member of the the Gang of Eight. This is the most sensitive classified information. I'm going to share this with. He said that we now know that was all a lie. We know and we know that he knew that it was a lie. It was fundamentally indecent. Speaker McCarthy made the absolute right decision not to permit him to be on the Intelligence Committee. He will protect America. Kevin McCarthy protected America by making that very decision. And I hope the good people of California will be smarter than to send someone who doesn't know how to handle classified information, who lied to America for at least two, two and a half years. Won't send him back to the United States Senate, but rather let him go out and get a different job in life.
MARIA BARTIROMO: Real quick, Secretary, before you go, we're all expecting you to run for the president for 2024. Are you about ready to make that announcement soon?
MIKE POMPEO BLASTS ‘RECKLESS’ ADAM SCHIFF: HE’S ‘ABUSED HIS POSITION’ ON THE INTEL COMMITTEE
MIKE POMPEO: We're in that this morning. But Susan and I are praying, trying to figure our way through that in the in the coming months, we'll make that decision. And if we conclude this is the right thing to present our case, make our arguments about how to protect America and grow our economy, we'll get after it. You'll see us in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina.
TREY GOWDY REACTS TO BIDEN’S JUDICIAL NOMINEE NOT REMEMBERING THE ARTICLES OF THE CONSTITUTION
MARIA BARTIROMO: What are your thoughts on Biden's judicial nominee not remembering Article two or Article five of the Constitution?
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TREY GOWDY: It was hard to watch, to be honest with you. I mean, it's not like memorizing a book like 100 Years of Solitude or in Search of Lost Time. I mean, there are only, what, seven articles? I will say this. I went last night and looked at and I'll give this to Senator Kennedy. He is an equal opportunity questioner. He also was really, really tough on some Republican presidential nominees asking them basic questions like, have you ever tried a case before? I think the bottom line is everyone should want really good judges for you. Just had Mike Lee on. Mike Lee may serve 30 years, but the the judges he picks will serve for life. This is a lifetime job. So it is not too much to ask that you actually familiarize yourself with the document that you're going to be interpreting as a judge.
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