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Well, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I'm Jason Chibitz. Thanks for taking part of your day. I think you're really going to enjoy this. I've spent a lot of time working on oversight. And, you know, oversight, what does that really mean? So, you know, when I first ran for Congress, I really thought, gosh, a fiscal discipline is important. You know, I've got to make sure that there's a
limited government and everything we do we need a strong national defense but we need oversight like the founders envisioned that every dollar that you take is coming out of somebody's wallet and given to somebody else and congress authorizes that and then the president spends it and
But how do you do good oversight? And so I started out on this quest and I eventually became the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. And then since I've left Congress, I've been doing a lot of things to –
to perpetuate that quest to really provide the best sunlight, the best disinfectant that I can for how people are spending their money, and that is to do really good oversight. So we're going to have a discussion today about that oversight with somebody who actually used to work with me, a guy named Mike Howell.
Mike is one of those tenacious guys behind the scenes, highly trained, really tenacious in what he does, loves his country, very patriotic. He's working now with the Heritage Foundation. I do work with the Heritage Foundation. I think my title is visiting fellow, so I work with them on this. But we're going to talk to Mike Powell about the weaponization of government and how it's being weaponized today.
against the American people and resulting in an unequal application of justice in this country. And it's just fundamentally totally wrong, and we're going to have that discussion. I want to give some thoughts on the news.
We're going to highlight the stupid. We always do that because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And then we're going to chat with Mike Howell at the Oversight Project there at the Heritage Foundation. And I really think if you care about your government, you care about how your taxpayer dollars are spent, you want to get really frustrated, but also kind of hear, hey, here's what we need to do and things that are happening behind the scenes, then this is going to be a
really good podcast for you. So thank you so much for joining us. All right, let's highlight a few things in the news because, you know, sometimes with all of the court cases and Trump, Trump, Trump, and Biden, Biden, Biden, all that happening all at once in a presidential year, there's some other wordly stories. Now,
To me, one of the fascinating stories, I don't know what you call it out of science, but almost science fiction is the cicadas that are now hatching. First reports I'm seeing of this are in South Carolina. These insects have been in the ground somewhere between 13 and 17 years. And it's coming to fruition and there will be trillions, trillions,
It's hard to imagine how many of these bugs are going to be out there. These insects are going to be out there. Trillions that are going to affect a lot of states. These are going to be swarms of like biblical proportions. It's hard for me to imagine how bad it's going to get here for a little while. The birds are going to go to town because birds like to eat these cicadas. But in terms of a news event affecting millions of people, these trillions of cicadas are
Now, we live out in the Rocky Mountain area. We're not going to get affected by this. Out west, Rocky Mountain's not really going to hit us. But for those of you east of us...
We're really feeling for you. It is a big news story and it's just, it's going to come to fruition and it is going to be unbelievable. We're starting to hear the first stories that somebody had called the police, um, in South Carolina already saying, ah, what am I supposed to do? What's happening? And it's going to happen in mass. And this is going to be absolutely unbelievable. Um,
Again, we're talking about oversight. We're going to get on the phone here with Mike Howell. But if you want to learn more about what the Oversight Project is doing, go to X, go to Oversight PR. Oversight PR.
One of the things you're going to see up there is what's happening in Mexico. They were able to find these flyers and these pushes by an NGO. Now, you're going to hear the word NGO a lot in the news, non-government organization. And let me just tell you that non-government organizations are a big way of how your government gets around
having to open up the books and show people what they're doing. And it works like this. An appropriation will go to, say, Health and Human Services or Homeland Security. Homeland Security will then go contract or give a grant to somebody to do a particular task, whether it's fly somebody who's here illegally to another part of the country or into the country.
or to house people who are, again, here illegally. They'll give these grants by the tens of millions of dollars. And they could be for a host of other things. It's not just for this topic. But I'm just telling you, you could take every department and agency in the federal government. You're probably going to find grants and non-government organizations that are there to help fill the void, to do what the...
2.5 million federal workers can't do themselves. Some of them are very worthy. Some, maybe not. Some highly suspicious. But these NGOs, one of them were caught in Mexico handing out campaign flyers encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden. So, you know, if you think that 10 plus million people are coming here
Across our borders illegally, and none of them are going to vote, none of them are going to vote. Yeah, right. You need to pay attention to that, and it's kind of scary what's happening there. All right, time to bring on the stupid, because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. ♪
All right, we're going to go to Amherst, Massachusetts, which has an inordinate number of stupid going on there. And guess what? They had an event. It was a queer story hour in Amherst, Massachusetts. The drag queen who was leading this with children. Keep in mind, this is children. Now, look, if you're an adult, you want to do something fun.
that maybe I wouldn't do or somebody else would do. I mean, you know, have at it with limits. You know, if you affect other people, that's where it becomes everybody's, you know, that's where it really becomes potentially problematic. But I have a real hard time when you're starting to do this with young children.
where they were encouraging the children there to chant or say, free Palestine. I don't know if it was a song or a chant or whatever, but that's the allegation that I read about in this story hour at an arts center in Amherst, led by a drag queen. Come on, folks. We can do better than that. Leave the kids out of this stuff. That's a bridge too far. ♪
All right, time to bring on Mike Howell. Like I said, doing work with Mike, doing work with Mike now. But let's get Mike Howell on the phone. Well, Mike Howell, thanks so much for joining us on the Jason in the House podcast. I appreciate it. Hey, great to be with you. All right, so like I said earlier, Mike and I have known each other for a while. Got to Congress, joined the Oversight Committee, and then I was
Mike was working on the oversight committee, an attorney by trade. And then when I ascended to become the chairman of the oversight committee, Mike was just awesome. You got staff, then you got other staff, then you get staff who really
knows how to get after it. And you are amazing. And now you're at the Heritage Foundation, headed up the Oversight Project. And I do some work with the Heritage Foundation on the Oversight Project. So, full disclosure, we've done that in the past, but I thought it would be really worthwhile to get Mike
Mike on the line and talk about oversight and all these challenges and problems that we're having because, you know, there's like I said, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. So, Mike, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to talking about it. So it's interesting with the Heritage Foundation because there are a lot of organizations that do some good oversight project oversight work.
I mean, there really are. There's some that have been around a long time. They focus on this. And I think it's the heart of what an open and transparent government is supposed to be doing. You're supposed to be, you know, open and transparent. It's what differentiates the United States of America from everybody else. We are self-critical. We do look at ourselves. We do open up the documents.
Um, but you've got a great philosophy about this, Mike. How do you think our government should be working? How is it working? Why is oversight so important? Absolutely. So let's take it back to absolute first principles of, you know, what makes the United States different from other countries. It was that for the first time in human history, we had a government, you know, accountable to the people selected by the people through a constitutional republic process. And
The founders were wise enough to know that for that to work, that people needed to have information available to them to make wise decisions and to be civically active and informed about their government. That's why the First Amendment was the freedom of the press. The people needed the press to be uninterfered with so they could know what was going on. Similar to that.
The founders envisioned a system in which Congress had a permanent check on the executive branch to demand information and to know what was going on with the affairs and how they were spending the money that Congress had appropriated to them. So all these principles are built in various other ways in our governmental process here.
But they've ultimately broken down in some pretty severe ways. And the way I like to explain this is just think you're looking at a graph. And on the left side, you have a number going all the way from bottom left to top right. That's the size of government over time. It's absolutely exploded, along with the amount of money and programs and just different places government's operating.
Also, think of the same graph running kind of parallel to that, which is the ease of getting information in this information technology kind of renaissance we're living in today. Everybody has a cell phone in their pocket that can tell them anything they want to know at any given point in time. So the most information the government holds is.
the most technological access to that information yet right now i would say you have another line on that graph running exactly opposite to that and that's the people's access to information and so things have broken down it used to be even when you were in congress sir like it was easier to get information out now congress barely gets anything out of the executive branch
The executive branch doesn't affirmatively disclose things. We're all watching these press briefings, too, with Karine Jean-Pierre, and they're a laughingstock of actually their intended purpose of a transmission of information to the free press.
And so all of these traditional vectors that are in there for first principle reasons have broken down at a time where they're needed most. And so after, you know, working on the Hill as a staffer, working in the Trump administration, dealing with oversight, decided that maybe the last best hope to really get information out of the executive branch
is really strategic, high volume, aggressive litigation and investigations from the outside. And so that's kind of the area we're playing in. And we've had a lot of great successes over the year and some change we've been doing it. But
That's ultimately why we're doing it is because people need to know what's going on in order for this whole theory of government to work. And I would argue right now people really don't know what's going on with their government. It's red team, blue team, and you just root for whatever's happening. Yeah, it's really sad. So the Oversight Committee, under different names through the decades and centuries, has changed. It was founded in 1814.
The whole idea is that every government expenditure, there would be congressional oversight and ability to challenge and look at and see how the executive branch is spending that money. And as it's morphed forward, like you said, I think the most rapid change has really occurred in probably the last 10 or 15 years is
where the press has, I think, unabashedly taken political sides. That what you have is a mainstream media, traditional media that just doesn't call balls and strikes like they used to. And there used to be a degree, I think, Mike, of shame. You'd be embarrassed if you didn't cough up certain documents.
that if Congress issued a subpoena, there was no question that you were going to cough up those documents. I mean, the idea that you would just say, thanks for the suggestion, I mean, which is really what it's morphed into. I mean, you would never do that in a traditional court. If a court issued you a subpoena or, you know, you got a subpoena, of course you'd comply for it because if not, you'd go to jail. But
When Congress, and I used to be one as chairman of the Oversight Committee, could issue a subpoena, nothing happens. And the ability to enforce that subpoena is our, my former colleague Trey Gowdy liked to say, your ability to enforce a subpoena, I mean, your validity of your subpoena is only as good as your ability to enforce it. And there is no enforcement mechanism. That's absolutely right. And part of that is because the Congress as an institution hasn't done any self-help in that regard.
Ultimately, they have the power of the purse. You know, they could defund or not fund programs. But we rarely see when we live by omnibus to omnibus, you know, Christmas tree packages, any sort of oversight activity resulting in legislative consequences.
Then also, Congress could enforce their subpoenas if they so chose. In fact, they used to. They used to have a jail in the basement of the Capitol where they could put someone in there for noncompliance. Over the years, the willingness of Congress to use those tools that they do have access to has dwindled. Right now, in a tightly divided Congress,
Ultimately, you need votes to go out and enforce these things. And that's just one step in the enforcement, I might add. To either send it to a judge or to DOJ, you need a vote of Congress and to hold someone in contempt.
And that's a political decision that a speaker has to think about in the context of where his control of the caucus is. And so what should be an institutional prerogative of, hey, the people deserve information. We're Congress. We ask for it. Give it to us. That is filtered through political considerations and a series of case law precedent that's occurred really over the last 20 years that has been harmful to Congress's abilities to actually get things done.
I mean, you were very involved in Fast and Furious and held Attorney General Holder in contempt. And you remember he refused to enforce the contempt citation. And so that kind of really called the bluff of a lot of this. But Congress never really decided, hey, this is our lane. You better play ball.
And if you don't, here's what we're going to do to you. Instead, they've kind of settled in celebrating the process of asking the question. And there's a lot of reasons why that's kind of detrimental. But we spend a lot of our time and energy focusing on like X, Y, Z, send a letter or is asking this question or calling them for a hearing. We're not spending enough time asking ourselves, well, what changed because of it? It wasn't just celebrating the question being asked.
Yeah, let's go back for a second, too, because I want to make sure people fully digest this. The courts and just the public, I think, fully understand that the Constitution is such that the power of the purse is supposed to be one of the levers of
That Congress can use to hold the executive branch accountable. And it's gone through a number of gyrations, but here's, I think, one of the fundamental problems. And I talked about this with Congressman Rob Bishop on a previous podcast earlier.
But I think it's one of the hearts of the problem is that there didn't always used to be an appropriations committee. Now, I would argue that there are of the 22 authorizing committees in the House of Representatives, right? Remember, all spending has to originate in the House.
There are 22 authorizing committees. Of those committees, they'll have, say, natural resources. Okay? Natural resources doesn't oversee energy or energy extraction. That's over in energy and commerce, which I think is wrong. I think energy should be part of natural resources. That seems natural. But we had a vote on that. They didn't switch the jurisdiction. But nevertheless...
The idea is that you would have hearings and accountability for years. And then all of a sudden it would be time to do an appropriations bill. And you have a separate appropriations committee who didn't hear all the testimony, who didn't go through all the oversight. And that appropriations committee will say, yeah, we'll go ahead and fund it. Now, I don't know what the total number is, but I know it's hundreds if not thousands of programs that
are funded each year by the appropriators, or as you said, rightfully so, the continuing resolutions or omnibus for programs that were never authorized. And that's what's crazy is they don't authorize the expenditure, they don't authorize the program, but they go ahead and appropriate it, Mike. That's the problem. They keep getting the money. And we've seen probably the worst example of this happens at the Department of Justice.
That's absolutely correct. And as you're walking through that, what was playing in my mind was about a year ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray went in front of the judiciary and got into an absolutely tense, you know, kind of argument with the Republican side of the dais. And then, of course, a lot of conservatives are rightly frustrated with the weaponization at the bureau right now.
And then a week or so later, he went in front of the Appropriations Committee. And it was the most kumbaya hearing you've ever seen. And so the disconnect is so, so major. And then also, we don't even regularly appropriate anymore. And so this all gets jammed up into a giant package at the end of the day. But I couldn't agree with you more. And you know who else agreed with us was the Republican House when they were coming into this Congress.
One of their major reforms that they promised, and I was excited for this at the time, although I was skeptical, was that they were finally going to break down what was called the firewall between appropriations and oversight, where that's where you get accountability is through the funding consequences. And there was a lot of hoopla about it in the beginning, but it quickly reverted back to business as usual.
Part of the reason for that, when you have this structure, is the swamp doesn't have lobbyists for good government oversight and accountability. There's not a lot of money in that. That's why the oversight committee is known as a C committee in the ABC rankings, which I think is outrageous. I think it's the greatest committee. But no one's going to donate to your reelection campaign.
for good oversight. They're going to donate if you can help out their regulated industry or their interests through appropriations or the authorizations committees. And that's a really backwards way to incentivize a Congress. Yeah, you don't have a lot of lobbyists up there handing out campaign checks and encouraging people and making the case to cut government.
They're out there with their hands out. They want to see an expansion of government or get a particular regulation, maybe from, say, the airline industry or you pick your industry. I don't mean to pick on just the airlines, but you pick on somebody who's
What they want to do is have a tweak or a piece of legislation like an omnibus or a continuing resolution that's thousands of pages long. And they just need a phrase. They just need a sentence or two to be inserted in there and not give any time. And this is why we see literally 2,000 page bills, multi-trillions of dollars, millions
And, you know, 48 hours, 72 hours to review it because they're not going to catch that one little line that changes the law that uses a reference code to an existing piece of legislation that you have to go look up. I mean, it just doesn't happen. What's interesting to me is since the 1972 Budget Act, which I believe is the right year,
they did a budget reform and this was supposed to solve all these problems there's only one time that they actually uh did it right and that is to take the 12 appropriations bills move them through the system
And guess what? Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House. He understood this. He pushed for it. Bill Clinton was the President of the United States. And guess what? That's the one time since 1972 that the budget came into balance. Surprise, surprise. It actually works if you go through and take the tough votes on everything one at a time. The way it's supposed to work is you take those 12 appropriations bills.
And the clerk literally reads every line of each bill. And it takes time. And any member at any time can offer an amendment to either strike funding, increase funding, move funding. And guess what? It's hard. It's difficult. They start the process, usually get through five or six of them, and then they quit. They don't get through all 12.
That's right. And that's probably part of the reason why it doesn't happen is it's really, really hard. And I think in the modern era, you know, in 2024, the muscle memory is not there for a lot of members and staff to really understand drafting, reading and understanding and contextualizing legislative text and the previous legislation it ties to and previous budgeting cycles and things like that. If
If we waved the magic wand and said, Congress, you need to go through all this tomorrow, they would struggle a little bit, but they have to to get back on track. Yeah, yeah. And the Senate wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they actually had to go to the floor and be the most deliberative body on the face of the planet. They'd actually have to debate bills and allow people to offer amendments and people like Senator Mike Lee or Senator Rand Paul.
or J.D. Vance or somebody like that, Mike Braun, you know, they would come and actually offer substantive amendments that would cause people to really think. But they don't want to do that. And that's what's fundamentally wrong, I think, with leadership is they don't want to actually take those tough votes. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Mike Howell right after this.
From the Fox News Podcast Network. Hey there, it's me, Kennedy. Make sure to check out my podcast, Kennedy Saves the World. It is five days a week, every week. Download and listen at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. All right, let's transition to the weaponization side because, Mike, you've been a huge advocate of diving deep and looking at how
government is used to weaponize for one political party versus another. And I want to get your specific examples and your concerns, Department of Justice and otherwise, what you're seeing and what the public needs to see in order to expose this, because the sunlight is the best disinfectant, but we're not getting the exposure that we need. I think Heritage is leading out, probably doing as much, if not more than anybody else out there. But give us your take on that.
So I think this is probably one of the biggest problems our country faces. It's kind of this new evolution or devolution of the way our political system handles the powers of government. It's not to promote
whatever policy wanted the polls or their idea and how to go out and effectuate something you and I may disagree with. But it's using the awesome powers of the federal government, in some cases, the total powers, for not just partisan advantage, but for damage to the other side, to turn them into vehicles for attack as opposed to policy promotion. And the
This is something that has taken, and we see this all the time in our investigations when we get to read a lot of people's emails. It's really the primary focus of this current administration and the people they put into to lead these agencies.
I think it's most pronounced and obvious at the places where people have guns and badges because that's where raw power can be expressed. And you see that in the most clear places, like how they're handling, you know, their chief political opponent, President Trump. But it's not just on the high level political side. It's also on the lower level ideological side. Look at all the people who are going to jail for protests, peaceful protests, I might add, at abortion clinics.
And then it's about basically allowing and pardoning similar activity on the other side, whether it's the BLM riots that engulf this country or any of the other violent crime we see surging or heaven forbid, the border, which is a total rebuke of our law and order principles in this country. And so DOJ, FBI, that's a very obvious place. But it's happening elsewhere.
The Department of Education, huge example. I would argue we don't even need a Department of Education. They have a terrible track record. That's what bureaucrats are doing all day. They're talking about how to go after Moms for Liberty.
I kid you not, we're reading the secretary's briefing book as we sued him to get it. And right there on top of his briefing book, what's Moms for Liberty up to? Because they're a political problem for him. And so he's not about promoting his idea for education reform as left and misguided as it may be. It's about how to use that power and bureaucracy to go after your opponent. And then this occurs in really like frivolous and insane areas that I think people would be shocked.
It's in the furthest, most radical kind of gender ideology spaces. People would be shocked to know that every single federal bureaucracy right now is building out a massive infrastructure to promote transgenderism and alternative sexual lifestyles and then to punish people who are, you know, skeptics of that for either religious or moral reasons.
But it's developing an architecture that is extremely sophisticated in that there are czars. There are boards to approve things. There are punishment matrixes.
And it sounds crazy, but when you think about the federal government's power to set standards across the country, these are what states adopt. Corporations then adopt as best practices. They gain quasi-legal power in effect. And it's just going after your people who disagree with you on this new whatever you want to call it. I'll call it some sort of
of this transformation of how we view gender in this country. Picking a side in that divisive battle and then using government to punish. And I could go on and on. It's hit virtually every posterior. The financial regulators are in this space, whether it's debanking people, whether it's the censorship complex. No agency has a clean record right now because the party in power has adopted that their highest priority
And best use of their time is trying to defeat what they think in their mind and that they've justified to themselves is an evil bad guy. And that's not a healthy way for a constitutional republic to operate. You know, one of the fundamental core problems here is that the states take an overwhelming amount of money from
from the federal government. Now, you can argue that taxpayers in your particular state pay federal taxes and you want to see as much of those federal taxes come back. Now, we are at $34 trillion in debt, so we haven't exactly taxed at the level in which we're spending. But when states take that money, then they have a degree of obligation to play by the federal rules.
This played out when I was in Congress and we were fighting against No Child Left Behind. This was an education program and may have had the best of intentions at the beginning, but it was really a problem. And I campaigned and fought vigorously to get rid of No Child Left Behind in the state of Utah. And I'm with you, Mike. I don't even believe there should be a Federal Department of Education program
So anyway, I had a chance with Trey Gowdy and Congressman Peter Roskam and others was invited to this dinner with Justice Scalia. Now, what an honor. I mean, he's one of the brilliant legal minds there ever was sitting on the Supreme Court, obviously, at the time. So we were asking questions and it came around to me and I said, you know, hey, no child left behind. How do I get rid of it? And he said, the answer is simple. It said, stop taking their money.
You take the federal money, you're going to play by the federal rules. And this is the coerciveness, whether it's the Department of Transportation, the infrastructure rules that are put into place and having to pay Davis-Bacon wages and doing all sorts of environmental impact studies and all this kind of stuff, you got to play by their rules.
And this is a real, real problem because those are the tentacles in which they go into the states and make you do things that you wouldn't do otherwise. And it can be whether it's DEI or some of these other initiatives. That's what they try to do. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges that the states have, because I do believe that states can ultimately offer support.
the best solutions, Mike, on how do we get out from under this problem of an omnipresent federal government?
That's certainly the way it was intended and the founders were a lot wiser than our current leadership class now. Those policy decisions on things such as education or even crime or what have you are best reserved to their most local level. That's a basic principle not only of America, but unfortunately now it's a right-left distinction, I would say, only.
But I'll go one step further than you because you're absolutely right on the technicals from the grant making and the policy side. But the government contracting community, I mean, the US government's biggest employer in the country, and they're the biggest spender of money and hiring and whatnot. And a lot of it's done at the contractor and subcontractor level. And the way the left has been able to wield the sword of policymaking through that over the decades
has been huge. I would argue almost as big as the way they tie it to grants and whatnot. And a couple of examples, this is how they pushed otherwise unpopular things that couldn't get through legislation into the bloodstream of the country. Whether it's some of the early DEI kind of initiatives in the affirmative action, hiring in quotas for the federal contractors,
or even pre-Supreme Court decision on gay marriage getting into that space. But we're seeing it pop up again today in the artificial intelligence space and other space to basically say, we're only going to do business with you. And then that means your whole downstream business community as well. If you adhere to certain, you know,
preferences of ours, things that are not strictly business and government contracting related, but a laboratory for social experimentation that can then spread out quickly. And it's just all emanating from DC. All right. So I'm going to give a little plug for my book. I wrote a book called The Puppeteers, The People Who Control, The People Who Control America. And there's chock full of examples of exactly what Mike's talking about there and how they manipulate these things to
to implement DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion principles that would never, ever be there otherwise. And it really is shocking. One thing I want to shift gears on here because
I've seen you, Mike, in particular, talk about this and did some great stuff at Heritage on this, too. But whistleblowers play a real important role here. And there are whistleblower protections where federal employees or people outside the federal government that witness certain things are.
can step forward, communicate with Congress, and provide those. But I've also seen a lot of repercussions that are just downright wrong. There's two topics I want to talk about I want to make sure you get to. One is what happened with the IRS whistleblowers who bravely stepped up. And the second one is what happened at the Department of Homeland Security on that whole –
You know, remember the horses and then the allegation was they were whipping people and they were using their whips and Alejandro Mearcas, they knew better. They absolutely knew better. And yet he went out there and said it and did it anyways. I want you to walk us through that as well. But let's tackle the IRS and whistleblowers first.
Absolutely. So back to basic principles here. For this whole system to work, the exchange of information needs to be protected. And Congress knows that. That's why they passed whistleblower protection laws long ago, which basically means if you witness, you work in the government, you witness something that's wrong, you can go to Congress to inform them about it. The problem is the bureaucracy has been fighting back on this front very hard for a very long time. And
Currently, probably the biggest high profile example of this are the IRS whistleblowers. These are the career...
I think they're even registered Democrats, to be honest with you, left-leaning prosecutors at the IRS who are looking at the Hunter Biden kind of case, suggesting to the DOJ, you know, here's what we saw, here's what we think you should do, and then having everything shut down for very odd and partisan reasons. Well, they went and they told Congress about it, as is their unquestionable right to do. In fact, they were so careful about doing it. Tax information is a special thing.
super class of protected information. You can only go to the Ways and Means Committee. So they engaged thoughtful attorneys who helped them navigate that process. One of my former colleagues who also worked for you, Tristan Levin, great guy in Empower Oversight, started a group basically just to handle that transmission of information.
Got them with all their, you know, dotted their I's and crossed their T's and took them to Congress. Got that information out in a lawful way. They presented it. You all know what happened next. It kind of blew open the whole plea deal that Hunter Biden was about to be given to let him off the hook for not only his crimes, but Joe's. And so what happens next?
The DOJ and Hunter's lawyers don't just let this happen. No, they start going after the whistleblowers and accusing them of criminally breaking the law and giving up tax-protected information, which they did not. And so then the DOJ, who is still the one who should be defending the whistleblowers because whistleblowers work at the government, is basically working in concert with Hunter Biden's lawyers.
to not protect these guys. And at the end of the day, they could be looking at serious punishment for it. And that's just such a breakdown, not only the principles at play here of protecting this exchange of information, but a perversion of the law where the Department of Justice, which reports to Joe Biden,
is basically taking a knee in protecting these guys for a partisan political reason. And there's a lot of very smart and motivated people that are rising to these whistleblowers' defense. But I'll tell you, if these guys take a real big hit on this, and they've already taken a huge hit, but I'm talking about some sort of court-ordered hit,
You're going to drive the wealth of whistleblowers a long time moving forward. And so we've really been sounding the alarm here at Heritage with our friends at Empower that the House of Representatives and others as an institution, left or right, if you guys do not step up and protect these guys here, whether you like what they said or not, it's going to be a big deal.
It's going to end the prospect of whistleblowers coming forward for a long time. And that hurts everybody, regardless of the immediate political aspect here. It's exactly right, because all they wanted to do is go before Congress to tell them,
what happened and didn't happen. And what they testified to, as you play back the tape, is they were not allowed to do their jobs. They wanted to follow the evidence, follow the facts, and be able to interview the people they wanted to interview. There was a specific time and place they wanted to interview Hunter Biden. There was a specific questions they had about Joe Biden in some of his documents. Couldn't even mention the word Joe Biden. That was the Department of Justice coming in saying, "Oh, no, no, no, no. That's not what you're going to do here."
And that is so fundamentally wrong. And this is why I think so much of America feels like they're being lied to, that there's an unequal application of justice, that justice has a blindfold, but she's peeking to see if it's a Biden or a Clinton or an Obama or somebody like that before they move forward. And that's until America...
It gets back into the proper balance where both sides of the aisle feel like they're going to get in an equal and fair treatment under the Department of Justice. This is going to go on.
And one of the big things that you were really a champion on, Mike, was what happened over at Homeland Security when those Border Patrol agents were doing their job, albeit on horseback, but with dramatic video. And we're talking about people that were trying to come across the border illegally, Mike.
Yep. So this was a year or two into Biden's administration down in Del Rio area, right there on the southern border. A large group of Haitians stormed the border, to put it mildly. There's as usual, there's mounted horseback patrol. And there was a photographer there who took some pictures.
And the image just made a lot of left-leaning people's jaws drop because they saw a big horse and they saw illegal aliens and they're so conditioned to be anti-border patrol and pro-legal migrant or whatever term you want to use.
That it created this immediate social media fed controversy that then crept its way quickly up to the highest levels of political power. And you had everybody in the Biden administration denouncing these force back border patrols for whipping the illegal aliens. OK, because the guy on the horse, the border patrol agent, was holding the reins of the illegal aliens. Right.
It resulted in Alejandro Mayorkas going to the White House podium to denounce the Border Patrol and saying that these images conjured up the worst memories of racism in America, something to that effect.
And so this is where we come in at Heritage. And Mark Morgan, who led the Border Patrol under actually Obama and then headed CBP under Trump, is a close colleague of ours here. And him and I were watching this situation unfold. And common sense really just prevailed at the end of the day. You don't have to be the smartest guy in the room to understand what was happening. We said there is no way.
These guys actually whipped them. Those are horse reins. And so we sent our very first FOIA, very first FOIA for this. And now I've sent. Explain to people what a FOIA is. Oh, gosh, I am doing my DC talk. Freedom of Information Act. So it's the process by which you request information of the government. The government then will say, wait five years. And so you have to be a guy like like me who can go in and sue them to actually get it out.
And so that's what we did. So we sent in this Freedom of Information Act and said, I want to see everything that was going to Mayorkas's inbox, the secretary, before he went to the White House podium, because I got a feeling that this guy is lying. And so we sent that in. We waited a little bit for them, of course, not to reply. And then we sued him. And so we're looking through the returns after, you know, the judge says, no, Homeland Security, you got to give him the documents. They have a right to him.
We're looking at the emails that went to Secretary Mayorkas before he went to the White House podium. Lo and behold, and this stood out to us like a like a sore thumb, was his top press person. So the person who accompanied him to the press briefing emailed them and told them that the guy who took the photographs down at the border, the guy who was there, said there was no whipping.
So the last thing New Yorkers saw before he went to the podium, if he was looking at his emails, which he certainly was because his press briefing person was with him, was no whipping happened. He could have dispelled the entire controversy then and there by being honest with the American people. The problem was the narrative had grown so out of proportion and was infused with racism and all this kind of stuff that there was no walking it back. The president and others and all the left-leaning anchors, they
had gone so far in on the narrative that honesty was not their policy that day because they couldn't embarrass everybody.
We got it out, you know, made a big hoopla on Fox News about it, thankfully. And then quickly that became kind of a chief criticism, in addition to the obvious one of opening the border, that really led to the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas and the House of Representatives. I believe it was one of their central articles of impeachment that he lied and defamed the guys that he was supposed to be representing and protecting. Yeah, exactly.
It was such a miscarriage and it was done so purposefully. And anyway, I want to move on to another one that I talk about my book. It's this executive order 14019. And what happened here is shortly after President Biden took office, he put out this executive order that directed all of his agencies and departments to come up with a plan to get out the vote. Now,
On the surface to say, oh, well, federal government should be helping people to get out the vote. Yeah, it sounds great. No, not so much because it's been highly, highly secretive. This is the concern. They had these 600 departments, agencies, sub agencies submit plans. They all came up through the ranks to Susan Rice.
And this is the question. Why? Why, Mike? Is this such a secret? Now, there have been lawsuits, freedom of information lawsuits to get that information out. If it's such a good thing to get out the vote, wouldn't you like to know how federal government resources, personnel, physical facilities are used to get out the vote?
Because I'm just saying here from my perspective, they're doing it for one side of the aisle, but they're not doing it for the other side of the aisle. And this is the concern. They're taking low propensity voters of highly likely Democratic voters, and they're using all these resources to get out the vote. Give us the latest on what you're seeing with this executive order 14019 that Biden put out.
Absolutely. So there's a good reason why the federal government has traditionally and, you know, is expressly kind of forbidding from playing too much in elections. That because the president has a vested interest in his reelection and has the awesome resources of the federal government at his disposal to help him in that effort. It's a clear conflict of interest. And so the Biden administration, at the behest of some of these far lefty groups, thought they came up with the perfect workaround.
That they would partner with the billion-dollar industry of dark money electors groups to help use government agencies to get people registered and out to vote. Now, we've gone pretty deep down the rabbit hole on this. I have yet to encounter a single conservative-leaning organization they're working with.
This is not a uniformly applied deal. I would seriously doubt they're showing up at a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting or a NASCAR race. They're looking at the counties that are most important to their re-election and the demographics. And so here's a couple examples. Prisons.
It is pretty insane how much their focus has been on has been on prisons. And that's partially because a lot of the lefty groups have told them that. So one interesting anecdote is the U.S. Marshals.
We all remember, you know, I think it was Tommy Lee Jones in that movie who chased a fugitive and arrested him. Now the U.S. Marshals are concerned with getting them registered to vote and reminding them at every stage of the incarceration process their rights to vote. We found materials that they changed a thousand contracts with all their service providers just to do that, to make sure they build in reminders of voting rights and whatnot into it.
And you're right when you said like it sounds benign when you say everyone should vote. We should encourage people. But when you take government agencies, partner them with billion dollar dark left groups that are aimed at only registering Democrats, and then you point the machine and the power at the areas of most benefit to the left, what you have is government interference on a partisan scale at a massive level into an election at a time where I don't think this country needs more distrust in the elections. Right.
Let's just do it free and fair. It's not that hard. Let the best candidate win. And instead, they couldn't resist the temptation to combine an already huge billion dollar dark money industry with the data, the access, the point of service kind of connectivity of the government together to try.
this election you know and what's stunning about so much of this is how secretive they are you know at one point uh joe biden president biden because they were you know had this freedom of information act request coming uh they claimed executive privilege
executive privilege on how they're going to help get out the vote which means hey the president was personally involved and engaged and they're not allowed and they don't want to now tell the public what's going on it's not as if we're talking about classified information about how our nuclear subs are operating in the atlantic ocean we're talking about how to get out the vote so they claim executive privilege but based on what what they just don't want the public to know and again
It's this fundamental upside downness that's just so wrong where the government works for the people, the people who work for the government. And when you have something as non-classified that isn't going to harm anybody unless it's being used nefariously to put your hand on the scale in an election, then
then why the argument to say, hey, we know it's executive privilege. We can't tell you how the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Department of Commerce is manipulating, using, giving data to their select groups that they want to get out the vote. And when you combine that with ballot harvesting and the ability to go collect ballots and do all that in, say, prisons, like you said, Mike,
Like, I mean, I really does scare me what they're doing and how they're doing. And they did this very early on in the Biden administration. They knew what they were doing because they would need it for the next election. And here we are. And we still don't have those documents. That's absolutely right. And we've we've been able to get some of those strategic plans out outside of litigation. Right.
Don't ask me how because I couldn't tell you, but we've been successful nibbling around the edges and sometimes they squeak out with this much activity. And so we've produced, you know, five or six and then a lot of related materials that kind of illustrate how this looks in practice. But the White House claiming executive privilege over the mass of these has to be the most absurd claim of executive privilege in our country's history. But it's because it's the crown jewels. It
This is the highest priority of the Democratic Party is to remake and federalize our election system.
They've had enough of this state by state process where states actually, through their constitutional powers, can decide the time, place and manners of their election. No, the reason why Nancy Pelosi's number one bill when she was speaker was H.R.1, the voting bill, is because they wanted to shift all their power to the federal government to make universal kind of these open ended mass mail in little accountability processes.
types of elections. And so they're not hiding it for any reason other than they just really, really want to be able to get this done, secure power and implement and forever change the way we send people to Washington, D.C., because they want to stay there forever. That's their goal. Power, baby. They want power. Mike, remind people where they can go to learn more about the Heritage Oversight Project.
Absolutely. So we're on Twitter, or I guess X, at Oversight PR. That's the letters PR. And that's because they don't give you enough characters to say project. So Oversight PR.
Very good. That's one of the great conduits to do and to learn about that. Now, Mike Howell, who's setting up this project over there and that I'm working with over there, I've got to ask you a few questions because, you know, normally we kind of go through where were you born? How did you do things? We bypassed all that, but I still got to ask you the rapid questions. All right. Let's do it. All right. First concert you attended, Mike?
Ooh, probably one of my dad's band concert. My dad leads a swing band, still does to this day. Oh, does he really? What's it called? The Mount Vernon Swing Band. He's gone from director to saxophonist. He does it all, but it's a good time. We play senior centers now, so we'll take you out there next time you're down. Interesting. All right. I haven't had that yet, but that's good. What was your high school mascot?
The Wolverines, West Potomac Wolverines. Yeah, because there's a lot of Wolverines in West Potomac. I understand that. I get that. Yeah, you see them all over the place whenever, you know, they're everywhere. I get it. What's your favorite menu item at Taco Bell?
Oh, that is a good one because I usually order quite a few at the same time. I like the Dorito tacos, but I'm loading whatever's up with all the fire sauce. So it's all an indistinguishable mass as a vehicle to get as much, you know, the fire sauce in me as possible. I buy that. If you know, Mike, that's highly believable, highly credible. No doubt about that. What's your current golf handicap?
Oh, boy. You would ask me that. My current handicap, as last time we were out there, I said I have four sleeves of balls. I'm done when I lose all of these sleeves. But I'm getting better. I'm getting better. I don't think I even have a handicap yet, but it's more a level of patience. It's very expensive exercise that I enjoy. Very, very good. Pineapple on pizza. Yes or no? No, no. It should be meat focused. Okay.
There you go. A meat focus. See, that's the clarity that comes from Mike Howell. That's a good one. Meat focus. That's ideal. You're big on oversight. You're a journey by trade. If you met Bigfoot, what would you ask him? Why have you been hiding so long? You shouldn't be ashamed. It's 2024. Let your freak flag fly, man. You'll fit right in. Come on out.
You know, when they showed... Anything that comes out on TV, the media, whatever, about Bigfoot, I am all over. I cannot get enough of that. I think that is just such a fun thing. The idea that they call Bigfoot Daryl and then some of the graphics that they come out with or he's flying the flag or whatever. I've thought way too much about what would you ask Bigfoot if you saw him. And every time you hear these stories, I just...
I can't help but giggle. I just, I just think that is such a fun story. All right. Uh, last question. Uh, best advice you ever got. Ooh,
Ooh, that's a really good one. I mean, some very early age of sports keep trying. Like, you got to keep fighting. And nowhere, I think, is that needed in not only our political system, but in the discrete area of oversight. We were up till, you know, late hours of the previous evening looking through returns, document review, just...
Staying up, staying up. You got to appreciate the gold at the end of the rainbow type deal. And I think sports really teaches you that, especially if you weren't that great at them like me. And so the way you stay is you get up, you brush the dust off, you keep going.
Well, you know, I think government and our form of government needs people like you who do care, that do dive deep, who develop an expertise, know what they're looking for. Because, you know, the federal government's got 2.2 plus million federal employees. And you get handfuls of organizations and oversight staff and that sort of stuff that, you know, you can count them by the dozens. But that's the openness and transparency that distinguishes us, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, publicly.
From the other countries is our openness and transparency and that we are self critical. We do go take a hard look and follow facts. That's what it's supposed to be about. And and I just wish that was more prevalent. And there was a little bit of shame from government agencies, departments and personnel when they abuse the system or perform poorly because.
I never see anybody get fired. They just never see it. They just, oh, whoops, sorry. And then they keep going. There doesn't seem to be the consequence. And I think that should be part of the equation as well. That's absolutely right. I can't tell you how many current or former FBI agents who I've spoken to said all they need or really, really need to see is one agent who misbehaves fired for it.
And, you know, that would go such a long way just to have examples of accountability, you know, let alone fixing the whole thing. Can we just get one example? Yeah. Yeah. That would go a long way. Mike Howell, everybody. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on the Jason in the House podcast.
Thanks for having me. All right. I can't thank Mike enough. He is a hard worker. There's a lot of good people behind the scenes who do good work on good things. And this is what it takes. The number one question I always get from people is, hey, what can I do? What am I supposed to do? You know what? Be a good American. Help out in your neighborhood.
Go, you know, with their precinct and volunteer to be a poll watcher. Do things like that. Encourage people to get out and vote. Those types of things. If we do that neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community, guess what? It makes a huge difference.
And you can thank veterans. You can help veterans. You can do all kinds of good things in this world. And the accumulation of that is really just a good thing. And when you call something out and when you see something or you have a question, ask your representative. That's the way our representative republic here in our form of government is supposed to work. So I would really appreciate it if you could rate this podcast.
Subscribe to the podcast if you can, but definitely rate the podcast. That would be really helpful. And then be sure to join us again on this Jason in the House podcast. I really hope you enjoyed it. I want to remind people you can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon podcast.
music app again rate us review it check out foxnewspodcast.com and we'll be back next week with another good exciting guest come join us i'm jason chaffetz this has been jason in the house
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