cover of episode Brett Tolman: From Capitol Hill To Criminal Prosecution

Brett Tolman: From Capitol Hill To Criminal Prosecution

Publish Date: 2021/6/16
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Welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and I really appreciate you joining me. I've got a great guest that we're going to phone a friend, somebody I've known for a few years, somebody you may not know, but you might. His name is Brett Tolman. You see him on Fox News. You see him on some other places as well as a former United States attorney.

probably best known for the prosecution of the Elizabeth Smart case. I think we're going to ask him a few questions about Elizabeth Smart and that whole thing. But he also worked in the United States Senate and just a great guy. So I want to make sure that you stick around for that. But I like to riff on the news a little bit, and I'm going to harp a little bit. And if you listen to the podcast week in and week out,

I still, one of my biggest top concerns is the lack of fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C. You know, it's and I'm disappointed on both parties, by the way. This is not exclusively something that I am concerned about. And that is all Democrats bad and Republicans good.

I think it's a bit of both. Unfortunately, I just happen to be a fiscal conservative. And, you know, if you want less government, if you have a little bit more of a libertarian leaning, if you're concerned about the overall role and function of government, look, I think there is a proper role of government, but it's a limited one. There are certain things we need to do and do well, and we can still have safety nets out there to make sure that

Nobody who's deserving falls through the cracks, but at the same time, whoa, our numbers are out of control. So let me put in perspective here. If you spend a million dollars a day, every day, it takes you almost 3,000 years to get to 1 trillion. So go back 10 years ago when I was in Congress. I was in Congress for eight and a half years, but go back to a

Obama-Biden budget and just compare it to where it is proposed by Joe Biden. So budget back then was roughly $3.7 trillion. Fast forward 10 years, the budget is almost 50% larger. They're asking for $6 trillion. How do you justify a 50% increase in expenditure over a 10-year period?

And the debt, which go back to where we were before, was roughly $16 trillion. And now it's approaching $30 trillion. So again, close to doubling. You can't sustain that. Now, I have to look up the latest number. But when I was back in Congress and I left in 2017, that wasn't too long ago.

we were paying the interest on this debt that we accumulate as a nation, we were paying about $600 million a day. That was the daily interest rate. Now, I believe, given the soaring debt and the deficits that we're playing, and remember, interest rates have been down near zero, and we've been buying...

Through quantitative easing and other types of things, we as a nation have been buying our own debt, which is dangerous. And in doing so, guess what? We pay, I'm guessing, over a billion dollars a day now on interest on our national debt.

So if you spend a billion dollars a day, you know, people say, oh, we want roads, we want bridges, we want infrastructure. And of course, Democrats have disguised that their definition of roads, bridges and infrastructure, everything from your coffee cup to, you know, who knows what they have just included everything in the kitchen sink and said, oh, that's infrastructure because they know it pulls well. You know, if you go and you say, oh, we need roads, bridges and

Everybody says, oh, yeah, hey, that makes sense. Well, we saw this movie before with Joe Biden and with President Obama. When Obama took office, first year I was elected, 2009, they had a $787 billion budget.

stimulus plan. It was all about infrastructure and putting America back to work and shovel-ready projects. Well, guess what? Less than 5% of that was actually roads, bridges, and highways. Most of it went to grow government. You saw soaring numbers going into state budgets. You saw soaring numbers going into the number of federal employees, more regulators, more regulation.

And it didn't really stimulate the economy the way it was sold as. So you would think we would learn our lesson coming into 2021, but no, we haven't. What's cracking me up,

And that's maybe not the right word. But what's frustrating me is that these politicians are out there in a bipartisan way, by the way, in the Senate saying that, oh, we're working on a bipartisan infrastructure bill. OK, that sounds good. I'd much rather have it be bipartisan. But they also in their lead sentence say paid for. Ladies, gentlemen, it's not paid for.

That's the kind of Washington, D.C. talk that they only get away with if you let them get away with it. But to suggest that, oh, we're going to add all this additional spending on top of all the COVID relief bills and all those things, plus our regular base budget, plus all of that.

The things we put into Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and Pell Grants and all. If you add all that in together and then they come up to you and say, but it's paid for. You know, we pay for it over and pick your year. One I've heard them say is 15 years, you know, but we're going to spend this money in the next eight to 10 years.

That is such funny math. That's why we are nearly $30 trillion in debt. And what escapes most discussions, which frustrates me, is that they never have a discussion in Washington, D.C. that says, you know, we have this urgent need.

And really what we ought to do is we're going to have to make a tough decision here. We can't spend money on all things. And so we're going to have to cut over here. But this is the greater good. This is what we really need. That is the discussion that we never have. But you know what? Only the American people can put the pressure on people to do that. And so when you hear them say, oh, it's paid for, just say, are you kidding me? Tell me how this is paid for. Where are you going to cut? And

And at the end of the day, if you're running a business or a family or anything else, you have to look at the annual expenditure and say, what are your revenues and what are your expenditures? And until we get our expenditures under revenues and remember how much we're spending, you got to come up with a billion dollars a day in order just to cover the interest.

then you got a serious problem on your hand. You got to account for that overhead when you say that something is actually paid for because it's not. Maybe in the future, we're going to talk about what Democrats and liberals actually think about roads, bridges, and highways because they're not really in favor of them. I hate to break it to you, but they really don't actually want that. And we'll explain that to you later. Something I had personal experience in, and I'll try to tell you those stories. But we'll save that for another day because...

Guess what? It's time to bring on the stupid because there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right. As you know, I love the smoking gun.com. I don't recommend it for everybody, but I read it and I go through it. And, uh, there are lots of different places to go find the stupid.

And I'll say at the outset, you can't pick your supporters. Okay? So it's always unfair. Somebody does something stupid somewhere, and then they say, oh, well, that's like all of the Clinton supporters or all of the Trump supporters. All right. With that background...

We have to go to the headline here. Trump man busted for serial pooping spree. Now, the allegation is back earlier this month, just a couple weeks ago, a 70-year-old Ohio man told cops that he was a quote-unquote Trump man.

And he confessed, according to the report, to repeatedly urinating and defecating in front of a neighbor's home because the residents, quote, are Democrats and support Joe Biden. Now, this is evidently showing up in a police report.

This septuagenarian is evidently a serial pooper, and he was cited for littering after the homeowner caught him in the act about 3.15 in the morning. 3.15 in the morning, guy wakes up, says, you know what? I got a great idea. I'm going to go over to my neighbor, I'm going to pull down my pants, and I'm going to poop in this guy's yard.

um he evidently admitted to doing this type of thing quote-unquote multiple times and i'll just read you this this cop say he admitted to going to the home because his spouse are democrats and support joe biden while he's a trump man um

And the patrolman noted in the statement, quote, leads me to believe this incident is politically motivated, end quote. Yeah, that was politically motivated. And it certainly was stupid.

All right. Now I want to tell you a story from the halls of Congress. And I don't know, maybe they thought I wasn't supposed to tell this, but I'm going to just tell you this because when I was in the Congress, and remember, I was there the entire time that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were there leading the way. So do you remember when the Syria situation happened and the

President Obama said he was going to draw a red line on chemical weapons in Syria. And then the evidence was that they did use chemical weapons and he didn't really enforce the red line. Well, there was a flurry in Washington, D.C., and we got a call. My office got a call. I was invited by the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden himself, to come over and go to the White House and talk about this.

honored to do so. That's what we should be doing in DC. That's the type of dialogue I would expect. And I was very pleased and excited and honored to be able to go over and do that. So they have a little conference room down there in the West Wing. They have little name places where you go and you sit. So I go and I sit down and just a few moments later, right on time, Vice President Biden comes and

My seat happens to be right next to his. I'm just to the right of the vice president. And he comes in, shakes hands with everybody, sits down. And then I'm just being honest here. The guy has a touching problem because, you know, it's, you know, slap somebody on the back, touch their shoulder for a second. Maybe, you know,

Reach out, slap the knee for a moment. I could kind of understand that, although you would think in this day and age, the idea of just touching people for the heck of it. But when it was about the 30th time that he reached out and touched me, I felt a little creepy.

Now, I don't have the exact right number, okay? But I'm just saying that's the impression that I had. And it got to the point of being absurd where he couldn't talk without actually being kind of touchy-feely. And it was just flat-out creepy. Well, the other part of this story that I thought was illuminating was when Joe Biden started, he said, now listen, I served decades in the United States Senate. Obviously, we follow politics. We know this.

And he said, I have been in your seat. I have been in your chair. I get it. You know, as a member of Congress, the last thing you want to do is come on over to the White House and have the president or the vice president just lecture you on how things should be and what their perspective is. That's not what we're going to do today. What we're going to do today is have a real dialogue. We're going to talk back and forth and

and we're going to have a good discussion and I really want to air this out. I want to hear what you're thinking. And everybody is nodding their head saying, wow, this is really going to be productive. And then Joe Biden said, so to kick things off, let me just lay the foundation.

Then we went for an hour and a half with the guy not allowing any questions. He did exactly what he said he wasn't going to do. And finally, right at the end, one of the members said, I actually really have a do have a question. Meanwhile, you had a couple other members saying, I've got to go. And the staff of the vice president is saying, you know, sir, we got to go. We got something else on your schedule.

And, but that's the way it rolled with Joe Biden. He just rolled for an hour and a half. And that was my probably closest experience, literally the closest experience with Joe Biden in the White House. All right. Now it's time to bring in somebody that I really do admire. I don't always agree with them on all of this, everything, but that's true with everybody. That's true with my wife and everything else. So

But this is a really good person, somebody I've gotten to know. He happened to be the U.S. attorney for the state of Utah, did some high-profile cases. I don't want to spill the beans on all this stuff. I just want you to know this is a good-quality individual who loves his country and loves the outdoors, and we're going to have a good discussion. Let's dial up Brett Tolman.

Brett Tolman, so glad we could have you on. Welcome to the podcast. Great to be with you. Thanks, Jason. Look forward to it, as always. I want to go back to your time on the Elizabeth Smart case because that was really, you know, I live in here in Utah.

And when that whole case came together, it was just so sad. And there were points where they asked the public here to go out and search for Elizabeth Smart, my wife and kids and everything.

We'd go up in the hills in the, in the Wasatch mountains and it was a somber moment, but it felt like it was, you wanted to do something and it was like the only thing you could do. Take us back to that, that time when you first heard about the case and what was happening behind the scenes until it, the miraculously happened.

She was found and she was found alive. Yeah. So I have I have sort of two chapters on the Elizabeth Smart case. I was a young prosecutor at the beginning when she was kidnapped and I got to actually work with the FBI and helped on some some search warrants.

And, and so I was, I was new to that sort of a crime and I was relying on the expertise of some, some agents. They were very good. We prepared search warrants for, um,

The computer, for example, one of the computers in the home because we were getting some some odd answers from her father. And so we just prepared a search warrant and we served the search warrant. It was very intense time because you had the family that they didn't want to want to be suspects at all. But yet.

law enforcement background is your most likely suspect is probably someone close to an individual. Nobody had any idea at the time that it would have been someone that was not part of the family, but that was brought to the home, saw Elizabeth and capitalized on the knowledge that he had. He was a work. He was a homeless man, basically, with him and Wanda Barzee and the father, Ed Smart,

They were bringing some of the homeless to help work on their home. That's how he learned about it. So I worked on the case. It was very like you, we searched, we wanted her to be found. And then, you know,

She's found nine months later, but I'm no longer in that position. And so I didn't know that I would be working on the case. But I found myself, you know, I was I was appointed as the U.S. attorney by President Bush. And when I was in that position, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, the kidnappers, had been assessed as incompetent and were in a mental institution. And the state had basically thrown up their hands. And I remember the county attorney coming to me and say, is there anything you can do?

And that's where I connected with a doctor in New York, a psychiatrist named Dr. Wellner. And he and I got together and we started looking at it and we thought we might be able to prove that he was faking it. So that's how I got back into the case and took over the case and actually took it from the state.

And, you know, wonderful things happened. We were able to work with Elizabeth and I got to know her very closely. And she's she's, you know, a miracle, in my opinion, both what happened to her, but also who she is just a powerful woman. And, you know, the rest of the story, you know. Well, talk about that strength, because, you know, I think the most inspirational stories that I see in the universe are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Right.

you know, there's some people that have phenomenal skills in sports or something else. And those are usually the people that get lauded the most. But I think I'm probably most amazed when that average American is thrown into a situation and they had no idea it's coming. And then they've dealt with it at a level that brings tears to your eyes, gives you just that raw emotional feeling, that little tingle in your spine.

Tell me what you were seeing with Elizabeth, because I can't imagine a, what she went through, but then to have the strength in what she did in the prosecution and then being a role model after that. Yeah. And, and,

So I think you sort of paraphrased her well, but I would tell you some things that maybe not a lot of people understand or know. You know, there were some dark chapters, dark days when we were preparing for her, you know, taking the stand and having to go through some of the details. There were also, you know, difficult discussions where we had to, you know, we had to get her to look back at what happened and

But part of that, we discovered, for example, by just doing that and going through it and her being strong enough to go through that, we discovered that she had actually done quite a bit to trick Brian David Mitchell in coming back to Utah.

So she was part of her own rescue in a lot of ways that not a lot of people understand. She was using his logic and his religious, you know, fervor against him to suggest that he, you know, that they should be back in Utah. Explain that some a little bit more because they were here in Utah, right? Then they went to the South to go to Nevada or Arizona, something like that. They went down into California. So they hitchhiked and got.

rides and spent a majority of time. I think when it got hot, when people were really looking and everybody's looking for her, Brian David Mitchell knew he needed to get out. Well, it was Elizabeth that was making suggestions to him about how maybe there's been enough time. Maybe God wants them to come back to Utah. So she was speaking in the language that he would understand and

And he decided, making it his own decision, instead of her saying, you got to take me back to Utah, et cetera, she was influencing him to do that. So this is a 14, 15-year-old girl that has figured out a way to influence her captor that's going to help her. And she does. And they bring themselves back across state lines, back into Utah. And that's where...

She's discovered and an officer making a wonderful decision to separate them and take, you know, and talk to each person individually in separate areas. Once she was finally separated in a way, she was able to reveal that she was Elizabeth Smart. And so little details like that, that became powerful messages of who this woman was.

really is at her core. She's one of the strongest, most powerful women I've ever been around. And to this day, we work together. Her foundation is trying to help victims of human trafficking. And just a few weeks ago, Jason, we sat with a victim and we're working with that victim to try to help her come forward and reveal her captors and her

you know, individuals that had committed some pretty ugly crimes against her. Well, God bless you and her for what you did, because to see that case successfully prosecuted and to have her, she's got a beautiful family, got a husband, got a child, you know, it's just, it's really heartwarming to see that.

So I want to talk a little bit more about your experience, because before you were the U.S. attorney, you were actually working in the United States Senate. And so tell us a little bit about that role. And then I want to ask you some questions about that. Sure. You know, I had...

So I left Utah and I went out to Washington, D.C. And like you, there probably was a time where you thought to yourself, maybe this was a mistake to come back to D.C. I mean, it is such a different environment. And I thought I made the biggest mistake of my life where I went from prosecuting cases. It's black and white. It's good guys, bad guys. And now I don't know who's good, who's bad, what's going on.

And I was working on the Judiciary Committee and we had some really tough, you know, we had tough issues. We had the Patriot Act and, you know, we had at the time it was just after 9-11 and we were getting evacuated multiple times and very intense. And I remember I was working for Senator Arlen Specter and we had been evacuated back there. And it turns out because a plane had flown into the D.C. airspace.

And I was standing next to Senator Specter and he said, well, I'll tell you, there's just one way to make sure this doesn't happen ever again. Let's shoot that plane down. And the guy next to him said, well, I think it's the governor of Kentucky. And he said, all the more reason to shoot it down. And I remember thinking, oh, wow, D.C. was someplace. But that was my early exposure. And I finally got into it like you did and started to dig into issues and work and

You know, I did have, though, a remarkable experience with Hillary Clinton when she became a senator. It's more infamous than it is famous. But I was running back from the Capitol to the Dirksen building. There was some urgent thing and senators demanding something. And you know how that is. So I started running and I'm sprinting and I turned the corner and I ran smack into Hillary Clinton.

And of the two of us, I think I was the only one that felt the repercussion of the collision. She definitely has a wide, stable base. Yeah. Yeah. So you did the collision and you hurt. Yeah. So I get up and she's she's very upset and angry with me. And then that same day I jumped on an elevator and it was the members only elevator. And I hadn't seen that that was the elevator and it was her.

And she asked me without joking, are you stalking me? I said, no, I just don't know what I'm doing yet, Senator. And I jumped off the elevator. So I avoided her as much as I could after that. That's really funny. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Brett Tolman right after this.

From the Fox News Podcasts Network. Stay on top of the latest news and information from Fox News. Listen and download the Fox News hourly update on your time. The trending stories you need anytime you want it. Listen and download now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com. Tell us some more about that, you know, the sausage making process that is Washington, D.C. I was always fascinated about. I always felt like when I was in Congress that

They made so much to do, if you will, about how we are always fighting and all this bickering. And behind the scenes, most members get along. It shows up in a hearing and the cameras are rolling and it's a little bit more vitriol. But by and large, 98% of the Democrats and 98% of the Republicans, they get along just fine. They were some jerks on both sides of the aisle. I get that.

But to actually get things done, I mean, you were able to accomplish a number of things. Explain, particularly in your staff role, how do you get senators to move in the right direction when, you know, a lot of them are just taking naps all day?

Yeah, no, it's very true. And, you know, we had extremes like John Edwards at the time, who was a senator and never showed up for a single hearing and never showed up for markups. And so he wasn't he just didn't feel like he was engaged in making any policy or, you know, getting ready to try to be the vice president. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Then you had, you know, the Patriot Act was it's probably a good example of the Patriot. The Patriot Act is a good example.

I worked closely with Senator Biden at the time and his staff, Senator Kennedy and his staff. And I was working on behalf of Arlen Specter, who was chairman, as well as Senator Hatch and Cornyn. And everybody was actually working really well. I mean, the

You had outside forces that were weighing in, you know, not they didn't want to get rid of too many civil liberties or encroach on those. And that is a very dynamic issue. But I remember sometimes it just comes down to at some point you're real close and you've got to do something to get over the top and get an agreement together.

I remember we were really close and Senator Specter wanted a meeting with Senator Leahy. And so four of us entered into a conference room, me representing Senator Specter and Julie Katzman representing Senator Leahy. And Specter says to him, Patrick, you tell me what you need in this bill to support it and we'll get it done. And so Senator Leahy turns to his staff because I'm not sure Senator Leahy knows anything about what's in that bill, right? And the staff

writes down three things and he forwards that note to Senator Specter over the table, passes it. Specter hands me that note and says, all right, go get it done. I looked at it. It was impossible. Like this was going to DOJ was going to freak out and all this kind of stuff. But we worked for months, me and Nick Rossi, and we just worked it and worked it. And he was an FBI agent on detail. We ended up getting all three done.

So then we go back in the conference room and Senator Specter wanted to meet with Leahy again. And he had put little blue check marks on each number and passed it across the table to Leahy and said, Patrick, we've gotten all three. Now sign this sign on to this bill and let's get it done. Senator Leahy looks at him and says, Arlen, I went home to my hometown grocery store and I got a standing ovation for holding out on the Patriot Act.

I can't sign on now. I just can't do it. So Spector stops and he's thinking, and I can see like, he's going to say something back, but he takes several minutes. And finally he looks up and he says, Patrick, were they all seated in the grocery store when you walked in? Good point, right? That's the ovation in the grocery store. Yeah. Yeah.

So Leahy never did sign on because of the politics, but we were able to get Feinstein and Schumer and all the others came on and we were able to pass that and really working together to get it done. I hope that there's still that ability to do that in Congress. Well, let me let me fast forward to a time where you were not in Congress working there and you were not the U.S. attorney, but

You know, we talk a lot about FISA abuse. And so when you've given your experience, Patriot Act and the reiterations afterwards, and then these revelations come to light, you have James Comey trading emails with James Clapper. He's the head of the director of National Intelligence there at the time. He's the DNI.

And Comey is signing off on a FISA application that at the very top says verified. At the same day, he is sending an email to Clapper saying, you know, the underlying premise here, we can't verify this. I mean, what's going on? These are the guys that are given the –

unique ability and the promise and the task and responsibility with these unique police powers to be the check and balance on this. And they just bypass it, especially Comey to sign off when he at the same time sends an email saying, I don't have the proper predicate. Yeah. So, you know, I have an interesting vantage point looking at that. It's not only offensive if I had no background, I would be offended at the

the effort by the FBI to really abuse a very powerful tool. But I'm even more upset because during the Patriot Act, when we expanded and gave them greater authority under FISA, it was Comey, who was then serving as the Deputy Attorney General, and Robert Mueller as the then Director of the FBI, who came in and sat down with us and senators and reassured us that they would not use this

to spy on the United States citizens. They would not use it in any abusive way, that it was not going to be something where they presented and asked for the ability to spy on somebody without going through multiple layers. And they would never present something that wasn't verified. I heard that from his mouth.

And then later we learn he was telling us that while at the same time they're submitting those, those agents and, and DOJ prosecutors were submitting unverified and they knew it at the very top levels that it was unverified and they were seeking these warrants. I mean, now, so you, you look at that now they're trying to utilize what happened at the Capitol. I heard that there are several senators and members in the house and the Democrat side who,

who want to expand the ability to use FISA to investigate and spy on churches, Christian churches, conservative organizations who may be part of this new America first terrorism sort of cross-section of people. And that's worrisome because we've gone from

the Democrats and the Republicans both concerned about civil liberties to now there's very few that seem to be concerned about how FISA is going to be used and abused and it will. Yeah. And that, see, that's what I see when I see the, the, the, the wire and the fencing around the Capitol and the national guard sitting there basically guarding nobody with no known threat. I think it's the precursor for what the Democrats are going to try to do to, as you said, expand their police powers and their ability to spy and,

because they think that this whole swath, half the country, these pro-Trump supporters are a clear and present danger to the United States and that they have to be spied upon in order to protect Americans from themselves. And that's the scary part of what I see happening. It's really scary. So Jason, I had a call two days ago from an individual that was referred to me

who's a citizen here in Utah. He's just an average guy. He was a Trump supporter and was in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. He got a knock on the door. Actually, he got a text first from an FBI agent that said, we'd like to talk to you. We understand that you were in D.C. on January 6th.

So he doesn't have a large social media presence. He's not like out there telling people or doing anything. He wasn't one that went in the Capitol and he wasn't one that knew that it was even happening. But his first question was, you know, after he asked me if I'd represent him because the FBI wants to talk to him, how did they know? And so my theory on it, because they won't tell you how, is that they are they are using national security letters, which is a power of the Patriot Act sort of expanded to

to serve those letters on either Apple, AT&T, or Delta, or whatever airline to get information about all those who may have been in Washington, D.C. from another state. And they're now going out and knocking on doors and talking to every single one of them and asking them questions about what happened. So, I mean, look, that's McCarthyism. That is, we're going to come after you if we think you are thinking wrong, right?

And we're going to we're going to we're going to use our powers in order to do it. Now, this agent was very nice. I like him. He's a good agent. He's just following orders. But that's the problem now. Thousands of people, just because they were there at a rally supporting their president and had no involvement in the in the Capitol riots, are now being talked to and made to feel like they have to have some concern that they were there.

Fascinating stuff. You've had a fascinating career, Brett Tolman. I always close my interviews with some rapid fire questions. So are you ready? Yep. All right. Ford or Chevy? Ford. Pepperoni or pineapple? Pepperoni. Best James Bond? Craig. Is it Daniel Craig? Yeah. The new one. Daniel Craig. All right. First concert attended?

Oingo Boingo in 1987. When you said Oingo Boingo, we figured it out that that was, yeah, back in the 80s. That's good. You know what mine was? What? Michael Jackson. Nice. Michael Jackson, Denver's My Little Stadium. It was awesome. I think that was him. I was sitting so far up in the stands and

I mean, I'm pretty sure that you could not have had a seat further away than I did. Mile High Stadium is a big stadium. I was like the top row and the very back. So I'm pretty sure. I mean, it could have been a double, right? It sounded like him. It really did sound like him. What was your high school mascot? A Viking. Oh, you were a Viking. All right. Person you'd most like to meet? Oh.

Ooh, that's a tough one. I would say probably Muhammad Ali. Unique talent that nobody knows about. Um, I'm a bow hunter, a good bow hunter. Yeah. I've heard that about you, but, uh, all right. Ideal time to go to bed. Uh, 11 o'clock PM. Sounds so politically correct there. Never go to bed at 11. Give me a break. Best advice you ever got.

The best advice I ever got was my father, who, before he passed away, said to me, you know, son, there's going to be a lot of people surprised at who's in heaven and who's not in heaven, but no one more surprised than the Mormons. Yeah.

All right. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. If you weren't an attorney or engaged in politics, what would you be doing in life? I would run a outfitter, a ranch. I'd love to run a ranch and guide people hunting and have horses and cattle and be on the open range. I would love that. And I know you want to be out there doing the archery thing.

More than anything, but you've kind of deserved it and found the proper balance. So thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Jason. I can't thank Brett Tolman enough. He is a good man, cares about his country. And, you know, you've got prosecutors and people all through the legal system that have to work on horrific cases, right?

But boy, they do it and they do it the right way. And just proud of what I'm mostly proud of Elizabeth Smart. I mean, I hope we have her on this podcast. That is one strong woman. And I can't even imagine what she's been through. And everything I've heard, she's doing wonderful and she's doing great. And it just makes it just puts a it's just a warm place in my heart for her.

And I can't thank Brett for his patriotic service. And I hope you all get a chance to meet him and see him on Fox News and other places because he really is a good guy. And so that was inspirational. But, you know, there's something else that was inspirational.

I happened, my wife and I, we have kids, we have grandkids at this point. And so I sent this out on our little family text and just said, aspirational. And they all kind of laughed like, ugh. But I don't know if you saw this, but there's a picture and I don't think it's been verified, but it was out there, I think on the New York Post.

And it was about the Deku Mom. This is a lady out of South Africa that supposedly was pregnant with 10 kids and gave birth to these 10 kids. Now, this may be debunked by the time you actually hear this, but I'm telling you, they showed pictures of this woman.

I mean, it's hard enough having a baby and then there are twins and triplets and then you hear about even more than that. But to have 10 kids, I can't even imagine this. This was a 37 year old mom who had six year old twins. They thought they were going to have eight babies. But by the time the doctor did this C-section and they they had 10 more kids, they

Seven boys, three girls. I don't know if this story is true or not, but I am just like, oh my goodness. I can't even imagine. And I hope she gets all the support because their family with the six-year-old twins and then 10 other little ones, they're going to have more than their hands full. That is inspirational to me and aspirational for our kids.

That's taken on a whole lot. Well, listen, I really do appreciate you joining us for this Jason in the House podcast. You can find more from the Fox News Podcast Network over at foxnewspodcast.com. Need you to like it, rate it, review it, subscribe to it. And we'll be back with more next week. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the Transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech Podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to FoxNewsPodcast.com.