➡ This podcast episode features Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch interviewing former House Freedom Caucus chairman, Congressman Scott Perry. They discuss the Freedom Caucus’s focus on fiscal responsibility, limited government, and accountability. Perry expresses concern about the U.S. debt, the cost of living for Americans, border control, and government surveillance. He also mentions the influx of Chinese immigrants and the potential security risks associated with it.
➡ The text discusses the political divide in the U.S. government, with some politicians unwilling to take tough stances due to fear of criticism. It highlights the issue of illegal immigration and the reluctance of some to debate it. The text also criticizes the lack of effective communication and leadership within the government, and the misuse of personal data by the government. It calls for politicians to be more courageous and transparent, and to prioritize the interests of the American people over political gain.
➡ This text talks about how online sellers and apps collect personal data about you, like your interests and habits, without you realizing it. It also discusses how the government can use this information to monitor people without needing a warrant, which is a concern for privacy. The text also mentions cases where the FBI has manipulated people into committing crimes, then arrested them, which has led to a lack of trust in these institutions. Lastly, it talks about the potential for political bias in the justice system, where people in power could be arrested for decisions they made while in office that others disagree with.
➡ The text discusses concerns about the U.S. government’s use of drone strikes on American citizens without trial, the labeling of MAGA Republicans as extremists, and potential voting irregularities. It suggests that these issues could lead to a slippery slope of criminalizing presidents’ actions and unfair elections. The speaker also expresses gratitude for Judicial Watch, an organization that uncovers information through the Freedom of Information Act.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is on Watch. Welcome to on Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we go behind the headlines to cover news stories that the mainstream media would rather you not know about, where we try to recover some lost history and where we try to explain the inexplicable. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. Whether you’re watching us on the video version of this podcast on YouTube or Rumble or whether you’re listening to it in the audio version on any of the platforms that are out there, we appreciate you taking the time to tune in and listen and learn what we’re up to here at Judicial Watch today.

We’re very pleased, very fortunate to have a congressional leader, one of the real thought leaders and movers on Capitol Hill, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. He also represents Pennsylvania’s 10th congressional district. Welcome, Congressman Scott Perry. Well, thanks for Judicial Watch and what you do and thanks for this opportunity to have a discussion. We’re real happy to have you on. There’s a whole bunch of judicial watch members and supporters out there who obviously are very interested in what the Freedom Caucus stands for and what you’re doing in Congress.

They identify very much with your membership within the caucus. And as chairman, I just wanted to kick off really with a question of what are the priorities for the caucus right now. When you talk to your other caucus members, when you guys have your own meetings, what’s the key driver? What are the top two or three things that you’re really focused? So let’s start out with a little clarification.

I was the chairman for two years. It’s a two year term. I just recently in January, relinquished that to a good guy. New chairman is Bob Good from Virginia. But the mission for the Freedom Caucus remains the same. If you look, we actually have a mission statement and generally put it is to speak on behalf of or speak for the millions of Americans that feel like Washington doesn’t represent them and the things that we stand for, limited government accountability and fiscal responsibility.

So within the envelope of that, it’s kind of perennial. So first of all, we’re going to spend a trillion dollars on debt service and interest this year. And about every 100 to 120 days right now, we’re adding a trillion dollars to our debt. And so that is uniquely one of our focuses. As you might have recalled in the January speaker challenge when Kevin McCarthy wanted to be speaker, one of the things we demanded was for many of the accounts to go back to pre Covid level spending.

Now, Kevin McCarthy agreed to that to become speaker. And then by April or so, the entire republican conference agreed to that when they passed limit, save, grow. But then by May, they immediately did what we call in the military a counter march and just reverse course and then decided to blow right through that agreement and agreed to spending at Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, spending levels and beyond. And ever since then, we’ve been in this tumultuous fight within our conference to try and reel that back to any position of sanity.

Fiscally, that doesn’t get us a trillion dollars in interest spending and spending beyond the levels that even Nancy Pelosi passed, that every single Republican, by the way, the last time speaker Pelosi was in charge, every single Republican in the House voted against that spending level. And now we’re poised to actually spend more than. Yeah, go ahead. And just servicing that debt. The payments on servicing that debt, it’s larger than the Pentagon budget.

That’s correct. We’re spending more time in history just paying off the interest than anything that the Pentagon is doing combined. Yeah. And people often have said to me, well, why do I care? It doesn’t seem to affect my bottom line, but it does affect your bottom line. Every single dollar that you spend is now worth less, which means you have to spend more. So from, as I like to characterize it, from lettuce to lumber, the american consumer cannot afford to live with the standard of living they’ve been used to for so many years simply because they can’t afford house payments, insurance payments, credit card payments, car payments, let alone buying new cars, let alone buying new homes, let alone children’s education and those type of things, literally just every single day expenses, everyday expenses are unaffordable to the vast majority of working people.

And so that’s how it affects you. So that’s a focus of the freedom Caucus and then the policies associated with the federal government, which we feel generally is out of control and doesn’t speak for most Americans. So the border, of course, letting millions upon millions of unvetted people come illegally into our country and then have us, the ultimate insult to injury, have us pay for them, have us pay for their housing, their food, their transportation, their cell phone, their health care, their education, when we can literally not afford our own, having us pay for that.

So that’s a unique and particular focus, but it doesn’t discount other things like your freedoms that are under assault every single day, not only by the Department of Justice. If you’re a Catholic and you want to engage in the latin mass or if you’re a parent that wants to go question your school board about an assault that happened in your child’s school, then you’re put on a threat identification list or listed as a domestic foreign extremist or worse, by the Department of Justice or the FBI, and how it is connected to a thing called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act and the Reauthorization of 702, which is a portion of that which has been used to, instead of spying on foreigners exclusively, but used to spy on Americans and not exclusive of all the information that you provide to third parties like Google, like Amazon online sellers, when you provide that information that otherwise would require a warrant, the federal government is now accepting or buying that information because they can’t legally get it themselves without a warrant.

So they’re just buying it and using it to spy on Americans. All those things that I just mentioned are priorities for the House Freedom Caucus. I think they’re priorities for Americans, should be priorities for the greater republican conference. Unfortunately, we’re not there because we continue to fund, whether it’s the destruction of the military, whether it’s continued spying on Americans, or a wide open border that leads to unfortunate and untimely deaths like this young lady just in the last couple of weeks.

Laken those are the things that we are focused on and trying to find some solution set from a legislative perspective. We’re not the chief executive. We’re not in the executive branch, so we can’t enforce these things and we can’t force them to enforce the laws that we pass. But what we can do is fail or refuse to fund this lawlessness. Unfortunately, with a slim majority, it requires every single Republican, because, remember, many of these things are happening because the left wants them to happen.

So they’re not going to vote against funding or to vote to defund that stuff. They’re going to vote to continue to fund it. Unfortunately, there are many Republicans that are assisting them in that effort. So just last week, there was a very interesting article on the Washington examiner that put in military terms the number of Chinese entering the country unlawfully. And so if you take the rough, so in the last ten years, about 15,000, that’s the ballpark estimate.

And all these numbers are wrong, by the way. But generally speaking, 15,000, that’s what we know. What we know under Biden, 113,000. And so the columnist did some fast math and did a little military analysis. And I’m a former army officer myself, so you’ll appreciate this. That equates to roughly depending upon what kind of unit we’re talking about roughly seven infantry divisions. Divisions. Yes. Right. So even if you look at this and you say, look, this is a communist chinese intelligence operation to insert either operators, collectors, fifth columnists, if even 1%, that’s roughly 1300 chinese actors, whether they’re intelligence operatives or PLA members, running around the United States, we have no idea who they are, where they are, what they’re doing.

And sadly, the House just squeaked out an impeachment of majorcas, which appears to be dead on arrival on the Senate. I mean, there’s a lot of Americans who are insanely and very justifiably frustrated out of their minds for the Congress right now. And you just rattled off a very great listing of all the benefits and privileges, entitlements and money that illegals are obtaining. They can go to New York and get a credit card for $10,000 cash to run around the city with.

But I guess what this really comes down to is with all these continuing resolutions that you’ve been operating under, at some point someone has to have enough guts to shut down the government to simply say, no, we’re not going to continue funding the government at the current rate. And I think that there are members not of the freedom caucus, but there are certainly members of your party who are terrified of having to shut down the government, and they’re just not willing to take being called mean names, that you’re harsh, cruel people, and they’d rather flush the entire economy of the country with radical inflation and devaluation of the currency rather than being called tough names in the liberal press? You’re exactly right.

And I would say that I don’t think any member, myself included, comes to Washington saying, my priority is to shut down the federal government. Nobody does that, Democrat, Republican, what have you. But the question is, I think, is that are we willing to say that those on the left are more willing to allow illegal foreign nationals from China and over 150 other countries, many of which are antithetical to the United States and are actively trying to subvert the United States of America? Is it worth it to have an argument over whether that’s the appropriate expenditure of taxpayer funds? And there are too many on the republican side of the aisle that aren’t even willing to have the conversation.

And I think the question is, can you win the argument? And historically, Republicans have always caved in. The media is against it, the left is against us. It’s all the same thing. But the public narrative is, oh, you voted to shut down the government. No, I voted to stop the inflow foreign nationals, among other things. And if the left wants to go out and defend that, then they should go do that.

But we’re not even willing to have the debate or the conversation. And once your side is willing to say we are never going to countenance that, we’re never even going to consider that leverage that comes from saying we’re not voting for more lawlessness, we’re not voting to fund more lawlessness. When we’re not even willing to do that, then the other side then just says, okay, well, the price tag just went up.

Right? That’s what we’re seeing. It’s extortion, right. On one side, you guys don’t have enough guts to shut it down because you really don’t even believe in what you just finished explaining. And then the other pressure point on the other side is a motion to vacate the pinstripe on this occasion. Apparently what I’ve read is that the Democrats are willing to support Speaker Johnson if there is a motion to vacate.

So you got to understand that apparently the Democrats are getting as good a service from the speaker on the republican side of the ledger as they would from a Democrat such that they would support him. Now, I’m not saying that we should make a motion to vacate or that I’m interested in doing that, but what I am interested in doing or seeing is a republican speaker that is conservative, that not only has the convictions of conservatism, but has the courage of that conviction to say, we are no longer going to fund this lawlessness.

And if you want to go out to the american people, Chuck Schumer, all the Democrats, and go out and make the case that american citizens should have their children kicked out of their school that they’re paying for and have illegal foreign nationals then reside there you go. Make that case. But we’re going to make the opposite the alternate case. That’s what I’m interested in doing. That’s the message.

Desperate. So it’s a leadership question always. Right. Right. Because rank and file members don’t get to, we’re not in the room we call a four corners discussion. Right. Right. That’s the House leadership and the Senate leadership. I’m not allowed in that room. But that would be my position if I were allowed in the, I mean, as an army brigadier general and a member of Congress. You know, it’s always a leadership question.

Always. And then, number two, it’s communicating. If you can’t communicate effectively, don’t even bother showing up because you don’t matter. Right. And of course. Yeah, we’re in a communications deficit, right? I said the left and the media, which is all the same thing, you know, that going in. But you can prepare, as we say in the military, you can prepare the battlefield ahead of that so that you have at least some chance of winning the message.

But we, instead of preparing the battlefield and come into the thing with a clear vision of what we want to accomplish and how to accomplish it, the first thing we do is surrender before the battle even starts. And it’s hard to win a battle when you don’t even get into it. So it’s a worst case from ours by far, but you’ll get my point. I was talking last week with a member of the argentinian governmental leadership, a smart guy or smart woman in Argentina, talking about Javier Mile and how he’s in a position where he’s told this public, I’m going to do really tough things that are going to hurt, and you’re not going to like it.

But when I get done, we’re going to stop the bleeding, we’re going to recover the economy, and we can turn the country around. And I said, this is a tough balancing act because you have to impose real pain and restructuring that the people are going to feel the hard way, and at the same time, you need to keep their support. How does he pull that trick? And the answer back was, it’s the power of his person, his ability to communicate.

He’s an argentinian sort of Trump where he can do tough things but keep the public informed and aware, and they don’t turn on. That’s, I don’t think that’s impossible. And the model that I use to buttress my claim is that the left, so called Democrats, often run and say, we’re going to raise your taxes, we’re going to raise the price of energy. It’s going to be unaffordable to do open a coal fired power plant or keep one open and keep costs low for consumers.

They run on that and they get elected, and then they go do it. The difference of the right is we don’t go tell our constituency, this is what’s going to happen. We don’t even attempt it. And so how will we ever know? I mean, the guy that’s come closest to doing that is Donald Trump. And it was difficult because not only did the other side come after him with every single facet of the battlefield, but he didn’t even have the support of half of his own side or a third of his own side, but yet he attempted it.

And he did it even in those circumstances and would have probably continued to do it if he were allowed to. And I think that more conservatives, Republicans, which aren’t always the same thing, more people that are interested in saving the republic, ought to use that model and not be afraid and say, yes, this government is not here to solve all your problems. This government was set up so that you could solve your problems.

And in order to do that, we need to unshackle you and take the reins off of you and allow you to do it by getting government out of your decision loop. But we’re not even willing to do that in most cases. You touch on something briefly that I think requires just a couple of more minutes of explanation, because my guess is probably 75, 80% of Americans have no idea that the federal government is doing this to them and at them, and that is the mass purchase of commercially available data, whether it’s communications data, cell phone data, and saying, well, gee, we don’t have enough guts to go in front of a judge and get a warrant, but we can go out to Verizon or any other of these data collection points, and we can purchase every credit card swipe in the country, every text message, every phone nodes showing linkages between people communicating, and they’re saying, well, we’re not doing anything.

That’s an unlawful search and seizure. We’re just going out and procuring data. And they don’t realize that that’s being used against them. That’s my one over the world description of it. But talk to me about what your concerns are in particular on that. Well, we have a fourth amendment protection from unlawful search and seizure. And while a lot of Americans will say, why do I even care? I’m not doing anything wrong.

I would just submit to them that there’s a lot of people in the United States of America that haven’t done anything wrong, but the pieces of a puzzle have been put together to portray or to give the appearance that they’ve done something wrong, and then their lives have been ruined. I would take General Flynn as one of those examples, but there are many, many others. And so when they put that mosaic together, it can look nefarious, but they would otherwise require a warrant to do that, and they haven’t gotten a warrant because they haven’t needed to.

They purchase this information, which is private, and oftentimes it’s characterized as, well, it’s your license plate information or it’s something that you posted online. Those things are publicly available, like your license plates on your car if you’re driving behind you, you can see it. So it’s publicly available. The things that you choose to post online are publicly available. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the information that online sellers are gathering about you, about all, how many bathrooms are in your home.

I want to give one brief example real quick. People don’t realize when you download an app on your phone and it gives you that long listing of what the information is, blah, blah, blah, and people just go, yeah, fine. And they click, okay. Or yes, right. They don’t realize that that app is collecting data on you and what you’re doing and what you’re interested in and where you’re looking, what time of night you’re searching, what kind of things you’re searching for.

Do you like to go to the local gun shop? And, oh, by the way, you’re a Catholic. You’re a practicing Catholic that likes the, you know, the FBI can look at that and put those two things together and say, well, this person’s a problem. We need to start surveilling them without getting a warrant. And that’s the problem. You should have the expectation of privacy unless there’s probable cause that you did something wrong.

But this is the weaponization of the awesome power of the federal government. People say, well, I’ve already given that information to Amazon. I don’t care. But Amazon doesn’t have the ability or the authority to arrest you. The federal government does. Right. And that’s the key. People are innocently downloading stuff, an app, whatever, and they don’t realize, I mean, essentially, it’s like putting a beacon on the top of your head as you’re walking around.

And it also collects all the data about your other interactions. And folks have no idea what that means. And the reason why I bring that up is because, again, we’ve talked to folks who have been following that phony Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case out in Michigan, right? And so the FBI goes out and they look for kind of low hanging fruit, right? These are guys that are not necessarily the brightest bulbs in the pack, and they’re kind of down and out.

And they go out and they recruit them, they equip them, they train them, they arm them, they give them the idea. They set them in motion, and then as soon as they take the first step, not even that they intend on doing anything, but just the fact that they’re organized, trained, equipped, and they go, we caught you. And then they arrest them. So they had 14 guys, either agents or recruited confidential human sources who were out running around, twelve guys, and then they arrested them and half of them walked.

But they do this over and over again. And for some reason, the American. Well, I think it’s really become corrosive. I think a lot of Americans see that. They look at that, they look at all the weirdness connected to January 6, and they have questions, they don’t believe, they don’t trust. It’s corrosive really, to the nation’s fabric. I think that’s the big message, is that there’s a lack of faith in trust.

Yeah, we don’t have any faith and trust in these institutions that we once revered. And the most recent shining example is this arrest of this guy Smirnoff, the top paid, or one of the top paid FBI informants that been informing for years. And suddenly, even though the information’s been available for a couple of years, the FBI arrests their own informant because he lied twice in his life about Joe Biden.

Okay, well, somehow supposed to believe that on its face, but then you add the other facet of it where Christopher Steele, the FBI, knowing that the information was fabricated on President Trump, they never made any move whatsoever to arrest Christopher Steele, was never even contemplated. They paid him a million. Right, right. But yet we’re supposed to believe that somehow they are acting in good faith in this occasion when we’ve already seen them stonewalling and subverting and thwarting the FBI is doing so, or the Department of Justice, any investigation into the Biden family and the receipt of millions of dollars from foreign entities and foreign individuals without any ostensible service or product to sell, they’re not interested in that at all.

And so that’s just the most recent example I can think of where the american people say, well, I don’t have any trust in this system. It seems like it’s one sided and it’s being weaponized against people for their political beliefs. And they have a valid reason for thinking that. That really is probably, if you had to say, well, what’s the biggest issue in the country besides the outrageous stupidity of federal budget and funding? The second, maybe the third, I don’t know.

It’s tough to decide because you had the spending issue, which is out of control, a wide open southern border, we have no idea who the hell is in the country. And then thirdly, we’ve got this really aggressive, weaponized law enforcement intelligence, really sort of a cabal that’s running loose. It’s unlike anything I think ever in our history. Nothing like it whatsoever. Nothing like it in our history. They’re persecuting the law abiding and letting the non law abiding roam around the country.

And if you do something about it, if you say something about it, you’re a racist. And if you have to defend yourself, like the gentleman in the New York subway that was trying to defend his fellow passengers from a lunatic, next thing you know, he finds himself up on charges, right? Suddenly people say that, yeah, suddenly he’s the bad guy. And people say, well, why would I even get involved? But unfortunately, we live in America, and when a young lady goes out for a run and is murdered by somebody here that’s here illegally, that should have been arrested and deported, they don’t know there’s nowhere for them to turn.

They can’t turn to themselves for defense, and they can’t turn to law enforcement for defense that either refuses to do it or actually aids and abets the criminal element by allowing them to get away with crimes, and they’re allowed to continue, which just emboldens them to commit either greater atrocities. It is a place that America has never been before. So you have a weaponized Justice Department going, not just the Justice Department, also you’ve got state and local prosecutors who are on their individual campaigns to destroy President Trump, running their own election interference, running their own lawfare, insurrection, frankly, against President Trump.

What’s your view going to today’s Super Tuesday, another big sort of benchmark on the way to the general election in November. The Supreme Court came out yesterday with a very strong opinion telling Colorado, knock it off with your, I talk about election interference gamesmanship there. I see Nikki Haley circling sort of like a vulture, waiting for somebody to do something bad to Trump that lets her swoop in.

Give me your prognosis. We’re heading towards November. What’s going to play out? Do people really see through Biden and the disaster that his presidency has been, or where are we going? I think more and more do see through it, but we can’t count on that. We got to keep informing people. And every single day, all day long, they’re being misled by the left and the rights being censored and the information that would have them make clear cut decisions is being censored.

So that’s going to continue. But I think that obviously, Donald Trump is going to secure the nomination. The question is, how does this play out in the courts? Does he find himself in a position of being accused? He is being accused criminally, but they’ve shopped for venues. The people that, like you said the local prosecutors, where he can’t find an impartial jury or an impartial judge to try the case.

And so it is very perilous for him. And while I’m pleased with the outcome of the recent Supreme Court decision, let’s face it, that should never have come to the courts. That’s absurd on the face of it. And as much as we see that as a victory, I see that as, of course, that’s how it should have gone. We shouldn’t really see that as a victory, because my concern is that the court oftentimes is trying to balance between both political ideologies.

And I’m worried that they said, well, we found for the president in this case and the constitution in this case, but we have to balance that on this issue of immunity. And so we’re going to meet the left halfway by know, either for them or partially for them, and imperiling the country into something which turns into a complete banana republic or third world, where everybody that serves as the president is then immediately arrested either during the presidency or immediately thereafter for making decisions that the executive would normally be required to make and be expected to make based on the information on hand.

But the other side sees politically unpalatable. And so those are dangerous, dangerous territories that we’re now delving into. I’m holding my breath on that. I’ve got two indictments teed up for Barack Obama. I mean, if they go down this path, they’ve got fast and furious, where he invoked executive privilege and rhetorically, he dragged 300 body bags into the Oval Office because there’s deaths directly attributed to fast and furious.

And then Barack Obama enjoyed killing Americans through that judicial process. And so he drone strike on Anwar Alaki and his 16 year old son, two separate incidents. Believe me, I’m not defending Anwar Alaki. The guy’s a monster. Right. But there’s a process. And if you’re a us citizen, you don’t get executed by the government unless you go to trial. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Yeah, because that’s a slippery slope. We think that Anwar Alaki is a terrorist and a horrible human who likely deserved what he got coming to him. But there is a process that protects you and I because there are people in the left in this country that think the same thing of us. Well, we have President Biden talking about MAGA Republicans. MAGA Republicans are domestic violent extremists and white nationalists and all this other, I mean, reckless, reckless talk.

You had the Bernie Sanders supporter who shot up the baseball. He had his marching orders from Bernie Sanders. Right. That’s the path we go down, given this effort on the part of criminalizing every act of every president ever. Yeah. So I’m very, very concerned about that. And then finally, let me just say that across the country, even flouting what their former president Jimmy Carter had said, that we have these elections now in Pennsylvania.

We have essentially 50 days of elections where nothing has really changed since the last time we had a presidential election. You had people voting before the election, people voting after the election. You have some people signing the ballot, some people, the signature didn’t matter. You had this disparate or unfair treatment. And I think, unfortunately, the Democrats are interested. If they can’t win the election based on ideas and performance, we’ll just try.

And the left will turn to a different methodology, which is just collecting as many ballots as they can. And I want to say that they’re doing it legally. Some have concluded or accused them of doing it illegally. That’s not me. But I think that it has left our circumstances wide open for chicanery. And you just wonder, especially with even the Pennsylvania governor saying that people here illegally can get a driver’s license.

And, oh, by the way, when you get a driver’s license, you’re automatically registered to vote. Why would we do that for people that are here illegally if we don’t want them to vote illegally and if we’re disinterested and it’s currently against the law to ask for their identification to prove that they’re an american citizen and they should be voting, why would we do that unless we want people that are here illegally to vote in an unauthorized fashion? Those things concern me, and I don’t think that they’re unreasonable or it’s unrealistic to talk about those things.

Congressman Scott Perry, thank you for the very straightforward, clear, articulate explanation of what is going on in this country right now and what the viewpoint is from a member of the freedom Caucus who I think sees things and explains things in a way that will resonate with the judicial watch audience. Well, I will just tell you, we thank God for judicial watch. There are certain things that we can’t get to, namely the FOIA stuff that judicial watch does a great job at.

It takes too long, for sure. But if it weren’t for Judicial Watch, we wouldn’t know the half of these things. So we’re very thankful for the work you do and the people that support you. And I’ve always been a big fan and I’m so appreciative of the opportunity to come and be with you. Congressman Scott Perry from Pennsylvania’s 10th congressional district. Thank you so much. Thank you. I’m Chris Farrell on watch.

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