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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Truth with Lisa Boothe: The Last Line of Defense with Senator Eric Schmitt
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- [00:00]
Lisa Booth
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
iHeart Sports Announcer
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- [00:35]
Lisa Booth
Come on.
- [00:36]
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- [00:38]
Senator Eric Schmidt
This thing is ancient.
- [00:39]
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- [00:55]
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- [01:12]
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- [02:14]
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- [02:42]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Use most this Labor Day.
- [02:46]
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- [03:44]
Lisa Booth
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth where we get to the heart of the issues that matter to you today. We're joined by Senator Eric Schmidt, author of the new book the Last Line of Defense, how to Beat the Left in Court. From exposing Big tech censorship in Missouri versus Biden, defining woke ideology and open borders, he shares battle tested strategies for conservative victories in court. So we'll dive into his book, we'll tackle the Russia hoax. We'll also explore why the courts are the ultimate battleground for America's freedoms. Let's get to it with Senator Eric Schmidt. Well, Senator Eric Schmidt, it's great to have you on. We were just talking about how I had you on when you were the Missouri Attorney General and then also after you've been elected. So it's great to see all the amazing things that you've been doing doing and I'm looking forward to digging into this book that you're out with now. So appreciate you making the time, sir.
- [04:40]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, it's great to be back with you, Lisa.
- [04:42]
Lisa Booth
So do you think it'd be fair so the book's called the Last Line of Defense, how to Beat the Left in Court. Is it, is it fair to say that the left is more litigious than the right tends to be?
- [04:52]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, I think so. And I think for a long time conservatives kind of Ceded a lot of that territory. I mean, look, more lawyers are left leaning than right leaning. For a long time, even when I was in law school in the late 90s, there's still this discussion of a living Constitution, all this nonsense. But I think conservatives now and why I wrote the book the Last Line of Defense, we need to be prepared to fight on all fronts. And the courtroom is another one of those fronts. So you've got the legislative fights that are always out there. You've got the court of public opinion, of course, you've got the executive branch. But the courts, I think are really important. And what this book is, the last line of Defense, how you beat the left in court, which you can get on Amazon right now. It's really kind of a field manual from the front lines of the battle against the left wing lawfare machine from when I was Attorney General in Missouri. So when President Trump was out of office and you saw the COVID lockdowns and the vaccine mandates and the open borders and the DEI struggle sessions and the ESG requirements and the censorship regime, we stood up and we fought back and we won. We took the vaccine mandate case of the Supreme Court. We won. We had the student loan debt forgiveness scam that would cost half a trillion dollars of taxpayers. We took that to the Supreme Court. We won. We filed Missouri vs Biden, which was the censorship case that exposed it before Elon Musk had even bought Twitter. And so this book really is kind of a playbook for how we fight back and how we win the future. So it's about those stories. It's about, you know, what was it like to take the deposition of Anthony Fauci, what came out of that? Elvis Chan, who was this FBI agent who was pre bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story, even though they had it in line, these social media companies. What was all that like, the landscape, what did it look like and what were some of the decisions we made to fight back and but more importantly, I think it just sort of, it puts the marker down that for conservatives in the future, we got to be willing to fight. And this isn't written for lawyers. I mean, I hope lawyers read it. I hope ags read it. But this is really for, you know, your audience, the people who are engaged every day, kind of a behind the scenes view of what this thing's all about.
- [06:57]
Lisa Booth
We. I'm not a lawyer, so that's good. We're not. So I always appreciate things being in layman's terms. You know, talk about, I believe it was Missouri versus Biden, the. You know, what you'd referenced previously with the bio Walk us through, like the censorship that you were saying and sort of what we discovered through your lawsuit against the Biden administration over censorship.
- [07:22]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Well, if you remember, you know, just something seemed off. You would see Jim Jen Psaki at the podium saying things like, we're flagging this for Facebook. And Biden would say things like, they need to do more. They're killing people. And then they floated this idea of a disinformation governance board. You remember this? It's just Orwellian where the government was going to decide what the truth was and what you could see and hear. And so we figured this was kind of the tip of the iceberg. So we just made a decision. I, as attorney General said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to sue these people for violating the First Amendment rights of citizens because they have to be censoring people. And so we gathered all the public data that was out there, all the statements, what we knew. We knew people had been deplatformed. And what we sought then, a strategic decision. Normally when you file a lawsuit like that and you're trying to stop the government from doing something, you seek an injunction right away that basically tells them they have to stop. What we did instead was we knew we were going to be called conspiracy theorists. We knew it was going to be labeled a lawsuit just to get attention or something like that. So we asked the court for discovery first and the court granted it. And what we found was shocking. And this was when my eyes were really kind of opened up because we got documents, emails, text messages, re thousands of pages of this stuff where there were these special secret portals set up between high ranking government officials and senior executives at Facebook, at Twitter, telling them, you need to take this down and they go do it. You had the CDC giving words and phrases to these social media companies. If this is uttered, deplatform, throttle these people. I mean, so we all know that the government can't do that, right? The government. The First Amendment protects the government from doing it, but they also can't outsource that either. And that's what we discovered in this case. It was really mind blowing. And it was this leviathan of agencies. It wasn't just one person. This was the cdc. This was cisa, which is the cybersecurity arm. It was the FBI, it was the White House. And they're, you know, they're just working methodically to. To suppress American speech. And that's illegal in this country. And so we decided to do something about it. And then, of course, you know, Elon Musk buys Twitter, and you have the Twitter files, and then we have congressional hearings. But before any of that, it took our lawsuit and the discovery to kind of flesh a lot of this out. And we took some depositions along the.
- [09:38]
Lisa Booth
Way, which is also sort of ironic. And I'm sure kind of gives you a chuckle when you hear the left now talking about Texas redistricting, which is something that's happening right now that like, that's a threat to democracy, but not what you just outlined.
- [10:00]
Senator Eric Schmidt
And that's also. I talk about in. In the Last Line of Defense, the book that you can get on Amazon is they have their own playbook, right? In Covid, if anything, I believe that power doesn't necessarily corrupt, but power does reveal, and I think Covid in particular exposed the worst tendencies, this kind of petty totalitarianism of the left of what they would do if they had control. You got to remember, like, if you take the DeLorean back in time here, like, there was police tape around playgrounds. Like they were, you know, we. We sued some school districts, 50 plus school districts in Missouri, to, To stop their mask mandates for kids and to punish kids who, who then didn't want to wear masks. They would put them in the middle of the gym on a stage to eat lunch by themselves. Like, these are grown adults doing this stuff. And it's totally wild, it's totally crazy. But their playbook is you have an emergency, real or imagined, you aggregate power, you. You do the othering of people who disagree with you, and then you silence dissent. And so it's up to us to see when that's happening and have the courage to stand up. I think what people are really looking for just kind of writ large here is they want authentic leadership. And to this day, Lisa, in Missouri, when I'm like at the grocery store or a ball game or something, what the most common comment I will get, other than you're really tall, is, you are really tall, though.
- [11:21]
Lisa Booth
So that's not six.
- [11:22]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, it's pretty tall, but is, hey, thanks for standing up for our kids. You know, like, that was a weird time and not a lot of people wanted to kind of stand out. And we sued these school districts and kids and parents were really appreciative of that. But anyway, so it's just kind of lessons learned from that. But more importantly, we've got our own playbook now, and we want, and I wanted to share that in the Book, Last Line of Defense, how to Beat the left in Court.
- [11:47]
Lisa Booth
Well, and we're saying the left really tried to use, at least particularly, I mean, I know there's a Supreme Court ruling about it, but really trying to use some of these injunctions, these nationwide injunctions to shut down President Trump, particularly on what he's trying to do with the border and, like, deport all these illegal aliens that were allowed under the past four years of the Biden administration. I know Speaker Johnson, I think it was in 2000, March of 2025, said that something like 70% of all injunctions against presidents since 2000 were against President Trump and 92% of those from were from Democrat appointed judges. So, like, how do we counter that? I guess, you know, countering the left really trying to use the courts to shut down President Trump's immigration efforts.
- [12:33]
Senator Eric Schmidt
It's a great question. And if people are interested in that, I do think the book will be illuminating because I think that the central issue in fighting back is you gotta be tough to do it. You gotta fight back. Like the Solicitor General of the United States now, John Sauer was my Solicitor General in Missouri. So we're populating the ranks now with people who know how to fight and win. And I think President Trump was the one that ushered in this kind of new era of the Republican Party anyway, of being tough and fighting back. But the good news is, even though you will see some of those district court, random district court decisions, by and large, as those cases have made their way up to the appellate courts and certainly the Supreme Court, they've been struck down. So whether it's on programming or personnel, think of like USAID stuff or the ability to fire people, they can do that. And the courts have weighed in on that. Immigration, on deportations. Remember, they made a big deal with Judge Boasberg and all that. But ultimately the Supreme Court's slap those guys down and they can move forward with deportations. And then on nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court about a month ago said, yeah, you've been abusing these nationwide injunctions. That's not what these are for. It's for the parties involved. Not one district court judge in a corner of the country deciding policy, or foreign policy for that matter, for the President of the United States and the whole country. So I think what's happened is people have wised up. We're not afraid to fight. We have a composition now in the courts of enough judges in key positions that rule on the law as it is, not how they want it to be. And That's a huge shift from 30 years ago. Like, 30 years ago, you still had a really liberal Supreme Court that believed in a living Constitution, that it just meant whatever you wanted to mean in the left. And the Democrats knew they had a super legislator at the end of the day that would just try to arrive at a result that has changed. And so since that's changed, we got to know what the rules are and we got to know how to fight back. And again, that's what the Last Line defense book is all about.
- [14:21]
Lisa Booth
You know, I agree on fighting power with power, and I think that's something that, you know, we didn't do as much. And you're right, like, President Trump has sort of introduced this more like muscular conservatism. You know, you did as attorney General in Missouri, and we're seeing that from Governor Desantis as well, and some of these other red state governors really fighting power with power. But I guess, you know, my only concern about all of it, and I just wonder, like, how much are we ceding too much power to, like, the judiciary? And, you know, like, does Congress need to step up and take back control of powers? Because obviously, like, separation of powers, it's very important. And, you know, I worry that, like, judges are sort of dictating laws in the country versus Congress. And so, like, I guess, what's your, you know, like, what do you make of that? And, like, what can we do to. You know what I mean? Like, are we blurring sort of like the separation of powers here?
- [15:18]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Well, think of it this way. Yeah. Here's how I think about. I think there's two points to make. The first is, if you really think about what these fights are about that end up in the judiciary, like, let's just take the student loan debt forgiveness case, right? We, we had standing because Missouri had a student loan servicing agency that the bureaucrats didn't want me to sue. It didn't matter. I sued anyway because I was Attorney general and you could do it. But we sued, we had standing, and we won. What were we really doing there? It wasn't the court saying that the president, it's a good idea or not. They were saying Congress hasn't passed a law that gives you the ability to do it. So to your point, that's actually what we are fighting for. What the Democrats are fighting for in the judicial system is for one judge to say, yeah, it doesn't really matter if Congress said something or not. We're deciding that this is the right thing to do. If you listen to judge Justice Jackson and you know, and even her own liberal colleagues on the Supreme Court criticize her. She basically just wants to kind of weigh in on policy matters. That's not the role of a judge. You know, that's not the role of a judge. So I think we are fighting for what, what does the Constitution say about this? What do the laws passed by the legislature, the Congress say about it? It's an expression of the will of the people. The second part of the answer I think is Congress does need to do a better job of sort of reasserting itself. Think of the administrative state that's gained so much power over the years. Part of that's because Congress has said, oh, I voted for the greatest bill in the world, but I can't believe this agency did that. So one of the things we need to do is make our laws more prescriptive, not give as much deference or authority to these agencies. Because if you think about it, it's really counter to the, to the idea of our republic. Our republic's based on self government and accountability. If you, if you hand over so much responsibility to a faceless bureaucrat that nobody's ever heard of, that person's not accountable to anybody. So I think to be true to kind of our founding and what the separation power is all about, the Article 1 branch or Congress needs to be more specific. And, and if an agency, by the way, wants to do something, Congress should have to red, red light it or green light it. Right? Like if you say we want to regulate this because it's going to have this kind of economic impact before it can go into effect, Congress should, should have to vote on it. And that's a more structural reform that's harder to get to. But the right answer.
- [17:31]
Lisa Booth
We've got to take a quick commercial break. More with Senator Eric Schmidt on the other side.
- [17:37]
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- [18:37]
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- [19:34]
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- [20:33]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Ah come on, why is this taking so long?
- [20:36]
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- [20:52]
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- [20:53]
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- [21:11]
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- [22:14]
Lisa Booth
Yeah, Justice Brown kind of lost me when she couldn't define what a woman. I tend to ignore people who, you know, are as nonsensical as that. But on, on, on the student loan forgiveness, I mean, Biden knew, I mean, don't you think that Biden knew that inevitably a court would strike it down? Like it was just, it was for like with like a election play, right? It was just to try to get younger voters to say, hey, look, I'm doing this before. I think it was before the midterms, if I remember correctly.
- [22:40]
Senator Eric Schmidt
It was.
- [22:41]
Lisa Booth
Yeah, right. Wasn't it like it was kind of like a cynical election play, right?
- [22:45]
Senator Eric Schmidt
It was. And I, in the book Last Line of Defense, I start the chapter by talking about when people run for class president, the things that they promise, if that's kind of what it was like. But, but remember what he said with the Supreme Court when we won? He said, well, the Supreme Court said I couldn't. I'm going to do it anyway. So he tried to kind of get around it. So for all of the, like, President Trump's not going to follow court orders, which of course he has followed every single court order. Biden was the one saying, I'm just going to ignore it. But yeah, it, it, I think it was an election ploy. But here's the truth of the matter which we get into in the book too, is that that case, the Supreme Court oral arguments, it all came down to standing, like, does somebody have the right to sue? Who, who's been injured by this right? Who has been injured by it? Because you have, that's what standing is. And if Missouri, if we would not have filed that lawsuit, the case would have, they would have let it go. Like it would have happened because it would say, well, nobody has standing has brought a lawsuit against that. We can rule against Biden on. But because we had a loan servicing agency that we argued was going to lose money because if you wipe away all the student loan debt, you know, that's what this entity does. That gave us standing and that's why we won. And I think that's kind of the cool part about the book. The last line of defense that people can order right now is it breaks down some of those things that, you know, like, are kind of in passing in a 24 hour news cycle, but kind of breaks down like, why did that happen and what are the implications of that moving forward?
- [24:12]
Lisa Booth
You know, I know one issue that you address that we've sort of seem in an alarming way is woke ideology in schools. And, you know, depending on the state and depending on the school system, you know, where they're like, kids can go to a teacher and be like, I'm trans. And like, the teacher's not going to go and tell the parent. And just sort of like this lack of, of parental rights and parent parents being sort of, you know, kept out of the business of their kids. It's really like this fight over who owns the kids, right? Is it, is it like the state is the school or the parents? So I guess what do you talk about in the book there? And like, what can parents try to do to reclaim their power over their own kids?
- [24:55]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Well, I'll just give you an example. This is in middle America. This is in Springfield, Missouri. Okay? This is not like New York City. This is Springfield, Missouri. Some parents were concerned that like, some of this stuff was happening in their schools, this kind of woke ideology. And they asked for documents from the school, like, hey, was there some presentation about this in the school district wouldn't give it to them. A state legislator then said, hey, I would like to see these two. And they said, well, that's going to cost you $120,000 for all the printing costs. Right? That's how we became aware of it. And then once we found out about it, I said, okay, well, we're in charge of enforcing these laws. You're going to provide the documents. And then once, once we found what was actually being part of this, this, these trainings, it was, again, it's shocking. There. There are teachers essentially being taught to divide the room by race, that they wanted to. They wanted to push down this oppression matrix. All of these kind of like the gender person, man, and all this kind of weird stuff that they wanted to keep hidden from parents. And I think by the act of us exposing it, and we sued them for hiding, turned over that school board. Like, that was the power of the information. And. And if you think about it, that no investigative journalist from, you know, a liberal rag was going to pursue that. We had to do it in the AG's office because they know their interests are aligned. The left coalition, which, you know, like during COVID when we would sue for mass mandates, they would say, you know, they would have some quote, unquote, VERIFY team or fact checker, say, well, actually, masks are very effective. And they had no studies to back it up, right? They had nothing. And I was being interviewed by reporters who literally were still not allowed in the newsroom. They were in their cars with masks on their face, interviewing me about, you know, trying to get school districts to stop force masking kids. They were asking questions like, why are you trying to harm children? And it was just a wild and crazy time. And I don't think we should forget about it. Like, I think there's a tendency to kind of like, memory hole all that stuff, but we shouldn't, because that's what they did with a little bit of power that they had at that moment. And we're on the other side of the fever dream now. But part of the reason why I wrote the last line of defense, how to beat the left in court, was that we got to document this and we have to have a playbook, because it won't be the last time you referenced this threat to democracy thing. Look, they justified unprecedented lawfare against the former president, who was soon to be president again, Donald Trump, to go after him, to try to throw him in jail for the rest of his life, to bankrupt his family, all because he was a, quote, unquote threat to democracy. He was all bs but that's their playbook. And if we want to win, we got to know how to fight. So that's why we wrote the book.
- [27:32]
Lisa Booth
And I want to get to that point in just a moment, but something I just thought of with COVID so I had Senator Rand Paul on, and he said that Biden signed Anthony Foushee's pardon with an autopen. And so he wants the Department of Justice to charge Foushee for lying before Congress and test the auto pen on the pardon theory in court, in the courts. What do you make of that strategy? Is that sort of like a plausible direction that all of this, like Biden investigation stuff will go in or, you know.
- [28:08]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah. So I, I chair the subcommittee of on the Constitution in the Judiciary Committee, and we actually had a hearing on the auto pin. We were the first ones to have a hearing. And there's a lot of people looking at it. DOJ's looking at it, the House is looking at it, the Senate's looking at it. And the central question is. Well, there's is two. One is no president has ever done prospective pardons, right? Like basically he was pardoning family members and other people in his administration for things that they hadn't been charged with. That's never been done before. So the power of a president to pardon is pretty expansive, but it probably doesn't include that. And he was doing that. But to your question specifically, we, you know, had had experts in their field come in and talk about it. Think of it this way, like if you have a contentious family dynamic and the matriarch or the patriarch passes away and you have a will, a dispute about the will, right? The, the most important question that's going to be asked and there's some change in the will at the last minute, like the deathbed kind of changed. You're going to ask, well, was, was that person of sound mind, did they know what they were doing? And if the answer to that is no, it's null and void, right? It doesn't, it's. The change doesn't not effectuated. The same would be true here with the auto pin. Like if he doesn't know what he's doing, that would, that would negate the pardons. And then also, you know, we are, we are actually seeking documents from the archivist who happens to be Marco Rubio, by the way. Right now he's got like a thousand.
- [29:36]
Lisa Booth
So many jobs, the poor.
- [29:39]
Senator Eric Schmidt
I saw him at some, I said, I got a letter coming your way. Not as Secretary of State, but as the archivist of the United States, he's lucky. He's lucky.
- [29:45]
Lisa Booth
He looks so young. He's like, that's right.
- [29:48]
Senator Eric Schmidt
A lot of jobs. But basically there should be a paper trail. Like for every time that auto pin was used, there should be a paper trail. What for? And there's some speculation, actually. I think a whistleblower's come forward and said that he was just being presented. Like, here are the kinds of things you would be signing for, like, and not individual pardons. Well, individual. That's very important because when you're pardoning somebody, like he did for murder or rape or whatever, like it's about that individual instance. Like, it's not like you pardon everyone who ever got a conviction for marijuana possession or something. Right? Like, it's got to be about the person. So that's another reason why I think what they were doing at the end was so flawed and, and ripe for legal challenge, because we just never saw anything like it. And you probably had this, you know, the staffer competition, you know, at the end of, like, what you could actually get auto pin to sign. What crazy nonsense could you actually get the auto pen to sign? And who knows if Biden was even.
- [30:46]
Lisa Booth
Knew what was going on, which is, you know, really concerning and also just concerning. Like, obviously this is a guy who's like, you know, in charge of the nuclear codes and.
- [30:56]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, yeah, like, kind of like. Yeah, like World War iii. Right, yeah. Crazy.
- [31:00]
Lisa Booth
And he's got no idea, like, who. He doesn't know his name. You know, it's like a Weekend at Bernie's presidency, you know, on the weaponization of government against President Trump and all the documents that have been put out with it from the Trump administration about the Russia hoax. Do you think. I mean, is anything ever going to be done about it, though? Because, I mean, I know that there are like, you know, indictments. I don't know if there's been any indictments, but there's been. There are like. Or what is it? Criminal charge, referred criminal charges or whatever it is. But like, do you think anything's actually going to be done about it? Because I think like, so many people are used to like, all this chatter and noise and we hype things up and we over promise and we under deliver, and then the base is just really frustrated, feeling like they've kind of been had, you know.
- [31:47]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, no, I. Yes, I get that question a lot. And I do think, knowing what we know now from the disclosures from Tulsi Gabbard, which By the way, if you want to understand why they were so hell bent on President Trump never getting back in office again, this would be exhibit A, because they knew they had something to hide. It could also explain, by the way, the Mar A Lago raid that they were so obsessed with, with guns drawn and going through the First Lady's, you know, underwear drawer. Like, it's crazy. But to answer your question, yeah, I think there should be indictments. And, and I, and I think they probably will come. And, and now, you know, from the legal perspective, Biden probably has immunity from the Trump case from when he was in office. And then you have the key player. But there's no immunity for like a presidential candidate. There's no, which was with Hillary Clinton. There's no immunity for, for Clapper, there's no immunity for Brennan, and there's no immunity for Comey. I would say those three are. If there's going to be indictments, and I think there should be, that would get pulled into that and the theory would go, yeah, the statute of limitations may have expired, but a conspiracy charge is different. Conspiracy is when you light the fuse here and something happens much further down the road and you don't even necessarily have to be intricately involved with what happened at the end of the rainbow. But if you began this conspiracy to defraud the people of the United States, I think they can and probably should be held accountable to that for that. And I think that's what we're going to see. I don't know that. I mean, I'm not like giving inside info here or anything. I just suspect that there's enough out there now that that indictments are going to come.
- [33:32]
Lisa Booth
Criminal referral is what I was trying to think of. And you know, in the Mar A Lago thing was really interesting one. I loved how Melania Trump, like, you're a guy, so you might not paid as much attention to this, but like during her first inauguration, she had this like, really beautiful, like soft blue, like Ralph Lauren outfit and like, looked really happy and cheery and like, you know, light. And then during this last inauguration, she had like the Vs for Vendetta hat and it's like super tailored suit. And like, even in her first lady portrait this time around, she's like at the desk in a suit, like looking like, I'm, you know, I'm coming for you, like, I've got your number, right? So it's like you can just see the difference between like her first, you know, the first inauguration, the way she was dressed and interacting. Even her first portrait, like, she's like, smiling. It's all like, soft. And then, like, the second one, it's like, you know, like, right. Coming, you know, like, you mess with the wrong family.
- [34:24]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah.
- [34:25]
Lisa Booth
Look at President Trump.
- [34:26]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah. The difference in his. His two portraits. Like, you know, the side by side on his two portraits. And then, of course, you had the mug shot in between, which was like this great rallying cry. I mean, I think they. They still can't. This part explains partly why the Democrats are so lost. They put. They went all in on trying to demonize half the country and essentially destroy Trump, his family, and maga, and they lost. Like, they went all in on that. That was their strategy. And they lost. And not. They didn't just lose the electoral map, they lost the popular vote. And now they don't know what to do. They don't have a messenger, they don't have a message. And they're still trying to kind of, like, deal with the Trump arrangement syndrome. And I don't think they've hit rock bottom yet. And. And I think, again, President Trump has taught us what it means to kind of fight back in this historic comeback. And, you know, like I said, you know, when I was Attorney General, Missouri and was out of office, and we had to kind of hold the line, that. That's kind of how I viewed my job in hindsight now. And right about in the last line of defense, how to beat the left in court, which you can get on Amazon, is, it was a crazy time. And we held the line until the calvary could arrive. And that's what happened in November of 2024. The people spoke up, and thank God they did well.
- [35:37]
Lisa Booth
And I think the problem for the left, too, is they were exposed as hypocrites, because you. Then we found out Joe Biden had all these classified documents and, like, including from his time in the Senate, which is like, really, really illegal because he must have probably taken them out of, like, a skiff and he didn't have the authority to declassify. Like, you know, president is the ultimate declassifier or classifier of documents. And so, like, you know, the. I feel like. I feel like the Trump stuff was more gray area because, you know, the president does have the ultimate authority, but then he also had classified documents from being a vice president who doesn't have the same authority. So it's like, you know, and then they basically, like, coordinated with Biden's team and, like, there was no show of force. There was no, like, showing up guns Blazing. And, like, what he did was a thousand times worse than the gray area that they tried to put President Trump in.
- [36:25]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, well, and think about it. It was also in his garage. These boxes were in a garage where Hunter Biden was stand, like the guy who could have been compromised by foreign governments. You know, like, that's just another layer to it. And if you remember, the only. Well, what they said was the reason they didn't charge him was, is he wasn't competent to stand trial. Like, that's what Robert Hear said. He said, this guy's too far gone to stand trial. And yet he was still president United States. And so at the time, I wrote a letter calling on all the cabinet members, you know, to invoke the 25th Amendment, because if he can't stand trial, like, how is he making these important decisions? Of course, they did nothing, which then was later exposed, you know, in the debate. And they were hiding all this from the American people. You know, you had again, the, the three days after President Trump announces he's running again, what happens. You have assistant DA in Atlanta meet with the White House counsel. You have the number three person at DOJ go to Alvin Bragg's office. You have Jack Smith appointed and goes down this witch hunt to try to throw him in jail. I mean, it was a very coordinated effort to make sure this man never got back into the White House. And I can't, I just think they still can't believe it happened. And I was an early endor in, early endorser of President Trump, maybe the first or second senator. And the reason why, first of all, I think the man connects in such a unique way with the American people. And I went up to his trial in New York and I went back with him to Butler after, you know, the second time. And it's. Is a singular political figure. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, I just turned 50, so it's young for the Senate, but I don't know how young that really is. So I just never seen anything like it. And I think his connection with the American people is pretty unique. And what we're able to do now, think about it in Congress, to hold these very slim majorities to move an agenda, it's really because of his ability to come back and, and harness the, the hopes and the desires of the American people. And I think everyone's responding to that, and that's a good thing.
- [38:20]
Lisa Booth
We're only 10 years old in me, so we're going to say 50s, very young. Quick break. If you like what you're hearing, Please share on social media or maybe send it to a friend or a family member. Stay with us.
- [38:32]
Big 3 Basketball Announcer
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- [38:55]
iHeart Sports Announcer
World.
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- [39:32]
Lisa Booth
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- [40:31]
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- [41:29]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Ugh.
- [41:29]
Lisa Booth
Come on.
- [41:30]
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- [41:32]
Senator Eric Schmidt
This thing is ancient.
- [41:33]
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- [42:07]
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- [43:09]
Lisa Booth
It'S interesting now because like we're seeing Letitia James potentially be in some major hot water over mortgage fraud allegations. And the same thing with Adam Schiff. Like I believe in some documents she said her dad was her husband. And so, you know, there's maybe a little bit of projection with all of that stuff from them. Do you?
- [43:28]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, well, I think again, I thought they were, they were playing for keeps. They were trying to put him away. They, they knew what he. They never forgave him for coming down the escalator in the first place. And so they concocted this made up Russia gate thing to try to. Well, not to try to, but to spy on him when he was a candidate to try to derail his first term. Then they use the Russia hoax stuff for the censorship stuff, which we outlined in the book Last Line of Defense. When we filed the Missouri vs Biden lawsuit, we found out that this whole like, Russia misinformation thing was. There was their fig leaf for all the censorship. They would say, oh, this is misinformation, or the laptop's misinformation or, you know, whatever. They just used it for everything. And then they continued that narrative, say, this guy was a threat to the country. We got to stop him. And the links that they went to. Thank God though, and this is, I think it's affirming for the republic, is that the American people sat in their own jury box and watched all this play out and they rendered their own verdict and they, they wanted reform and they wanted him back.
- [44:27]
Lisa Booth
So, yeah, that did give me comfort. You talk about Soros back prosecutors, I guess, like, why do you think George Soros wants to be such a destabilizing force? You know, he's like this hedge fund guy. Is it ideology? Is it like financially motivated? Like, what do you think is behind his desire for such disruption across the country and destabilization?
- [44:53]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Well, if you, if you kind of are study the history of Marxism, what you really need for societal change is a, is people to sort of lose confidence in everything and kind of chaos, you know, and so covet. Think about, think about what covet was. Like, people couldn't interact anymore. You couldn't go outside unless. Unless you were protesting, quote, unquote, systemic racism. Then they made an exception for you and people, I think, was that at that point in that summer, people knew it was all bs. But that's what Soros, he arbitraged. The system was relatively inexpensive to finance these local prosecutors because there's only one person in that county or that city who can prosecute crime. That one person. World needs a hell of a lot of social workers, I guess. But you, you only get one prosecutor to make charging decisions. And if you could corrupt that system, then People would look around and they would see violent crime and they would want something very different than kind of what we have. And I think he views that as his inroad to change the system, to flip it over and to have this kind of neo Marxist regime in the tip of the spear where these prosecutors that he was funding. And you know, I think, I hope people are kind of waking up to this. I think again, we're moving on a little bit from that. But that fever dream that we were in for at least four years was just, it was defined by this, you know, lockdowns and, you know, social unrest and an expansive regime in the White House that just was. Didn't care about individual liberties, that's for sure. So, so anyway, I mean, again, why I wrote the book, I'm not, you know, we had one of those in St. Louis, I wrote the book last Time Defense. We took on the Ken Gardner, who was a local Soros funded prosecutor, if you remember, in St. Louis, she went after the McCloskeys who dared to come out and defend their home as the rioters were coming. Like that was a flashpoint. And those people were on their way to the mayor's house, a Democrat mayor, to protest outside her home and terrorize her family. And along the way they passed McCloskey's home and, and it was a private street and there's that. You know, thankfully the confrontation didn't get, you know, violent in that way. But she decided instead of charging a lot of the rioters that summer, that who she was going to charge were the McCloskeys. And so we stepped in and said, no, in Missouri we have the Castle doctrine. People can defend their life and their property and there was nothing wrong with what they did. So anyway, you just had these flashpoints all along the way that I think were instructive. And again, what the book is really about is to kind of walk through the behind the scenes. What was that like? What was it like dealing with a Soros prosecutor? In fact, we had a, we had a case where I prosecuted through a quirk of a conflict of interest, took kind of a. You know, when you're attorney General trying a case yourself, not many people do that. There's a lot of risk associated with it. But I tried a murder case in the city of St. Louis and my message when we got the verdict was there is somebody in this town who cares about the people and their safety. Right. And so there's just a lot of that kind of stuff in the book that I think people who Aren't lawyers who track this stuff daily who listen to your show are going to appreciate because there was so much on the line, we were able to fight back and win. But more importantly now we can't forget those lessons. Right? There's going to be more fights, whether it's like climate alarmism, when they say, oh, there's some emergency and you can't, you know, drive this kind of car anymore. And you know, we just have to have the willing to push back, willingness to push back and fight back.
- [48:21]
Lisa Booth
And then before we go, you know, what do you hope people take away from the book? What's the call to action here? You know, how do we protect freedoms moving forward?
- [48:29]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Yeah, I mean, this is, this isn't just like history. It's a playbook, it's concrete, it's actionable. I think left wing lawfare is one of the most important stories of the second Trump administration and this is how we beat him. And a lot of it just comes down to courage. It really does. We got the law on our side. We have common sense on our side that people are with us. We just have the courage to fight on all fronts. And that's why I wrote the Last Line of Defense.
- [48:54]
Lisa Booth
Senator Eric Schmidt, the last line of Defense, how to beat the left in Court is out now. Go get it, Senator. Really very interesting stuff. Very interesting book. Really enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate you making the time, sir.
- [49:06]
Senator Eric Schmidt
Thanks, Lisa.
- [49:07]
Lisa Booth
That was Senator Eric Schmidt, author of the new book the Last Line of Defense, how to Beat the Left in Court. Really interesting conversation. Appreciate him for making the time. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. Also to thank my producer John Casio for putting the show together. Until next time.
- [49:26]
iHeart Sports Announcer
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- [49:57]
Lisa Booth
Come on.
- [49:57]
Tech Advertiser
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Senator Eric Schmidt
This thing is ancient.
- [50:01]
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- [51:05]
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- [52:04]
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- [52:48]
Lisa Booth
This is an iHeart podcast.