← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Nunes: From Truth Social to the President's Intelligence Advisory Committee
01:11:44
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- [00:00]
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- [01:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
This is the Victor Davis Hanson show and I'm once again going solo today. Jack and Sammy are not with me because we're doing one of the Victor Hanson interviews. And if you recall, not too long ago, we discussed recent Trump transitional appointments. We had Stephen Quay, who commented and analyzed for us the Nia Bacharya appointment and the RFK appointment and then other appointments in the CDC, the FDA and the Dr. Oz appointment. And so we're going to talk today about former Congressman Devin Nunes, who served for 20 years in the District right next to mine and whom I've known for a long, long time about his recent appointment by the President. We'll start off with that if we can. Then maybe we'll get into some questions about Truth Social. But he was just appointed to this very prestigious and important President's Advisory Board on Intelligence, or the official name of it is actually the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, and it oversees the conduct and the performance of Americans Intelligence Agency. And it has a number of formal mission statements, one of which is it, quote, oversees the intelligence community's compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws, executive orders and presidential directives. And as you know, Devin Nunes was not just a member of Congress for 20 years, but he oversaw the House Selecting Committee on Intelligence right during the turbulent Christopher Steele dossier and the unmasking of Trump officials by people as well known as Samantha Power and the Michael Finn scandal, as well as, and I think Most importantly, the FBI's skullduggery when it came to FISA applications and surveillance on the domestic American citizens. Among them his lead investigator, Kash Patel. So with all that, Devin, welcome and tell us a little bit about what the history or what you envision this select board will do.
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Devin Nunes
Well, thank you, Victor. It's great to be back on the show. And obviously it's an honor at any time to serve your government. I served for a long time in the legislative branch of government, and this is my first foray into the executive branch of government. Well, I guess it's technically my second. I did serve for a short time in the Department of Agriculture many, many moons ago, for a short time in the George W. Bush administration. But this is a White House level position. It's a very interesting position. It dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was president. And Victor, you know better than I do the history surrounding the President and former general's concern about the defense and the Defense Industrial Complex, I believe he called it. And he put this into place, bringing in citizens from the outside that are essentially volunteer, created this board to oversee the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies in the 1950s, because I believe he was, he had concerns that at some point these agencies could go awry. And as you know very well, as I got a firsthand look, having to run this investigation into these agencies for the last decade or so, they have been totally politicized and corrupted.
- [05:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Can I ask you, to this point, when we say intelligence agencies, most prominently, we're talking about the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and are we talking about the investigatory agencies like the FBI to the degree that they do intelligence operations as well? Is that going to be included in the purview of the committee?
- [05:57]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, from my perspective, you serve the President and you have the highest clearances. So there's actually a couple different committees within this Intelligence Advisory board, one at a higher level. But, you know, look, it is what the president wants it to be. I believe the reason that he chose me to do it is because I was, you know, I saw the corruption up front and personal. And so when things go wrong, this board is there to have a fresh set of eyes, a fresh look into what these agencies are doing or have done. So I've described it, Victor, as something that's very similar to my role when I was chair of the House Intelligence Committee, where I effectively reported to the United States Congress, the legislative branch of government. Here I report directly to the President. So it has very extensive powers and obviously the President can increase those authorities or decrease those authorities as he see fits. But you know, look, I, I feel like he has the confidence in me that, that if I see something wrong, that we're going to get to the bottom of it. That's, I have a long track record of doing that. So hopefully in a perfect world, nothing does go wrong. And hopefully Cash Patel, John Radcliffe and others that are going in will clean this mess up. And then the Intelligence Board would be more likely looking not at necessarily problems, but maybe opportunities, you know, maybe expensive weapons programs, intelligence programs, et cetera, et cetera, where there might be opportunities that having people from the outside of government that have extensive experience can make recommendations to the President that may differ from what he may be receiving from other areas. So on one hand, Victor, I see it as a problem solver, a backstop when something goes wrong. On the other hand, there's probably going to be a lot of opportunities with the position to use the experience, obviously chairing the board. It'll be up to the President to decide who else he wants to put on the board. But I'm sure he will have very talented individuals and then working with a seasoned staff of professionals who have all the key access points that will run this, run it on a daily basis. Because this is a non paid volunteer position. Hopefully, Victor, it doesn't take up that much time because obviously I have another job to do. But if there are problems, I'll be ready to, ready to get in there and figure out what's going on.
- [08:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
So the President selects you and then I've been on one of these boards, the oversight of the American Cemeteries Overseas, the American Battle Monuments Commission. It wasn't probably as pivotal in current affairs as this one, but traditionally does the President then select the other members or does he consult with you, the chairman and members? And are they more. Because I went back and looked at former members of these committees, it seemed to me that a lot of them were honorific, that they were either so called wise men, lawyers, ex politicos in Washington, or they were major donors to the particular administration in power. But the chairman, your role, as I saw, was always someone who had some expertise in intelligence matters. Does that sound correct to you?
- [09:31]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, I mean, look, it'll be up to me to find the staff, hire the right team of people, and then there'll be an array of whoever the President thinks are the right people. You know, just the different. Hopefully it's a diverse set of people with extensive backgrounds. And, you know, it may not. Sometimes it's better to not have people that are directly that spent time at the Department of Defense or the intelligence agencies. It's better to have other people that may have other experience out there. So I'm sure the president will, you know, he'll pick the right people. Obviously, I will be watching closely to make sure there's no problematic people that are put onto this board. But. And everybody will go through the vetting process because they all have to get the top secret clearances. So it'll have to be a pretty, pretty thorough vetting process that'll have to take place here.
- [10:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do you feel that there was a pattern here of Donald Trump's appointments in this sense that the NIH went after to destroy Jay Bacharya in a way that was unbecoming of it, if not unethical or illegal. And now he's running the naih. The HHS has damned RFK for years. Now he's running it. Kash Patel was surveilled by the FBI. Now he's running it. Tulsi Gabbard was put on a terrorist watch list. Now she may run the Department of the Director of National Intelligence. I could go on, but in your case, you took a lot of flack in that crazy period between. And I can tell you as somebody who was in the district and read the Fresno B, looked at billboards, but is there a sense that he wanted you there because you knew best what the intelligence agencies were capable of when they went awry? And now in hindsight, we've had the Michael Horowitz IG report on a lot of this. We've had the House Oversight Committee report, We've had a lot of journals report. And I don't think anybody believes today that John Brennan, James Clapper did not lie under oath, or that Andrew McKay did not lie to federal investigators or James Comey did not claim amnesia 245 times before the Judiciary Committee. I don't think anybody believes a laptop that you expose was genuine or that Steele was a skilled and professional ex intelligence agency. I don't think anybody thinks the laptop was cooked up in Moscow. As 51 intelligence authorities, they weren't really former, by the way. A lot of them were still working under contract for the CIA. But we got to remember, Devin, that two former CIA directors, John Brennan and Leon Panetta, signed that letter claiming right on the eve of the election that that Laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. But I don't think anybody believes. I don't think anybody believes that Samantha Power today was disinterested or just inquisitive when she asked intelligence agencies to unmask, I GUESS it was 3,300 officials. These are all things that are relevant because you exposed them, most of them, and you took a big hit from it. And I can tell you somebody who's in the San Joaquin Valley, I would drive in the 99s, as I said, see the billboards, read the Fresno Beast. So do you feel in some way, looking back over those crazy years of the subsequent evidence that came out, you were, you know, you were proven correct and that Donald Trump thinks because they went after Devin and he was able to show the other side of the argument and win that argument, he. He's the type of person I want in there, just like I wanted Jay Bachari or I wanted Cash Patel. There's a, there seems to be a pattern there that people who have been done an injustice by particular agencies or, you know, bureaus of the government are most qualified to correct those deficiencies.
- [13:57]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, you know, Victor, I mean, I did. Not only did I do the Russia hoax investigation, but a lot of people, you know, also forget that I was, you know, in the middle of the Mangazi fiasco.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I remember that as well.
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Devin Nunes
And had. Was the person actually identified the folks that were on the ground there that had important evidence to share with the American public that were being hidden from us, from the Obama administration. There was also. So I brought those guys forward so that they could appear before Congress. I tracked them down and found them. Also people forget about this, that the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was a former four star general in charge of Central Command. We magically found that intelligence had been manipulated on the status of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq. If you remember, you remember that very well when, when Obama famously said that, you know, that, you know, bin Laden was dead, al Qaeda was on the run. Well, and then he recklessly, much like Afghanistan pulled troops out and then Baghdad nearly got overrun, including own embassy.
- [15:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
And he said ISIS was, he said.
- [15:19]
Devin Nunes
ISIS was a JV and ISIS was the jv. Well, we were the ones. It was myself, Mike, you know, and a few folks on my committee, including actually Mike Pompeo and Ken Calvert, served on this special task force that I created. But we actually tracked the manipulation of intelligence all the way up to right before you got to Austin. And somehow who was at that time the the head of central Command, miraculously, the trail ended there. So everybody, as we followed it all the way up the chain of command as to, well, who changed this? Oh, it wasn't me. I reported to this person. Oh, it wasn't me. I. For this person. Well, we got it right to Austin, who then at that time claimed amnesia to not know anything. Yeah, I mean, so there's multiple of these intelligence and DoD hypocrisies and, and, and really embarrassing moments in the last, in, in the last, you know, gosh, I guess it's going back almost 15 years now. I've been at the center of it. So, you know, I guess there's. I guess the one way I look at it is you never think that you. I, it never ceases to amaze me what the left is willing to do and how they're willing to be corrupted. I mean, they got all the way now at this point to corrupt the Archives and National Archives and target Mar? A Lago and these people. There's nothing that they won't do. And so nothing will surprise me that it happens. But I've, I've been around, been on these investigations, have, have, have either ran or been part of, of investigations that got to the bottom of things. But as you said, ultimately nothing was done about it. So, you know, look, I don't want to see another. I don't want to see the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, treated like they were done in the first administration. And even though I have plenty of stuff to do, running a public company that's critical to protecting the First Amendment, you know, look, I wouldn't serve unless I thought I was the best guy to do it and believe in my, and believe in my own capabilities. And I think that's what the President's out looking to do is just to fill these positions with the very best people possible. And, and I, and I'm, you know, look, I'm not, not, not to brag or. It's not anything like that, but I, I just think I have seen a lot of these, this behavior. And I just, you know, I guess to put it bluntly, I'm just not going to be bullshitted by these guys anymore. I spent, you know, dedicated a lot of my life to, to, to working on these issues. And now that the President's back in, I'm honored that he asked me to do this. And like I said, I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I was qualified to do it.
- [18:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's funny how these people who come in Contact with the public and investigatory oversight committees. Once they get off, they seem to be empowered. You mentioned Lloyd Austin. I remember that very clearly how he claimed amnesia. And then he would go on to be Secretary of Defense. He would go AWOL when he had a medical problem for a week almost, and not tell the president. He accused in blanket fashion the military of harboring white supremacists, white ragers, white privileged people. He said he was going to run an investigation. He did, and then he quietly released it, I think, in December of2023. And they found no such cabal. But they did end up alienating about 45,000 people who didn't, you know, they quit the military or they didn't reenlist or they didn't enlist in the first place, all from that demographic that he attacked. And of course, he came to. After you guys questioned him, he retired and he went right to Raytheon. And he was part of the revolving door phenomenon where these generals go to a defense contractor board and they go into the Pentagon and then they go back again. So I had a couple of questions though, for you. You mentioned basically sins, not just of commission, but omission. And I think that's a really good point, because if you just think for a minute, was there any intelligence that could have warned us that we were on the eve of a catastrophic humiliation and Kabul that was worse than anything in the last half century abandoned $50 billion? Or didn't anybody in these intelligence agencies warn the people in the Pentagon or the White House what Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah were cooking up before October 7th? It seems to me that they didn't even know that Russia was about ready to attack on February 24th of 2022. They don't seem to have anything. You know, they talk about an Iranian assassination plot, but very late in the game. And, you know, the FBI was reportedly dissident when they suggested that the Wuhan biology lab was the source of the COVID virus. But all the other intelligence agencies, or at least they were forced to, or they volunteered to, said that it was a pangolin and a bat origins. So what I'm getting at is why they're doing all the things we just discussed. They're not doing the things for which they were tasked to do, at least not in a competent way. I hope your committee can look at that and say, why haven't you looked at the greatest catastrophes that hurt American reputation and security in recent years? And you don't say a word about what China did at this lab or what happened in Kabul?
- [21:05]
Devin Nunes
Well, Victor, I don't actually, I believe it's, it's pretty simple as to what's, what's happened. Even though the Defense and Intelligence Industrial complex is bigger than I think Eisenhower ever imagined it could be and more dangerous, but there's only one word, it's been politicized. And it was politicized on purpose. And the people that live in Washington D.C. that mostly are part of the left, but as we have found out, it's pretty easy for people who you would think are hard. Right. That if their livelihood is threatened, they somehow move and team up with the left, I. E. The Cheney family. That's, that's shocking to me still, that that would, that that could happen.
- [21:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. She voted 95% of the time with Donald Trump, the first trooper.
- [21:52]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, yeah. So. So if you, that's really at the heart of this. What, what, what needs to happen? I know that the President wants to have a DOJ and FBI and DOD and CIA that America can be proud of. And it's, you know, it's pretty, the President sees this pretty simply and he, he actually campaigned on it. What did he campaign on? Make America safe again. It's not complicated, but in order to do that, you have to have a depoliticized intelligence agency. And to your point, every, almost every single item that you named the list could go on and on for these incidents that are, that are, that are, you know, anywhere from you can call them a disaster to quagmires. It's been because the wrong people were promoted that were willing to do what was politically expedient and not do their job that would actually keep America safe. There's plenty of good people, lots of patriots out there. You and I know, many of them ourselves, Victor, that, that either work at the FBI or high level at the, at the Department of Defense or many of the people that I worked with over the years that worked for the CIA. These are patriotic people. They're effective. They know what they're doing and they're smart. They've dedicated their whole lives, a lot, many of them in dangerous situations to serve our country. And then what happens is that when it becomes politicized, those people that have that practical experience and the real life experience that know what's going on at the ground level have been crowded out for political reasons inside the swamp in Washington D.C. to serve political purposes. And it's, and it's just gotten, you know, look, it's just gotten so far out of hand that, that nothing is off the table. Anymore, including the rating of Mar A Lago. You know, I don't think there's anything more ridiculous than that. And I think you and potentially the attempted assassination not once but twice of a former president and a candidate for president in Donald Trump this past year.
- [24:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Speaking of all these things. But they're not capable. I remember and this is by memory, everybody. So but as I remember in 2018, Ryan, Liza, I think he was writing for Esquire, he went to Iowa and bird dogged your family trying to cook up scandal. I only mention that because he was the same reporter. I mean there is a sense of hubris that earns nemesis. So they really went after you almost in the way, well, in the way they went after Trump. And just as he kind of survived it and his accusers were made to look ridiculous, that same reporter then was fired from the New Yorker subsequently for sexual misconduct. And he's in the news now for a he said, she said, blackmail, theft, physical intimidation with this fiance, Olivia Nuzzi. And so, and then the same thing has happened with McCabe, you know, was going to wear a wire and you guys interviewed and all of a sudden he's now admitted he lied four times to a federal investigator. I remember when you had the memo, the four page memo, the left went hysterical and then Adam Schiff, you were kind of characterized her as the dairy farmer from Tulare versus the Harvard train Schiff. And he published the counter memo. But from what we can see from the Horowitz report, no one believes that memo anymore.
- [25:39]
Devin Nunes
It wasn't a, it was a classic whatever they accuse you of doing, they're actually doing themselves. I mean the shift memo was, was full of conspiracy theories, many that were his and Hillary Clinton's and the DNC's and Christopher Still's conspiracy theories that they forced it on the American public for years. And by the way, Victor, many of those people still have not recanted. No, I don't promise you, I mean I, I haven't paid attention lately. But I'm sure if you go back, who Ship, who's now a senator from California, he's still giving speeches out there talking about, you know, Republicans and Trump being Russian agents, when in fact it was proven beyond a shadow of doubt the only people that were communicating with Russians were the Clinton campaign people and the dnc, plain and simple. And so yeah, it's going to take a while longer for the what's he's saying for the truth to get its boots on. But that's, you know, part of what this Trump administration is all about. The next four years are going to be about cleaning up the mess and restoring some normalcy to this country again. People are tired of the craziness. I was just, it was kind of funny. I was with a family friend here a few days ago over just after Christmas, and you'll like this story. He slowly, he's a Mexican American guy, very successful, but supported me because he liked me, but pretty much voted for Democrats. And then he slowly, he kind of liked Trump. Came over to the Trump side, just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton or Biden. But I wouldn't say he was definitely not a MAGA guy. But he brought this up and I hadn't really thought of it because you and I are just so close to this sometimes you sometimes need to step away with just some common sense. And he says, you know, when I became red pilled and went full bore maga, I said no win. As soon as they brought up that men could play in women's sports and boys could be in girls sports, I said, I'm out, I'm out, I'm done. Like, I'm not part of that. I don't want anything to do with it. And I think that, you know, it's really funny, I just, I kind of stopped because. And to think that, you know what, I forgot that it wasn't. This really didn't start happening in full blown scale until 2021 when Biden and Harris got in. We didn't really see that because, you know, obviously Trump would have shut stuff like that down. You saw hints of it in states and that, but then they went full blown like, let's just indoctrinate all of America, give them the transitioning drugs, tell them, you know, it's my body, my choice, until it's not. And you get given transition drugs to turn yourself from a either male to a female or female to a male. But I was just, I just kind of sat back and says, gosh, sometimes we're so close to this, we just don't pay attention and think like, yeah, it really is that nuts. They really are that nuts. And I think they're gonna be. They have a lot of work to do here to earn back the trust of the American people.
- [29:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
I wrote something to the effect that in a strange way, even though we had to suffer four years of the madness, that Trump came back stronger because he sat out those four years, because he had said all of these things as you had and I had, and a lot of conservatives, what they were capable of but they never saw it in the raw form that this left wing, whoever this cabal was, the Obamas or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Jill Biden, speculation that use this wax and effigy of Joe Biden to implement this agenda. But the Americans saw it in the Raw. They had seen a porous border, but never a non existent. They had seen a million illegal eggmans, but never 12 million. They had heard about transgenderism, but never men dressing in front of teenage girls in a locker room or slamming a volleyball, a man 6ft tall down a woman's head. And this was in the Raw. They never seen anything like Afghanistan. $50 billion turned over to terrorists. So I think in a weird way everything worked out so far, although the country is, is still going to have to recover from those nightmare years. But it really made a contrast and said these are who these people really are. You wanted them, you got them and they're going to do things that you won't imagine. And it was a good experience. A couple of other things. Just before we go in our last segment to Truth Social and I had a question about Cash Patel. What was the, I don't know if your audience knows that. How did you get to know him and what was his role on your House Intelligence Committee?
- [31:07]
Devin Nunes
We had actually worked with him. I remember I mentioned the Benghazi debacle. He was, as I recall, I don't remember which specifically what prosecutions that they were Benghazi related. He had worked on that and he had come to brief our staff as we were investigating that. You know, you remember that, that went on for a long time.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I know it did.
- [31:32]
Devin Nunes
I do. And I. So I think by the time it, you know, we started that investigation, obviously shortly after, after that, the embassy got overrun, which I believe was, was that 2011? I believe it. I think it was 2011, if I remember right. So then you fast forward finally they were getting down to prosecuting some of these terrorists and Cash was involved in that. And this would have been in the 2000, 15, like 14, 15 time frame. 16. So he had come to brief our committee a couple times. I, I got to know him then thought he was, you know, obviously, you know, seemed to be a guy that was just trying to get to the bottom of it, do his job and prosecute the bad guys. You know, pretty, pretty simple there, Victor. Yeah, you know, just like track him down and prosecute him, the terrorists, I mean, what kind of a normal thing that the Department of Justice should be doing? And he was working with the Department of Justice. And then when the Russia hoax stuff started to happen, I reached out to him and because I realized into that the first part of that year in 2017, that we didn't have, you know, we had a lot of people that were skilled on our committee that had very specific. Because, remember, the House Intelligence Committee used to do, you know, just kind of normal work, right? Look at the regions around the world, look at the hotspots, look at the different programs. And even. Even though we had jurisdiction over the Department of Justice and the FBI, we really didn't spend a lot of time on that because, you know, it just. They didn't have a lot of programs that we would spend time on because we were so busy looking at kind of the big picture things with the Congress. So we needed somebody from the Department of Justice. And I think it was around March of 2017 when we were in full blown crazy Russia hoax hysteria with, with all of these former Obama people who had started off this investigation. That was. And then Sessions, who was the appointed Attorney General, has to recuse himself, which he never should have. And then you get a deep stater like Rod Rosenstein in there who then multiple times misled us, in my opinion, and threatened, actually threatened Cash Patel. He was the Deputy Attorney General. He got put in charge of it. Of course, this thing gets put on steroids. And that's how I went. We. I went and recruited Cash Patel from the Department of Justice to help us figure out how, how and why this could be happening. Because I knew it was all nonsense. Because, of course, I had been around intelligence for a long time at that point, and I never had seen any evidence of intelligence. Right. Specific intelligence project that had to do with Trump and Russia or any Republican. And I had just. And that's what I kept asking From December of 16 onward, hey, just give me the intelligence. If I see any bit of intelligence that Trump or Republicans are colluding with Russia, I'll be the first to say it. And that's why Schiff and these guys, they love to go out and the left, it was so easy to hide behind the intelligence apparatus because they could say things like, this is an ongoing FBI and DOJ investigation. I've seen a lot, but I can't tell you about it, but I've seen a lot. And then I would go out there and say, no, you've seen nothing. I've seen nothing. I'm the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Will you please bring me that intelligence so that we can actually see what all the bad things are that Trump is doing and all you would get back were crickets. We went to meet with Rod Rosenstein. We went to meet with Ray, by the time he got put in and said, look, I think, you know, and I told them flatly, you guys are now under investigation by us. And then miraculously, after I said that, they actually used the power of Department of Justice and FBI to do what? Spy on my staff and Senator Grassley's staff that also included my, at the time, my staff was Cash Patel, who you mentioned that earlier. So look, these are the types of things is, you know, you go through these battles, you go through these, you know, political battles. You learn a lot. And you know, like I said, I think that's why the President asked me to do this, knowing that I have a lot of work to do, but that's why he asked me to do it.
- [36:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, let's, let's go to Truth Social. We'll take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor and then we'll be right back. Now, AT T Mobile get four 5G.
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Devin Nunes
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Victor Davis Hanson
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Devin Nunes
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- [37:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
And we're right back with Devin Nunez, who served in Congress near he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, among other roles. And then Devin left Congress on, correct me if I'm wrong, on January 1st of 2022. And you shortly thereafter assumed the CEO role of this new social media platform, Truth Social, which was part of the Trump Technology, the Trump media and technology Group. I went back and was reading today, Devin, about your appointment and it was very interesting. It was almost the same attacks that they had made against you as a congressman during Russian collusion. They were as CEO. And everybody should remember that this was a period in which Trump had been banned for life from Twitter. He was shortly, I think in a few months going to be banned for two years from Facebook. This is following January 6th. And then this new thing and Devin and I knew the owner pretty well, Rebecca Mercer, very fine person, wonderful person, but she had a new alternative called Parler Parlay in French. And it was ascendant. And it was starting to draw millions in its nascent days as a counter to the Twitter Facebook monopoly and a place for conservatives to flee to after January 6th. And suddenly there was, I guess you would call it a conspiracy. But Apple, Google and Amazon colluded and denied Parlier any access to apps. So you couldn't really get on without their help and you had to go online. It was in very soon. They extinguished it. So when you. It was announced that you were going to start Truth Social, and I also should add at this time, some months later, Elon Musk out of nowhere came in and said, I'm going to pay maybe three or four times the market capitalization of Twitter just to open it up. Which he did. But in the process, he also offered something that wasn't there when Truth Social was created. That is a platform for conservative free speech, anybody's approach, political affiliation. So what I'm getting at, I went back and looked at this period and it was amazing to see what people wrote in. And I just wrote something down. It said, the Washington Post said Trump's once considered sticking with True Social. Now he's stuck. And then they use this term, I think you remember it from the Russian collusion. The walls are closing in on Trump's True Social. Social that came from Bloomberg and then New York Magazine. Trump's True Social is an unmitigated failure. And then they attacked you because they said you didn't have business experience. They said, there's no need for True Social now that you have X, which we hate.
- [40:28]
Devin Nunes
Also.
- [40:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
They said, but. And then they said, of course your fate would be that of parlier because you wouldn't have access to apps. And then they said, you were bleeding money, you were broke. I went back and looked at a lot of the data that wasn't true. And then in October, the price after the election soars to 35, $37 a share. And the market capitalization, I know it doesn't represent market share or profitability, but it was incredible. $10 billion. It was almost, if not the same as Twitter's market capitalization. Capitalization. So when they were saying all of this about you, that you were stuck with this losing idea, you, your stock would crash, you couldn't merge the fec, stop your merger with the Digital World Acquisition Corporation, I think it was called, and you were going to be more abundant or you were moribund. And then you, being the dairy farmer from Tulare, would not have the expertise to run a sophisticated. What were you thinking all this time when you, you knew that you were gaining cash? You had cash on hand, you weren't bleeding, you were efficient. What was the, what was the attitude these two years when they were saying all these things?
- [41:48]
Devin Nunes
Well, I. And I love the fact that you're too. That they, they always like to pick on farmers for some reason.
- [41:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, they do.
- [41:54]
Devin Nunes
And, you know, and you know what's interesting about that is they always say dairy farmers. You know, I haven't been on the dairy farm in many, many years. But, you know, what they don't talk about is that, or barely is. They never talk about the winery that I'm a part of that. You know, obviously it's a very small business, but I find it interesting. They never say anything about that. You know why? Because my wine is very, very good. So they, they like to just. They. They like to selectively put forth the things that they. That they think will put you in the worst light.
- [42:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I, I know it. I hear that at work all the time that I'm a raisin. I was a raisin farmer or I remember the Washington Post said once, Dick Cheney praised my book, and it said, dick Cheney praises raisin farmer's book.
- [42:41]
Devin Nunes
That sounds about right. Yeah.
- [42:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
I was introduced at a major university, oh, maybe 20 years ago, and I got up to speak and he said, this is Victor Hansen. He's a raisin farmer and he teaches at Fresno State, and he's a colleague of Jerry Tarkanian at that time, the fire and basketball coach.
- [43:01]
Devin Nunes
So you're lucky If, If I would have been in the news at that time in the Russia hoax would have been going on, they would have said, friend of Jerry Tarkanian and Devin Nunes.
- [43:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I did. I went back and I looked at. I wrote a couple of articles about you, if you remember. And I, I read the comments, and the Fresno B really went after me. It said, victor Hansen writes defense of the undefensible and crony. Anyway.
- [43:26]
Devin Nunes
But you know what, Victor? That's interesting about that. Speaking of the legacy media.
- [43:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [43:31]
Devin Nunes
And we, we haven't talked about it during the show, but you bring up the Fresno Bee. I can tell you that even though I was, you know, defamed by McClatchy and the Fresno Bee on, On, you know, dozens and dozens of occasions, you know, it was obviously horrible for my, for my family, especially my, my young children at the time. But here's the good part about that. They're. They, you know, they were so young at the time. And. And you know what? Now, I think, kids, I think if you're. You're under the age of maybe junior high, and I. And you know somebody out in Selma there by where. Where you live or, or. Or Tulare, and you ask, what do you. What do you think about the Fresno B? And I think people are going to say, like, what is that?
- [44:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, they don't know.
- [44:22]
Devin Nunes
Never heard of it.
- [44:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
They never heard of it. It's almost nothing now. It's just when I was growing up, and I'm a lot older than you, 20 years older. But it was the McClatchy dynasty. Four generations owned the Sacramento Bee, the Modesto Bee, the Fresno Bee, and there was no antitrust legislation then in the state. And they owned all of the TV stations in those three cities, the main ones, and the radio stations. And they were a wealthy liberal dynasty, and they were. And I knew them very well. And James McClatchy had been very generous. He gave a million dollars to the classics department. I like them, but the point I'm making is that tragically or inevitably has dissipated.
- [45:09]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, they're. They're gone. And. And so what's the irony is of all of this is so many times they've said the walls are closing in on me, but it just seems to be like, in fact, the walls aren't closing in. In fact, the walls are closing in on them.
- [45:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know the walls are.
- [45:28]
Devin Nunes
And the walls. The walls are actually gone. In the Fresno beast case, I don't even think they have an office anymore. I think their. Their office. They have.
- [45:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
Funny you said that. I got a note from a guy statistician, and he. He wrote me something about three weeks ago, and he said, on Amazon Audible, you're number seven in news and politics. News, a podcast, and you're number four. I think Chartable doesn't do it anymore. Apple Chartable. You were number three that week, actually. And he said, you live in Fresno, and this is the number of listeners that I calculate you have, and this is the number of listeners the Fresno B has. And I'm thinking, well, that's impossible. The Fresno Bee. I grew up with this, you know, 100 employees, roving reporters, millions of dollars. And here I am sitting in a converted barn this morning by myself. That can't be possible. But it shows you that one of the reasons that Donald Trump won, he understood that whether Barron Trump advised him on some podcast or Joe Rogan, they were reaching so many more people than msnbc, cnn, even the network news. And they went, yeah, let Me.
- [46:41]
Devin Nunes
Yeah. So let's go, let's just unpack this a little bit. Right, so we talk about the frozen beat because you and I, we grew up with that. And, and, and they literally have collapsed. They're, they're gone. I don't, they have a website, I think. But look, it's happening at cnn. It's happening to msnbc. If Bezos doesn't quit, quit, keep subsidizing the Washington Post, it's going to happen there. The legacy media is collapsing. And so if you go back a little bit, you mentioned how did I get involved in social media? Well, it was pretty simple. During the Russia hoax, as the walls were famously closing in on me, I was using Twitter and Facebook and other methods to get around the fake news. So I was able to get, for example, I was able to create a text system within my, for my supporters and my constituents around the country. I was able to email them directly. I was able to put the, I started my own podcast. So effectively I would just go around them. I, I started in 17. I just started to ignore them and go around them. And it was so successful, in fact, that I was one of the first members of Congress that was shadow banned by Twitter and then by Facebook and then we later found out, by YouTube. And so as my podcast, you know, this was when podcasts were new Victor, you didn't even have yours at the time. But I was successfully using that technology to get around the fake news. And I was one of the first members of Congress. Like I was the first to go on parler that you mentioned. And then I was, I actually Rumble is a very interesting story. Rumble, which is a YouTube alternative. They were, they were, they were a small company in Canada. They were doing back end infrastructure for websites and they were trying to break into the YouTube realm. And so what they did is they started acquiring many funny animal videos. And when I, when, when YouTube began censoring me, I just looked around and my team, we just looked around. Look, let's just find a company anywhere that won't censor me that has, you know, similar capabilities to YouTube that at least if people go to the, you know, go to the, the, you know, sign up for the, for my, to follow me, they'll actually get my information or they will, you know, search me and find me. Because you couldn't find it on YouTube. So I was on parlor. I went to Rumble. It was, it was me and funny Animal videos in 2020. That was it. And within after my third episode, three weeks, I had 40,000 followers. After three months, I had 400,000 followers. And that's when I. And I had seen the same type of thing on Parler, where I quickly surpassed my followers on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter combined. And so you can imagine, I still think there was a really horrific period. The worst thing I think that's ever happened in this country was when Parler was effectively a billion dollar company and it was destroyed overnight because 30American companies said, we're not going to do business with you, and turned off their services. Parler never recovered from that. So a billion dollars was wiped out by the richest men in America. And Parlor was just there. It was my form of. I had been shadow banned everywhere else. So I was then only on Rumble, which is, which is, you know, I could put my podcast up there, but it made it hard for social media. So I spent 2021 going as the President was banned everywhere off of every platform. And I was going around the country saying how bad it was. And then towards the end of 2021, I think it was around Thanksgiving, the President called and asked if I would be, you know, knew that I had, you know, faced these injustices and had been fighting with these social media companies over censorship and asked if I would come and help put this deal together. Which then in turn you kind of mentioned it. We had to fight for two years. The Biden administration, the sec, they were trying to cut off our financing and the walls were closing in, Victor. But, you know, now we have, you know, over $700 million in the bank.
- [51:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Let me ask you just to, let me say this.
- [51:12]
Devin Nunes
We have 700 million dol. Million in the bank. We have, I don't know, 700,000 shareholders or so, which we rely totally on retail shareholders. We don't try to go pitch Wall street or try to get institutions to buy the stock. We are the only company in history that's ever been built specifically to protect your rights to the First Amendment. And we are well capitalized and we've done it very, very cheap, much cheaper than any of these other technology platforms. And we are a total closed loop system, meaning that we don't on an AWS or a Google or a.
- [51:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
Amazon.
- [51:51]
Devin Nunes
Or Amazon or Microsoft Azure, we do this all in house ourselves, closed loop so that we can never be shut down again ever again. And it was Donald Trump, because he was banned from everywhere. And I always say Trump didn't need a company. I was perfectly fine in Congress, I didn't need a job. But we actually, what we went out and created is something that's never been done in history before. And that is a public company with essentially all, nearly all retail investors that are solely focused on a mission of protecting the First Amendment. And guess what? We did it a lot cheaper and we run for virtually nothing compared to the Facebooks and the Instagrams and the Twitters of the world. So the fact that people said it could never have been done and remember all of those companies, Victor, you know what they all do, they all rely on each other. I mean, like, I don't think there's hardly a company around that's, that's out there, a tech company that doesn't rely on either AWS or, or Microsoft cloud system. I mean that they, they basically have monopoly on the whole entire network. So, so we have created not only True Social Throughout 2025, we'll be launching True Streaming, which is an alternative to YouTube TV and Netflix. And once again, this is a closed loop system. So we have done something that nobody's ever done before with a small, nimble, lean team that has executed a mission that's, that's never been done before. It's, it's really, you know, been amazing to be a part of. And, and the more, you know, every time they say the walls are closing in, it means that the walls are actually closing in on them.
- [53:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
We're going to come right back with a final segment with Devin Nunes and our discussion of Truth Social. And we're right back. I'm back again with Devin. I got a question, though, a couple, two questions before we end. I went back and looked at some of the data and when they were saying that you were bleeding, you're losing 300 million, you were insolvent, you actually had over 600 million and now you have 700 million. Wasn't that that data was easily accessible. So what was their argument when it was so easily contradicted?
- [54:18]
Devin Nunes
Well, what they do is they love to use, they love to use figures based on whatever the stock price was at the time. And so, and look, in many cases they actually just outright lie. So instead of just taking. It's not like there's no secrets, right? In the public. And having. In public. Yeah, there's no secrets. And we, and we, you know, usually in the first sentence or two or even in the headline, when we put out our quarterly results, we say, here's how many investors we have, here's how much cash we have, here's how much our, you know, here's how much cash we burned. And you know, look, we're a new company we've only, you know, now, you know, even though Truth Social is a private company that we, you know, it was built on really, you know, over three years, less than like $50 million that was spent to build this, that would have taken these other behemoths billions of dollars to build. Look, and we have a big advantage too that we're able to move in real time because we have so many people on the platform because it was Trump's only place to, at that time, only place to put, to put information out. And pretty much now that's the only place he puts information for the most part out on. And it allows us to, you know, to test and build, like test in real time with real users. So we've been able to scale this thing fairly, you know, fairly quickly over the last few years. And it wasn't until April of this year, that end of March that we, that we went public where now everything we have is transparent, you know, you know how much cash we have. And it's very clear what's happening. But once again, the media just lies. And the funny thing is now look, we're going to do big things. We're looking at different mergers and acquisitions. We're building some fintech type properties to make sure people don't get debanked. There's a lot we're doing. But what is funny is that every legacy media company is going to be long gone before this company is gone. If we just stay the way we're going now, which is just offering two great platforms, keeping it simple, lots of cash in the bank. Now look, we think there's a much larger mission out there and we're going to continue to execute on that plan to fulfill the mission of protecting free speech. But Victor, it is just, it is just nonsense that, you know, all you gotta do, if you weren't so fake and demonic, you would just print our press release.
- [56:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, that's what I looked at and I collated it with these articles. I have a final question though, and this is very controversial because right when Donald Trump was being leveled with first, I think it was $82 million settlement in that crazy E. Jean Carroll case with Judge Kaplan, who was another biased judge. And then it was followed weeks later by that original fantastic amount. I mean, fantastic in the pejorative sense. Four hundred and something million dollar fine in the Letitia James and then that was reduced, I think to 370. But the point I'm making is there were headlines that 400, 400 million, 400 million 400 million. TRUMP. TRUMP can't survive this. They need it in cash. And then a few weeks later it's announced and they got very angry about this. The legacy media, that it had gone public and after an original spike up to 50 or something dollars, it settled down. I think it's around, is it 35 to 36 now? But the point is they estimated the market capitalization and for a while it was I think 10 billion. And then it, it came down and then I started looking at the reaction to that and they were saying, oh my God, Trump. We thought we had, basically I'm translating. But the gist of some of the commentary is, yes, Trump owns, owes $400 million. But don't get your hopes up because he just is now worth giving his shares 4 billion or TrueSocial's worth 8 billion. And I think Reid Hoffman, the funder of the E Jean Carroll was really angry and he said this has never happened before, that if you had the same user participation or follower or subscriber numbers to the amount of market capitalization for Facebook, it was to be worth 2 trillion or something. So the point they're making is, and I understand what they're making, that you have that brand and you have this loyalty. So that makes a stock price that's just astronomical and that drives these people crazy because according to traditional metrics based on the size of your company, your market capitalization should be much smaller. Is that a fair description of what's going on?
- [59:26]
Devin Nunes
Well, look, the left is going to make what, whatever they want to make up. But the fact that, the fact of the matter is, is that, that we have a lot of cash in the bank. We have 700,000 investors, we have two very successful apps that you don't even hardly hear anything. Even though we've been testing our streaming app for the last three or four months. You hear nothing about that. Why? Because it's, it's really game changing technology. And then you have one of the most prominent brands in the world which, which now is going to be established as one of the most important political figures in the last, you know, 150 years across the entire planet.
- [60:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's the.
- [60:12]
Devin Nunes
So look to say that for, for a company like ours that is only nine months old in terms of when we actually got, finally got financed and we're two small, two startups that are just rolling now. And I just laugh at the amount going back to. Just go back and look at the years and money that these other platforms spent and burned through and many of them remember, many of them failed, by the way. Victor.
- [60:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I know that, I know that very well.
- [60:47]
Devin Nunes
And yeah, so this is a company that, you know, my opinion, obviously, I wouldn't be doing it if I, if I didn't believe it. You know, we, we have things that a company, many, well, actually not many companies. There's been no company in history that has what we have. A brand, successful apps, cash in the bank, a low burn rate to protect the First Amendment. I mean, it's really, it's really incredible to be part of this movement. I mean, truth Social, the Trump Meeting Technology Group represents a movement and, you know, look, and we do it in a responsible way. And so I think, you know, we are well positioned. As I've, you know, as I've told President Trump, you know, one thing is for certain, him and I, at some point will, will leave a scene. But, you know, this, this movement and this company will live on. Will live on. If you, if everybody impossible that this company will just, will, will disappear. In my opinion, if you just take.
- [61:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
The word 10 billion, put it in quotes and Google it, it's going to come up with sensational stories about true social. And I think you're right. It's not just that you have this unique brand, but the brand itself has changed, say from 2021, I think. You know, I don't want to get into January 6th, but I think the more we learn about January 6th, the more we know it was not an armed insurrection, believe me. And when he left office, he was, I think, you know, I mean, I, I just collated what they said about him. It's just incredible. He was an insurrectionist, he was a traitor. They were going to do this to him. They were going 34%. And then he had the most astounding comeback, more impressive than Harry Truman's, than Richard Nixon's, up there with Napoleon's hundred days and Churchill's return to the prime ministership in May of 1940. But my point is that when he went into the Notre Dame Cathedral, I'd never seen anything like it. I looked at that crowd and I said to myself, that guy, that guy, that guy Macron, Joel, all of these leaders used to hate him and they were like little kids trying to touch him. And I thought, wow, this is the most amazing comeback culturally, politically, socially I've ever seen in my life that he pulled off. And I don't. Part of it was the assassination. Part of it was a brilliant campaign. Part of it was bringing in when that menagerie when he went into Madison Square Garden. And I'd never seen the speaker of the House with rfk, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Joe Rogan, Dana White. It was just. It was just so inclusive and any weird, it was just on and then the McDonald's and all. So what I'm getting at is the brand is become, as you said, it represents not just the number of subscribers, but almost a sense that he's a historic figure and you want to help him and it's invaluable. And no one, you're right, no one else has a brand like that. And that's what drives the left so crazy, because they use traditional metrics. This is what I was trying to say in my question to you. They look at traditional metrics on social media platforms and this is the number of subscribers. This is the amount of profitability per year. This is what the stock price is. Then they look at Truth Social and they said, we've never seen anything like this. This is unfair. This is unfair. How do they get. How do they make. How did Nunes and the CEO make Donald Trump a multi billionaire? How did they make all these people billionaires? This is not fair. It defies logic. And that's what's so stunning about it.
- [64:49]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, I think. No, I think you're exactly right. And what they. By, by writing their fake news stories, making up their own headlines, just purposely not actually just reading our quarterly financial results that are public. And, you know, we, you know, we have to explain everything there. It's the law. So it's not like, you know, if there was something there that was, believe me, if there was something there that was inaccurate, we would know about it immediately from the fake news. But they've spent so much time just trying to. Suffering from this derangement of just relentlessly attacking us, our movement, our company. And what they've lost sight of is the obvious, outside of the brand and our retail investors, that someone someday should be asking, how on earth did these guys build this company for this little amount of money? When you compare it to, I guarantee you, for the 10 successful kind of social media companies out there, Facebook, et cetera, and Twitter, by the way, Twitter never made, hardly ever had made any money. Reddit just went public, been around for 20 years, had never made any money. For those that are successful still, that are still companies that still have users, Victor, there's a wasteland. There's a whole graveyard of probably hundreds of prominent tech companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars that have done what they failed. So someone at some point needs to ask the question, well, how do these guys build this closed loop system, not use any other company that's out there? And they did it for less than $50 million and were stymied, stymied by the Biden administration, ironically, by Gensler, no less, the head of the sec, Victor, who, who, guess what, this brings this whole, this whole interview back to the start. He was the one who worked for Clinton. I remember we discovered that he was the one that had funded the dossier. He developed a scheme to move the money from the Clinton campaign and launder it to multiple firms in order to pay the fake and phony Russians that openly used to frame Trump. This guy successfully blocked us for two years from getting access to capital. Imagine if we were treated like a normal company and we would have been able to go public two and a half years ago. When I left Congress In January of 21, I'm sorry, January 22nd, in any normal, if you would have asked me at the time, I would have said, yeah, we'll get through by March, April, but for sure, by June we'll be June of 22nd, we'll be fully capitalized and be a public company. And yet, Victor, we did not. That did not, it didn't happen for over two years. But see, I think from the time I left Congress, from the time we.
- [67:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Were able to go public, I'm not trying to be religious, but I think there is a force that when these things happen, there's a reaction to it. So when I looked at this story and I've been reading about it and talking to people, it seems to me that there are hundreds of thousands of people, you say 600,000, that they're in Madera, California, they're in Provo, Utah, they're in Montgomery, Alabama, they're all over and they want to help Donald Trump. They believe in it. They believe your company will be honest, it's going to be profitable. But more importantly, they defy. They don't go read the Wall Street Journal and say, this is the amount of money that's cap, this is the amount of subscribers. Therefore this is what they don't care about. That, well, they don't want to lose money, but they feel that there's so many of them that they're going to invest in this company and more and more people are going to invest and they're not as, I mean, as you say, you didn't go to Wall street, you count on these people. And they have created something that the market hasn't seen because it has this. And one story, Devin said that in October, Truth Social had a higher market capitalization than Twitter with its 84 million or whatever followers. So what they're saying is we don't care what market reality is. We like Trump, we like this small, efficient company. We want to help it. We don't think we're going to lose money. We think other people are. There's millions of us out there and we want to invest in an idea. And the Trump brand and the Wall street analyst and the left wing, they can't comprehend it. They're furious.
- [69:48]
Devin Nunes
Yeah, I think that's, that's right. But the, but the underlying fundamentals, Victor, too, just, you know, just to kind of put a closer closure to this, is that it's not just the brand, it's not just the investors. It's also what's underlying it. That, that, you know, we did this for. We built indestructible closed loop apps to protect the First Amendment that everybody, I mean, you've kind of mentioned, you know, on this show here today, how many stories were written that, you know, first it was, oh, you know, it can't be done. Nobody's gonna work for him. They can't get anybody to do it. They'll never be able to do it. Ha ha. What do they know about that? Bezos and Gates and all these guys, how smart they are. And how could, how could Trump ever, ever do something like this? And then when, then it went from, well, they'll never become public. This is, this can't be done. And they stopped us for two years and then they said, well, oh, well, oh, they lost money. Well, okay, yeah, we're a new startup company that most of these companies lose money for decades. You know, 10 years, 20 years, they don't make any money. And you know, look, that's, that's not our goal. Because what we're doing is, is we've positioned ourselves. We, we run very lean, very efficiently, and we've got great products. They'll be rolling out in 2025. It's, it's really remarkable to watch the fake news story. And just in these three years, Victor, basically three years since I left Congress, look how many of the fake news media outlets that predicted our demise who are now what? Gone? Gone. They're gone. Not us. They are. It's funny, I think that's what our movement's about. Protecting the First Amendment, investing in your future. And that's what people have done. And obviously Donald Trump is the leader. Not because he or I wanted to have to lead this. It's because we had to do it out of necessity to survive. That's the bottom line I've just closed.
- [71:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's so ironic because the left always says that they're for David and not Goliath. And when you read these accounts of Truth Social, it's all these left wing communitarians, dei, equality, equity, we're for the little guy. America's run by all of. They're all rooting for Facebook, Amazon, Google. They worship these huge conglomerates and they're attacking this small independent, upstart startup company. And you'd think they'd say this is what we like about America, competition. We like small companies getting larger and successful and challenging monopolies. We don't believe in trust. But it was like the parlier when they extinguished it. They were all cheering on Apple and Amazon and Google to take their hands around this little company's neck and strangle it because it offered. They're not egalitarians, they're not for equality. They are Jacobins, they really are. And I think everybody should. The story of Truth Social brings that out. They despise a startup independent company that's taking on these mammoth companies and they're siding with the establishment anyway. Well, Devin, thank you for spending your time and I hope you can come on again. I'm sure there's going to be a very busy night news year as you take over the advisory board on intelligence for the president and Truth Social continues to thrive and I don't know what it is, but it drives the left crazy.
- [73:37]
Devin Nunes
Well, thank. Well, Victor, it's great to talk to you here at the end of the year and let's have a great 2025.
- [73:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, thank you and Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody. Victor Hansen signing out.