The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

Two things are worth remembering when you read about the long fight to elect a House Speaker. First, the dissenters were a mixed bag of principled conservatives and publicity hounds. Second, some good came out of the repeated voting to select Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as the new leader of the House. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers explore the positive things that came from the chaos.

On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Peter and Eric shake off some holiday crud and plunge back into Washington crud. They start by breathing in the sooty exhaust of the Omnibus.

On our most recent podcast, Peter and Eric introduce you to two unlikely muckrakers who take local corruption very seriously. And there are about 560 former officials in Illinois who have seen the business end of that seriousness.

Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) is a badass who flew 30 combat missions more than 30 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in the skies above Baghdad, Fallujah, and Tikrit.Now a congressman, Garcia confronts a greater adversary as a member of the House GOP’s China Accountability Task Force. He joins Peter and Eric on the most recent episode of The Drill Down to give us a preview of what the new majority will be focused on starting next year with respect to America’s “peer threat,” the People’s Republic of China.

On this week’s show, Peter and Eric discuss the recent prisoner swap of basketball player Brittney Griner for a Russian arms dealer known as “The Merchant of Death.” Is a former Olympic medal-winner and LGBTQ activist worth unleashing one of Russia’s most notorious weapons purchasers? And when American citizens choose to travel to dangerous parts of the world and get in trouble overseas, do they have a right to expect help from America?

Peter and Eric draw a parallel between stories you wouldn’t ordinarily put together: Hunter Biden’s laptop and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s doubletalk. Connections await on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. The online world is abuzz over journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter revelations. Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, turned over thousands of internal documents to Taibbi to show what happened at the social media giant in 2020 when Twitter took extraordinary steps to censor any mention or links to the New York Post’s devastating expose on the contents of an abandoned laptop computer previously belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

As the nation awakes from its turkey-induced tryptophan coma, Americans remain a thankful and forgiving people. The mood and the time are right to forgive those bad decisions – but on the most recent Drill Down episode, Peter and Eric reflect on what went wrong in America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the first step to granting forgiveness.Take Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for example. In February of 2020, early in the outbreak, he first urged people not to mask unless they had symptoms. Two months later, he reversed himself and issued general masking orders regardless of any symptoms. Why?

“A massive crash and burn.” That is how Peter Schweizer describes the collapse of crypto-currency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his ill-fated company, FTX. The company has filed for bankruptcy, and reports indicate it owes its fifty largest creditors $3.1 billion dollars. Quite a cautionary business story. But here on The Drill Down, we explore the political side of this story – the corruption and “regulatory capture” that allowed Sam Bankman-Fried to create such a house of cards. In the latest episode of the podcast, Peter and co-host Eric Eggers dig in on the Washington side of this.

Former congressman Jason Chaffetz joins Peter and Eric to talk about what might happen next year if Republicans take over the House of Representatives. Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which investigates what the executive branch does with the money Congress appropriates. And if the GOP takes over control of the House, as most observers expect, offers a sneak peek of what House Republicans might do with control of that committee. It will all come down to what insider’s call the “rules package.”

Doesn’t the Department of Homeland Security have better things to do than police lies posted by users of Twitter? After 9/11, DHS was created to better coordinate America’s defenses against terrorist attacks on the homeland – to promote cooperation among law enforcement agencies and fill in the gaps in domestic security. Yet, today as those threats have receded, the department is in search of a new mission. It has gotten into the business of being “speech police.” On the latest episode of The Drill Down podcast, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers take a look at the Biden administration’s efforts to clamp down on speech they call either “misinformation,” or “disinformation,” or even “malinformation.”