Show Notes
Gerald Posner, the investigative journalist renowned for his books on political assassinations, says that six months after the attempted assassination of president-elect Donald Trump, the Secret Service and the media seem to be wishing the event away.
“It’s the greatest dereliction of duty I’ve ever seen by the Secret Service,” Posner told co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers, on a recent episode of the Sean Hannity radio show. ow.
“I was surprised by the ineptness of the Secret Service,” Posner tells the hosts, noting that there is still little information being shared by the government publicly on the shooter or on his motivations.
“This fell off the shelf in terms of focus from the media.. And, who loves that it has fallen off the radar more than the Secret Service and the federal agencies? No one.”
Posner has written thirteen books, including Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993) and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998).
Schweizer asks how we get full accountability for the incident, given such a black hole of information about the would-be assassin. “Is he really a mystery man, or is the truth being held back?”
Posner says, “We can’t answer that, because the information is not being put out there… We may never understand… But we need to see the information publicly to know for sure.”
Eggers asks whether it was really incompetence, or something more nefarious.
“The government has always had an ‘elite view’ that wants to give the public as little information as possible,” he says, recalling his research into the JFK killing. “But now it’s harder to do that.”
An example he cites is the story of President Joe Biden’s mental decline, which was denied hotly by government officials for years despite signs that were noted by some in the press and among the public, even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, which led to his decision to step aside and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead.
“Not only did they do that for his first four years in office, they tried to do it for another four,” Posner says.
Schweizer sees a parallel to the recent story of drones flying around parts of New Jersey and the Eastern Seaboard. Is the government’s spotty information based on incompetence, or intention?
“It’s intentional, and with malice aforethought,” Posner believes, noting this event correlates with a pattern he has observed where they “want to cover their intentions with incompetence.”
“They want it to look like bumbling, but they are really trying to prevent people from getting to the truth,” Posner says.
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In the second interview, Schweizer and Eggers got the lowdown on the battle over Congress’s fight over increasing the debt ceiling from Republican Sen. Rand Paul, (R-AR), who has long been a fiscal hawk. It is Sen. Paul’s first appearance on The Drill Down.
He was not happy with the outcome. “It’s good that conservatives are finally standing up and fighting,” he said. “But we’re losing. The swamp is winning, and big government Republicans are spending and borrowing more money, and the Democrats are happily going along with all of it.”
Eggers wants to know if Americans have essentially given up on reining in government spending.
“Well, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are bringing attention to it, and they’re just getting started,” Paul says. He described how the various “continuing resolutions” debated by Congress were full of new, added spending that, in one example, doubled the size of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Paul has long been a critic of NSF, which funds some very strange research projects.
“I’ll give you an example of science waste. NSF paid to study whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous when they are on cocaine.” He described another study, funded by NSF, seeking to ascertain whether drinking gin or tequila made codfish more aggressive. “I don’t know how you get a codfish to drink tequila,” he asked. But the study, readers will be pleased to know, seemed to find that tequila made the codfish more ornery.
“They once studied whether Panamanian frogs have a different mating call, based on whether they live in the city or out in the countryside,” he noted.
Still, Paul is not completely cynical about the future. “On the plus side we [Republicans] do all agree about lower taxes and less regulation. We appreciate the power of capitalism and the wealth and prosperity that is dragging everybody up. There is a lot of good news about capitalism, but we have to keep our eyes on the ball about spending,” he continued.
