Sen. Johnson Outlines the Enormous Challenges Facing Republicans

CLAY: Senator Ron Johnson joins us, recently reelected. And, Senator, I want to start with this. Republicans have won the House. There was a report that you were visiting with Congressman Jim Jordan, along with several other senators, to help set up investigations into covid, into Dr. Fauci, the origins of covid, all of those things. It doesn’t look like you’re going to have the ability in the Senate to necessarily set the agenda for all of these hearings. But what will the House be able to do? And have you been working with the House side to help facilitate those investigations?

SEN. JOHNSON: Sure. Well, obviously, it’d be better had we won a majority in the Senate and I’d be chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations with the gavel and subpoena power. But because of the House majority, they will have subpoena power. We have, you know, a number of officers that have been investigating all the scandals throughout all these agencies. And we’ve been working together literally for years.

So we just met to, again, I think, pledge cooperation, do everything we can. You know, it is interesting with all these whistleblowers coming forward and we encourage more to do so in federal health agencies, federal law enforcement. But they’ll come to different offices. And, you know, we all protect their identities. So it is important that our offices share the information. We’ll have different whistleblowers, different pieces of information, different pieces of the puzzle. And so the good news is, you know, certainly Senator Grassley and I and our staffs have worked together very well. You know, Senator Paul, we have very similar interests when it comes to a lot of the issues surrounding covid. Representative Jordan, we’ve been working together for years. We’ve had staff go back and forth between our offices, so our staffs work together very well – and Representative Comer as well. So, just a very good meeting.

The whole purpose behind this probably is to get to the bottom of things, to expose the truth, because the American people deserve the truth. So, again, it’s disappointing. We don’t have the gavel over here on the Senate side. But, you know, in addition to subpoenas, which truthfully with the Democrats, Department of Justice, it’s going to be difficult to enforce those.

So we also have things like FOIA requests. I mean, one of the things we’ve done is the 4,000 pages of 40 emails that were fired. They were received heavily redacted. Our staff took a look at that. We identified 400 pages we wanted to look at unredacted. Now it was like pulling teeth, but we’ve looked, I think at 360 of those 400 pages. They confirmed a lot of the cover-up from my standpoint. But it’s interesting. We’re down to about 50 pages. HHS will not allow us to see that. Well, that’s kind of interesting piece of information, isn’t it? I’m sure that’ll be some of the first documents that the House will subpoena, because the American people deserve to know what’s under those redactions, those final 50 pages.

BUCK: Senator Johnson’s back. Appreciate you being with us. And we know that, you know, fortunately for the people of Wisconsin and for the country, you were able to win reelection. But it was close. It was closer than we thought it was going to be based on some of the polling. Clay and I have spent a lot of time speaking to everybody, from pollsters to campaign consultants to people who are actually running in these races about the machinery. I just wanted to hear what you think about some of the after-action criticisms about the GOP not leveraging, say, early voting. And also, are there any things in your state that are funky the way they are in, say, Arizona or Nevada, that show a way that the Democrats are trying to rig the rules in their favor?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, first of all, thank you for letting me come out and thank your audience for their support. But you know how many times they came out and said, I just view this is a dead-even race.

CLAY: You did.

SEN. JOHNSON: It’s Wisconsin. The three races I won, one was by 100,000 votes. The second one was 100,000 votes and then by 26,000 votes. You’ve all seen the county map of the United States. It’s all red except for some bright blue dots. Right? Our state is the same way. So we have a far more difficult challenge. Know bringing out low propensity voters, Democrats, we believe we have to win after action after we analyze the data. But it appears the Democrats did a phenomenal job of focusing on Madison, Wisconsin, and focusing on the abortion issue and sending people out with ten names and getting those people to turn their absentee ballots. Okay. So they did a good job.

Our challenge is we’ve got to do that statewide. You know, 30% of the votes in Wisconsin come from all the rural communities. It’s a much more difficult task. But the other reality is that Democrats lie with impunity. That is the hallmark of the 2022 election, is Democrats didn’t tell the truth at all. They couldn’t run on their records so they  lied through their teeth. And unfortunately, the media and the journalists were the advocates, and they amplified those lies.

So we have enormous challenges. I will say, in terms of election integrity, we had a robust election integrity component to our election. I was actually quite surprised that Milwaukee kept that their vote totals in pretty early in the evening, because really, I mean, there’s really been networks that refused to call the race there, hoping that something would come up so that they could challenge and do a recount. But, you know, that’s why I all but declared victory kind of in the wee hours of the morning, because it’s obvious. But I think our robust election integrity component really did discipline the process. We had 5,000 poll workers versus 6,750. The previous election. We had every shift filled with the election observers. They were allowed to observe. Now we had to go to court in a couple of cases, but the things we did on the front end, I think everybody in Wisconsin, I don’t think anybody is questioning the results.

Well, first we had bipartisan results. I won and other statewide candidates lost. So there’s really nothing to complain about. But again, we really didn’t see anything significant on the ground or election night because we deterred it by having observation. And we had poll workers.

CLAY: Senator Johnson, this morning, and we’re going to play some of this audio later in the show. The House announced that they’re going to be conducting a real investigation into Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, potentially illicit relationships from a financial perspective with foreign adversaries. What can the Senate do to help that investigation? How important is it? I know you found yourself in the middle of this, based on FBI helping to cover up for Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s connection to him. How important is having the gavel in the House to conduct that investigation? What do you anticipate they’re going to be able to uncover?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, again, hopefully the truth. Now how we can all work together is once again, we have different whistleblowers coming to our offices with different whistle blowers, have confidence in one committee, ranking member versus the other. So we’ll have different piece of the puzzle. But we can all support each other’s efforts.

Yeah, we certainly have heavy information from our whistleblower on the Hunter Biden. I brought this up with Director Wray today at hearing that the whistleblowers said they were not going to look at the Hunter Biden laptop so that they weren’t going to change the outcome of the election again. But those are some pretty revealing pieces of information.

Chuck Grassley has the whistleblower saying that, you know, the FBI had a scheme in August of 2020 to basically downplay the derogatory information. So, again, as corrupt as the Biden family is, as important as maybe more important is the corruption within federal law enforcement. And then, of course, you have the corrupt and complicit media.

All of these things need to be exposed. We’ve got you know, what I think is a great lawsuit with Missouri, Louisiana. We have an attorney general now is a U.S. senator-elect Eric Schmitt, you know, uncovering the cooperation, I’d say the collusion between the Biden administration and social, the Big Tech social media giant.

So there’s so much to look at. There’s so much corruption, there’s so much to be exposed. It’s going to take a lot of bodies to do it. And so that’s what we all have, is we’ve got different investigators, we’ve got different people coming to us. We have different pieces of information, and we’re going to cooperate as best we can, as much as we can.

CLAY: Senator Johnson, you’ve got a 50-49 deficit right now. There’s a runoff that’s going on in Georgia with a 50-50 Senate two years ago. Could be a 50-50 Senate again. What is the difference from your perspective on 50-50 Senate versus 51-49 for people out there listening in Georgia or who may be thinking about donating money potentially to Herschel Walker against the Reverend Raphael Warnock? From your perspective, what difference does that make?

SEN. JOHNSON: It’s a huge difference. A 50-50 Senate gives us equal representation on the committees. So in the case of a really horrible nominee, we have a better chance of blocking it. You know, even though we control the House, we would not put it past the Democrats in the Senate, even though it would make no sense, they could utilize blowing up the Senate, getting rid of the filibuster to really pass legislation with the House. But they may do it anyway, just to get it done. And if it’s 51-49, all they need is, you know, we would need both Sinema and Joe Manchin just to stand firm, but they still may keep that as well. So it’s just it’s just too fine a line. And 50-50 is just so much better than 51. And 49 doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a big deal.

BUCK: Well, we’re very happy to see that both Kemp and Trump have said they will be helping Herschel get across the finish line there. So some unity on the GOP side in Georgia that could have a really big impact as you laid out. Before we let you go, Senator Johnson, I’ve just got to ask you, I’ve got some data in front of me here. We’re a week out from Thanksgiving, and there’s always these fun charts of which states have what the most popular Thanksgiving sides in every State of the Union. What is your favorite Thanksgiving side?

SEN. JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s hard to say, but it’s got to be the dressing because it’s kind of special, but you need all these things with it. I mean, dressing just by itself isn’t good. But I mean, you need the turkey, the gravy, the dressing, the mashed potatoes and the corn — and the sweet potatoes. I need it all.

BUCK: He’s had all of the above.

CLAY: All right. Last question for you. And it’s a big one. I am a Tennessee Titans fan, your Green Bay Packers, Senator, Thursday Night Football. My team is traveling up to Lambeau. You guys got a nice win over the Cowboys? Are the Packers back? Does Aaron Rodgers and crew get it done tonight?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, that looked pretty good, you know, last Sunday. So, yeah, we’ve done it before. I mean, we won the Super Bowl after six losses or with six losses. So it’s entirely possible. And you’ve seen our receiving corps now step up to the plate. It’s entirely possible. What you’re absolutely guaranteed is that the folks in Green Bay will be very nice to anybody coming up from Tennessee. We’re just very nice people.

CLAY: It’s a phenomenal place to watch a game. I’m looking forward to watching it tonight, Senator. So glad we got you for six more years. We appreciate you spending time with us.

SEN. JOHNSON: Take care. Thanks.