The Risks The Big Banks Continued Taking

The net is tightening. House Republicans are acquiring more evidence that connects Hunter Biden’s China business dealings to other members of the Biden family including his father, the current president of the United States. Peter Schweizer first exposed many of the connections and the coincidences all the way back in 2018, and the Government Accountability Institute continues to uncover new details. Peter and co-host Eric Eggers detail the latest revelations on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.

Peter and Eric return to the topic of COVID-era restrictions on the most recent episode of The Drill Down with more proof that when the government rushes to do things, it becomes a loose cannon. “March madness” for most people might refer to the college basketball tournament, but the madness of the restrictions thrown on Americans to control the COVID virus by the federal government also celebrates its third anniversary this week.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moves into its second year, Peter and Eric welcome to The Drill Down the author Rebekah Koffler, a Russian-born U.S. intelligence expert who served as a Russian strategy specialist in the Defense Intelligence Agency and with the CIA's National Clandestine Service to analyze the war’s likely outcome and ask questions about the Biden administration’s strategy for helping the Ukrainians.

On this episode of The Drill Down, Eric Eggers takes over the pilot’s seat and welcomes Seamus Bruner, director of research here at the Government Accountability Institute. Seamus is an investigative journalist and the author of two books on corruption within the FBI and other parts of the federal government and has been one of GAI’s biggest investigative stars since our founding in 2012. His third book, “Controligarchs,” will hit stores soon. Seamus joins the podcast today to talk about his research on Chinese government money flowing to the “Biden Center” at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

The environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio had many causes. Government incompetence and neglect played a role, as did both excessive regulation and deregulation under different administrations. Corporate “efficiencies” as well as domestic politics created the conditions that caused a terrible accident. The response was to prevent one type of disaster by creating another type of disaster.

There’s a huge balloon floating over the nation. Everyone wants it gone, and we all worry what it might do to us. It’s the national debt, currently about $30 trillion dollars. Your hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers tackle ways Congress might start to reduce the federal debt, much of which is the fault of spending on programs such as Medicare and Social Security, on the Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.”

When Peter and Eric open this week’s show by talking about balloons and popcorn, you might be imagining wide-eyed little children at the county fair, not a sneaky communist regime committing economic and military espionage on America. But that’s what popcorn and balloons mean here at The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer. Of course, the big story of the past week was Communist Chinese government’s spy balloon that floated across the US through Montana and 10 other states before being shot down by a missile fired by an F-22 fighter jet off the coast of Myrtle Beach, SC. Not since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite shot into Earth’s orbit, has a foreign government’s flight activity so captured attention and rattled so many Americans.

Kenny Xu joins Peter and Eric on The Drill Down to talk about the dark side of “diversity and inclusion” efforts in America’s schools and universities. It’s a subject he knows very well as an Asian American who is president of a nonprofit group called “Color Us United.” Kenny, 25, is also the author of the fascinating book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence, which takes a deep dive into that dark side at what was once America’s premier university. In the case of Harvard, it shows up in a hazy admissions metric that no one at the university can really explain known as the “personality score.”

The federal debt ceiling needs to be raised. Again. The White House says it won’t negotiate with Congress over raising the amount of money the US government can borrow, and Congress has not passed a normal budget since 1996. Peter and Eric welcome financial commentator and investment manager David Bahnsen to talk about big debt, big government, big mistakes, and why he believes there is still hope.

On the most recent episode, Eric Eggers admits to misplacing his keys. We all misplace things. But not all of us keep classified documents in a box in the garage. President Joe Biden did.

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.”