Press Corp Humiliated as Press Sec Makes Them Regret Ignoring Swalwell's Open Secret

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1:51All right, I'm Dave Rubin. This is The Rubin Report. It's Friday, April 17th, which means it's time for another Friday Roundtable extravaganza. And joining me, I can't believe this, but our both first-time guests, one, the host of News Nation's Katie Pavlich tonight. Katie Pavlich and an author at The Christian Post, Mikhail Olsen. Guys, welcome to the show. And before we do anything here, I want Mikhail to quickly introduce himself. But Katie, I don't know how you have not been on this show before. You mentioned to me right before we started, Fox had you under lockdown. It was hard for you to do other appearances, but this is very, very long overdue.

2:28So I'm happy to have you on. I'm happy to be here. So thanks for having me. And Mikhail, you have been absolutely on fire on X. I started following you about six months ago amidst some of the craziness on the right. And you've just been one of the great communicators as to what's really been going on here. Maybe for just 20 or 30 seconds, you can just tell the audience a bit about yourself and then we'll dive in. Yeah. So I started contributing over at the Federalist about 2024, kind of mid 2024. I did that for a few months. And then I got hired over at Not The Bee as a news writer, kind of contract news writer over there.

3:01I did that for almost a year and stopped doing that somewhat recently. And now I'm primarily just over at the Christian Post writing about the woke right and Christian nationalism and all this fun stuff that we've all been dealing with for the last year or two. so yeah excellent all right let's leave that there we'll dive in to the week that was we'll start with the scandals eric swalwell a man who for years literally years everyone has known banged a chinese spy named fang fang that's not even what's taking him out it's now all of these other accusations of rape and drugging women and a series of other things the video that leaked where there were several people in the room where they think at least one of the people was a sex worker and it's like, who the hell was taping that thing and that somebody might be underage?

3:47I mean, it's just an absolute, it's like a little bit of everything here. Here's Caroline Levitt responding to some of the flip-flopping around Ruben Gallego and some of the other Democrats, Ruben Gallego, who said he was Eric Swalwell's best friend. Look, I think the accusations and allegations against former Representative Swalwell are despicable and disgusting. I think it's also quite plausible, as you point out, Jack, that there were many other Democrats in this town on Capitol Hill who knew about his perhaps illegal behavior, certainly his disgusting and inappropriate behavior, and why were they silent for so long?

4:24I think those are questions that must be raised of these sitting representatives, including Mr. Gallego, and I hope that the journalists in this room will do their jobs, and the journalists on Capitol Hill will do their jobs to ask Democrats in power how they knew about such despicable behavior from one of their elected representatives for so long, but never said or did anything about it. Katie, can I call you a DC insider? Is that offensive? Can I? I'm in DC, but I'm not of DC. So I've been here long enough that I know what's going on. Unfortunately, I haven't, I can walk around and go, yeah, this place is disgusting.

4:58All right. Fair enough. So to that point earlier in the week, when this story broke, one of the things I kept saying was that in DC, there are no secrets, meaning you go out to dinner, It's all staffers and it's the congresspeople and senators. Everything, everyone's talking to everybody. They're all out drunk all night long. The idea that people were keeping this a secret or that certain people didn't know or something like that, as Pelosi said, nobody had a clue about any of this stuff. That's just completely insane relative to the culture around D.C., right? It's absurd to say that. I mean, this has been an open secret on Capitol Hill for years, and it just shows how dirty the Democrats are willing to play.

5:41I mean, Nancy Pelosi was Eric Swalwell's mentor. She protected him when the Fang Fang scandal broke. Let's not forget that Eric Swalwell was on the House Intelligence Committee at the time. He was having this situation occurring. He was ripe for blackmail. And then he got a free pass on that. So he decided to continue on with overindulging in his new position of power. And the Democrats just kind of put these things in their back pocket until they needed to use them. And now all of a sudden they need someone to drop out of the California governor's race so that Republicans don't take the two top slots on the jungle primary ticket.

6:16Starting to panic. They're going to lose the governorship of California. And all of a sudden, Eric Spalwell and all of his dirty laundry that's been out in the open, really, but excused for so long, forces him to get out of the race. Now, I'm not saying that the accusations are false. The accusations against him are absolutely horrific. And I hope that if they're true, the women who he victimized get justice. However, his overall behavior was tolerated because he was willing to go out on TV. He was willing to go out and be the bulldog, the pit bull for the Democratic Party, especially in the age of Donald Trump over the past 10 years.

6:53So that's why this was excused. And for people in D.C. to say, especially Ruben Gallego, who's a senator from Arizona, who is speculated to possibly have been in that video, went on a number of trips with Eric Swalwell. There's a photo of them on an official Codell riding camels with no shirts on. To say that he didn't know anything and that Eric Swalwell was leading a double life is just absolutely laughable. Right. And also if somebody – And disrespectful to the people watching. Right. And if someone is your best friend – I mean, they claim that they have been best friends. Like you're going to tell me you just had no idea.

7:24And yet when the story breaks, you immediately throw him under the bus. Especially when you're a dirtbag yourself. Ruben Gallego is also a dirtbag. I was going to say, it's all these people that are up in arms right now about the Epstein files and they're yelling at Trump or whoever else that might be allegedly named in the files. And who knows what's actually accurate in there and what's not. But they're up in arms and using this as political ammunition against the right while their own people are being caught doing this. And they kept quiet about it for years. It's this D.C. hypocrisy, which is why I'm glad I'm not a D.C.

7:55insider and I never will be. I will stay far away. I will stay far away. You're safe somewhere in Wisconsin, apparently. Let me show you this quick compilation. This is Ro Khanna, Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu. I mean, this is like laundry list of just the worst kind of guys. And no, no, we had no idea. Nobody had a freaking clue what was going on. Why were Democrats on Capitol Hill silent for so long when, in many cases, we're learning some aspects of this behavior, alleged behavior of Swalwell's was an open secret, quote unquote? Well, look, I had heard rumors that he was a womanizer, and that's one of the reasons that I endorsed Tom Steyer in the race and didn't go along with a lot of the other California establishment that was lining up behind Swalwell.

8:42But I certainly didn't know that he was abusing staff, let alone that there were allegations of rape or date rape. I certainly didn't know that he was involved in any conduct along the lines of what has come out since Friday. And if I had, I wouldn't have gone near him with a 10-foot pole. I had no idea until I read the San Francisco Chronicle article when it was published. And I believe Representative Swalwell did the right thing by resigning. Guys, it's worth mentioning that there was a vote on whether to release the people who have been named in payments, congressional payments, to all of these staffers over the years who have been harassed.

9:23And it's a crazy amount of people. 357 members of Congress, including Ro Khanna, decided to vote against releasing that information. Only 65 voted for it. Mikhail, I guess none of this should surprise us. Like, this is the swamp. This is the swamp. This is the swamp. And I don't want to hear another word from any of these people about the Epstein files, especially Ro Khanna. Because it's, again, it's like, it's rules for thee, not for me. It's, I'll use this sort of political leverage against my opponents, but when it applies to my team, I'm going to vote against transparency. I'm going to vote against accountability.

9:57I'm going to play dumb. I'm going to deny and deflect. This is the classic pattern. It's crazy. Well, and on this exact issue, Dave, you mentioned slush fund. So we had Anna Polina Luna on my News Nation show on Wednesday night because she's the one leading the charge to get this list exposed of the people who have been using this slush fund, which is taxpayer money that was codified into law by Congress to pay out settlements for sexual harassment or sexual abuse cases committed by lawmakers on Capitol Hill. It's to the tune of something like$20 million, millions and millions of dollars. So she's working to get that list.

10:35Speaking of lists, that list released. But when it comes to accountability, she talked about, look, we're also, we're not, I don't care whose party it is. I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat. If you're engaged in this gross, creepy, inappropriate, unprofessional behavior, especially with subordinates who are working for you, your staffers who are trying to come to D.C. and have a career, we are going to make sure that you're held accountable. I mean, Tony Gonzalez, who is a Republican, also resigned this week because there were threats of expulsion against him. He had an affair with a staffer who then lit herself on fire, committed suicide.

11:08Then you have Corey Mills, who is a Republican as well, also under fire for having a number of inappropriate relationships. And these things vary. They're not the same as the swallow accusations. His are certainly the most criminal. But her point is just we're tired of defending. And I think taxpayers don't want their money going to cover up the misdeeds of people in Washington. Right. And that's not even a little bit of power. And that's not even to talk about the Democrats who obviously have ties with terrorist organizations like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and everything else. But just think how crazy it is that there is a slush fund set aside because these people are all harassed.

11:43Like, I don't have a slush fund at this company. If you harass this guy, you're fired. You don't get money. I have a slush fund. I'm just kidding. It's just so insane. Like, I'm going to set aside some money every year so that in case these people start harassing each other, we'll just quiet them. It's bananas. I want to get you guys. I'm going to take money from people in Kansas and then give it to people in D.C. to be disgusting. Right, exactly. Exactly. Here's a White House spokesman, Stephen Miller, talking to Jesse Waters about how actually all of this blackmail and the slush funds and everything.

12:11This is all baked into how the Democrat Party operates. Has the president said anything about Swalwell? He I don't know if he said anything. Has he been following that? Why? Has he had a bad week, Jesse? I haven't been watching. You might be. You might be busy with anything on with bigger matters of war and peace. It couldn't have happened to a better person. But look, here's the most important thing if we have 10 seconds on this, and I'm sure you would agree with this. The most important part about this story, and look, Swalwell is a scumbag. He is a terrible person, the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low, the most dishonest and the most dishonest.

12:48But the real story here is how the Democrat Party controls its members through blackmail. It's got a blackmail file on all of its politicians, and it uses them to leverage and control them until it's time to release it. That is how sick and twisted the Democrat Party is. That's the next thread we've got to pull out here. Katie, I mean, that's quite an accusation. It doesn't ring untrue to me that when you see Democrats consistently take sort of crazy position after crazy position, that there actually might be a reason behind that, beyond the ideological lunacy of the left. Yeah, and people also from a policy perspective, Democrats are willing to tolerate a lot of this behavior, and they have for decades, to get what they want politically.

13:34So, for example, everybody's kind of like, how did they tolerate Eric Swallow's disgusting behavior against women when they claim to stand up for women, especially women's rights, blah, blah, blah. It's like, I remember being at the 2012 DNC convention, and it was all about how Mitt Romney himself and the Republican Party was waging a war on women. He had a binder. He had a binder. He had a binder full of women. that women were going to have a war against them if Mitt Romney were to win the election. And during a break in between speakers, they played a seven-minute long tribute video to Ted Kennedy.

14:06And on it, they stamped the words, Women's Rights Champion. And I was like, didn't this guy crash his car into a river and leave this woman to drown, but then she suffocated to death because he didn't call the police in time? And the reason they tolerated that is because they're doing that so long as you vote for abortion. Right. You can do whatever you want to women. You can sexually harass them. You can – Bill Clinton's a good example of that. You can sexually abuse them. You can leave them in your car to drown so long as you support the policy positions that they want. Mikael, do you think it's as bad in the Republican Party?

14:41I mean Katie mentioned we got – what's his name? Was it Gonzalez in Texas? So there's some stuff going on with the Republicans and Mills is probably in some deep doo-doo. And I have no doubt it's a both sides thing. However, the extortion portion of it seems more obviously bad on the Democrat side. Yeah, I think it's worse on the Democrat side, if I had to guess. Obviously, I'm not the D.C. insider, so I don't know. But if I had to guess, I mean, even looking at who these people support politically, like kind of what you said, where they're claiming to champion women's rights, but they're supporting abortion.

15:12They're supporting all these things that are very anti-women at the end of the day. They're also championing, which I'm sure we'll get into this later, they're championing Hamas and Islamic radical terrorist organizations while also claiming to be feminists and pro-women and pro-women's rights, and they care about women. But they're tongue-kissing these radical Islamists who hate women, like objectively and overtly. And so I don't think we can expect anything else in their private life if this is what their public life looks like. We don't see that as obvious on the right. I think there's a little bit more of a culture of – obviously, there's parts of it that are bad, I'm sure.

15:48But generally speaking, it seems like more of a – it's more – there's a culture of actual decency and honor and conservatism that still at some level exists on the right that we just don't see anymore on the left. Right. There's some level of belief in personal responsibility. At least like there's just something there. Maybe not much left. Maybe not much, but there's a little flickering. You're not going to wave it in your face. But you gave me an action. You gave me a perfect segue to the next thing that I wanted to hit on, which is that this guy, Hassan Piker, who, believe it or not, I worked with at the Young Turks many lifetimes ago.

16:23He is one of the worst human beings I have ever come across. He is a multi-millionaire, communist, quasi-Islamist who is telling his kids, and it's kids that are watching him on Twitch, literally how to build suicide drones, that 9-11 was good, that Hamas is good, that he has nothing. He walked the streets of China and said he has nothing to be proud of as an American. He went on one of these Obama bro podcasts, and here he is saying that Hamas is better than Israel. And actually, he would vote for Hamas. When you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you actually mean that? Or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal?

17:01Like what? I mean, it's all of the above. I do mean it. I think it's a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people. I've also said I'm a harm reduction voter. I'm a lesser evil voter and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time. Katie, I mean, what? What? I go from laughing to like this is super dangerous. I mean, this guy is on the record multiple times, dozens of times, calling for murder of people he disagrees with politically, just like a good Hamas supporter would do. Yeah, blood in the streets. And yet Democrats are campaigning with him for the midterm elections.

17:37This is not some guy who's on the far fringes of the Internet. He is actively working with the Democratic Party on the campaign trail. And it just goes to show how far the left has gone to solidify this communist Islamist partnership that they're using, this anti-Americanism that they are not just shying away from, but fully endorsing and embracing. I mean, it's wild. He was at Yale University, I believe it was on Tuesday, talking about, again, which he said before, that the fall of the communist USSR was one of the worst thing that's ever happened to the country. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that the Democrats are endorsing this guy.

18:14So, Mikhail, for those of us that don't want the Democrats to be in power or win the midterms or whatever, we should sort of want them to attach themselves to this guy, right? Because at some point, if you push the average person far enough with the rhetoric, for example, I'd vote for Hamas who killed – put aside Jews in Israel. They killed 47 Americans. Right. Right. It might actually backfire. For sure, yeah. I mean, you can't go around saying that I'm going to vote for a terrorist organization because I must. What did he say? Safety voter. I care about safety or however he worded it. It's it's obviously ridiculous to the average person, to the normal person who's not in this, you know, this this swamp that we mentioned in the first section.

18:56Most people are going to see this and be immediately repulsed. They're going to want to vomit. And so I'm not sure how this is in any way different than what they've done in the past, which is what led to them or losing the last election. They were saying crazy stuff under Biden. They were doing crazy stuff under Biden. Kamala Harris was saying crazy stuff. And people rejected it. People rejected this woke mind virus because of it. And Donald Trump won. And I don't know why they're running the same op again. It's almost worse this time. This is worse. Well, it seems like it's going to its final form, which is the morphing into Islamism or jihadism or whatever you want to call it.

19:30But I want to show you this. I don't know if you guys saw this. This is absolutely wild. So the New York Times, which is it is pure propaganda that would make Pravda red in the face. So I think it was the day before that piece that we just showed you there where he sat down with the Obama bro, this Hassan Piker guy. There was a piece written by Ezra Klein, who's just kind of one of these limp wristed Democrat, whatever. He wrote and it was an op ed piece, but he wrote the headline is Hassan Piker is not the enemy. Then that piece comes out, that interview comes out where he says he would vote for Hamas.

20:03And then they subtly and quietly change the headline to, this is why there is no liberal Joe Rogan. I mean, Katie, to me, that is the perfect example of everything. It's the perfect example of the media lying. It's the perfect example of running cover for these crazy leftists. Like, it shows you the radicalness of their positions. It's just got a little bit of everything. So there's two things that are happening here. There's the first, there's like the camp that are true believers, like the Hassan Piker wing, where they truly believe that Hamas is better and that communism is better than capitalism.

20:41They're the true believers. But when it comes to like Ezra Klein, they're trying to kind of stand the Obama bros and they did this in this podcast. They try to kind of say like, you don't really mean that, right? Like you're just being – you're exaggerating. They try to kind of sanitize it and make it palpable for the average person. And then the people are like, Hasan Piker's like, no, I actually believe in terrorism. And they don't know what to do with it. So then they have to change their position. They're kind of like, oh, my God. So there's the denial people, the delusional people, and then the true believers who are taking over the party.

21:16Katie, at what point, at what stage do you think a guy like Ezra Klein gets beheaded? So he runs cover them for a while. But what do you think? It buys him an extra month when the revolution comes? Or you think you get a couple weeks? What do you think? With a name like Klein, I think he'll be first on the list. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding. Like, come on. This guy's the Nick Fuentes of the left at this point. It's the same kind of thing. We saw this with Tucker Carlson when he interviewed Nick Fuentes when Nick Fuentes was saying crazy stuff like, oh, I actually really admire Joseph Stalin. And then Tucker was just kind of like, wait, what?

21:47Like, he kind of had this like, you don't really mean that, right? Okay, let's just move on. It's like, no idea. Not really pressing him. It's the same thing. It's the same kind of, as Ben Shapiro says, they're laundering bad ideas to the American public so they can have this plausible deniability. So then when this Obama mainstream Democrat gets questioned on this, he can say, well, I didn't actually say it. I tried to give him an out. I don't actually blah, blah, blah. You could see how this could go. It's the exact same thing we're seeing with the woke right. We're seeing this with the woke left.

22:14And I think most Americans are just – we're just tired of it. We're all tired of it. I think people are starting to wisen up and we just have to show them better ideas. There is one sane Democrat. He is a man who a few years ago had brain damage. And as his brain has healed, he has become more conservative. Obviously, I'm talking about John Fetterman. Here's Fetterman on Piker. Do you feel isolated with your views? Do you think that because the Democrats usually they all stay in the same line. They get in line. Well, it's like if you're going to embrace a guy that proud he loves Hamas. I mean, you're going to like I don't care who says that if if someone decides, oh, I love Hamas, I'm never going to, you know, partner with them.

22:55Katie, how much longer until the Democrats go in full revolution mode on Fetterman? I mean, they basically got him in the Senate. I don't know how many sane Congress people they have. Nobody that really rushes to mind. And they've got and they've got half of Bill Maher at the media level. But they're coming for this guy, right? Yeah, absolutely. When he's up for his seat, there's going to be a lot of money poured in from the far left of the party. The Democratic Socialists, for example, who are openly pro-Hamas, they're the ones who got Mom Donnie into office. They have a plan for the rest of the country.

23:24Everyone kept saying, oh, Mom Donnie is kind of a joke. And it's like, no, it's actually a test case for how to get these radical pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism, anti-American candidates into office. And Fetterman is certainly on the top of their list, unfortunately. I mean, it's crazy how normal Democrats have just gone extinct in the party and the ones that are left, like Elise Slotkin in Michigan, for example. I wouldn't say she's super moderate, but she's not as far left. She's not great, but she's not like Hassan Piker, and she's changing her votes to appease this wing of the party. It's absolutely insane.