Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “The ObamaCare Battle,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Larry Kawa: We’re going to be talking today a little bit about executive overreach. It’s a phenomenon I think that America has become fatigued by. The one good thing for the President about having so many scandals is each one of his next scandals kind of eclipses the previous scandal, so you can’t even think about it anymore. The one that we’re here to talk about primarily today – we’ll start off with and then I have a couple other surprise scandals at the end I’ll throw in – is the employer mandate. It’s one that’s been very near and dear to my heart, and thanks to the tremendous help of Judicial Watch, we’re doing very well at trying to enforce that component of the law, and I’m here today to start off by introducing to you my dear friend who is the president of Judicial Watch who does many, many things, only one of which is the great thing that he is doing to help with my lawsuit, which I will get to later in the program. I’d like to take a moment to introduce to you Mr. Tom Fitton. Tom, if you could please come up here.
Tom Fitton: I thank you very much everybody, and I just have to be careful with talking to people at these meetings because I get as outraged as you do, and that’s what motivates us at Judicial Watch, and I joke, and it’s only half a joke. I go to the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage, and the pews are much more full these days, and there is a crisis in Washington. It’s a crisis of lawlessness that others have already spoken about at this panel, and we could talk about Benghazi. Judicial Watch has worked doing the work of Washington in getting the truth out on Benghazi, getting the truth out on the IRS scandals and also getting the truth out on Obamacare, and we’ve all seen this Gruber comment where he said that lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. That’s Gruber’s point, and he got, what, $400,000.00 from the Health and Human Services to help push Obamacare, but that’s the guiding principle of President Obama, so the focus on Gruber is actually a misdirection, and our focus ought to be on President Obama. He is the king of non-transparency. He is the king of secrecy, secrecy that would probably have Nixon staring with his mouth agape, “Why didn’t I have his lawyers?”
The President began his presidency with the premise: we’ll be the most transparent administration in history, and when we do this healthcare law, C-Span’s gonna be at the table and anyone promoting the drug companies, that will be on C-Span and all the special interests will be held accountable as a result of the transparency he committed to. Well, we all know how that turned out, and Judicial Watch had to sue to get information about those meetings at the White House. Judicial Watch has had to sue to get information about how many people are participating in Obamacare. Judicial Watch has had to sue to find out about the propaganda efforts behind Obamacare. Judicial Watch has had to sue to find out about the navigators behind Obamacare. Judicial Watch has had to sue to find out about the security of the healthcare web site. Transparency is a bad word with the Obama administration, and so Gruber, he’s a sidebar issue, and we need to focus on the stonewalling and the secrecy of this administration.
Today the administration opened up healthcare.gov for the next enrollment period next year. Well, the information about the pricing of the insurance policies was released last night to the New York Times. Guess when the election was, and the New York Times reports that unless you change your healthcare plan, you’re going to get an increase of 20 percent, and that was a data dump to the New York Times on the Friday after this election. Now, they knew those numbers long before, and they would not release them prior. When did Obamacare open last year? October 1st. This year the middle of November. Guess when the notices were allowed to be sent out by the Obama administration from the states telling people what they needed to do in terms of the next year’s healthcare plan? Guess what day the letter was approved; November 5th, the day after the election. So, it’s outrageous but you know what? It puts people in jeopardy. It means people may be double enrolled. It may be people don’t have healthcare. It may be people don’t know what the opportunities are to protect themselves in case of catastrophe as a result of the health insurance that we’re all paying for being made available to them. So this transparency is more than just about the operations of government, and we want government to operate well. It’s about protecting people and making sure that the government’s accountable and that we have the ability to govern ourselves.
Now, I say we had to sue, but why did we have to sue? Where was the media? Where is Congress? Frankly, where are honest people in the federal government? And, we found out why we had to sue, and, by the way, every lawsuit is an indication they’re violating the Freedom of Information Act. We don’t sue because there’s no case to be had, it’s because they’re not following the law, and we know that the cover up is significant. We know the number of signups. How many people do you think signed up the first day of Obamacare? It’s was a big controversy, right? No one asked about it. We did. We sued. One person signed up the first day of Obamacare. One person. Well, there was a little bit of a controversy in the documents we obtained because someone said maybe two people signed up. I want you to think about if we knew one person signed up the first day of Obamacare back in October of last year as opposed to the summer of this year when we obtained the information, how different the debate would have been. We were able to get documents showing the PR campaign, the propaganda effort, hundreds of millions of dollars going to Obama-connected PR firms to “do behavioral change.” We found that money was being pushed out, especially in the seven days before the 2010 election. Again, where is the oversight by Congress? We found out information about the security of the Obamacare web site. Think about that. The documents we have show that the Obama administration knew before the opening of healthcare.gov last year that it was an unsecure web site. The details they refused to divulge to Congress, but we got the details from them. Essentially, any joke of a hacker could upload an Excel spreadsheet or an Excel type of program and just gum up the works. They weren’t tracking what the security flaws were. I mean anyone who owns a business, anything related to IT, you’re looking for problems, you basically have to keep a list of what the problems are so you can address them all. They weren’t even doing that and, in fact, they knew it was insecure, and what were the fix-it dates for them? Months after the healthcare.gov was opened, months. So, I can tell you if you’re putting information on healthcare.gov, you’re putting your personal information at risk, and, tying it back to the IRS scandal, guess who collects your information about whether you have health insurance, thanks to the individual mandate. The IRS, and guess who they click with to make sure everyone’s on the same page; this healthcare.gov web site. So, this unsecure web site – with the IRS web site and services which are also not terribly secure – my gosh, a hacker’s dream. So, forget about K-Mart or Target or all those businesses who are being dragged and maybe criminally prosecuted by this administration. Their criminal neglect of our privacy and their knowing neglect in putting our privacy at risk so they wouldn’t have to deal with the political consequences of admitting that the web site screwed up is really beneath contempt.
But, on top of the lack of transparency we’ve got the law breaking. Now, the debate is whether we repeal Obamacare. The public wants Obamacare repealed, but let me tell you what the dirty little secret is. It has been repealed. The Obamacare of 2010 is no longer in existence. Now, it’s been repealed, in part, correctly as a result of legislation passed by Congress, signed into law by the President, but also the President himself has repealed it, taking the role of judge, legislature, and President all at once. And, as Larry indicated most famously – well, perhaps most famously now – with the pushing back the statutory deadline on the employer mandate, and in the case of Dr. Carlisle, his business. He was doing the right thing. He prepped. He knew this employer mandate was coming down the line. He spent a good deal of money and a good deal of time that could have otherwise been spent pursing, expanding his business further, which is already tremendously successful, and so Obama says, “The law doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have to follow the law, and I can just, without any cause, any authority, just ignore it.” He’s out of all of his money. He has standing, and we sued to challenge his ability to do that, and in that lawsuit, in highlighting it, we talked about this old U.S. Grant quote saying, “The best way to ensure the repeal of a bad law is to enforce it vigorously,” and President Obama has learned that and that’s why, at least, there’s like 24 changes to the law he’s unilaterally made in absolute violation of the law.
And let me tell you, this lawlessness has ensnared everyone else. Congress, we have sued the District of Columbia over Congress’s participation in the small business exchange. The House of Representatives, the small business exchange that DC has, limited to people with 50 employees or under. You literally have to list – because I know because we’re a District of Columbia business, Judicial Watch, we’re located there – to apply in the exchange you have to list every employee and their birthdate. Guess how the House of Representatives did it? They just wrote Congress, birthdate 1994 – maybe there was a political statement there – nothing else. Guess how many employees the House and the Senate have together; 20,000. So, we get these forms that a representative of the House and the Senate made attesting under oath that they employee less than 50 people. So, I want you – just a little activism – ask your member, do you have healthcare under this Obamacare exchange? Do you know that it was obtained through fraudulent means, and what are you gonna do about it? Maybe that’s one thing for the Republican Congress to do, heal thyself. The lawlessness includes the judiciary where you had, frankly, Chief Justice Roberts rewrite Obamacare in order to save it, and the lawlessness extends to us where we’re forced to obey laws that weren’t passed by Congress. There’s nothing to justify them other than raw power being exercised by the President, but we have to follow them in order to get health insurance.
So, the lawlessness of President Obama isn’t just about President Obama, it ensnares us all, and we’re happy to do the work to kind of bring back our ability to govern ourselves, but talking about Obamacare lawlessness, talking about Obama lawlessness, doesn’t really cover it. The system is broken down. Judicial Watch did all this great work that is talked about with Obamacare with the Benghazi and the IRS, and I’m proud of our work and pleased to have done it, but what an outrage that it was this little old group in Judicial Watch that’s asking questions about how many people are enrolled in Obamacare. Why are we asking the questions? Why are we suing in court? This President doesn’t believe he is subject to the law. We know that from other discussions. The agencies he runs don’t think they’re accountable to the people, and Congress signs checks with their eyes closed and shows up like a fire department after the house burns down and yells “fire.” Meanwhile, previously, we’re giving gasoline and matches to the 3-year-old in the house and wondering why the house burned down. Really, when there’s no control like that, that’s not self-government and, in my view, we’ve got the appearances of self-government. You vote. There are elections, but if Congress goes back, doesn’t want to conduct any oversight, just gives blank checks to unelected bureaucrats, and if the President doesn’t think he is accountable to the law, if you think that’s self-government, it isn’t. So, we present a way forward through this independent activity – lawsuits direct at [email protected], using the law to get transparency and accountability – and that’s the way forward. We’ve got to get our government back under control.
Talk about policy is almost irrelevant in the meantime and actually dangerous because the criminal class is running Washington. It’s a racket, and until there’s an honest game going on, we shouldn’t play it, and the way to play it and to make it more honest is to get that accountability back and that ought to be the focus of any new Congress, both honest Democrats and Republicans, and that ought to be the focus of what we’re doing here as a movement and I really appreciate Mr. Horowitz’s approach to what’s going on in Washington. A) He’s not in Washington and he recognizes the crisis, and if we recognize the crisis this doesn’t mean oh, it’s insurmountable as a result. It means that at least we know what the problem is so we’re not fooling ourselves with wasted efforts on silly things that don’t impact the fundamentals.
And so when I hear Mitch McConnell, for instance, saying, “Well, we need 60 votes to repeal Obamacare, and it’s not gonna happen.” Well, why is that? Where is the can-do attitude? Maybe it will happen. Obamacare has been repealed. Who knows, the Supreme Court may rule later this year that the subsidies are illegally being given to people in certain faiths and it’s eviscerated, and Democrats may say, “Well, what’s there to save, let’s repeal it.” It’s that sort of proactive leadership. It’s that we’ve got to get something done, and I tell you, Obamacare is destroying our healthcare system. People will die because of it. Our house is burning. We need to protect the family and the treasures, and Congresses need to understand the importance of that, and if it means making sure the President follows the law through a lawsuit that gets a law that we don’t like implemented, so be it. And if it means that members of Congress and their staff have to pay more money for Obamacare, so be it, but we’ve got to protect ourselves.
So, these are nonpartisan issues. Corruption, transparency, there’s a reason President Obama talks about transparency. I know it’s the big lie of his administration because he appeals to people who support him as well, and I can tell you, having worked with groups on the left, they like transparency too. They don’t understand that when you have a big government and big money transparency is very hard to achieve, but they like it in theory. Take it for what it’s worth. So, there are ways to reach across the aisles that don’t require us to leave our principles at the door, but getting government under control, making sure that the politicians are accountable to the people, making sure that businesses aren’t being – in the case of President Obama’s insurance commissar, Kathleen Sebelius – being shaken down to support Obama’s third-party group Enroll America. I mean, Sebelius was out there campaigning on government time, violated the Hatch Act; first cabinet official in U.S. history. Hatch Act prevents you from campaigning as a government official on government time. She should have been fired. Obama left her in.
I mean this is a crisis and Judicial Watch, I think, is recognizing it and has a way forward to address it, and I appreciate Dr. Carlisle’s participation with us because without a client we can’t do the lawsuit so it’s just great work, and I have to say, do not let up. Hold your members to account and don’t let them say, “Well, this is the plan.” No, they’re individually accountable, and it’s about time the individual members be accountable to you, and this is the story I want to leave you with: Larry Carlisle is a business man down here in Florida, a successful businessman, and he is not cowed by the fact – he is a business man who is not a politician, not a public policy expert – that he can’t talk to politicians in Washington about what they’re supposed to do and what ideas they need to pursue or to lawyers at Judicial Watch. I’m not a lawyer, but telling them, “Well, hey this is an idea. Why don’t we do this?” It’s that sort of, hey, you’re citizens of this grand republic and you need to participate too and don’t be shy about holding those politicians to account, and my guess is most of you are significant enough in your communities to get members of Congress to return your calls, and you should be pushing these issues. So, with that, I can talk forever about Obama corruption and the situation in Washington. I’ll end my remarks, and I encourage you to support Judicial Watch, obviously. We’re 300,000 active supporters, by the way. You wouldn’t know that, would you, but isn’t that a sign to conservatives looking for a way forward, Republicans, honest Democrats? Wow, this Judicial Watch, all they do is talk about transparency, accountability in government, rule of law, and look at all the support they’re getting. Is there a lesson there? I think there is. Thank you very much.
Michael Reagan: I’m actually here as eye candy. And today I’m not even worried about Obamacare ‘cause I’m on Medicare, and those of you who are on Medicare with me, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And so what I, it’s the younger generation has to understand what’s going on. And, what really kinda, excuse me, ticks me off is, I’d like to see Obamacare rolled back and gotten rid of ‘cause I don’t want my 26-year-old child living in the home anymore. Does anybody have your 26-year-old child living at home? Get them the hell out. You know how I became an empty nester? I bought another house and moved to it. My son’s still living in the old house wondering where his parents went. That’s what you need to do.
But I tell you, up here, because then we all go back, and I would really suggest this, ‘cause we all know the story, but we really have to bring another generation of people in who are going to be paying that 20 percent increase in their care and you really need to sit them in a room, the young generation, and let them listen to a speech my father gave back in 1962 on socialized medicine because he warned us back in 1962 what was gonna happen and, guess what, it happened and we’re all here now with socialized medicine with Obamacare. My wife earlier this year, it’s interesting, she had to have rotator cuff surgery and so she went down to have her MRI done and she went for the MRI and they said, well, Mrs. Reagan your insurance, you still haven’t paid the full deductible on your insurance, but the reality of it is that, can you just give us a check for $350.00? She said why? She said because we’ll actually make a bigger profit if you give us a check for $350.00 than if we charge your insurance company for the MRI we’re gonna give you. So my wife wrote a check for 350 bucks, got the MRI and then went and had the shoulder surgery a couple of weeks later and then the outpatient surgery center billed the insurance company $87,000.00 for rotator cuff surgery. I mean, our system needs help. I think we all agree to that. But having socialized medicine is not the answer.
And what I really think about and Tom, maybe you could answer this question, Larry, ‘cause I go out and speak on this, I think that members of Congress, I think the insurance companies, I think the banking industry, I think every major industry in this country, oil and gas, you name it, I think they are scared to death of this administration and what might happen to their industry if in fact they go after the President of the United States of America, and I think we all saw that and see that what happened with the whole IRS scandal. And they’re absolutely scared to death. I mean you have an insurance industry today who doesn’t say anything about what’s going on because what do they get? They got a reinsurance policy. So they are guaranteed 100 percent of their losses are recovered in the first 2 or 3 years of Obamacare. They got bought off before they went in the game so when they talk about too big to fail, they’ve now insured them against being too big to fail so we’ll never face that again. There are so many things that are in fact going on, like one of the best reactions to one of the tweets I sent out – and by the way, David, are you here, or Michael Finch – should be #freedomcenter, just to let you know. One of the biggest reactions I got is one time you were talking about, Tom, about Congress living up to the law that they passed on to us and the tweet that I sent out was “How would you feel if every member of Congress was made to pee in a bottle before and after every vote?” And if you didn’t pass the pee test, then your vote didn’t count. I think that’s, I’d like to see that law passed tomorrow. Because I really think sometimes after they vote, don’t you think, my God would they pass the drug test themselves? But again, it’s going to take all of us and really staying in touch –
Audience Member: I know at least one who would fail.
Michael Reagan: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s really upon us to stay on top of our members of the House, members of the Senate, but also be really educating the youth of America as they come out of that 26-year-old and started having to pay the fees and pay the prices here and with their prices going up. It’s not getting cheaper and the death panels are there. They’re all there. We know that now. Now it’s a matter of getting it out and we can’t just sit back and say, well, wait a minute, the dominant media is not going to cover it. No, they’re not gonna cover it. They’re never gonna cover it. So, it’s up to us to be screaming from the mountain tops and doing something about it and as I said this morning when I was speaking, you can’t just come to these events, listen to Tom, listen to Larry, listen to David, listen to Mike, listen to Michele Bachmann, listen to Ann Coulter, listen to everybody and then go home and say that was a wonderful time, I had the greatest time of my life at the Breakers, and listen to all these great speakers and go home and do nothing. You’ve gotta go home and do something. Because if you go home and do nothing, then Obama wins. If you go home and do nothing, the left wins. And that’s what they’re counting on is for you to come to this, go home, and do nothing. And so through your support of the Freedom Center is one thing, but you also have to be vocal at home. You have to be involved at home. And you have to be educational at home. And if you do that, then we will win the day. If we don’t do that and we just show up for these conferences, we are going to lose the day and let me tell you, the world cannot afford for America to lose. My God, where are the Canadians gonna go now for healthcare? So I’ll turn it back to you, Larry.
Larry Kawa: So many scandals and lies out there. It’s hard to pick one that’s really your favorite. So, just last night I get back to my room and I decide it would be interesting to do another FOIA request before I get into mine briefly. So I said, they say that the Keystone Pipeline, the President didn’t want to agree to it yet because he was waiting for some research, he’s always waiting for something, waiting for some research to come back so I go on the Department of Energy’s FOIA request, like most people probably do at midnight, go into their Carlsbad Division and I look under the Waste Isolation Pilot Program to complete my FOIA request and it says to complete this you need to have RB Media. It’s a government subcontractor. So, I said okay, I go to RB Media, go on rbmediasolutions.com, you’re welcome to go on your phones right now, and go on rbmediasolutions.com, a government subcontractor. So I’ll read to you what it says on their web site, “Notice,” this is their landing page, “We apologize for the downtime over past several weeks. Our server was attacked by an Islamic group and we are in the process of getting everything back in order.” It’s hard not to mention fun stuff like that. This is a government subcontract. But in any event, getting back on point, back in March 2013 I spent money on legal fees to make sure that my business, which is an orthodontic business in Boca Raton, was compliant with a law that I didn’t agree with, the Obamacare law. I might not like it, but I have respect for the Constitution, I’m a law-abiding citizen, so I paid some lawyers to make sure that my business is in compliance with the law. Being that I have more than the required minimum of 50, I am technically a large employer, it affects me and a few more months go by, July 2, 2013 on his first day of an 8-day-long, $100 million trip that the taxpayer paid for to Africa, as he flees his own country, our Commander in Chief, decides he’s gonna tweet. He tweets that he is going to wave the employer mandate. Now that’s a head scratcher.
It says in the law that it shall go into effect January 1, 2014. How does that happen? Well, the day goes on and there’s a blog post from the Department of the Treasury, later memorialized by IRS Memorandum 2013-45 standing behind him saying we agree with his tweet; even though it says it nowhere in the law, we’re gonna change it to be January 1, 2015. Now, it doesn’t say may, it says shall. I’m not good at a lot of things, but English I’m okay with. Shall go into effect and now suddenly it’s not. I want to remind you that the purpose of any type of executive action is only one. It is to better enforce the existing laws. Let’s just go back to the basics of the Constitution. Article 1 says that only Congress can make or change a law. Article 2 says only the President has an affirmative fiduciary duty to enforce the existing laws. Therefore, there’s nothing you could do by executive action to better enforce a date of January 1, 2014 by making it a year later making it January 1, 2015. Now, there’s a question that I often see asked in the news, which I still haven’t seen the right answer to. The question is, if this president hasn’t done anymore executive orders than any other president, he’s done less than 200, so did George W. Bush, how you gonna claim that he’s a tyrant? Why is he ruling by executive fiat? Well, here’s the answer, which I’ve learned from Tom and his group, terrific group, I’ve been educated along the way, it’s because there are other types of executive actions other than executive orders.
If you want to see every president’s executive orders, it’s not hard. Go on Wikipedia. Put in the two words and they’ll list them for every president. However, tweets, blog posts, signing statements, and inter-department memorandums are also executive actions that carry with it a very similar authority. So, contrary to popular belief, the employer mandate was not waived by executive order. It was waived by executive action. Now if you, this is really the kicker, if you added up all of the executive actions that this present president has done compared with other presidents, it blows away everything all the other presidents have done combined. Just like the amount of increase in the national debt this president has done. In six years he’s accumulated as much debt as 233 years of the United States of all these other presidents, 43 other presidents. Well, he’s also broken the record with executive actions, not necessarily executive orders, but they have the same force and effect. He has poked his finger in the eye of the Constitution and I had had enough and that’s when I called up Tom and the rest of the group at Judicial Watch and they graciously agreed to take the case and defend both me and defend the Constitution and you might say, well, why doesn’t Congress do something? Well, in order to bring a lawsuit, I want you to bear in mind that the judicial branch under Article 3 of the Constitution only resolves actual disputes or controversies. They do not step into the legislative system and resolve controversies between the executive branch and the legislative branch. It’s not like two children are coming to their mom, that’s the courts, and saying come on, he said, she said. It doesn’t work that way. You have to have standing.
And with due respect to John Boehner who has said that he is going to bring a case on the employer mandate, I wish him the best of luck at trying to show that he has standing, injury. Injury is only one of three components of standing. You also have to show that the cause of your injury is an executive overreach and you have to show remedy. You have to show that the courts can patch the bleeding by intervening. My injury is the fact that I spent thousands of dollars of my money to make sure that my business was in compliance with a law that I didn’t agree with and all that I ask of the President is to simply do the same thing that I did. Obey the law. But I guess I was asking a little bit too much. He governs by his mood ring. Every day he looks at it and, well I would say he would look at what color it is, but like everyone would say, I’m a racist; the color of his mood ring, okay. So then he decides what the law’s gonna be each day. Well, when he waived the employer mandate on July 2, 2013, the reason that he brought it up was because he said large employers, like myself, need transition relief. Nobody asked for it. I didn’t ask for it. Never even heard the phrase before he made it up; he’s got some good catchy phrases, he’s a wordsmith, but if you want to give transition relief, don’t give it to large employers, give it to the people that really need it, the average working American with calloused hands. Waive the individual mandate. I didn’t hear anything about that.
So, he waives the employer mandate and one question I have about the employer mandate is, how can you both love creating jobs, while you want to punish the job creators? The liberals have the jargon down. They say eat the rich, the wealthy, let’s punish them. Nobody ever got a job from a poor man, right? So, do you think it makes it easier or harder to create jobs, when you put more bricks in the knapsack of success of those who do so? So, I think that’s really a message that needs to resonate with the left. I doubt that they want to cover stuff like that, but if they really want to show the truth, that’s one way. But, in terms of their ability to help get the truth out, let’s just say, I don’t want to say that they lie, but they’re a little bit challenged in that respect. I think that they should be more willing to get out stuff like what Judicial Watch does, like what Michael Reagan talks about when he goes around the country speaking, and explain stuff like this, and understand why, when you hear the President say, I am going to do everything to make things a better America, and if Congress won’t agree with me, I’m going to go ahead, as a Congress of one, and just march forward and do it alone, like some sort of renegade James-Dean version of Congress. That’s not how the Constitution was written. If you want to, oh I love you, too, Mike. Thank you. That was very kind of you. I really appreciate that. And I can’t marry you. I’m already married, come on. Not in this state. That was a very sweet thing, but in any event, there is a lot of stuff like that that goes on.
And I also want to let you know there’s another interesting thing that you’ll see, and I know I’ve got to be brief. The Department of Defense was blamed by the President for having no strategy on ISIS. You may remember that he said that the reason he had no strategy on ISIS is because he was waiting for options and direction from the Department of Defense, and they just never got back to him on it. So, listen, stuff happens. You get busy, right? So I said, you know what? I’m walking by my Jeep. I have a bumper sticker on it and it says on the back, what would Reagan do? There’s a picture of your dad, not you, Michael. So, I said he would trust, but verify. So, I sent that on my iPhone and I do a Freedom of Information Act request, requesting for all communications between the Executive Branch and the Department of Defense. Somebody should ask, what did you say? There’s a lot of stuff going on with this ISIS thing, you might have heard about. Normally, these things take about a year, to a year and a half to get back; 8 weeks later I get a response from the Chief of the Pentagon, FOIA Division, and I thought Christmas came early. I mean, it basically said that we have gone – and by the way if you want to see it, I have a catchy little web site I have. Fortunately, the President let it lapse. It was obamaforpresident.org, from the same great minds – feel free to go on your iPhones now and check it, if you want – that had healthcare.gov. They let his main campaign web site lapse, so I took it and I posted this response, signed by – oh, this is like the Ginsu. Don’t answer yet. I’ve also got votehilary.com and hilaryforpresident.com. Yes, for real. Go on it. You’ll see videos of me. Okay? Who says we don’t have social media? So, I posted this response, signed by the Chief of the Pentagon’s FOIA Division. So, I call him up. I say, you know, I thought Christmas came early. I mean, this basically nails the President to the cross. It says there is absolutely no communication, at all, between the Department of Defense and the Executive Branch. I said am I missing something? This just sounds too good to be true, and Hannity covered this last Thursday, by the way. I think you’ll hear more about it. It sounds too good to be true. Could there be classified documents that are missing? He says no. He says we actually took it upon ourselves to expand the scope of your request, something they never do, and we searched for ISIS strategy, ISIL strategy, Iraq strategy and Syria strategy, not only with the Executive Branch, like you asked, but we also searched the entire National Security Council. I said who’s we? He says me. I looked through every one of the emails for Secretary of State John Kerry and his deputy, National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her deputy. I went through Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his deputy, Robert Work. There was nothing. I went through CENCOM Central Command and all of their nine combatant command divisions, nothing at all. He goes, the only thing that we were more surprised about, than having zero results, is thinking that you are the only one that asked. So, I said well maybe this time, you got lucky. So, in closing, I don’t want to jeopardize my friendship with Mike. I know you guys are on a short runway here. I’m going to skip Q&A, if that’s okay with Mike, and thank you guys for your time. Please visit the web site. You’ll see everything else about what we’re doing. Enjoy the rest of your day.
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