#140 Eli Crane & Tim Burchett - Two Things All Americans Want: Accountability and Transparency

In this gripping episode of SRS, we dive into the raw realities of American politics with special guests Congressman Tim Burchett (TN) and Congressman Eli Crane (AZ). Together, they unpack the Secret Service's failure to adequately protect former President Donald Trump and the conspiracies surrounding these incidents. They also explore the dark undercurrents of government corruption and how hidden agendas manipulate the corridors of power, impacting policy decisions and American lives alike. The congressmen also pull back the curtain on what really happens behind closed doors in Congress, exposing the unexpected alliances, the bitter rivalries, and the influence of special interests shaping key legislation. With firsthand insights and candid commentary, this episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking an unfiltered look at the inner workings of government—and the challenges of maintaining transparency and accountability in today’s political landscape. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://unplugged.com/shawnryan https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://preparewithshawn.com https://trueclassic.com/srs https://drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Tim Burchett Links: https://x.com/reptimburchett https://www.instagram.com/reptimburchett Eli Crane Links: X - https://x.com/RepEliCrane Support Eli Crane - https://eliforarizona.com Bottle Breacher - https://bottlebreacher.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/elicrane_ceo Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Tim Burchett, Eli Crane, no strangers to the show, welcome back. We've got a ton to cover. I'm not going to, uh, I'm not going to do the typical introduction we've had because you guys have already been on multiple times, so. But I want to talk to you about Trump assassination. Want to talk to you about, Tim, you've done a ton of work with the Afghanistan stuff. Want to talk about that. And then, um, I think all three of us want to talk about some of the government corruption, uh, in both parties that's going on inside of Congress. And then, um, we'll see what we get into after that. I know you guys both have time constraints, but I just want to say, love you guys.

• 1:48Shawn Ryan?

  Super happy to have you back here in the studio to have this conversation. And, uh, lots of important stuff happening in the, in the country right now. And, um, so let's just get to the bottom of some of it. But, but, you know, to kick it off, Eli, I know you've done a lot of... Work investigating went on with the with the first assassination attempt on Trump's life and just yesterday we had another attempt and actually before we dive into that you guys both know we got a Patreon it's what enables me to be here what you guys enables you guys to be here there are top supporters and so I give them the opportunity to ask

• 2:33Shawn Ryan?

  a question you interview this question is from John Phillips since we're on the topic will anyone at Secret Service be held accountable for the major snafu in Trump's attempted assassination plural

• 2:52Eli Crane?

  I think it's I think it's too early to tell you I think it's gonna largely be based on whether or not Trump becomes president or not I don't have any faith whatsoever that with the people that we have in Congress now that anybody will be held accountable I've just you know I'm only a freshman but I've seen seen the game enough to kind of see how it see how it plays out I think if President Trump gets back into office I do think that there's a really good chance that there will be accountability but everything is so political up there as you know I mean one of the and just on that topic I volunteered

• 3:35Eli Crane?

  to be on the assassination task force you know I sent Speaker Johnson a text saying hey I was a you know NSW sniper I think I could bring value to this investigation and I wasn't put on it now I get it

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  You were not put on it?

• 3:52Eli Crane?

  I was not put on it.

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  Why were you not who made that who made that call?

• 3:55Eli Crane?

  Well it's

• 3:56Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you not have a former Navy SEAL sniper who's better than probably any of the Secret Service snipers out there why why why would they not have somebody with that relevant of experience on the topic inside Congress on the committee?

• 4:14Eli Crane?

  So to be to be as transparent as I can be To my knowledge, there's three snipers in Congress, myself, Morgan Luttrell and Corey Mills. Not one of us was put on that task force. So you, you know, you start asking questions right there. And then what

• 4:31Shawn Ryan?

  Who makes the determination?

• 4:32Eli Crane?

  Leadership always makes the determination.

• 4:34Shawn Ryan?

  Who's the leadership?

• 4:35Eli Crane?

  Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House right now.

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  So Mike Johnson doesn't want the three most relevant individuals in Congress to be on that committee?

• 4:43Eli Crane?

  So what, what I was told is that it, you know, he had to please the entirety of the conference, right? Because it was such a big deal and so many people other than myself volunteered to be on it. You know, he had to make this group over here happy, this group over here happy, this group over here happy. So there's a part of me, because I work up there that understands, understands that. But it, it, because the selection of that committee was political. Once you start going down that rabbit hole, you start asking yourself, okay, so are the witnesses that we call? Is that going to be political too? Are the findings and what we released to the American people, is that going to be political too?

• 5:28Eli Crane?

  And my answer to that is most likely yes. And that's why

• 5:32Shawn Ryan?

  So this isn't about, this isn't about, sorry to cut you off, Ben. I'm just, I'm pissed. So this isn't about uncovering anything or, or getting to the root issue. This is about jerking people off and, and making people happy. That's Washington.

• 5:48Eli Crane?

  Yeah, I would say that they still want to, they still want to, you know, do the investigation. And there are a lot of people, whether they were snipers or not, who want to get to the bottom of it. My point is, is they didn't pick the best people for the job and they know it. And that, that's what bothers me because that's, it doesn't stop there, Sean.

• 6:05Shawn Ryan?

  Who did they put on the?

• 6:07Eli Crane?

  It, every committee that you look at up in Capitol Hill, it's not, you know, who's the best for the job? It's, you know, who has influence, who has money, who can fundraise, who's been here longest? And so you see a lot of the same stuff in other committees as well. And, and often the higher you go, the more you're willing to, you know, play the game and be a yes man. And that's why often I think, you know, people like myself are given the Heisman and told, hey, no thanks, man, we're good.

• 6:40Shawn Ryan?

  Who's on the committee? Who did they put on there?

• 6:43Eli Crane?

  So you you guys actually have a representative, a pretty good representative here in Tennessee, who's on the committee. Mark Green is on the committee.

• 6:54Shawn Ryan?

  Chair of Homeland Security.

• 6:55Eli Crane?

  Yep. Clay Higgins is on the committee, who I think is probably, in my opinion, you know, the best guy on the committee, just because Clay, Clay is willing to, you know, Clay's tough. And he was in law enforcement and he was also in military and he's already gone and done his own independent investigation. He's already released that to the public. So I'm glad that Clay got put on there. And I don't know all the other names, Tim. Do you know?

• 7:23Shawn Ryan?

  I can't even recall. Are they, are they utilizing you and the two other congressmen's expertise?

• 7:31Eli Crane?

  No, not at, not at this point. But I don't think they've even, I don't even think they've had a hearing yet. So we did, we did our own parallel, we called it a roundtable, up in Washington DC, a couple of weeks ago with Eric Prince, Dan Bongino, and then one of the counter snipers who was there. Because I don't know about you, Sean, but I don't have a lot of faith in the federal government to get to the bottom of this. And even if they did get to the bottom of it, I don't have a lot of faith that they would, you know, you know, even reveal it to the American people, just like, we still don't have the Kennedy files, right? And so that's why some of us were like, okay, well, we might not be on the task force, we might not have subpoena power, but let's

• 8:14Eli Crane?

  do everything that we can within our, our contacts, you know, and our intelligence, you know, to get to, you know, to get as many answers as we can for the American people.

• 8:24Shawn Ryan?

  Did you get any answers?

• 8:26Eli Crane?

  Well, we've, we've gotten some, we've gotten some answers. One of the, you know, one of, I, I've actually been to Butler twice now. One of the things that I, I did a video about, you probably saw it, was one of the first things that Director Cheeto was saying was that we, we didn't put counter snipers up on that roof because it was too steep. So myself and other members from the Homeland Security Committee went and got up on that roof. And I showed out, you know, we were walking around on it. Right after me, a 70 year old man named Carlos Jimenez, who's a representative from Florida, got up on it, walked right up it, no problem at all. You could see the water tower right over my shoulder that nobody got up on top of. That would have been a sniper's, you know, paradise or a counter sniper's paradise. And nobody got up on that.

• 9:11Eli Crane?

  One of the things that I broke on with Dan Bongino on his podcast was that these pipe bombs that we were told Thomas Crooks had were built in ammo cans. But, you know, some of the other things that we've learned is that, and I know you've talked about it as well with Eric Prince, but the Secret Service is completely incapable of, you know, stopping a 20 year old kid with no military experience from getting 150 yards from the president. What would that look like with, you know, a trained, you know, team like, you know, whether it's the Houthis.

• 9:46Tim Burchett?

  We had Iranian intelligence. The Iranians were.

• 9:49Eli Crane?

  Whatever it is.

• 9:50Shawn Ryan?

  We had, hold on, we had.

• 9:51Tim Burchett?

  We have intelligence that said that the, was it the Iranians that were, that had put a hit out on, on Trump just prior to that?

• 9:59Eli Crane?

  There is, yeah, there is intelligence that that's a, that that's a very big threat as well. But some of the other things that we've learned, Sean, that's alarming is that the Secret Service seems to be completely allergic to innovating and adapting to modern warfare. Right? Dan Bongino was talking about how when he was there, it took decades for them to even put slings on their primary weapons. Right? Yeah, like their primaries, their M4s or whatever, whatever they were carrying. And anybody who's done, whether you're a police officer or you've been in special operations or you're, you know, a Marine, you know that how important slings are because if you, if you're shooting your primary and you go dry or you have a jam and then you

• 10:44Eli Crane?

  need to transition to your secondary. What are you going to do with your primary? Are you going to throw it on the ground? Or what if you have to climb a ladder, right? What if you have to do some prisoner handling? You know, what if you have to process some evidence? You know, you can't just be throwing your weapon on the ground. And so he was saying, I mean, the Secret Service was so backwards that it took decades for them to even get slings. He also said that they didn't want to transition to a higher caliber weapon. Like a, like an AR style platform that shot something that maybe some of the threats were carrying. Right? And so you couple that with, oh, they didn't have a drone up on site. Right? They even turned down a drone from some of the local authorities.

• 11:27Eli Crane?

  And you just got to wonder, like, why aren't they forward thinking at all? You know, because our enemies most certainly are. And he also, you know, one of the other things that we've learned is that the Secret Service is absolutely not in a better place with the new director. People are just like in every other government institution, they're failing up. Right? Director Rowe probably, you know, had a lot more say over what security and what personnel and what assets were at, you know, onsite at Butler on that day than even Director Cheadle did. And so, you know, you know, there's been a lot that we've uncovered and we've found, but definitely there's still a lot more to uncover. And, you know, for those of us on the outs, it's going to be difficult because we don't have subpoena power.

• 12:13Tim Burchett?

  And let's be honest, the answer to your question is no. And the other question you ask is why is Eli not on there? He ruffles feathers. He votes his conscience, you know, we, he and I both voted against McCarthy and, you know, deposing him. And that's, that's what I think is at the bottom of it. That's the base of it. You've got a little leadership cabal that calls the shots on everything. And How has there not even been a hearing on it? I don't know that have they had a hearing?

• 12:46Shawn Ryan?

  They put a committee together.

• 12:48Tim Burchett?

  They went there, they went, did they go to Butler maybe? They did, they did go to Butler, yeah. I mean, it's Washington, you know, they're gonna, it's just gonna churn it out and then six months later, they're gonna issue a report and somebody's gonna get a nasty letter in their file and it's just, it's complete Washington to a T.

• 13:05Shawn Ryan?

  And this isn't about daylight savings time. They tried to assassinate a former sitting president who's running again.

• 13:12Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Shawn Ryan?

  So how, how, how does this just go, well, guys, we don't have time, we don't have enough sessions?

• 13:18Tim Burchett?

  You gotta realize the machine doesn't, they don't want Trump. If he gets in there and he does what he says he's gonna do and starts eliminating two thirds of the bureaucracy, the machine, the corrupt machine, that, you know, they always come in and fire the top people or replace the new people, old people, but it's that second, third, fourth tier that are in there for life, that are just, that infiltrated our government that we've, we've allowed to be there. Department of Education, billions of dollars, stays in Washington. It seems to me it'd be easier just dismantle the whole department, send that money to the states and let them decide and let the locals have a say so. But no, you've got, I mean, how many, honestly, how many bureaucrats in Washington DC have

• 14:01Tim Burchett?

  caught a, taught a kid how to, how to read in Claiborne County, Tennessee?

• 14:05Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 14:06Tim Burchett?

  Zero. But that, but that's, that's part of the machine, that's part of the structure. And that's why every hundred days, we had another trillion dollars to the debt and neither party has a plan to pay it off and neither party wants to pay it off, cause all they're doing is buying boats.

• 14:21Shawn Ryan?

  So I got a, maybe you can help me and the audience understand who makes the determination of when these hearings happen? Who?

• 14:33Tim Burchett?

  Ultimately, it's the speaker.

• 14:34Shawn Ryan?

  Who makes it?

• 14:35Tim Burchett?

  And you, the speaker and they'll appoint a chairman and the chairman will, will bring in the legal folks and then that's part of the problem because part of the problem is the staff machine that's there. You've got great staffers that work, but some of those folks have been there years and years and years and years and they don't get in any rush. They decide literally what, I mean, I've had chairman say, I've heard chairman say before, I can't get that bill to the floor because, you know, my staffers don't really like that bill.

• 15:06Tim Burchett?

  What? What are you talking about? You know, I had a bill that dealt with, um, well, for instance, the, um, the Chinese, you know, these ancestry.com, you know, you take a swab, you send it off. Well, they're buying it, creating a genome. The Chinese are buying it legally from these companies and they're selling it to them. And they create a genome for, say, so they'd like to, um, come to, uh, imagine the Chinese creating a disease that could, you know, disable the entire world. So they wanted to just, just take out females of, of childbearing ages in United States of America. Well, they could create a genome to do that. And apparently that's what they're attempting to do. That is what they're attempting. I can't even get the Chinese.

• 15:50Tim Burchett?

  I can't even get, I couldn't even get a hearing on the bill because the committee's just in total shutdown and it's, you know, and that's the way Washington works though. They want to have hearings. They want to issue press releases, but the bottom line in Washington DC is get your ass reelected. It's not fixing the problem. They go home to their MAGA dinners or their, their left does their Truman dinners and they throw out the red meat, how bad the Republicans are, how bad the, how bad Speaker Pelosi is, how bad Johnson is. They get reelected and they all come 98, 99% of them get reelected and hell, they'll be right back doing the same stuff. Just, and that's part of the problem.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 17:27Shawn Ryan?

  What are, what are the hearings? Because I had a, I had a meeting with McCall's people too. Apparently they can't get Masood in because there's no time. There's no time.

• 17:39Tim Burchett?

  To me, that's

• 17:39Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what is more?

• 17:41Tim Burchett?

  You're rocking the boat, Sean. You're rocking the boat.

• 17:43Shawn Ryan?

  My question is, they did agree to a 30-minute Zoom call. Yay.

• 17:50Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what the [bleep] that does. But why?

• 17:55Shawn Ryan?

  What are the other hearings? And maybe, maybe there is stuff that's way more important than the fact that

• 18:00Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, well, every committee, you know, every committee

• 18:01Shawn Ryan?

  US government's sending the Taliban millions of dollars, 40 to 87 million every week. I mean, we're literally, do you know what? What, what the government would have done if they, if I would have done a $5 donation to the Taliban 10 years ago?

• 18:17Tim Burchett?

  Cuffed and stuffed, yeah.

• 18:18Shawn Ryan?

  They just admitted $239 million went to them. And it's a lot more than that.

• 18:22Tim Burchett?

  It was a lot more than that.

• 18:24Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what are the, what are some of the upcoming hearings in Congress that are more important than the Trump assassination attempts? And the fact that the US government's funding terrorism?

• 18:39Tim Burchett?

  Absolutely none. None. But that's, that doesn't feed the K Street lobbyists. And that in turn

• 18:50Shawn Ryan?

  Seriously, though, what are some of the subjects coming up on the pal, on the plate?

• 18:54Tim Burchett?

  I couldn't tell you. It's, uh, I couldn't even tell you. Could you? I mean, every, every week, there's a hearing on something, you know, you'll bring in, like on transportation, we'll bring in the railroad people if there's a railroad derailing. Yeah, it's not sexy, but it's the, and, and people get, understand, don't understand in government that, you know, these committees of jurisdiction deal with those issues. And I do videos as soon as I walk out of committee and I tell, because people don't realize that all that other stuff's going on. All they see is what's going, C-SPAN, what's going on in the floor, which is bogus. That's already been decided back in the back rooms. There's never really too many surprises on boats. Um, and it's just the committees of jurisdiction.

• 19:36Tim Burchett?

  We'll have, um, you know, we, when I asked the question on the Afghanistan issue of the Marine sniper, I said, do you have the, the suicide bomber in your sights that killed the 13 Americans? Staff Sergeant Ryan Canales, I live on the Ryan Canales highway. I want, every day I drive out, there's his name. And yes, in fact, he had the guy two times in his sights. And we found that out and, and, but what did we do with it? Nothing, because we don't have the guts to go after anybody. We can't, you, anyway.

• 20:08Shawn Ryan?

  So it's nothing of any substance where you're talking to the railroad people?

• 20:12Tim Burchett?

  Well, we developed legislation because of that allegedly, you know? It, it goes along that. And then, of course, you've got, they bring in the lobbyists from both sides. The Democrats, they're in the majority, minority, so they get two. And then we get the Republicans bring in three witnesses on our side. You know, they're like, have a pro-union and then a pro-business side and, and you, and nothing ever gets done, though. If you pass legislation, it goes to the Senate and Schumer won't bring it up or vice versa.

• 20:42Shawn Ryan?

  And some of these, some of these hearings have been planned, you know, months in advance. But to your point, I don't, I don't know that any of them are as important as what you're talking about.

• 20:50Tim Burchett?

  None are as important.

• 20:51Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you'd think they would cancel, I don't know, the railroad meeting and bring in the fact that they're, you know, trying to kill. Presidential candidate, former president.

• 21:02Tim Burchett?

  Well, you could do, you can still have them going on.

• 21:04Shawn Ryan?

  Or, yeah, I don't know.

• 21:05Tim Burchett?

  I mean, they're still.

• 21:06Shawn Ryan?

  Two a day.

• 21:06Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, they're gonna assign staff to it. They're gonna assign staff to it and probably hiring a lawyer.

• 21:12Eli Crane?

  And they did, they did have, I think they did have, what, Cede Lynn, was it judiciary or oversight?

• 21:17Tim Burchett?

  No, we, we had an oversight, that's where I told her she was a D E I nightmare. And then that was, and she quit the day after that.

• 21:26Eli Crane?

  So they hit that, they, they've already hit that one, but as far as this new task force goes, I'm hoping they're just doing, you know, trying to do as thorough of an investigation as possible. And honestly, Sean, like, e- even though I didn't get put on the task force, whatever, you know, I'm rooting for, I'm rooting for them because at the end of the day, it's not about me. It's not about Corey Mills, it's not about, it's not about any one of us. It's about, okay, how do we make sure that this never happens again, regardless of what the candidate is, right? But what happened yesterday?

• 21:54Shawn Ryan?

  But they didn't do that because it just happened again.

• 21:56Eli Crane?

  What happened yesterday? We found out once again that, you know, the Secret Service, because President Trump isn't the current president, they're not giving him, you know, the detail that he needs, right? So they're, they're defaulting to historical norms instead of actually looking at the threat presence to this guy because he's clearly the most targeted politician, you know, possi- maybe besides Netanyahu in the, in the world right now. And so it's like, if I was the secret director of Secret Service, I wouldn't be going off of, you know, historical norms or what we did yesterday. I'd be going off of, hey, who's, which one of these guys that I'm assigned to protect has the most threats?

• 22:37Eli Crane?

  That's who's gonna get the, you know, the majority of my assets and the majority of my attention. And I'm gonna try and do as good of a job as I can across the board, but that's clearly not happening.

• 22:49Tim Burchett?

  And politics plays into it.

• 22:51Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 22:52Tim Burchett?

  Because Robert Kennedy Jr., I mean, his dad was assassinated. John, I mean, there's no other family that's fallen to more assassins' bullets than the Kennedys, obviously. I mean, historically in this country, I'm sure there's somewhere. But he was denied Secret Service by the President of the United States. And they made up all this BS, but Obama was given, when he was running, was given Secret Service protection early. And that was, and it's, it's at the discretion of the President of the United States. And so, so you've got to wonder, and at, at where Trump got shot, you know, there, there

• 23:30Tim Burchett?

  was the talk of Homeland Security was there instead of Secret Service, you saw people that were too short, and then you could, they couldn't put their guns in their holsters, and they were hiding behind the pile.

• 23:44Eli Crane?

  Yeah, as somebody, as, as, as somebody who's trained, what'd you think when you saw one of the Secret Service agents up on, you know, on that detail that couldn't holster a weapon after like three attempts?

• 23:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Eli Crane?

  I mean, I mean, I don't, honestly, I don't care, I don't care what the sex is, man, I really don't, but at the same time, like, does that look like somebody who's well-trained to you? No.

• 24:09Tim Burchett?

  And let me ask you guys this, you know, you got these guys up there that were obviously too short, I mean, you wouldn't have somebody in that iconic picture, that should have never been, been able to have happened, because the only way it was, because there was an agent, or whoever it was, was head and shoulders short, I mean, they got a specific job, I mean, it's to take, it's literally to take a bullet for Trump, or whoever they're guarding, and they, they clearly failed at that, and then that frontal view was just awful, I mean, that was just, to me, I was shocked that they allowed that, and then if you ever, if you can listen to the audio, he says, "We're gonna move on, on, on my count, three, two, one," and they just stayed there, you know, the thing would be to get him off, if

• 24:53Tim Burchett?

  there'd have been a second shooter, and all you do is just start shooting into that pile. I would, from what I've been told, the, the job is to get his ass off the stage, and get him, get him out of there, and get him in a secure environment.

• 25:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know, you know, I don't know what they're putting out at Secret Service, but it's against, pretty much, from, from everything I saw, it's completely against everything I've ever learned in the SEAL teams, or the agency's protective unit, so.

• 25:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, maybe there I

• 25:24Eli Crane?

  And I know that I knew I know they play by different roles because I've talked to other Secret Service agents because of the political ramifications of it. Like I've been told that, you know, these advances can come back with the recommendation that, hey, let's not hold this rally here, but even then it's up to the campaign. So, you know, if a campaign decides, hey, we're going to hold a rally here regardless. You know, of what your recommendation was, you know, they're going to hold the rally there. And so that was one of my issues when I went to Butler and, you know, I was looking at how many threats there were on that site, how many rooftops, how many windows, how many trees, right? There were a lot of trees that somebody could have easily got gotten up into and made like

• 26:07Eli Crane?

  a like a hide site deer stand, you know? And there were way too many threats for the amount of security they had to cover down on. And so that's another thing that we got to get smarter on.

• 26:20Shawn Ryan?

  And it seemed like a really basic target to me looking at it from the, I mean, you were there.

• 26:25Eli Crane?

  If you would, yeah.

• 26:26Shawn Ryan?

  But I mean, comparative to like, I mean, I remember being in the SEAL teams in 2004. There was a big NATO convention in Istanbul and we did a ton of sniper overwatch at that, at that, at that NATO convention and every, I mean, that was a nightmare.

• 26:42Eli Crane?

  Right.

• 26:43Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're looking at 15, 20 story buildings with windows on every floor completely surrounding the venue and thousands of people.

• 26:55Eli Crane?

  Way too many, way too many avenues, you know, to cover with the guns that you have in the.

• 27:00Shawn Ryan?

  And we felt like we had it covered. And so you take this, which appeared like it was in a rural setting, you know, mostly farmland. I mean, a thermal imager could have covered those trees like, you know what I mean? And within five seconds.

• 27:15Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 27:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, stuff just doesn't get dropped. It just, it was impossible. It seemed impossible for any, anything to be dropped.

• 27:27Tim Burchett?

  That's what I asked about the golf course shooting. Shouldn't there have been a drone? Anytime he's out in the open, I would think there'd be a drone. And I went to a football game in Knoxville this past, I've been, every week I've gone to a football game. They've had multiple drones. I mean, it's just like they could, you could see the part in my hair from up there. I mean, you know, and again, we said that we needed drones the first time. And then the second time, there's still no freaking drones out on the golf course.

• 27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Eli Crane?

  Well, the other thing too, Sean, is that when you, my perspective and what I, what I know now, and obviously this is a fresh story because it just happened yesterday. But when I look at the pictures of his hide site, you know, if, if that's what it, that, or his final firing position, as we would call it, um, you know, one of the things I noticed based on this story that I'm hearing is that he was spotted because he put the barrel of his gun through the fence, right? Behind me, you have a picture of a, a legit, um, you know, sniper team on a rooftop. And it looks like somebody blew a loophole or a hole in the wall, which, you know, most snipers want to use. They want to be as far back from, you know, the actual hole they're going to be shooting at.

• 28:36Eli Crane?

  And so I was looking at it and like, the Secret Service, in my opinion, got lucky again because this guy wasn't trained. I, and I could tell by, if he was trained, he would have had a pair of $20 bolt cutters with him. He would have cut out his, his loophole or his, uh, line of sight through that fence. And then he would have pushed back into the shady leaves so that he couldn't have, you know, been seen, right? The other thing that I noticed was he had his two ballistic plates up on the fence. What is, what does that create? Well, it's definitely not, it's, it, it, it stands out. And one of the first things they teach you in sniper school is there are no straight lines in nature, right?

• 29:18Eli Crane?

  And so you got, if, if a Secret Service agent is just scanning a fence line and he sees a bunch of, you know, leaves and then boom, he sees two like dark, you know, plate looking things that have straight lines, it's going to catch his eye. And so it just showed me once again how lucky we were that the guys right now that are being, you know, that are coming after the president or being sent after the president don't have a lot of training.

• 29:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's my next question. After everything that you've dug into, both you guys, what was this? Is it lone wolves coming after him, or is this orchestrated from who the left?

• 29:59Eli Crane?

  Yeah. I honestly don't know yet. And one of the, one of the things that I still want information on that I think is going to definitely help answer that question is these bank accounts. And whether or not he did indeed have offshore bank accounts with a lot of money in them. Because based on, you know, pattern of life and the type of job that he had and the family that he came from, you know, I think he was just working at a little, little store. If he had, if he did have overseas bank accounts with a good amount of cash in them, that's going to be a massive red flag, you know, that he was working with somebody. And so, we don't know yet.

• 30:44Eli Crane?

  But again, without subpoena power, it's tough to get the witnesses, you know, in there that, you know, can answer questions.

• 30:52Tim Burchett?

  There's a thing called MKUltra. They used to, they used to say that's, you know, it's bogus, but it's, it's a reality. It's been documented. I think there's been lawsuits because of it. You know, they use psychotropic drugs and influence people and, and brainwash them. And I think it ended in the sixties, maybe sixty-three or something. It was CIA operation. And they took people and, and just turned them into machines, basically, or tried to. And of course, they said it didn't exist. And then they got popped and then they had, they were forced that to make, that it did exist. And to me, that begs the question, is something like that still going on?

• 31:36Tim Burchett?

  Because I don't trust them to tell me the truth. So many billions float, you know, the Pentagon right now can't, can't count for a half a billion dollars in assets. I mean, what is that, a battleship?

• 31:45Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Tim Burchett?

  You know? So, we're, we're awash with something, with money to do something with, and there's some people in this. World in this government that are that are pure evil.

• 31:57Eli Crane?

  But and on top of that, though, Sean, I do want to say to to answer your question. I do think that there is, you know, at the very least, I do think. There was a desire to weaponize the mainstream media outlets to radicalize. American citizens against the president. I mean, come on, man, you can only call somebody.

• 32:21Tim Burchett?

  Hitler.

• 32:22Eli Crane?

  A threat, you know, a threat to democracy, or, you know, he he's like a modern day Hitler so many times. Before somebody feels the moral obligation to do something about it.

• 32:33Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, magazine cover of a national publication that has a picture of of Trump with a Hitler mustache.

• 32:40Eli Crane?

  Right.

• 32:40Tim Burchett?

  You know, it's just, it just, and this goes back to my point about MKUltra. It maybe they're not, maybe they're not bringing in somebody off the street and doing this too. But they know if they put enough of this thought process out there, there's enough. Kids or misfits or something that are going to do something. And this guy, though, he's he's he's a North Carolinian, Lannion, lived in Hawaii. But comes down to Florida, sits on a golf course, and he's going to take out Trump. That how does that happen? How does this guy do this? This guy's got all kinds of these international connections. He's been busted before for federal firearms violations.

• 33:25Tim Burchett?

  And then they don't even charge him with attempted murder. They charge him with possession of a firearm of a felon. And then I think altering the serial numbers on the gun. And so this is, this is what they've just charged him with, apparently. So and then the reports that I got, they haven't even charged him with murder, attempted murder. So, you know, again.

• 33:50Shawn Ryan?

  They haven't even charged him with attempted murder?

• 33:53Tim Burchett?

  The last report I saw, that could change. And, you know, I don't know jurisdictional, maybe they they can get more of a charge out of a altered firearm by federal violation. I don't know. But and too. I've always said this, Americans want their pizzas in 30 minutes, and that's about our dad gum attention span. And they. You know, we've already, they won't even talk about the first assassination, Tim. That's a, people are allowed to joke about, you know, how it was fake and, you know, he didn't hit his ear and how does ear heal so fast and all this other stuff, you know, and, and they're allowed to talk about that and joke about it now openly. And so this one, you know, my local newspaper in Knoxville wasn't even, apparently wasn't

• 34:37Tim Burchett?

  even in it, wasn't even on the front page of it this, this morning. So, um, which I don't take, by the way, I don't take that paper, but they, um, uh, you know, they just want it gone and move on.

• 34:53Eli Crane?

  Hey, I do want to say something about yesterday though, and the stor- the story that's been put out there, because I know a lot of, and I'm sure you're probably in the same boat, probably you too, Tim, a lot of my best friends are in law enforcement, right? And, uh, I just, if the story that I heard yesterday was correct, that, you know, a Secret Service agent spotted this guy with, you know, sticking his weapon through the fence and then he, he was proactive and actually engaged this guy, um, I want to give that guy kudos and props.

• 35:23Tim Burchett?

  Hundred percent.

• 35:24Eli Crane?

  You know, because, uh, anybody who's ever had that, like, it's even, even overseas, you know, I know of instances where guys were shot at and they'd never shot at anybody before. And so there was a pregnant pause and it took them a second to actually do what they were trained to do because, um, you know, they knew, you know, it was so new to them. And so it's, it would be much different if you have to do that on US soiled in like Fallujah or, you know, Mizzou, Mizzou or whatever it is. And so I know that a lot of people, you know, look at us going after the headshed of the Secret Service and because, um, that institution clearly needs a massive overhaul and it,

• 36:12Eli Crane?

  You know, I, I just want to say that I know there's a lot of awesome men and women, you know, not only in the Secret Service, but in many of our other institutions who are sick and tired of seeing, you know, these institutions be, become political, become biased, and not focused on what they're actually supposed to do. And so I want to make sure that that's said and clear. And we do appreciate you guys, those of you out there that are still trying to do a very difficult job. And, you know, you can help us. You guys can help us, um, you know, transform these organizations by whistleblowing to us. And I know it's not comfortable. And I know that you're risking a lot then, when you do it.

• 36:54Eli Crane?

  Um, and I think you should be selective about who you talk, who you talk to. But, um, I just want to make sure that that's said because.

• 37:02Shawn Ryan?

  Well, here's a, here's a question for you then.

• 37:04Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Shawn Ryan?

  Because a lot of people probably don't know where to go to blow the whistle. So if they do have information, Secret Service, FBI, CIA, whoever, where do they go to blow the whistle? Where do they go to get your attention?

• 37:18Eli Crane?

  Yeah, they can.

• 37:18Shawn Ryan?

  So that they know they will be heard and somebody has their back.

• 37:22Eli Crane?

  Yeah, they can call, they can call my office. We also posted a tip line on, uh, when we did that hearing up in DC. I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but if they, if, if, if they call my office, um, somebody on my staff will, will take down their information. Um, and if, if they don't have the number to my office, there's an app called Bill Blaster. And you can get every single senators, every single member of Congress's information and call them directly in their office.

• 37:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's called Bill Blaster?

• 37:54Eli Crane?

  Bill Blaster. And it's a great, you don't have to just use it. Please don't just use it for that. Like if you see a piece of legislation coming up that you're fired up about, or you want us to vote a certain way on, please engage your member of Congress because you'd be surprised, Sean, that actually does work. It doesn't work if five or 10 people do it. But if a couple thousand people do it and we walk into our office from going from one committee hearing to the other and like, hey, we're getting blown up right now about this CR with the SAVE Act or this FISA bill or whatever it is. And, and then it's like, okay, well, what are people saying? What are you hearing? You know, there, there are members of Congress that listen to that. And for the ones that don't, you can apply enough pressure to where they'll think twice

• 38:37Eli Crane?

  about, you know, selling you out if, if you get loud enough.

• 38:41Tim Burchett?

  And I would caution though, on the whistleblow, just reiterate what Eli said, be careful who you talk to.

• 38:48Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Tim Burchett?

  And I would be careful about leaving messages and I would face to face it if you get the opportunity. Um, yeah, I would think I'd just be cautious. Um, since I've been in Washington, I've, you know, I remember I always give the example, my wife and I were, a buddy of mine's in the, a trinket business, you know, whatever. I don't know what you call it, swag. And, um, we were talking about these little solo, red solo cups. It had some made out of aluminum and I just thought that's the coolest thing. And both of us, within 30 minutes, what'd we have on our phone? Ads for red solo cups.

• 39:30Tim Burchett?

  And that, it's not so much when you call in your congressman's office, but I, I, I just think it, there's ears and eyes everywhere up there. I just don't think, uh, I don't think we, we are scratching the surface.

• 40:23Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of accountability would you see, would you like to see for the

• 40:29Shawn Ryan?

  attempts and who would be held accountable?

• 40:31Eli Crane?

  Yeah, I'd like to see, I would like to see every, everybody in the cha- chain of command.

• 40:40Eli Crane?

  That's got caught covering up anything to be fired. I'd like to see, you know, those that made decisions based on where to put the counter snipers. I'd like to see them be, you know, held accountable. And that has very, you know, accountability, whether you're in the military, law enforcement, that can be a myriad of different things, depending on the severity of it. You know, I'd also like to see, you know, like whoever made, who, I think, you know, those who made decisions based on, one of the decisions that was, or pieces of guidance put out was, hey, we're not going to send counter snipers anywhere unless they can, they can drive there. Right? Decisions like that.

• 41:24Eli Crane?

  Whoever made the decision, whoever made-

• 41:26Shawn Ryan?

  What does that even mean? We're not going to send counter snipers unless they can drive there?

• 41:31Eli Crane?

  It sounds like a budgetary decision, like we're not going to pay for our counter snipers, you know, and all their gear to get on a plane and fly somewhere. Right? If you can, if we can, if they can drive somewhere to a location, then we'll send a counter sniper team. Right? Whoever was denying, you know, whoever made the decision to deny President Trump and his team, you know, the extra assets that they were asking for, needs to be held accountable. Right? And I think if, I think if you, you know, if you started holding those at the top accountable, I think it would send a trickle down warning and effect to the rest of the service. That, hey, the, you know, the games that have been going on here, the politis, you know, the political games that have been going on here for the last couple of decades,

• 42:16Eli Crane?

  they're done, they're over. You know, our mission is to protect these executives, these individuals. That's what our primary responsibility is going to be. And if, if you don't do it, you're gone, you're gone, period, point blank. And so, but what keeps happening? The same thing that keeps happening in every other major institution within the federal government, people just keep failing up.

• 42:42Tim Burchett?

  I just add one thing very specific though is if it was a leak of how this latest sniper knew to be where he was.

• 42:54Eli Crane?

  Oh, for sure. That guy's whoever leaked that needs to go, needs to go to prison. I mean.

• 43:02Tim Burchett?

  And that's they'll be covering their ass. I mean, it's just a, that's why I say you just never you'll, you'll never know. We will never know. And the only person knew on the first shooting, you know, I got his head split open. Rightfully so, but still.

• 43:22Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think he needs to watch out for moving forward?

• 43:26Eli Crane?

  Well, I think he, I think he needs to be very careful about where he holds, holds his rallies. I think that's, that's a big thing. Obviously, you know, risk mitigation needs to be a factor. And just, I've gone to rallies in Arizona, you know, out in rural country where it wasn't at an arena or a sports complex, whereas I'm driving up to it, I'm looking at, you know, rock piles here, this little hill over there. And you know the deal, when you're trained in this stuff, you know, you always think, you know, you always think, and, and, and this might sound alarming to people, but you always think, if I was going to do this job, how would I do it? Right? And you start thinking that

• 44:08Eli Crane?

  way. And I think that's why the guidance that Eric Prince put out on your podcast, why you need to send some shooters in on the advanced teams and not necessarily law enforcement guys who tend to be rear, rearward looking is so important because if you start sending hitters in there and shooters, that's how we think, how would I do this job? Where would I be? And then you work backwards from there to start putting deterrence in place to where those spots, you know, those strategies that I would use are, are going to work because of the deterrence that I've put in place now.

• 44:48Tim Burchett?

  Let me ask you two something. You know, my dad.

• 44:53Tim Burchett?

  The Pacific Marine Corps combat, nothing like you guys, of course, but it was his war, World War II against the Japanese. And he used to tell me, and the media's been critical me of saying this, but he told me this. He said, look, buddy, he said, if somebody's willing to lose their life to take you out, there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do. I mean, you got to stop them out there. And if you get a suicide situation, or somebody's not a, you know, how would you protect him in an open situation? I mean, you've got the bomb dogs, you've got this, but, you know, they took, they took down the World Trade Center, basically with a couple, allegedly with a couple of box cutters, that somebody had snuck in the plane. I mean, how do you, do you, you know, I, I would just think you'd,

• 45:37Tim Burchett?

  you'd have to isolate the president so far back and have so many bodies between him that knew, you know.

• 45:44Eli Crane?

  Yeah, the other thing.

• 45:45Tim Burchett?

  The new mindset that Eli's been talking about. What, what, how do you stop that?

• 45:49Eli Crane?

  The other thing I'd do is I would bring in some private guys, just so I had, you know, just so I was covering my bases and I had guys that were more loyal to me than they were to an organization that might or might not be, you know, corrupted. A second set of eyes to fact check and look at just, you know, look at everything that they're doing with a, with a mandate to report back to me if they see anything that's shady, any practices that, you know, are obsolete or, you know, not productive. And, you know, that's, that's what I'd do if I were him. I'd, I'd start bringing in some private guys

• 46:33Eli Crane?

  to augment what's already been going down. Not only for the extra presence and deterrence, but also so they could report to me.

• 46:41Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, how do you do, how do you defend against that? This is how you defend against it. I mean, you have to have a lot of observers, but there's always signs that you're looking for when it comes to suicide bombers. So profuse sweating, are they dressed different than everybody else because they're hiding a vest?

• 46:59Tim Burchett?

  Right.

• 47:00Shawn Ryan?

  Um, are they acting nervous? Are they acting anxious? I mean, all these type of things are things that you would look for as an observer to see, see who's out there. Are they interacting with other people?

• 47:10Tim Burchett?

  It's not somebody that. Currently thinks the way we think, though. I mean, you gotta have somebody thinks like y'all do.

• 47:16Eli Crane?

  And on that note, Sean, if, if, if, if he were to do that and bring in, you know, private guys to augment, and let's just say the Secret Service, you know, still hasn't gotten with it and they don't wanna fly a drone. Well, that's fine. We're gonna fly, we're gonna fly a drone. Or you, you, you guys aren't using thermals. Well, we're gonna use thermals. Or you guys aren't taking the radio, you know, we're gonna take the radio. And that, just, just a bunch of things like that, you know, whether it's a four man team, you know, whatever it is. I mean, it can't, it can't hurt.

• 47:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And then, and then the other thing is, you know, allowing bags, purses, things like that. And that way, if they do have some type of a vest or, or a suicide bomb, then it has to be on their person and.

• 48:00Tim Burchett?

  Right.

• 48:01Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know what I mean? So, that, that's how you would do it. Fairly, fairly simple, to be honest with it.

• 48:09Tim Burchett?

  Well, I actually spotted the guy in Afghanistan twice, so, and they weren't allowed to take him out.

• 48:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I don't think anybody has, well, I guess I can't say anybody, but seems like competence in the federal government is just diminishing at a very rapid pace. I saw DeSantis is starting his own investigation.

• 48:30Eli Crane?

  Good.

• 48:31Tim Burchett?

  I just wonder how far he's gonna get with that, cause the ego of these federal governments allowing him to move forward, you know, having access to that.

• 48:39Shawn Ryan?

  So they could shut him down.

• 48:41Tim Burchett?

  I think so. I think they'll just shut him down because of, I mean, you used to see that a lot within, um, inter ag, uh, the agencies, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, they would, there was always feuds between them, you know, that wouldn't allow them. And you saw, under Obama's administration, some guy literally scaled the fence of the White House and they caught him inside the freaking White House, you know? And there was some sort of bridge, breach in security, obviously, but there was some miscommunication there. And, uh, and I don't know if that was an instance for that. I mean, you had a instance at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where a, a group of nuns climbed over the fence and were painting a wall inside of a secure.

• 49:23Tim Burchett?

  Nuclear facility type situation. Nobody ever explained that. Somebody went to jail for it, but you know, there's just, I just don't think there's a seamless, it's not seamless between the agencies.

• 49:36Eli Crane?

  Well, it's not seamless, but I think the good thing about it is when I saw that headline, I was glad to hear it because I think often

• 49:43Tim Burchett?

  Which headline?

• 49:44Eli Crane?

  Even DeSantis is gonna

• 49:46Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.

• 49:47Eli Crane?

  Independent investigation. I think oftentimes if, if an agency like the FBI knows that, you know, Ron DeSantis is gonna fire up a separate, parallel investigation, even the pressure of that and the pride of, hey, if these guys find something and, you know, expose it to the American people that you guys didn't, or you wouldn't, I think that creates pressure right there because it'll make, it'll, it'll make, put egg on their face and make them look bad. And that's something they definitely don't want. So that's why, that's why I like that, that one of the reasons I like that they're doing that.

• 50:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, sitting in Congress, do you guys, do you guys see the, the opposition, or whatever you want to call it, the left, the Democrat side, is anybody concerned about this at all?

• 50:38Eli Crane?

  I think that, I think that there is a little bit of concern. And I think, I don't, I don't think it's, I, I think definitely a part of them wants it to be a memory hole because of the fact that they called Trump Hitler and they called Trump a threat to democracy so much. And so they know there's a possibility that they own a little bit of that. But they're also, also elected officials. And so they, you know, some of them see the correlation. Well, if, if this could happen to the former president, it could happen to me too. And so I, I do see a little bit of concern there as well. Because they're

• 51:20Eli Crane?

  They're radical, whack, you know, wacky people on both sides of the aisle, right? They they get death threats, just like we get death threats. And so I do, I do believe that there is some concern there. But I also believe that a lot of them would like to see this memory hold. Because of, I mean, after it happened and Trump survived and had his historic fight, fight, fight, you know, moment. I think that really opened a lot of people's eyes. Because like, let's not forget, I mean, they tried to impeach this guy. They tried to bankrupt this guy. Then they were trying to throw him in jail for 750 years. What's the progression there? We all knew what it.

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they silenced the sitting president.

• 52:06Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, he's gone.

• 52:08Eli Crane?

  Two guys, you know, and I used to, I told people out on the campaign trail, you know, and and people around me, don't be surprised if, you know, they they take a shot at this guy. I know Steve Bannon publicly said they were going to try and kill him. I know Dan Bongino said they better.

• 52:23Shawn Ryan?

  They're going to go after him again.

• 52:24Eli Crane?

  They're going to go after, and he said it before they went after him the first time. And he said, in our hearing, he said, if you think this is the last time this is going to happen, you're crazy, right? And so I I think people realize that that was the the progression and the the track that we were on, right? And so I think that the the media and the Democrats know that they have ownership in that, just because of how radical they got with, you know, the messaging they were putting out.

• 52:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, if it was a lone, if it was just a lone wolf, both times. You know, just the fact that that the first guy was 20 years old. I mean, we've seen eight, nine years, a year before he got elected, it kind of started, right? Nine years of having that pushed down your throat. So that guy was what? 11 years old? Since he was 11 years old, that's all he's heard from the media. And. So I grew up listening to that.

• 53:25Tim Burchett?

  It's always a lone wolf until we find out later that it wasn't.

• 53:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Tim Burchett?

  Always, every one of them, every one of our national, James Earl Ray. I mean, here's a guy that didn't have a pot to pee in, end up catching, he drove his brand new, they found his brand new Mustang at the airport, I think, and then they caught him in London, England, making a crazy shot off of a commode in a bathtub through sideways. And you got, um, Saran, what was it, what was the guy called Bobby Kennedy? Saran, Saran, whatever his name is, you know, he was a lone nut. And then Oswald, lone nut. And then, but you always, there's always the peripheral.

• 54:11Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:11Tim Burchett?

  But you find out about them later and that's, and that's exactly what we're finding out. That's why nobody trusts the government. Kennedy killed 60, I just turned 60 two weeks ago. And, um, he got shot before my birthday and they're still hiding it. They still won't release the stuff.

• 54:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. What do you guys think about the fact that, um, RFK will have pretty much, sounds like free rein to investigate all of the former assassinations and attempts? What do you think's gonna come out of that?

• 54:45Eli Crane?

  I don't know, but I, I love it. I love the fact that they're bringing, that Trump is willing to bring in people, even that he ran against, who have the courage to speak out against, you know, the power elites in this country, bring them on the team and, you know, whether it's Elon Musk, RFK, and, you know, let them go to work. Cause obviously we have a ton of unpacking. We have a ton of house cleaning to do and you're gonna need people with that level of courage and strength.

• 55:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, shit's gonna come out. If he gets, if Trump gets in there and RFK gets access to this, there's gonna be some shit that comes out. What does that look like? What does it look like?

• 55:27Tim Burchett?

  I, I think it.

• 55:28Shawn Ryan?

  If the American people find out that the government is the one who orchestrated all these assassinations and assassination attempts? What, what does that look like in daily life?

• 55:39Eli Crane?

  I honestly, I honestly don't know, but I do know this. If we're gonna turn this country around, and I think that's, you know, that's what we all want. It's gotta happen, right? We can't, we can't keep having a government that's supposed to represent the people working against the people and trying to, you know, take out and silence political opposition and the people themselves. And so it's gotta, it's gotta happen. So it could get really, really ugly. Obviously, at the, at the bare minimum, you're gonna see trust that already is really not there plummet even more.

• 56:22Eli Crane?

  But it, it could get worse than that.

• 56:25Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think, Tim?

• 56:27Tim Burchett?

  I welcome it. I think you're gonna have to tear it down to build it back up. Because these agencies have a history of this and they have a track record. I mean, we, you know, we can talk about the UFO stuff all day long, but these assassinations are just, you know, the, the way they, they put them together. And the gun that shot, allegedly shot John F. Kennedy was a Mannlicher Italian carbine. It was written up as a gun that never won a war. He could have gone into a western auto and bought something much, much more precise. And, you know, every one of these is just, it is just too much. And I think it, I think it needs to happen.

• 57:10Tim Burchett?

  We need a cleaning and it should have happened years ago. And I think it's also gonna put people, more people's trust in Trump. Because on both sides, people don't trust the government for good reason. I think that could be a unifying factor.

• 57:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think, I think so too. I mean, who, who doesn't wanna know what happened to JFK?

• 57:33Shawn Ryan?

  But where I'm going is if the government is involved, let's say, everybody thinks it's CIA, right? Let's say that the CIA is 100% behind any one of those or all of them. What's the next step?

• 57:51Tim Burchett?

  Well, the people that did it are dead, but the channels are still there. The thought process is still there that allows that to occur. It allows them to step outside the Constitution and murder somebody. And so I think that that needs to occur before we have a cleansing.

• 58:09Shawn Ryan?

  Does the organization get dismantled?

• 58:11Tim Burchett?

  I think it could. It's going to reemerge as something else. I mean, if it has a vital need, then yeah, it should reemerge. But if it doesn't, then it should be, it should be taken down. We didn't have an EPA and I think Nixon brought the EPA in, Marine Protection Agency. So it's a Reagan. One of the Republicans did them. Sorry, I'm losing my chain of thought. But yeah, I think it should.

• 58:38Eli Crane?

  It'll be tough, Sean. I mean, it's like a lot of these things. A lot of it's going to depend to me on, on the people of this country and whether or not they pay attention and they engage on it, right? Like, we were talking at breakfast about, you know, just the primary votes that we just had, right? Only a little over 30% of people turned out to vote in our primary election. I was talking to my friend Corey Mills. He's also been investigating this assassination attempt with myself and others. And he said in his district, it was 19% of people. And so we love, and I'm as guilty as anybody at pointing the finger at

• 59:19Eli Crane?

  politicians, but a lot of it is going to have to do with what they want and what, how they rise to the occasion. Because if you keep seeing numbers like that, nothing's going to change. And so a lot of it, like you can fire, they can fire me and Tim every two years if they think we're doing a horrible job. Every two years you can get rid of me, right? But because people don't pay attention, because they're complacent, and because we've had it so good here for so long, you know, there's people in this country are pretty complacent. They're pretty checked out and they don't really pay attention. And so I think that's what it's really going to hinge on is how fired up they get. You know, if in a hypothetical that this stuff comes out,

• 1:00:03Eli Crane?

  you know, I think it's going to hinge on them. If they, if they pay attention, if they coalesce together and if they demand change. Because if we see the same, if we see the same, you know, pathetic turnout that, that we see all the time and just a bunch of people that want to talk about it, but not be about it. Nothing's going to change.

• 1:00:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm with him. I'm in.

• 1:00:28Eli Crane?

  Like there's millions of, there's millions of Christians that won't vote right now.

• 1:00:32Tim Burchett?

  They won't vote.

• 1:00:33Eli Crane?

  There's, there's hundreds of thousands of outdoorsmen that won't vote. There's, there's demographics that would usually, you know, identify with, in the, in the two party system, you know, with, with, with the Republican side of things that just don't participate and they don't vote and they have their own reasons for it, you know? But to my point, you know, we can sit here and, you know, and let's do it. I'm all about it. Let's do it. Let's blame politicians. But who keeps sending those politicians to Washington?

• 1:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  No, I'm with you. I mean, there's the old saying, Congress has a 10% approval rating and a 90% reelection rate. And that is lazy fucking citizens that can't get off their ass.

• 1:01:16Eli Crane?

  It was just like when you tried, when you were doing that, when you were doing that survey. You did, you got frustrated, didn't you?

• 1:01:21Shawn Ryan?

  I did. And then we got, I think we're getting close to 350,000 signatures now.

• 1:01:27Eli Crane?

  Thankfully you stayed after it. Go ahead.

• 1:01:29Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say when we, um, my campaign manager, Thomas McPhee, now we go out and knock on doors and we use a registered voters list. And you go by a house that's got the don't tread on me, I'm proud American, or a Trump flag. I say, pull up that, why aren't we stopping there? And he'll pull up the list, he'll double check it and triple check it. Ain't nobody there registered to vote. You know, and you'll see these guys riding down the interstate with a American flag on, which I think is kind of disrespectful, on the back of their pickup truck flapping around all tattered. And you'll pull up and say, hey, where do you vote? I don't know. Hell, they don't even vote. And that's, you know, that's the mentality.

• 1:02:12Tim Burchett?

  And the left understands that. And they've got these college campuses feeding into this. And, you know, they've got this life, this life supply of, lifetime supply of voters. They just regenerate them every year. And we are very short sighted on the conservative side, very short sighted. And we're gonna, as my dad would say, I'm afraid we're gonna get what we deserve.

• 1:02:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think, uh, talk is cheap, man. Talk is cheap. And there's a lot of talk. But let's move into, let's move into Afghanistan and the, you know, I'm starting to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here. But, I mean, it's important to me. We're, we, I mean, we fought these people for over 20 years. I don't know how many lives were lost. I don't know how much money was spent, how much equipment we've, I mean, and, and now we're funding the same people that we were fighting.

• 1:03:14Tim Burchett?

  The Taliban.

• 1:03:15Shawn Ryan?

  Upwards 40 million to 87 million dollars a week. IG came out and said, we accidentally gave 239 million to the Taliban. We already know it's much more than that. Tim, you wrote up a bill. What was that initial bill?

• 1:04:06Tim Burchett?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

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• 1:04:57Tim Burchett?

  They just basically cut off funding to the Taliban taxpayers' dollars, passed the house, and it's sitting there. Schumer won't even address it. And I've talked to multiple senators, they're gonna try to attach it to this bill, attach it to... Now, that should be, Americans should just come unglued. You think that'd be a number one story with the legacy media? You know, they just say, hey, these guys, what are they thinking? The Democrats in the House, they didn't want to touch it. I mean, it went, again, it went, like I say, went like Grant through Richmond, you know, they, it was unanimous, no discussion.

• 1:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  How can, how can they not be concerned that we, I mean, I've said this multiple times, I'll say it again, 9/11 was a $500,000 budget. Now they have 239 million at the, at the minimum to make a move. We already know that the passport office is creating legitimate passports for terrorists after terrorist after terrorist, flying them down into South America, Central America, to funnel them up through here. We've already caught, what, I don't know how many, I know they caught at least eight, aid terrorists, right?

• 1:06:14Tim Burchett?

  It's more than that.

• 1:06:15Shawn Ryan?

  That the FBI's...

• 1:06:16Tim Burchett?

  They turned them loose into the, they've turned, I think that many, they've turned loose and they don't know where they are.

• 1:06:21Shawn Ryan?

  They have no idea what's coming.

• 1:06:22Tim Burchett?

  No idea.

• 1:06:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so how, how is anybody, right or left?

• 1:06:28Shawn Ryan?

  Okay with this because it is both parties.

• 1:06:32Tim Burchett?

  Both parties.

• 1:06:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's both parties.

• 1:06:33Tim Burchett?

  We're crooked in this deal. It's again, until the legacy media addresses it and, and, and, you know, when I was in the state house, state legislature in Nashville, I voted against the Oilers coming up here. I think there was probably three people in the house in the senate, a hundred, see, uh, ninety-nine house, ninety-nine house members. And, um, I think two of us, three of us might have voted against it. I had three phone calls from home against it. That was a ground swell of support, you know, and that's why I voted against it. And people just, if they were to light up their senators and say, hey, why are we funding the Taliban? Where is that bill?

• 1:07:19Tim Burchett?

  Where's Burchett's bill? That's, you know, what, what Eli said, you get a couple thousand people call you at lunchtime, man, and you get nervous. And that's what they need. They need to get nervous. This is just the tip of the iceberg. And if it hadn't been for you and Legend and some others.

• 1:07:40Shawn Ryan?

  Scott Mann and Sarah Adams.

• 1:07:42Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, they hadn't have gotten involved with it. It would have, um, it would have not gotten anywhere because, you know, it's funny, we had that bill filed and I get a call from leadership, say, hey, man, what's going on with this bill? I said, I don't know, I'm waiting on y'all to do something with it. He said, what's up? It's gonna be up next week. Get ready. I told my people and I was like, I gotta, I remember I got the text and I thought, well, hell, finally something's moving.

• 1:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, so only Schumer can do something about this at the senate.

• 1:08:16Tim Burchett?

  In the senate, that's where it's gotta go. Oh, another senator needs to address it and put it on one of their bills, but yeah.

• 1:08:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I spoke with Senator Hagerty.

• 1:08:25Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, he called me, um, he called me actually from Japan one day and said he was gonna get working on it, but we gotta get, you know, we gotta get the pressure. I mean, he's gotta, that bill has to move in the senate and the only person that can allow it to move is Schumer.

• 1:08:43Shawn Ryan?

  You wrote another bill up. Did you write another one up?

• 1:08:46Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's the next one?

• 1:08:47Tim Burchett?

  Um, uh, the Vienna Protocol or whatever. It where we, uh, we, what we do, we, in, in government, we duplicate so many, um, so many things and, um, and what this is, is we're gonna identify these other countries that have, uh, that consider the Taliban and those groups terrorist organizations. And we get together and we unify on the fight because what's happening now, you know, everybody hits one little area, this area, and we don't do anything with it. And this just forces our hand and exposes what we've been doing in the past. And that's where a lot of the discomfort is, but I don't care. We screwed up. We paying these murderers, literally, American tax dollars.

• 1:09:32Tim Burchett?

  And, um, and this formulates that and it, and it keeps us from doing that in the future. And it, and it also is kind of a, a buddy check with the other countries that they, you know, we sort of, like what NATO was originally intended to do. And it, and it, and it forms that basis for that. It's a lot of bureaucracy. I usually don't like bills like that, but this makes a lot of sense that we, we start talking to our, our friends about our enemies.

• 1:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:59Tim Burchett?

  And it, um, it cuts the middleman out. And it saves us a lot of money in the long run because we're not duplicating the process somewhere else. We're not just wasting funds or assets.

• 1:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  When is that going up?

• 1:10:11Tim Burchett?

  Well, it's, I filed it, um, I think two weeks ago. So we're just waiting. Again, you know, these committee chairman, it's like moving a freaking glacier.

• 1:10:22Shawn Ryan?

  Who, who, what, what committees?

• 1:10:24Tim Burchett?

  Uh, let's see. Where'd that go? I just, we put it in the hopper. I haven't even heard back yet. I'll have to let you know. I would suspect it would, um, it would have to be Foreign Affairs.

• 1:10:36Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, I mean, what, like, what do you think in there when, when you found this out? Fought in those wars?

• 1:10:44Eli Crane?

  Yeah. Um, I mean, I hate, I hate to sound obtuse, but I feel like I've kind of been desensitized to it a little bit. Like, I'm not, almost nothing surprises me anymore, you know? So, um, you know, it's...

• 1:11:03Eli Crane?

  When you just get outraged, you know, hour after hour, day after day, you kind of get desensitized to it. And so it's for me, it's just kind of like, not surprised, let's try and stop it. And Tim, put me on your bill, you know, but I, there is a level of desensit, you know, desensitability that takes place when you're up in that place long enough. And you, you try and fight to, you know, not become that way to where you're so institutionalized that you, you know, quit caring. But, you know, it's definitely, it's definitely a reality. And, and I try not to get super emotional and just, all right, what's the

• 1:11:47Eli Crane?

  problem? What's the mission? Who's got the bill? Let's go, let's get on it. Let's start, let's start applying pressure so that we can get this one fixed. Because it does, it feels like we're playing whack a mole up there. We're always 10 steps behind. And, you know.

• 1:12:03Tim Burchett?

  And we pass some good stuff and it just dies in the Senate. And I'm sure vice versa. But Eli, I'll tell you, every day, you're on the House floor and somebody says, and they always have their little rectangular cards. I might have one right here. Yeah. And they'll come up and say, hey, my bill is, you know, the be kind to mothers bill or something. And, you know, it sounds like a good bill. Would you sign on? And say, sure. And then you don't ever, it never goes anywhere. It just sits in these freaking committees. It's very frustrating because the money changers are in the temple, brother. They are in the temple and they pull the strings. And that's the bottom line. And until we get people

• 1:12:48Tim Burchett?

  that, back to Eli's point, until these voters start recognizing that, that your, your congresspeople are feeding you a load of bull when they come home, follow up with them, find out why they voted for that 2000 page bill called the transportation bill that only, that 85% of it had nothing to do with transportation. Say, what in it in that bill? What is it that I'm mortgaging my grandchildren's future financial well being? It's worth it in that bill? And if they can't give you an answer, vote them out. I don't care what party they're in.

• 1:13:29Shawn Ryan?

  How do these bills? How do you educate your constituents on? The latest bill agenda?

• 1:13:36Tim Burchett?

  I do my videos. They're, you know, my redneck ass. I get out there and I'm holding the camera and I'm telling, I tell what it is and what I've just.

• 1:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  That's how it's done.

• 1:13:46Tim Burchett?

  That's how I do it. And I'm seeing a lot of the people do it now that's well produced. But I just still just me, you know, because I'm too tight to hire anybody, obviously.

• 1:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  There's no, there's no. Present official presentation.

• 1:13:59Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, well, there is, but again, like the SAVE Act and Eli and I've talked about how frustrating this is. You know, the SAVE Act prevents foreigners from voting in our elections. We already passed that in July. And now they're tacking it on to another bill, a spending bill. You know, forcing Eli and I to vote for terrible funding issues that are Pelosi Schumer funding levels. So they can pass this thing again. So we're going to send it over to the Senate and force them to, to not do anything, to shut the government down. And it just doesn't work because. We're not putting out a message, unified message. We ought to hold a press conference every day, every dad gum day. We ought to pass a bill dealing with the border. If it may be the same bill every day and force the Democrats.

• 1:14:44Tim Burchett?

  But we don't, it's about getting reelected, Sean. It's not about what's doing best for the country and both parties are guilty of it. And that's in lies a lot of the corruption that's within our government.

• 1:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's move into.

• 1:14:55Eli Crane?

  I'm sorry. I was just going to say, one of the ways that we do it with our voters, educating them on bills, policy. We do town halls, teletown halls, social media. I know Tim does all this stuff too. We also do a newsletter. Uh, you know, once a week we put out everything that, you know, we're either voting for, voting against any bills that we have coming up. But, you know, it is, it is important, you know, to make sure that you're staying in communication. Sometimes if, if I'm torn on a bill, uh, because, you know, it's, it's got some good stuff in it, but some bad stuff in it. Sometimes I'll send out a poll to my district like, hey, what, how do you guys want me to vote on this? So.

• 1:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing that you do that.

• 1:15:38Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  What are, I want to move into government corruption, but real quick, what are some of the most concerning things that you guys are seeing up there at the house? What's, what's your primary concerns right now? Go ahead.

• 1:15:55Eli Crane?

  I'll take this one first. If I, if I was to look at all the issues that we're facing, the, the number one priority, I think for us right now is getting President Trump back in office. I think that alone alleviates, you know, and it won't happen overnight. It'll, it'll take time, but that alleviates and starts to turn back a lot of these horrible policies that are destroying the country. So that's number one. The number one thing I think that is going to stop that is illegals voting in our elections, right? Because if you look at Arizona alone, in the last election, it was about 10,000 votes

• 1:16:36Eli Crane?

  difference between Trump and Biden, right? If you look at nationally, you know, in the five swing states, I think it was a little over 40,000 votes. There was the difference in that election. Sean, they've let in over 10 million people and they are trying to register as many of them as they can. And they're, they're also using all the agencies, like even the SBA, we've done a hearing on that, right? I just saw a clip of Harriet Hageman and her committee, you know, they're using all of these agencies through executive order to get out into communities largely that vote

• 1:17:17Eli Crane?

  Democrat and using these agencies to register, they'll hold an event, like a small business event, and at that event, then they'll, you know, start registering people to vote. And so my biggest concern is what, you know, that they're going to have a lot of these illegal aliens voting. That's, that's my biggest concern right now because I think that's the number one thing. President Trump has never been up in the polls. He's up in the polls now, but in the past, he hasn't been up in the polls. So he's up in the polls. Their candidate sucks. You know, she just does. She's a Marxist. She's more left than Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

• 1:17:59Eli Crane?

  The reason that her campaign has shielded her from press is because they know the moment she opens her mouth and starts talking, this whole false identity that they've tried to create of her being a moderate problem solver goes away. And I will give her props for the debate the other night because she outperformed what any of us thought she was capable of. But that being said, that's my biggest concern is illegals voting in this next election.

• 1:18:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I've got a question for you. You know, I mean, I just interviewed this guy, Eric Bethel. He was the World Bank. He was a representative of the World Bank. And we were talking at dinner and he was talking about the swing states.

• 1:18:45Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Shawn Ryan?

  And how these aren't correct numbers, but it's somewhere along these lines like Pennsylvania, for example, the RNC has like three offices in Pennsylvania, but the DNC has like 40 offices. How do you, how do you, I mean, we're not even, take it, take the illegal situation out. It's like, it's like the RNC isn't even attempting to win, win the swing states.

• 1:19:17Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  They're not deploying anybody in there. They're not expending any resources.

• 1:19:21Tim Burchett?

  I'm gonna get myself in trouble for this, but I, I tell people, if you want to give money to somebody, give it to the individual candidates. You decide.

• 1:19:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Tim Burchett?

  You look at somebody, you say, man, that guy's, get on the internet and say, that guy's struggling out in Arizona or wherever, but he, he or she is a great candidate and looks like they're close. I'm going to support that person. Because what we had in the past with our leadership is that's no longer there, but they, they were given money to go after Democrats. And as it turned out. Several good Republicans, Anna Paulina Looney was one of them. They used that money. Greg Stube, when he first ran, they they claimed they weren't in those races. They're not supposed to get in the middle of primaries. And they went after Thomas Massey, you know, they called, because I was in conference and and

• 1:20:17Tim Burchett?

  Cheney, Liz Cheney said, Thomas is a special case. And that's how he's in my phone now. Thomas special case Massey, you know, and the rules don't apply to them. And they've, we, and what they did was they went after conservative candidates.

• 1:20:33Eli Crane?

  Who did?

• 1:20:34Tim Burchett?

  Our leadership. And they had seventeen million dollars. Sorry, I'm pointing, but they had seventeen million dollars. And that was the money that was used against Eli in his primary. The, the money they used against Matt Gaetz, they might as well just throw that money down a well. The money they used against Nancy Mace. Yeah. And they

• 1:20:54Eli Crane?

  Bob Good.

• 1:20:54Tim Burchett?

  Bob Good. They beat Bob Good. And they had a couple of people that I know of. And one, they flew up to DC to run against me. And they, the polling data didn't show that they were, would, would, would fare very well against me.

• 1:21:13Eli Crane?

  And, yeah, and I was telling you, Sean, when we were driving here, that's why a lot of, it's one of the many reasons a lot of Republicans won't, won't do the right thing, represent their voters and not the Republican Party, right? Because they don't want to get on the wrong side of that machine because that machine has a lot of money. And they'll put a hit on you, just like they did on me and Tim and they weren't, Tim's so popular in his district. They weren't even able to recruit anybody running against him. The same thing's happened, same thing happened with Andy Biggs in Arizona. They weren't able to find anybody to primary Andy Biggs because he's beat everybody that's run against him. And nobody was like, I don't, I don't want to go tangle with that. But, you know, for a young freshman like me, they finally found somebody.

• 1:21:56Tim Burchett?

  They're vulnerable.

• 1:21:56Eli Crane?

  That was willing to jump in there and, you know, thankfully, thankfully, my voters had my back because I have their back up there.

• 1:22:02Tim Burchett?

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:03Eli Crane?

  But a lot of, a lot of politicians don't want to get on the wrong side of that machine. And they want to stay there for a long time, you know, and everything that goes with it. And that's why you You rarely see people go up there and kick the hornet's nest.

• 1:22:18Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, the old timers will tell you to compromise. That's what we need. And that's what we're thirty five trillion dollars in debt. Every hundred days, we had another trillion. Neither party wants to, won't address it. And because of the compromise, the Democrats will never talk compromise when they're in the majority, but they sure are now.

• 1:22:35Shawn Ryan?

  What do you find the most concerning thing to be right now?

• 1:22:39Tim Burchett?

  Obviously, on the short term, it's this election, which would have long-term effects on the future of our country. But the spending, we just keep, we're addicted to it. We cannot address it.

• 1:22:51Eli Crane?

  Both parties.

• 1:22:52Tim Burchett?

  Both parties, both parties. The Democrats will, thank you for saying that, Democrats will use it for woke stuff. We'll use it for, you know, missile defense plans or something. And, and that's why they pass these big, humongous budgets, three thousand pages. I read down to page twenty-six. Well, my wife or girlfriend, or both, is employed by this group. That takes care of them. And here's my bridge I need. I stop reading. There's, you know, two thousand and eighty-five more pages of spending. And as long as they get their stuff, they're there. But if they don't, and that's why, and, and that's why we need single spending. And Tennessee, what state you're filming in right now, our legislature,

• 1:23:37Tim Burchett?

  we have a balanced budget, zero debt, single spending bills. If the caption has about dog catchers, there's not going to be a dad gum pay raise in there for state legislators. It has to be about dog catchers all the way through. And that is why they don't want that in Washington. They don't want to pass a budget, because if they did, every one of those jug heads up there would have to come down on the House floor and explain. Why their bill, I can explain the funding in my bill, why we don't need to be funding the Taliban and why it's, and I always want a clean bill. I don't want to attach anything else to it. I don't want any more garbage. Vote it up or down. And eventually, we're

• 1:24:18Tim Burchett?

  either going to go that route, or we're going to become a third world country.

• 1:24:23Eli Crane?

  It's another one of their tricks, Sean. It's another one of the establishment's tricks. Because we've continually funded the government with CRs or continuing resolutions or omnibus bills that are like, like Tim said, thousands of pages, right? They, they got you between a rock and a hard place as a representative. Because if, if you vote no on it because you don't want to fund, you know, you know, what, whatever agenda it is, or some woke and weaponized

• 1:24:51Tim Burchett?

  Well, you can take that out. The first bill I had up there, first budget. Sorry, I'm gonna go back to you. The first budget I had had three different studies on lobsters. And it was in three different ranking member, chairman, or leadership people, district, Republican and Democrat. And, and it just continued, you know, it was the same thing, but it was funding in there. And some of this funding, we've come to find out, the programs of our, don't even exist anymore. You know, where the hell does this money go?

• 1:25:20Eli Crane?

  What?

• 1:25:21Tim Burchett?

  So, yeah. Well, you have, you have armed situations of that way where they, they don't, but they're still, they're funding this, they're building, you, you'll build a, a military device that's outdated or antiquated, but they're still going to, and they're, now all they do is, what do they call it? Mothballing it. And it's just going to sit out in the desert somewhere. And you see this time and time again in government. And yet it just keeps happening. It just keeps happening. And then when you say something like this, when this comes out, that, you know, I'll get the, hey, big boy, you better be careful talk on the House floor. It's the same old crap every time.

• 1:25:57Eli Crane?

  Damn.

• 1:25:59Tim Burchett?

  But there's enough of it. There's a few of us that sit back there on center's row and right back in the back there, about 25 or 30 of us are just tired of it. And we called it out. And I think people are paying attention, but it, just how long will they pay attention? When it starts affecting their, their sweetheart deal or their families?

• 1:26:19Tim Burchett?

  Little junkets or businesses.

• 1:26:22Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into the corruption inside Congress.

• 1:26:27Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Shawn Ryan?

  You'd mentioned something about the whistleblowers and how they need to be careful with communications and who they communicate with and the calls. And so I'm interested to hear, how concerned are you guys with your communications to each other, your colleagues, me, anything?

• 1:26:53Tim Burchett?

  Every bit of it.

• 1:26:54Eli Crane?

  Very bit, very concerned.

• 1:26:55Tim Burchett?

  I think everything I do and say is, at some point, tracked, at least the cellphones or, you know, they gave us, they gave me a cellphone when I first got to Congress. I said, I don't want it.

• 1:27:08Shawn Ryan?

  They gave?

• 1:27:09Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Shawn Ryan?

  They gave you a cellphone?

• 1:27:11Tim Burchett?

  They gave us all a cellphone. They gave everybody a cellphone. And I'd got my own. I still, you know, I'm sure they can, if they want it, they can get it. I'm pretty small potatoes. I'm the 435th most powerful member of Congress. But the, but the, but the real corruption in Congress is in the structure. It's, and Eli alluded to it very eloquently earlier about, you know, the funding, how you, you have to raise money. You raise money for your conference. You're issued a bill when you get there. Everybody is, the Democrats and the Republicans, everybody talks about it. And, you know, they'll tell you, we're going to see how you do on your committee selections if you want to move up, how you do, you know, on your, on your bills and how you're doing and how you do across the street. And what that means is, you're not supposed to be technically supposed to make fundraising

• 1:27:56Tim Burchett?

  calls from the office. You have to go across the street, the Capitol Hill Club or someplace else. And how much money you raise for the conference. Literally, we've had committee chairmen that have written a personal check and been made chairman of committees. Personal check. So, you know, I've said this many times, that if, if the NFL was Congress, Peyton Manning would still be waiting to get in. Wow. Because you, it's not about putting the best player in, because if it was, you wouldn't. I always remember this, Steve Cohen crossed the aisle, don't agree on anything, but he's my friend. He called my mama when my dad died, when we were in the state legislature. I remember one time, we were looking at each other, and this old chairman come up the, came up the aisle,

• 1:28:41Tim Burchett?

  and he's no longer there, so, um, he came up the aisle, and they called for the vote, and he turned to the little girl that was beside him and said, "How am I voting on this?" And she says, "You're for this, Mr. Chairman." He goes, "Oh, okay." Puts his card in, hits the green button. I remember I looked at Cohen, and we just shook our head. Because that structure is in place. You've got to understand, when you're a chairman, I mean, you'll have, how many, 25 or 30 people, maybe, that work under you? And then all those people's jobs require, and they're out whining and dining, and they're not supposed to be, but surely they are, whining and dining, and they go on the junkets, and they go on the trips, just like you are as the chairman. And, you know, it's just constant, and they raise the money.

• 1:29:26Tim Burchett?

  And they have to, to get in that spot, they have to raise the money. And so they keep them in that spot, because they, because you're a chairman, and you're the one who ultimately decides if your bill's gonna have a rough go in your committee or not. And so, um, I mean, that, that, it's just a completely corrupted system because of that. Because I don't, I'm not a billionaire, Eli's not a billionaire, and we don't represent a lot of billionaires, or millionaires for that matter. And it's, it's just tough on people like us, because I don't, I can't raise the money that some of these guys can. Not that I'm, I, I told my wife the other day, if they begged me to be a chairman of a committee, I don't think I would do it, just because of all the nonsense that's involved, all the stuff you're expected to do, and the money. What if you had a billionaire to write that check for you?

• 1:30:10Tim Burchett?

  That's what happens. That's how they own you.

• 1:30:13Eli Crane?

  Well, I think he's saying if, if you had a billionaire that shared your worldview there.

• 1:30:17Tim Burchett?

  Oh.

• 1:30:19Eli Crane?

  And wanted you to fight. Is that what you're saying?

• 1:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Tim Burchett?

  Are you will, are you that billionaire?

• 1:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  I wish I was, Tim. I wish I was.

• 1:30:26Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:28Tim Burchett?

  You got a soul. Yeah, I, I agree with you that, I, I, yeah, if you had one that, that shared your values, but that gets squishy, man. You know, you start, you get that.

• 1:30:38Shawn Ryan?

  What does that check look like? I'm just curious. What does the check look like?

• 1:30:42Tim Burchett?

  I think my dues this year, what, two fifty, two hundred and fifty thousand? I'm a low man. I mean, cause I'm in a, not in a wealthy.

• 1:30:48Shawn Ryan?

  A check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars gets you in charge of a committee?

• 1:30:52Tim Burchett?

  No, no, that just gets my base dues. That puts me in good standing and that I can continue in the committees I'm in. Probably a committee's probably five million, maybe something, three or four million. I don't know. Some of them raise a ton of money. Man, they come in there and they announce.

• 1:31:09Shawn Ryan?

  Three to four million dollars buys you.

• 1:31:12Tim Burchett?

  I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?

• 1:31:14Eli Crane?

  No, no, no. I talked to one of, one of our friends and he, he told me that when he first got to Congress, he was told that he needed like, you know, to stroke like a, I think like a hundred and fifty thousand dollar check if he wanted to be on a certain committee. And so he had to call some of his donors, you know, to, to fork up so that he could be on that committee. But to Tim's point, it's, it's a big part of the corruption in the structure.

• 1:31:41Tim Burchett?

  And you can get to the bribery and all that other stuff and how people are compromised. And I've, I've talked about that till I'm blue in the face, but it's, um, and that's a reality too. People have family members that work for.

• 1:31:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm just thinking as concerned as, as people seem to be.

• 1:31:56Tim Burchett?

  And none of this is illegal though. That's the problem.

• 1:31:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what I'm saying is, yeah, you're right. It's not illegal.

• 1:32:01Tim Burchett?

  But it's immoral.

• 1:32:02Shawn Ryan?

  So how do we get you guys, a couple of billionaires to fund you to be in charge of a committee? I'm not even fucking around here. I'm being serious.

• 1:32:09Eli Crane?

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe some of them watch SRS, dude. I don't know.

• 1:32:13Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe that's why we're having this discussion.

• 1:32:15Eli Crane?

  Even then, you would probably still need leadership to sign off on it, wouldn't you?

• 1:32:19Tim Burchett?

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and since we've, you know.

• 1:32:23Eli Crane?

  So I don't think that's.

• 1:32:23Tim Burchett?

  voted against McCarthy, of course, that, and that, that upset a lot of the structure because a lot of people. Had a lot of money invested in that structure.

• 1:32:31Eli Crane?

  Cause that had never happened before, Sean.

• 1:32:33Tim Burchett?

  Never.

• 1:32:34Eli Crane?

  Not in the history of our country had that ever happened.

• 1:32:36Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Eli Crane?

  So there's still a lot of butthurt about it. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:41Tim Burchett?

  Cause they'd invested a lot in that structure and they could make the call and say, hey, I need some help with this. Can you pick up the phone and, and move this along?

• 1:32:49Shawn Ryan?

  What committee would you want to be on?

• 1:32:52Eli Crane?

  It goes back to what I was telling you. It's, it's, it's why I, I believe you need people that don't want to be up there. Right? To, to, to go and I think it's, I think it's even healthy for me personally, I have this, you know, I visualize the, the swamp finally getting me at some point. I, I believe they're going to get me. They're going to get rid of me. And that's okay, right? Because it's just like, I'm not there to be a career politician. I'm there to try and change the system. And in knowing that, I know that it's going to fit, you know, I'm going to face opposition and I'll have a lot of people that don't like me. Um, but what I'm, one thing I hope

• 1:33:31Eli Crane?

  that, you know, the example set is, is, is going to cause is I hope other people that are better, smarter, more talented than I am, see that you can come into Congress immediately. And you don't have to follow the line and do what you're told. You can actually represent the people that sent you there and try and change the system.

• 1:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  Move on here. Real quick. I want to, we were talking about the communications and we've had offline conversations with both of you guys about phones. So, uh,

• 1:34:09Shawn Ryan?

  these are the ones Prince developed, Prince Unplugged Phone. So those, you can have all your, uh, social media apps on. There's actually a quick menu on there. You can turn on a VPN. You can make it so that those applications on social media, any of the, any applications you can, all it is, is you flip a switch and they can't access any of the rest of your phone and suck that data out. There's a kill switch that actually puts something in between the battery and the phone so that, you know, that's, you probably know this. Maybe you do too. I mean, even when you turn your phone off, they could still listen, but if you separate the battery, then they cannot.

• 1:34:51Shawn Ryan?

  And so there's a kill switch on those. Those things are the shit, man. So you can just take it to your provider and get a SIM card put in there.

• 1:35:01Tim Burchett?

  Have to make sure it fits the thing.

• 1:35:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'll be listening.

• 1:35:05Tim Burchett?

  I'll have to write you a check, but we'll probably have to write you a check. Just for the record, we'll have to write you a check. We're not allowed to receive gifts. Probably over the limit. I'll have to find out. If you'll find out what they're, what they're worth.

• 1:35:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:17Tim Burchett?

  And then, and then we'll write you a check for the difference.

• 1:35:19Shawn Ryan?

  Another, another, another rule.

• 1:35:21Tim Burchett?

  I would love to catch him and I in there.

• 1:35:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's so crazy. It's so crazy how many, how many rules we have, but yet how corrupt.

• 1:35:28Tim Burchett?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like when I was.

• 1:35:31Shawn Ryan?

  Are you fucking with me right now?

• 1:35:33Tim Burchett?

  No.

• 1:35:33Shawn Ryan?

  You can't take. You can't take a gift over 25 bucks. Isn't it 25 bucks?

• 1:35:37Tim Burchett?

  I don't know. I just don't take anything. That's my rule.

• 1:35:39Shawn Ryan?

  They're definitely worth more than 25 bucks.

• 1:35:42Tim Burchett?

  I'll get, we'll, we'll find out. I would love to have something like this because this is, this is something I would really love to have.

• 1:35:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Eric was just up in, he was just up in DC this week doing a foreign policy discussion with, uh, uh, Mike Lee. It's pretty cool. I only got to sit in for like 30 minutes of it, but I guess smart. Yes. Yes, he is. Back to corruption.

• 1:36:09Shawn Ryan?

  What else is going on up there? Why is everybody so concerned about reelection? Why are the, why are all these congressmen, senators, why are they terrified?

• 1:36:18Tim Burchett?

  The gravy train stops and they're terrified of people like you because you've hit some crazy nerve across this country.

• 1:36:26Tim Burchett?

  My Mexican restaurant, some kids, the Mexon, Mexican restaurant attached to an Exxon is really not a Mexican. They went up on their prices. Margaritas are like six bucks now. I'm not a drinker, but apparently that's a, that's not very, that's not a very hefty price. But anyway,

• 1:36:43Tim Burchett?

  everybody's talking about you and people like you are a threat to them. I really feel like that because they, they hope you're a flicker in the pan and I don't think they understand the whole podcast situation. And I was at the ballgame yesterday and one of my biggest supporters, grandson, he's like, Sean Run really like that in real life? And I said, that's the way he is. And I was at a ballgame and some young guy said something. So I think you've really struck a nerve in this country.

• 1:37:14Eli Crane?

  Got an answer for that. I think one of the reasons so many people are so worried about reelection is because this has become their identity. I think it's the same reason a lot of guys struggle when they get out of special forces or the SEAL teams or the NFL, because it's become their identity. It's who they, they believe they are. And I think anytime you put your identity in something that can be taken from you, you're in trouble. And that's why for me, man, I always try and come back to, what is my identity, man? And I'm an image bearer of God, man. You know, I'm a son of God. I'm a husband. I'm a father. And that's what I

• 1:37:55Eli Crane?

  try and put my identity in. I'm an American. I love my country. You know, those are things that, you know, those are things that are more foundational. Even some of those things can be, you know, taken from you. But anytime you put your identity in something that can be taken from you, you're in trouble. And I think a lot of these people, they've never done anything really cool in their life or anything that they're super proud of. Some of them have, but you know, I think some of them get caught up in the, oh, I'm a congressman or oh, I'm a senator. And, you know, they don't want to lose it. They don't want to go back to just being a, you know, regular old civilian.

• 1:38:33Tim Burchett?

  And they'll compromise everything they got.

• 1:38:35Eli Crane?

  And I think that's what our founders wanted. I think our founders wanted us to go, you know, into public service and then, you know, go back home and go back to whatever you were doing beforehand and not become a career politician.

• 1:38:48Tim Burchett?

  You know what the worst?

• 1:38:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, Tim, you brought a great point up when.

• 1:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  When you invited me, thank you by the way, to the State of the Union, you had mentioned, at some point, you had mentioned, you know, none of these congressmen go back to their districts. They all hang out here like it's a fucking club. And they're not worried about what their, what their voters want. They just want to be in the social club. And that, that really resonated with me and I started paying attention and.

• 1:39:22Tim Burchett?

  It's, Eli's a hundred percent, once again, it is the identity. When I was in the state legislature, I remember guys would, would leave. And then within six months, they'd be back up there. I mean, people become sergeant at arms because they just couldn't leave that. And I remember one time a buddy of mine called, he called a lobbyist. I knew his name was David McMahon. And he said, David, I lost. And he said, what? He said, I lost. And he goes, who is this? And he told him who he was and he says, I've never heard of you. And he was joking, but the reality is, and David was friends with this guy until he died.

• 1:40:02Tim Burchett?

  But the reality is, is that you don't, you know, you've got to realize that this is. Everybody likes you up there. Hopefully they like you for the person you are, but you have to sometime realize that it's what you can do for them. And then when you can't do that for them, and I, and I always talk about how, and if I go back home after the election, I said, you know, I'll probably be mowing a lot of these people's yards. You know, that's how I'll know. And that'll be the relationship because I won't be their congressman and you. I think too many of them don't realize that. And that's why you see them, you know, slip into depression, alcoholism and everything else after

• 1:40:46Tim Burchett?

  military, you know, or NFL or what have you, professional sports or the spotlight that we're in. Because nobody, unless you're a consultant or something, you know, and that's, that's part of the crooked nature of it. But yeah.

• 1:41:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you had mentioned the, the gravy train stops. But I just gave you a cell phone and you told me you're not allowed to take a gift over $25. So what gravy train?

• 1:41:14Tim Burchett?

  I think going to the front of the line, being invited to the concert, sitting in the nice box.

• 1:41:23Eli Crane?

  Well, there was just a-

• 1:41:24Tim Burchett?

  How about the insider trading?

• 1:41:26Eli Crane?

  Yeah, for sure. And there was just-

• 1:41:27Tim Burchett?

  How much is that going on? Well, that's prevalent. There's a, there's a website, Wales or something. I forget what it's called. You can find it. Get your kids to show you how to find it on the internet, Google it, but it, it lists, um, it lists all the legislators, you know, and their trades and everything. Heck, Pelosi, everybody rails on her and she's not even, she's about halfway up. Who's the number one? Uh, forget his name. He's a Democrat. He had a 300% return. He left, he left though. I think he, he left early, actually. Shortly after that report came out, but still I think he'd already had it in plans. And it's, and it's equally divided pretty much between Republicans and Democrats, you know? I want to point the finger. I wished I could, but-

• 1:42:12Tim Burchett?

  Yeah. And legitimately, some of them have a relationship with their broker where they say, I don't want to know what you're doing and all that. But it, it's got to enter into it.

• 1:42:23Eli Crane?

  And then there was just a senator that got like busted for having that jacket given to him with gold bars-

• 1:42:29Tim Burchett?

  Gold bars in the pocket.

• 1:42:30Eli Crane?

  That's extreme, but it, even stuff like that happens.

• 1:42:33Tim Burchett?

  I mean, it isn't extreme. You don't know till somebody gets caught. And then they, they write the tell all books and you hear about stuff. I, um, before I got to the legislature, you know, they would have a, um,

• 1:42:48Tim Burchett?

  everybody in Tennessee would, there was a liquor store across the street, catty corner, and you'd go by and, and you'd hand them your, a slip of paper and, get your take home for the week, you know, and you could go on trips and it was unlimited and, and, um, and then they, they figured out a way to do, I don't know, $50 per person. So I was in high demand because they'd have to, they figured out an average. And since I didn't drink, you know, I'd get like a hamburger and a sweet tea or something. And that would be around six or seven bucks. So bring the average down. So I got invited to every dinner, you know, in the legislature. But I mean, the people that, that write the laws are the ones that are going to be breaking the laws.

• 1:43:32Tim Burchett?

  Cause they've already figured out a way to get around it. That's why they're paid the big money. Hmm, hmm. And, and we-

• 1:43:41Tim Burchett?

  You know, there's a lifetime retirement after one, after you get elected, that's just not accurate. It's, um, it's, uh, it's not anywhere near that. And it's not a lifetime health insurance after one year kind of thing. It's, there's.

• 1:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how are they getting these guys, even like, even a lot of the veterans that I had so much confidence in get into Congress, obviously not you, but, I mean, they just crumble.

• 1:44:09Tim Burchett?

  Because here's how it is. You, and I'll tell you how it was. When I first got elected to the state house, the best thing that ever happened to me growing up was we never had money, but we were around people with money. So it wasn't, you know, I was, I was a teetotaler. I didn't drink. When they started busting people for DUIs in UT college campus, I was always asked, I was driving somebody's 260Z or their BMW or their Porsche because I get to smoke him out in market and get chili dogs after midnight because they were hammered drunk and they knew I'd be sober and I'd eat for free. So, fast forward, I'm in the state legislature. I get elected and all of a sudden, the ladies are laughing at my jokes and compliment me on the way I'm dressing. People telling me how, that's a great story,

• 1:44:53Tim Burchett?

  man. Thank you. And invite me to dinner, introducing me to people. I'm told, you know, all these great things. And you just, you just start believing it. And, you know, I've been doing this my whole, most of my adult life. And I mean, I just laugh at it because I see it. Because I've seen people commit suicide, ruin marriages, never talk to their kids again. And I go back to the suicide. That's happened more than once, of people that I've served with. Because they got caught up in it and they were going to get popped and they couldn't take the heat. So they took their own lives. And it just, you get elected, I was, I remember I was, I was first elected and I was sitting on the house floor.

• 1:45:38Tim Burchett?

  And these guys were walking in and they're coming into their committee with their entourage. And you know, you think once you're elected, you're going to get, you know, you're going to be asked to negotiate a trade deal with North Korea or something by the president. That's just not the reality. But you, but you get this enforcement, reinforcement from the lobbyists and the public and everything. And you just, you start believing your own press releases. And I'm sorry, I've talked too long. Go ahead, Eli.

• 1:46:04Eli Crane?

  No, I, I think we might've discussed this before, but I think the, the biggest thing with military guys, from my perspective is we have courage. A lot of us know how to think outside the box, I think, which we're, most of us know how to play on a team. And I think all those things are great skills that could be transitioned well into public service and Congress. I think that, I think where most, a lot of us get caught up is that we're so used to being a part of a chain of command that when we go up to Washington and we see a new chain of command, because like they have, you know, speaker, you know, leader, whip on down, they see a new chain of command that they've got to fall into and take orders.

• 1:46:48Eli Crane?

  And they also start to game plan, well, if I want to, you know, become a subcommittee chairman, or then a chairman, or then get into leadership, how do I do that, right? So that I can affect the change that I want to see happen here. And, you know, I understand that mindset, but the way I always looked at it was that my chain of, first of all, that Washington DC is completely busted and broken. And so therefore the chain of command is not doing a good job. And secondly, my chain of command is really the P, the 750,000, 800,000 people back home that sent me there. That's my chain of command. And so I'm going to work for them. I'm going to try and bust this up as much as I can.

• 1:47:29Eli Crane?

  And I just, I, I think, I don't think that, you know, everybody comes in with that mentality. And I also don't believe that many people, and maybe I'm wrong, Sean, but. I don't think that everybody comes in with the mentality that um a lot of people come in with the mentality of incrementalism, right? Well, you know, um, you know, and and back to Tim's point on compromise, if we can get one little good thing here, you know, yeah, I might have to vote for a lot of crap over here, but I'm willing to do it if we get, you know, a little win over here. And I've looked at it as in we're in big trouble. We need to make big moves. And that doesn't go over well in DC.

• 1:48:11Shawn Ryan?

  Not one bit. You know, one thing I've noticed just from talking to you guys and some of the other congressmen and senators and being around a little bit and I fucking hate politics, by the way, but um,

• 1:48:26Shawn Ryan?

  you always hear that it's the one of the most elite social clubs on the planet.

• 1:48:33Shawn Ryan?

  And the observation that I have is that these people get in, they get elected into these social clubs, and then kind of what you were saying, they buy into their own bullshit. They start thinking they're too important for everybody else except the, in this case, the congressional social club.

• 1:48:54Shawn Ryan?

  And even when they know shit is wrong, they refuse to call it out because they don't want to be, they don't want to be ostracized from the elite social club that they've just been elected into. Is there, am I on the right track here?

• 1:49:09Eli Crane?

  You are. And then there's a step above it. So they don't want to be ostracized from the elite social club. But if they want to be promoted within that elite social club, because, you know, I know, I know members that are angling for bigger spots right now, you know, and if if you, they got to be very careful politically on not to piss off the wrong person that could cast a vote, or even, you know, have a backdoor conversation that would keep them from that position. And they're, they're all working angles.

• 1:49:40Shawn Ryan?

  There's a committee that feeds this too.

• 1:49:43Tim Burchett?

  The speaker, if that makes sense, and that's sort of the the hierarchy. I forget the name of them, but it's um, I call it the selection committee.

• 1:49:53Eli Crane?

  Or even if you wanted an appointment that had, you know, took Senate confirmation, right? A lot of these people are thinking about that, like, if I want that spot where I need to get confirmed by the Senate, I can't vote against that Senator's bill because, you know, that's the one vote that that I need to get over the hump. Like, and that's politics.

• 1:50:12Tim Burchett?

  And if somebody dies or somebody gets indicted, man, the ink's not even dry on it. And they're already figuring out a way to get to that position. Seeing it how it moves them up, I can be, I can move up from nothing to be the third assistant to whatever. I forget, you know, they've got all kinds of names, but it's, to me, it's a bunch of BS.

• 1:50:33Eli Crane?

  And that's not unique to the government. I mean, there are people in corporate America, people in the military.

• 1:50:38Tim Burchett?

  People in church.

• 1:50:38Eli Crane?

  We're, we're, I think.

• 1:50:40Tim Burchett?

  Deacons committee.

• 1:50:40Eli Crane?

  That's our, that's our nature to be selfish and to be self-serving, right? But I think it's definitely, you know, elevated and escalated there just because of the power and the prestige of, you know, working, you know, in, in the federal government at the, at those levels.

• 1:51:01Tim Burchett?

  More people have played professional baseball in this country than, than have been elected to Congress. That tells you how.

• 1:51:11Tim Burchett?

  Elite or whatever you want to call it.

• 1:51:14Eli Crane?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:18Eli Crane?

  Is there anything else we're missing? I'm sure, I mean, we could probably talk about this all day long, probably for a week.

• 1:51:25Tim Burchett?

  I just remember there was a YouTube football game and this chairman ended up, he ended up getting indicted. I remember he pulled up, I think he parked kind of illegal and he got out of his car and was strutting through the crowd. And um, get his tickets to the ballgame or whatever. My buddy said, who's that? I said, well, he's a pretty big deal in Nashville. And he said, tell him he ain't in Nashville anymore. He's in Knoxville, he ain't nobody here. And I think sometimes we forget that. I see these guys come out of their district and, you know, I don't know anybody, nobody knows me in Eli's district. And I think sometimes we forget that, that we're supposed to be back home representing that group.

• 1:52:13Eli Crane?

  I do want to bring something back up about when we were talking about biggest threat, biggest threats. And I said, getting Trump in and then illegals voting. I don't know if I brought up the fact when we voted on the SAVE Act, which would keep illegals from voting, and I think this is so important. I think it was only five Democrats voted to support it. Only five Democrats voted to stop illegals from voting in our election. And I think that's so telling and so important because I know you have people on all sides of the spectrum that watch the show.

• 1:52:46Eli Crane?

  Explain that one to me, right? Explain that one to me. You guys have created and orchestrated a system that has allowed over 10 million people within four years to come into the country. And now your party is fighting to allow them to vote.

• 1:53:07Eli Crane?

  And you call us a threat to democracy. And you have the audacity to talk about foreign intervention in elections.

• 1:53:19Eli Crane?

  Think about that.

• 1:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know who the five were by chance?

• 1:53:24Eli Crane?

  I don't.

• 1:53:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's public record. Yeah, I'd love to know that. We'll find it out, put it out on the screen. Give them a little kudos. But, um.

• 1:53:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:53:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I know this is a super touchy subject, obviously, but people talk about it all the time. Civil War. Do you guys think we're headed to a civil war?

• 1:53:59Eli Crane?

  I think it's, I think it's possible. I think at the very least, I think we're headed. Towards civil disobedience, I think that will come first. And I do think we're headed down a track of, you know, towards totalitarian rule. And I said that the other day, I was talking about the Kamala Walz ticket. You know, when, when he talks about, says publicly, one man's socialism is another man's neighborliness. And then she regularly talks about equal outcomes. That's the dialect. That's the code. That's the dialect of the socialist, the totalitarian, 100%. I think I was sharing with you that some reporter asked me, um, cause I was talking about that at

• 1:54:44Eli Crane?

  an event with Governor Greg Abbott. We were stumping for Trump a couple of weeks ago in Arizona. And she said, what, what are you talking about? This ticket being totalitarian? And I just looked at her and I said, well, what governments censor their own people? And that was it. But it's like, it's not even, it's not, they're not even really trying to hide it anymore.

• 1:55:09Tim Burchett?

  No.

• 1:55:10Eli Crane?

  You know, of all the things that Trump was fact checked on the other night in the debate, notice how he wasn't fact checked when he talked about Kamala's dad being a Marxist professor.

• 1:55:21Tim Burchett?

  They got through that quick.

• 1:55:22Eli Crane?

  Yep. She, and she didn't, she didn't, she rebutted many things, but she didn't rebut that. And, you know, it's just, it's just telling to me because, you know, the, the strategy of Marxism is divide and conquer. Right? Back in, back in the day, it was divide us all up economically, the haves and the have nots. Now they've employed, and I think even more effective tactic here in the West, and that's divide us all up by race, ethnicity, gender. And Dr. Vody Bakum would call that cultural Marxism. And I think it's been very effective here, but instead of trying to unite us around the,

• 1:56:04Eli Crane?

  the values that, you know, have made this country so great and have created so much opportunity and prosperity for us all, they try and divide us up. On all these, all these different metrics and barometers, you know, and it just makes us, makes it easier for them to conquer us and then to present themselves as the Savior, as the solution. And I, it, it blows me away that some people can still be gaslit into thinking that the federal government would ever be the solution for anything.

• 1:56:34Tim Burchett?

  I, I think the civil war question is, uh, I think it'd be more of a regional thing. I always remembered, um, when Trump was giving a speech at the White House and riots were, remember where, um, Rand Paul got attacked, him and his wife did. And then I was, I guess we were maybe a hundred yards behind that. And so we went back the other way. And I remember the police were, um, I remember, um, Andy Barr from Kentucky, his wife had died and he had his two precious little girls there in these pretty little matching dresses. And people were just saying filthy stuff and I'd had enough. And I told those, I asked that one little girl, I said, you want me to carry you? And she said, no. And I just held her

• 1:57:16Tim Burchett?

  little hand and I, I told her, I said, those people probably just needed Jesus, honey. I said, we pray for them. And, and it seemed to give her a little comfort. But anyway, we had the girls and Mark Green was with me on one side. And I remembered the police, this town was like bordered up, boarded up. And, and I'm, I'm not a big city guy. So, but the blocks on every corner, that's where the cops were. And they weren't allowed to go within the, the city, within the block. They were told where to be. And I just thought, this is what civil war looks like. I mean, this is, and I think it'd be a regional type

• 1:57:56Tim Burchett?

  situation where people will move out of the, the, the people who can will get out and they'll come to places like Tennessee, refugees, so to speak. And then they will end up, um, when they leave their states though, they will turn them over to the cabal or whatever, the corrupt far left machine. And that's what, and I think you'll see two Americas emerge more so than we have now. And also, but, you know, I'm at these gun shows and I hear these guys talking tough, you know? And I said this at breakfast to y'all that they're gonna, you know, if a tank rolls down the street, they're gonna. Hands will go up. You guys will know how to handle that, but people like me will not know

• 1:58:40Tim Burchett?

  how to handle that. I just can't see that being happening. I see somebody shoots a couple of shots and they get them fired back and they're throwing the white, the white flag up. So I just, I don't, I, I, I don't know how you would, how, what that would look like.

• 1:58:57Shawn Ryan?

  I think about it all the time. And I mean, I don't think it looks like how traditional civil wars look. I mean, I mean, look, we saw, we saw a 17 year old kid and

• 1:59:13Shawn Ryan?

  an entire city of riots with what, three bullets? Done. Immediately stopped. I don't think that's what it looks like. I think it's like what you're talking about. And I think it's already starting. I mean, you see, you see, there's a massive migration happening in the US right now. You see red states going farther red. You see blue states going farther blue. I think that some of that, I mean, like, let's, for example, and I'm not asking what your guys' stance is on it or anything, but abortion, for example, like my, personally, I think it's a little, a little

• 1:59:56Shawn Ryan?

  out there to be hunting women down that have had an abortion and throwing them in prison. Um, but I don't think that's actually gonna happen. I, I think that that is a deterrent from getting

• 2:00:12Shawn Ryan?

  lefties to move into the state. I think that some of these other things that are far left are deterrents for

• 2:00:21Shawn Ryan?

  people on the right to move into the state. And I, I think it's dividing right now. On top of that, you see these governors starting to align. I mean, um, that event that we went to in Nashville, what, a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago?

• 2:00:38Tim Burchett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, it was what the governor of Louisiana and, and governor of Tennessee talking about how they are aligning on all these issues and sending in the National Guard to help on the Texan border?

• 2:00:52Tim Burchett?

  Yep.

• 2:00:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean,

• 2:00:55Shawn Ryan?

  This is kinda how it starts. It's kinda how it's, it's not kind of how it starts. This is how it starts.

• 2:01:01Tim Burchett?

  You have fifteen percent of the population voting too.

• 2:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:01:04Tim Burchett?

  So. You know, the war, who's gonna notice almost kinda thing.

• 2:01:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:12Eli Crane?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is there talk about this up in Congress?

• 2:01:16Eli Crane?

  Not really. I don't hear a lot of talk about it. Maybe, maybe a joke here or there, but I, I, I do think there's a level of detachment up there, clearly, and just not, not representatives picking up on the frustration of the American people and the frustration of the continuance of the status quo.

• 2:01:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think, I mean, what, what would it look like? Man, you guys seem like pretty forward thinkers.

• 2:01:49Tim Burchett?

  Well, of course.

• 2:01:51Shawn Ryan?

  What does it look like?

• 2:01:52Tim Burchett?

  We lose our, we lose our firearms.

• 2:01:54Eli Crane?

  We fooled him. He thinks that we're forward thinkers.

• 2:01:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know. Our, our evil plot is, is worked.

• 2:02:00Tim Burchett?

  No, thanks. I, I, I worry about, makes a lot of people uneasy, but, um, you know, Kamala Harris has said that, you know, she'd like to get the guns. What does that look like? How do you get the guns?

• 2:02:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:22Tim Burchett?

  I don't like, I mean, I think that's the start of it. You got a second amendment and then without a second amendment, it was clearly put in there for a reason.

• 2:02:29Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:30Tim Burchett?

  Clearly people abuse it. There's no question there, but it's, um.

• 2:02:35Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel like state government's becoming more important than federal?

• 2:02:42Tim Burchett?

  I think it originally was designed, that was set for national defense. That was it.

• 2:02:49Eli Crane?

  I think it's, I, I think that's important. You know, and unfortunately, not a lot of people pay attention on the federal level or the state level, but I think you're seeing now, especially post-COVID, how important it is to have a strong state government, you know, and so many people benefited by being in a red state. And many people fled out of blue states to go live in red states just because they could still, you know, have some, you know, level of freedom. And so it goes back to something I was talking about earlier. How important it is that people actually pay attention and do the bare minimum, you know, of what it, what it means to be a citizen and be engaged, be educated, you know, vote, be an activist.

• 2:03:34Eli Crane?

  There's so many, there's so many ways you can participate in this government. But what, here's the key, what happens when you don't? You're seeing it right now. It's all, there's always a vacuum and that vacuum is filled by something. And what's it being filled by right now?

• 2:03:50Tim Burchett?

  Bob Dylan had a song. He became a Christian for a while. I'm not sure if he still is or not. I don't know what his faith is, but he, it was called, "You gotta serve somebody." And it was in the line, "You gotta serve somebody, be the devil or the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody." And what I think he was saying was, if you're not filling that gap, the other side is. It's just a vacuum. There is no vacuum in politics. It's you're either at the table or you're on the dad gum menu. And right now, America is on the menu because the fat cats are, are getting fatter. And all they're concerned about is, is keeping in power and keeping that, that cash machine rolling.

• 2:04:32Shawn Ryan?

  How much do you think the states can shelter its citizens from the federal government?

• 2:04:40Tim Burchett?

  It depends on who's in the White House.

• 2:04:42Eli Crane?

  Yeah, and, and up to this point, I think quite a bit, you know, when you look at just like going back to COVID, you know, what life was like when you had a governor, you know, a governor, you know, who wasn't enforcing any of the mandates that other states were enforcing. Even in, even in Texas right now, you have a governor that's willing to actually, if the federal government won't protect the people, which is one of its primary responsibility from the invasion coming over our southern border. That governor there has actually erected walls, barriers, you know, Constantine wire to protect his own citizens.

• 2:05:23Eli Crane?

  And so up to this point, I think, you know, they have been able to play a very big role on, you know, the prosperity and safety of their citizens. To, to Tim's point, though, how long does that continue based on, you know, where we're headed? And the type of candidates that we have now that are running on the other side of the ticket, who are way too cozy with totalitarianism.

• 2:05:47Tim Burchett?

  And, and one of the things you've got to realize too with the illegals is that who supports that? Who supports that issue? The National Chambers of Commerce do, the National Chamber of Commerce did. Every time there's a bill, they're always mucking it up. You know, you got to remember there, y'all, they're your little local Chamber of Commerce. Well, they give 1% or something to the National Chamber of Commerce. You got to realize they endorsed about four, first time I ran six years ago, about 14 or 15 of Pelosi's closest allies. And they kept the Democrats in power. And that was obviously against small business, but large business loves it. They love the fact they have some guy on their roof, your roof, that doesn't speak English.

• 2:06:29Tim Burchett?

  And when he falls off, he's not going to do anything because he's afraid he's going to get deported. They're going to take him down to the emergency room and then you and I are going to pay for it. And the big boys, they're still going to be making, making their cut. And the working class people are going to suffer. And they continue to rise. My daddy used to always tell me, I said, why are these people, why would they be for communism? They said, because they're the ones that'll be in power. They will be in power.

• 2:06:55Tim Burchett?

  Well. What's the answer? What's the answer? I'll tell you what the answer is revival.

• 2:07:01Eli Crane?

  That's right.

• 2:07:03Tim Burchett?

  As a Christian, that's gotta be the, at the first and foremost. I think we've got to realize where we are as a nation and preachers got to start preach, preaching the gospel again. And not be afraid of it, be bold. I spoke to a group of preachers a couple of weeks ago. I said, y'all just gotta be bold. Quit being afraid. Man, we got, your calling is, is, is bigger than the United States government. And I think we've allowed them to get in their comfort zones too much. We gotta call them out and they've got to, and that's where it's got to start in this, in my, in my opinion. There's other areas, of course, and people are going to say, oh, but you know, I'm an atheist or whatever, but, but as a Christian, I think that's where it's gotta happen. We have, we have failed, we have turned from God and we've allowed

• 2:07:49Tim Burchett?

  um, this transgender thing. Man, good gosh, we're allowing kids to permanently scar their bodies. Their testicles removed, little, little boys and little girls getting their breasts removed and we're celebrating that.

• 2:08:08Eli Crane?

  On, on that note, Sean, there's a.

• 2:08:10Tim Burchett?

  You might want to edit all that out. I apologize.

• 2:08:14Eli Crane?

  There's a scripture in, in second Corinthians and it says, I don't know it by heart, but it says something to the fact of if my people who hear my voice will humble themselves and pray and repent.

• 2:08:26Tim Burchett?

  Call upon my name.

• 2:08:27Eli Crane?

  Then, then, then I will heal them and I will, I will hear them. I will, and I will heal their land. Like, I think that is the biggest, most important thing going on here. I think everything that you see is just um, a ramification of like Tim said, pushing God out of everything. And I think that you're seeing God, you know, be like, okay, you don't, you don't, you don't want, you don't want me? Okay. Well, and, and I think, I think that's the key, you know, um, of people that have turned their back on God and every time this hap, every time that happens throughout the scriptures, it's always the same cycle. It's always the same cycle and it never ends well.

• 2:09:09Eli Crane?

  Until it gets so bad that people finally are willing to humble themselves and turn back to God. And so. I I hope we do it. I hope we do it before it gets much worse, but based on what I'm seeing in the culture, I'm I'm not, I'm concerned.

• 2:09:27Tim Burchett?

  I I don't think Trump's the Messiah. I don't think he's, you know, I was asked on the BBC, they were making fun of something I said about God's will. And I said, yeah, I'm a Christian. I believe the scripture says a sparrow falls from the sky. I know it. I know how many hairs are on your head. Of course, on yours, there are a few less than are on mine and Eli's. But my point was, is that, you know, we have, every time God puts his hand out, we've swatted it away. It's the old adage, you know, this old redneck farmer's on a roof on his ladder, and he starts falling. He says, Lord, help me. And then a nail catches his pant leg,

• 2:10:10Tim Burchett?

  or his overalls. And he says, never mind, Lord, I got it. Well, in mine and Eli's, in your minds, God put that nail there. And, you know, and I have, I'm a big believer in that. I was, when I was county mayor, we had a, I used to ride around in these ice truck, the snow trucks, and they'd go out and salt the roads there in Knoxville, Knox County. And we hit this black ice spot. I'll never forget it. It just this, just almost just went slow motion. And we were just sliding. I looked over, and we were going off a cliff. And I looked down there, there was a dead deer carcass. I thought, how ironic is that? And that thing, that truck goes like this. It just goes, and it just stopped. And there

• 2:10:55Tim Burchett?

  was one tree there. And the press asked me about that, what I think about that. I said, God planted that tree 60 years ago, knowing that my dumb ass was gonna, would have died probably. I could have, we could literally, because it was. And I'd probably end up with a jack stand impaled in my head or something. But you know, continuously in this country, we swatted away when Trump, that bullet and what they were making the point was with us, that it was God's will that Trump missed. You know, I don't think he's, I don't even know if he's a Christian or not, but I, I know what he'll do if he's in, in power and you know, King David, for instance, terrible guy. I mean, he sleeps with Beth Sheba, his best general, his best buddy's old lady, has the

• 2:11:39Tim Burchett?

  general killed, sends him out in this area and then they pulls everybody back and leaves him in there and he gets killed. But, but God had favor on him and, and he led, he led the Jews through it all. And he, to this day, he's remembered as one of the great, as a matter of fact, I think he's one of the, the only non-American who's, there's a, in the, in the Capitol there, he's got his, his face up on the wall up there and, and so I, I, he's not a perfect vessel. Trump isn't. But I, I think for some reason, he is our best choice right now.

• 2:12:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Man. Well, it's funny you mention that because me and Eli were talking about that on the way over here too, that I think the left versus right thing is, it's not working.

• 2:12:36Tim Burchett?

  No, it's not. I mean, and that, but, but also it keeps the big boys in power. Now, you don't think that they're not just laughing. I mean, they're, at the end of session, they'll, they had, a lot of the head boys in both parties, they're up at Kenny Bunkport or someplace drinking a expensive glass of wine or something, toasting each other, laughing at us. And I think we've got to realize that these-

• 2:13:01Tim Burchett?

  These parties are leaving us, man.

• 2:13:03Eli Crane?

  And but to that point, that's why I love, even though I know this this title, the America First Movement, I know it's been hijacked and turned into some like white supremacy, like nonsensical, you know, thing, but I love that the movement because it puts Americans of all political parties, you know, of every color first. And I think that's what we've been missing. That's what the Uniparty, that's what the cartel, the establishment, whatever you want to call it, that's what it fails to do on a daily basis. And that's why I love that movement because regardless of whether you're talking energy policy or border policy, that movement is based on putting, you know, Democrat, Democrats,

• 2:13:47Eli Crane?

  Republicans, independents first if they're American citizens.

• 2:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  And that would be nice.

• 2:13:52Eli Crane?

  It would be.

• 2:13:53Shawn Ryan?

  That would be nice, but um, well, gents, I know you guys are on a time crunch, so I'm gonna wrap this up, but uh, I just want to say, you know, we talked about the voting, only 15% of the people vote, most people are too lazy. I would say

• 2:14:13Shawn Ryan?

  just grab a buddy, drag their ass to the pole and make them vote.

• 2:14:20Shawn Ryan?

  If we all did that, then we get double the numbers. So on that note, I just want to say once again,

• 2:14:30Shawn Ryan?

  it's an honor to have you guys. You are uh, there's not very many people in Congress that uh,

• 2:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  still have control of their soul and I think you guys do and and I just, I just really appreciate both of you, you know, with the Afghanistan stuff, with the Brad Geary stuff, all, I mean, you guys are just always doing the right thing and uh, which appears to me.

• 2:14:55Tim Burchett?

  It's an honor for me to be here with you two guys. Y'all served our country and that, in my family, that goes a long ways. And I'm, I'm always, it's an honor for me to call you two guys my friends because I'm in public a lot and people ask me about you all. And, and I don't tell you that enough, that much I appreciate you guys because it's a, it really is an honor for somebody that, because you know, my dad served and my mama flew an airplane and. My wife's deceased husband, the biological father of my child, served, you know, and I never did. My brother-in-law's a Marine sniper. I never served my dad come country. And you guys did. You weren't drafted. You chose and you were called on to do incredible things. And I'm in honor.

• 2:15:40Tim Burchett?

  I'm in awe of you guys and it is incredible honor to call you guys my friends and I appreciate it. And y'all let me hang out and say stupid stuff and I appreciate it. Thanks, Tim. Thank you, Tom.

• 2:15:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's a good note.

• 2:15:56Tim Burchett?

  All right, brother. God bless. Shout out to God bless me. Thank you.