Tucker: Some within the US government helped China coverup

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Tucker: Some within the US government helped China coverup

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' reacts to apparent coordinated effort to keep COVID origins a secret

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," June 3, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

A little over 15 months ago, a group of Chinese scientists working on the ground at the scene of the outbreak of a brand new virus came to the conclusion that the novel coronavirus, probably escaped from a government lab in Wuhan. These Chinese scientists said that in the clearest possible terms and then posted it on the internet.

From our perspective, this struck us as an amazing and important story. And also, by the way plausible. We expected a flurry of media interest in it. Where did this virus come from? It seemed worth knowing as people were dying of it, but no one asked the question.

Instead, there was silence punctuated only by occasional smirking about anti-Asian racism and conspiracy theories, and that's where it stood for more than a year, until just a few weeks ago.

Then suddenly, for reasons we still don't really understand, all the smirking morons in the American news media changed their view completely overnight. Of course, corona escaped from a Chinese virology lab. Duh. What? Do you think it came from a wet market? Come on?

That was the new consensus.

An avalanche of evidence followed. "The Wall Street Journal" confirmed that the first corona victims seem to have been researchers working with bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. BuzzFeed that obtained thousands of e-mails showing that Tony Fauci knew from the beginning that COVID may have been manufactured in China in dangerous experiments he helped pay for.

The lab leak theory, it turns out was never crazy. It was always likely true. So why did they lie to us about it for so long?

A shocking new piece, and of all places, the celebrity suck up magazine, "Vanity Fair," answers that question in great detail, you should read it.

In short, many research scientists are addicted to American tax dollars. If the American public understood just how recklessly they have behaved, endangering the entire world with their weird little experiments in poorly regulated labs in China that money might dry up.

As a former N.S.C. official called Jamie Metzl put it succinctly, quote: "If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what a three-mile island in Chernobyl did to nuclear science." Can't have that. Got to keep the money flowing, so they lied about it.

And then they intimidated anyone who tried to tell the truth. That would include the Director of the C.D.C., Robert Redfield. Redfield received death threats from scientists after he suggested the virus may have come from a lab.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.

Other people don't believe that that's fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That's not some guy on Twitter. That's the former Director of the C.D.C., so you think the world would stop and ask follow-up questions such as: why do you think that? Where's the evidence?

But that's not what happened, quote: "I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis." Redfield told "Vanity Fair," "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science," but maybe he should have.

Redfield had dared to buck the orthodoxy that have been imposed by the global scientific establishment. It began on February 19, 2020, just as the virus was getting to this country and scaring the hell out of all of us.

At that moment, one of the leading science journals in the world, "The Lancet" published a letter that was signed by 27 scientists. That letter declared flatly and for all time that the coronavirus did not originate in a lab in Wuhan, and you'd have to be a bigot to believe otherwise.

Now, that letter we now know was organized by Peter Daszak. Daszak is a man with everything to gain by pretending that COVID came from a wet market. Daszak was involved in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

E-mails show that Peter Daszak carefully selected other signatories to "The Lancet" letter, so that this obviously disqualifying conflict of interest would remain secret. At one point, Daszak wrote to another scientist called Ralph Baric, who was also working on gain-of-function research in China, telling him not to sign the letter. Here's why, quote: "We'll put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration, so we maximize any independent voice," end quote.

So the whole thing was a fraud. And yet, it worked. It was in "The Lancet." Everyone trusts "The Lancet." In fact, Tony Fauci himself cited Daszak's letter as proof that the virus was not caused by research he was funding.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what's out there now, is very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated the way the mutations had naturally evolved.

A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: No, of course, it couldn't have been us. So really, this is a story about the self-licking ice cream cone that is the Federal bureaucracy. No matter how badly they screw up, it's never their fault. Oh, we didn't imagine WMD in Iraq, et cetera. Pick your screw up. It's your fault, racist.

But it wasn't just Tony Fauci and the Federal bureaucrats who cited that letter. Self-described fact checkers, the one who control the flow of information in our country now, used "The Lancet" letter to censor anyone on social media, who mentioned the possibility of a lab leak. It can't be true, "The Lancet" says it's not true. Twenty seven eminent scientists say it's not true.

Only a few scientists in the face of all of this dared to speak up. One of them was called Gilles Demaneuf. He formed a group of researchers called DRASTIC. That's an acronym for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team, something that all scientists should be.

Jamie Metzl, the former N.S.C. official soon joined the group. Almost immediately as early as April of last year, it was becoming clear to Metzl that the lab leak theory was not a conspiracy theory, in fact, it was plausible.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMIE METZL, FORMER N.S.C. OFFICIAL: I think that if I had to just bet based on what I've read and logic, I would bet it's most likely this was an accidental leak from a lab.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So it turns out that Metzl wasn't exactly speculating on that. Unlike the scientific establishment, he and DRASTIC had evidence that they had bothered to gather.

They found that the official scientific consensus had in fact been doctored at the source. In one instance, they discovered that Shi Zhengli, the bat lady in Wuhan had collected samples of a bat coronavirus that were virtually identical to COVID-19.

Where did she get these samples? Well, she found them in a cave in the Yunnan Province in China. Several miners had been killed there after inhaling the bat guano left by these bats. She recognized this virus was significant because it had moved directly to humans without going through an intermediate animal host first.

The Chinese seems to be looking for the most dangerous virus they could find. And in that cave, they found it.

After the coronavirus pandemic began, Shi Zhengli tried to hide that COVID- 19 was virtually identical to this virus that she had collected in the mine. In her records, she renamed the virus to hide its source. Peter Daszak then published a paper with Shi Zhengli categorizing all the various coronavirus strains they had encountered in recent years.

The paper listed hundreds of them, and yet somehow, and you'll be surprised by this, they omitted the deadly viruses found in the Yunnan mine. Funny. Were those viruses significant? Well, the government of China appears to think they are.

Late last year, journalists from the BBC tried to visit that mine to get some answers, and when they got there, they were followed by plainclothes police officers. They found the road to the mine had been blocked by a broken down truck.

So the Chinese government covered this up. But here's the worst part and the most shocking part, if you're an American. Some within the U.S. government helped them cover it up. They knew all along this was going on, but they buried the truth, too, because their interests were aligned with the interests of the Chinese government.

Christopher Park, a Director in the State Department's Nonproliferation Bureau told the agency's investigators, quote, " ... not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government's own role in gain-of-function research." Now, why would he say that?

It turns out that Christopher Park was involved in a 2017 decision, a world changing decision it turned out, to lift the Federal moratorium on funding gain-of-function research.

"Vanity Fair" obtained a memo from Thomas DiNanno, who was then the Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Arms Control Bureau. In that memo, he wrote that staff from two State Department bureaus had warned leaders within his office, quote, " ... not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19" because it would, quote, "open a can of worms."

These are Americans working to hide the truth of the origin of COVID-19 from a country that's been destroyed by COVID-19. You can't prevent outbreaks unless you know where they came from, and yet Federal bureaucrats prevented us from learning where this one came from.

One of the officials you wanted to shut down the probe was Chris Ford, acting Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. A former administration official with direct knowledge of the probe -- direct knowledge -- tells this show that Chris Ford was briefed about the lab leak investigation earlier than December 2020 when Ford claims he first heard about it.

We are told that Ford wanted it shut down. He was overruled by the Secretary of State at the time, Mike Pompeo.

Ford, by the way, was not a permanent bureaucrat. He was a political appointee. But he spoke for many in the bureaucracy, many of whom we are told wanted to bury the probe out of political animus. They didn't like the administration they served, and they didn't want to give it points.

They accused anyone who asked questions about where the virus came from of being a conspiracy theorist, and in our conformist culture, that's enough to shut people up.

In other words, they acted just like the people you see on TV, just like MSNBC anchors. They did not act like Federal officials who have been sworn to protect American lives. They weren't protecting American lives. They're protecting the consensus and that endangered American lives.

As for actual MSNBC anchors, well, they have regressed to a childlike state of incoherence. Watch this dopey little fan girl swoon over Tony Fauci like he is the bassist in a boyband.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: As you learn more and more, you've got to continue to evolve with the data and that's what I was trying to do, is to always tell the truth on the basis of what the data is and it was never deliberately something against the President. In fact, he spoke about my e-mails, he looked at my e-mails, I never in the e-mail said anything derogatory about President Trump.

NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC ANCHOR: Well, the true mark of someone is if they look good, even when their personal e-mails come out, so you pass that test that very few of us would pass.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: I love you, Tony Fauci. Still talking about Trump. That's where some of them still are.

But there are still adults in this country. One of them is former N.S.C. official, Jamie Metzl, who history will be very kind to. He has been asking honest questions since the very beginning of this non-partisan questions, as he should have done, and he did.

We're happy to have him join us now.

Jamie, thanks so much for coming on. So my concern is not just with what people did or didn't do, or what they said or didn't say, it's how people think. And people in science ought to be reaching conclusions based on the evidence alone, political considerations, questions of personal animus, even questions of funding should not interfere in their conclusions about what happened. Am I right?

METZL: Absolutely, Tucker. I mean, what we need is what we call the scientific method. It's data driven and we have to explore all of the hypotheses. And I said, the last time I was on this show with you, I'm coming from a very different political space.

CARLSON: Right.

METZL: I'm a progressive Democrat, but early last year, I was looking at the evidence and it was -- there was this fake consensus, I felt, saying, well, we know something that nobody I felt knew, that it was a natural origin. And I was looking at all of the data that was suggesting to me that a lab incident origin was really possible. And I started asking those questions, and I think everybody should have been asking those questions.

Some were, but there was a forced consensus that was pushed by -- certainly by the Chinese, but by a number, even a small number of scientists who had very significant conflicts of interest, undisclosed conflicts of interest. And unfortunately, we allowed, we, collectively, a lot of fake consensus to emerge and I think that stifled some very healthy question asking that needed to happen last year. And I'm glad after a lot of us have worked very, very hard for almost a year and a half now that suddenly, but appropriately, we're asking these tough questions.

CARLSON: I think that's exactly right. And you know, you expect this kind of behavior from an authoritarian regime, like the government of China. It's so distressing and so embarrassing, it is humiliating as an American to think that American officials would engage in this kind of behavior.

I mean, it's so beneath our country. Were you shocked by it? Or have you been in the bureaucracy long enough not to be?

METZL: Well, it's not just officials. The way I see it is from day one, following the outbreak, China began its massive cover up, which involved destroying samples, hiding records, imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists, asking the most basic questions, they established a universal gag order on their scientists. So there wasn't a lot of information coming out as a result of that. And a lot of scientists here were a bit hands-off because they didn't have the data.

There were a small number of these self-interested scientists who recognized, and you quoted me in your intro, that there was a binary outcome that if the story was that this pandemic starts from a natural outbreak, it's not just that that's a boon for virology, it also helps support things that many people really believe in, like defending, protecting wild spaces and all sorts of things.

But if the story was a lab incident origin then, it is a lot more challenging for a lot of scientists, even ones who were doing things that they believed in.

On top of that, we had this very toxic political environment, and I was one of the people who was a big critic of President Trump.

CARLSON: That's right.

METZL: And there was a lot of things that he said that I didn't agree with. But I didn't -- I never wanted to be in a position where I disagreed with something just because someone maybe I didn't even like said it.

And so when President Trump last year was talking about the origins, I may have disliked 95 percent of what he said, but it made sense to me and I felt that we have to, whatever our background, we have to be asking these tough questions for getting who is saying it, let's look at the data and follow the evidence.

CARLSON: Stay rational, and you'll be rewarded in the end and I hope you are being rewarded for doing that. You deserve to be. Jamie Metzl, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.

METZL: My pleasure.

CARLSON: So there are people, not just a few people, but quite a number of people who are sitting in solitary confinement tonight in the D.C. jail charged with trespassing. And yet, Tony Fauci is not only free and unindicted, uninvestigated, but he is running around basking in the love on cable TV shows.

What's the difference? Well, possibly, Tony Fauci knows how to use the media and if you watched MSNBC last night, you saw the surreal interview he did with Jeb Bush's former flak. Really, it's hard to believe that actually happened.

Over at CNN, one anchor at least tried to make his interview with Tony Fauci look legitimate. He asked Fauci why some of his e-mails were heavily redacted, and Fauci just laughed in his face.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: An e-mail exchange between you and N.I.H. Director Francis Collins, the e-mail sent to you said "Conspiracy theory gains momentum." And this again, was the idea of the lab leak. Those e-mails, though, as you can see on the screen, or I can see on the screen, was all redacted between you and Francis Collins, you happen to remember? Do you remember?

FAUCI: You know, John, they only took about 10,000 e-mails from me, of course, I remember I remember all 10,000 of them. Give me a break.

BERMAN: But to be clear, you're saying you don't remember. You can't tell us what was in a body of that --

FAUCI: I don't remember what's in that redacted. But there -- I mean, the idea, I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people. I think that's a bit far out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: It wasn't much of an interview, to put it mildly. But that's now Tony Fauci's official response. He's not going to say anything.

Over on MSNBC, he was to be fair, pressed harder by someone who is actually smart, and Fauci refused to discuss whether China might have a motive to cover up a lab leak.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIE GEIST, MSNBC HOST: You say it's in China's interest, but would you agree, though, Dr. Fauci, it is in their interest to hide it if there was a lab leak or worse if they were designing something in their lab so that the world, that America didn't know that it came out of their own lab? Wouldn't they want to conceal that?

FAUCI: You know, Willie, I don't want to be speculating on that because every time I say something like that, you know it as well as I, it will get completely taken out of context, and go into the Twitter world like crazy.

So, I mean, I'm going to leave that to other people and not surmise and guess who is interest it is. It's not helpful.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Miranda Devine is a columnist for "The New York Post." She joins us tonight. Miranda, thanks so much for coming.

I know, you hate to keep grousing about the media, because it does get repetitive. But this is something that actually matters because if we don't know where the virus came from, we can't prevent another pandemic. And you know, we could probably save lives if we figured this out.

At what point are we going to get to the bottom of this? Will the media decide, you know, enough of this nonsense, Tony Fauci, answer the freaking question.

MIRANDA DEVINE, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I don't know if they ever will. I think Anthony Fauci has been very clever at shaping the media, particularly on this pandemic story. I mean, he knew from day one, that there were reputable scientists who believed that this was a man-made virus.

He also knew that he had been funding gain-of-function, this Frankenstein research to juice up bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab, specifically to get around the Obama administration ban.

Anthony Fauci was probably the world's greatest fan, greatest supporter of this dangerous gain-of-function research and there are hundreds of American scientists who thought it was too dangerous to persist with. They convinced the Obama administration to lift the ban. Then Tony Fauci took advantage of the new Trump administration in their early days in 2017 to go and tell them that there was nothing dangerous, they had done a review and to lift that moratorium.

And he is, you know, if this is a lab leak, that's why he has a vested interest. The last thing he wants is for anybody in the media to come close to saying, if this is a lab leak, are you responsible for the research that resulted in that lab leak?

He doesn't want that. The other person who is very conflicted is the man whose sub-agency, whose nonprofit in New York at the N.I.H. through Anthony Fauci was funding, that is Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance, and like Anthony Fauci, he is very powerful in terms of shaping the narrative.

You just talked about "The Lancet" article that he engineered, and also, he was the only American person on the World Health Organization investigation whitewash into what happened in the lab.

CARLSON: Yes, this -- I hope that you keep pushing, and I knew that you have been, Miranda Devine, you and a few others to get to the bottom of this because it has profound consequences, not just for understanding our past, but for the future.

This is Frankenstein stuff and it should stop immediately. I appreciate it. Thank you.

DEVINE: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: So equity is the idea that some people are better and some people are worse. Some people should be rewarded and others punished based on the way they look, how they were born, on their skin color, it is grotesque. It is now mandatory in some kindergarten classrooms, this poison.

At least one mother is fighting back against this. She has been threatened for it. She's got an update, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Well, for months now, we've been waiting for the U.S. government's report on UFOs. What exactly do they know? They are required -- language inserted by Marco Rubio in last year's budget -- requires them to tell us.

Now keep in mind, the bottom line finding of all government reports no matter what they are about is, we need more money from you. So there's no question this report will find that. Increase in DoD budget.

"The New York Times" has been briefed. We don't have the report, but we are just getting a report from that newspaper in New York that they have spoken to someone who has seen the report and here is the bottom line as described by "The New York Times."

Lots of these sightings. No, they did not come from the American military. This is not some secret advanced government technology they haven't been telling us about. They don't know where they are from. They don't know if they're from another country or from another planet. They have no idea.

We will apparently learn more on June 25th and that's when the unclassified report is set to arrive. And of course, we will give you all the details we can, and maybe more leaks.

Nicole Solas is the mother of a kindergartner enrolled in school in South Kingston, Rhode Island. This summer, she filed several public record requests to learn about the indoctrination that the school was forcing on kindergarteners. Nicole Solas then wrote a post on the blog Legal Insurrection and the south Kingston School Committee threatened to sue her for doing this.

She wanted to know what her child was being taught, and they threatened to sue her, and then of course, predictably, you could have guessed this, a member of the school district at a hearing accused of being -- you know that thing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This issue -- issue -- is a much larger one. One that involves a disturbing attempt by a national organized racist group to create chaos and intimidate our district in recent weeks as we discuss -- as we discuss bringing equity and anti-racism curriculum to our schools.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Hey, crazy people, what are you teaching my children? Shut up, racist.

That's in school districts across the country. Nicole Solas, though is unusual because she stood up to these people and good for her. She joins us tonight with an update.

Nicole, thanks so much for coming on. So, have you found out what they're going to be forcing on your daughter?

NICOLE SOLAS, CONCERNED PARENT: Well, I know that in kindergarten, they don't call the kids boys and girls, which I don't know why that is. They also don't use gender terminology in the classroom. I know that when they teach the children about Thanksgiving, they ask them what could have been done differently on Thanksgiving, which strikes me as a way to shame children for their American heritage.

CARLSON: Well, of course it is. Yes, of course it is. It's a way to make them hate the country. So you asked about this and then they called you a bigot for trying to find out what they were telling your child. How does that work?

SOLAS: Right. You know, that is a patently false outrageous defamatory statement that should be retracted and the chair of the school committee should resign immediately. But you know, this is what they do. They smear people who ask them questions, who disagree with them, and it's just a false accusation of racism that they use to bully you into silence.

They reduce everyone down to the color of their skin and a human being's worth is more than that. And if this is any indication of what's going on in my school district, our town is in deep, deep trouble.

This is exactly why I was submitting my public records request to get information about how exactly this is being taught in our schools. And then they turn around and have a public meeting to discuss suing me for submitting the public record request, which they told me to do.

CARLSON: That's right. Well, their hysteria tells you everything. A hurt dog barks, they can't answer these questions. They can't defend their racist lunacy in the light of day. And so they attack you.

Tell me what other parents, how have they responded to you?

SOLAS: You know, other parents, they want transparency. I've got great community support that came in person to the meeting. I have people coming from other towns. I have people coming from other states. I have people from other states finding me on Facebook and messaging me and telling me that they were going to watch the school committee meeting from another state.

And I want parents to know that if they are going to get answers from their school district, they need to submit public records request, it's called an APRA. It stands for the Access to Public Records Act. This is a way that you can legally compel your school to answer your questions so you can know what is being taught in your classrooms.

Parents across the country have to start holding their school officials accountable. They are our civil servants, they work for us. They're not supposed to be these tyrants in the classroom. We need to stop being afraid of retaliation.

CARLSON: Exactly.

SOLAS: The risk of retaliation is there. It happened to me, but our children are worth the risk of that retaliation, because we're the only ones that are going to be asking these questions.

So parents, please, start submitting your public records request and ask what's going on in the classroom.

CARLSON: It's so inspiring what you just said. That's right. Cowardice has a cost. We need more brave people like you.

Nicole, I appreciate your doing this and coming on and telling us about it. Thank you.

SOLAS: Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: So when you think of war, you think of planes or tanks or submarines or drones. It turns out cyberattacks may be more effective than anything anyone has ever tried. A few cyberattacks recently have crippled entire sectors of our economy.

Why can't we defend ourselves against them? What is going on exactly? It's not a partisan question. It's a real question. Glenn Greenwald has thought a lot about it, he joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Eight years ago, a Pentagon committee called the Defense Science Board issued a very stern warning, quote: "The cyber threat is serious," they wrote, " ... with potential consequences similar in some ways to the nuclear threat of the Cold War."

Almost a decade later, it doesn't seem like the government is taking these threats as seriously as they promised they would. And suddenly those threats have multiplied, they appear to have anyway.

When hackers shut down the gas supply to the Eastern Seaboard earlier this year, for example, the White House said it was a private matter. And watch how Joe Biden's top spokeswoman reacted yesterday to a hack of about 250,000 servers operated by Microsoft.

Microsoft says that hack came from China. Here's how the White House responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: In March, we heard from the National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan who came in here and told us that the U.S. in the near future -- to use his words -- would name who is responsible for the hack on the Microsoft Exchange. So can you tell us who that is, several months have passed and what the holdup might be?

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I'm happy to check with our National Security team and see if they have an update. As you know, they are quite careful and thorough, I should say thorough is probably the right word -- on how they review and assess and provide public guidance.

But we can see if there's anything more they can report out.

QUESTION: Is the prevailing theory still that it's China or you can you not go any further than he did then?

PSAKI: I don't think I have an update on it from what we've provided in the past.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: The White House also is not commenting on news today that hackers with ties to China tried to hack a New York subway system in April of this year. But the interesting thing is that not all hacks get this treatment. See if you can spot the difference when another country is involved. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PSAKI: President Biden certainly thinks that President Putin and the Russian government has a role to play in stopping and preventing these attacks. Hence it's a -- it will be a topic of discussion when they meet in two weeks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: What's going on here exactly? Sincere question. Glenn Greenwald has a theory about it. He is an independent journalist. He joins us tonight.

Glenn, this seems like a potentially crippling problem, these cyberattacks -- we are utterly dependent on the internet. You can shut us down with the keystroke. The responses from official Washington are puzzling. What do you make of them?

GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: It's obviously bizarre in the sense that we're constantly talking about our massive Defense budget. We spend 10 times more on Defense than the next 12 countries combined. It is run through the Department of Defense. Constantly, this word is invoked to justify these huge bureaucracies and these huge military budgets, we have to defend the country.

And yet, when you look at the Defense budget, very little of it is actually about Defense, things like protecting our industries and our food supply and our energy supply from actual hacks, right? Spending money to fortify those systems, that would be defense, there's very little of it, that is spent on that.

You see this over and over. You know, when I did the Snowden reporting in 2013, which was about eight years ago, which is when that report came out, $75 billion was spent on the Intelligence budget, almost all was spent on spying on American citizens, hacking into the systems of other countries. Virtually none was spent on how to do Defense, defending our own country.

And even during Russiagate when there was all that hysteria about the Russians hacking our election system. People like Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic Congresswoman would say, if you're really that worried about it, pass this bill to provide paper ballots to make sure there can't be hacking and there was no interest in that.

CARLSON: Yes.

GREENWALD: It seems like sometimes, there's a real interest in hyping this enemy, constantly creating new programs and bureaucracies that take billions of dollars, but simple solutions to actually provide defense don't generate much interest in Washington.

CARLSON: That is such great point about paper ballots, and people just weren't interested. I vaguely remember this people were not very interested actually in protecting the system with paper ballots, which would do it.

GREENWALD: Yes, I mean, that what was her point, you know, Tulsi Gabbard would always say, all you do is hear about Russian interference in our election, Russian hacking of our election system. There's a really simple solution. I have a like a two paragraph bill that just requires states to generate paper ballot backups so that nobody can ever hack our voting machines, because we'll have a paper backup to prove it. And I think she had like four sponsors in all of Congress while they were constantly babbling about Russian interference in our elections, and it just shows you that so often these things are pretext to build massive budgets that really have nothing to do with the interest of the American people.

CARLSON: Yes. It's totally and exactly right. And your point about our food supply is ominous and true. The country's biggest beef supplier was just taken down with a cyberattack the other day.

Glenn Greenwald, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.

GREENWALD: Good to be with you, Tucker. Thanks.

CARLSON: So there's a lot, billion -- well, trillions in fact of coronavirus money floating around. How is it being awarded? Well on the basis of skin color, in a lot of cases. Isn't that illegal? You bet it is immoral. It goes without saying, but it is happening. Almost nobody is fighting back. Stephen Miller, former White House adviser is, leading a legal charge against this. A Judge just handed out a ruling in the case. Miller joins us after the break to explain what happened.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: It's easy to forget, but when Eric Swalwell was not having sex with Chinese spies and contrary to popular opinion, there are moments when he is not doing that or coming in last place in presidential primaries, Eric Swalwell is still a sitting Member of Congress from California. Amazing.

He also sees himself as a hero who is going to bring justice for the January 6th insurrection. He's got a plan for that. He is investigating his own colleagues.

We learned yesterday that Eric Swalwell has hired private investigators to fine Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama. Swalwell claims Brooks is avoiding a lawsuit he filed to hold Brooks accountable for the insurrection.

But there's an easier way, Swalwell can just call his old girlfriend, Fang Fang. She is good at finding people in power. Hey, Eric Swalwell, call Fang Fang, the Chinese spy you had sex with. She'll get it done.

Well, the Biden administration while the rest of us have been otherwise occupied have been awarding many millions in coronavirus stimulus money to people based on their skin color alone. This is illegal, it's immoral and then it goes unchallenged. Stephen Miller has finally challenged it. He's a former White House adviser.

His group, America First Legal just won an injunction against this racist policy. Stephen Miller joins us tonight.

First of all, thank you for doing this. Second, explain to the non-lawyers in the audience what exactly this means, if you would?

STEPHEN MILLER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: Absolutely. Well, you know, I'm not a lawyer either. I'm a person who cares deeply about injustice and about what's happening to our country, just like millions of your listeners. So I put together a group, hired some of the best lawyers in the country to stand up for Civil Rights in America.

We hear two terms a lot in this country, systemic racism and institutional racism. Almost always those terms are wielded by progressives in a way that is a lie. That is dishonest. That is a smear.

In this case, we have real life institutional discrimination, real life systemic racism, where restaurant owners and farmers are being denied aid solely because of their skin color.

That is not only racist and bigoted, it is flagrantly unconstitutional. And I'm proud of the fact that we have won for our clients in the restaurant case, an injunction so they're able to apply. And now we're seeking for all others in their same situation, the same right under law to apply just as any other American. We want equality, not equity, which is code word for racism.

CARLSON: Why isn't the NAACP joining you? I thought they were against discrimination.

MILLER: What we are finding out, which is tragic, which is heartbreaking, is that progressives in this country are willing to use the awesome power of the Federal government to punish people solely based on how they look or where their ancestors come from.

If we allow that to happen to our children, to our colleagues, to our neighbors, to our fellow citizens, the American experiment, Tucker, it's over. Those are the stakes here. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I am suing the Biden administration to say, in this country, you do not punish people because they look a certain way, because their ancestors come from a certain place.

Because if the government has the power to destroy a business because of how someone looks, what's next? Put someone in jail because of how they look. Take away somebody's entire life, their dreams, everything they have. This is genuinely depraved.

It is sick what is going on and it is absolutely a violation of law.

CARLSON: Yes, and it's illegal in addition to everything else. That is -- everything you said is true, unfortunately.

Stephen Miller, thank you so much.

MILLER: Thank you.

CARLSON: We've got some news for you after the break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Back in January, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri did what many Democrats have done in previous presidential election cycles, he voted against certifying the results pending a review.

For daring to cast that vote, Hawley became the most reviled man in Washington. Democrats demanded his expulsion from Congress. And then Hawley's publisher, Simon & Schuster suggested that he was somehow an accessory to violence and insurrection.

In a press release, Simon & Schuster denounced Hawley and canceled his book contract and the book ironically, was about the danger of big media companies. Shortly after this happened, we invited Josh Hawley on the show to talk about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: The people on Simon & Schuster are now so crazed with ideology that they can't bear to hear a contrary view expressed? I mean, what does that portend for the country?

SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO): Well, I think it really shows, Tucker, that we're in a period where the First Amendment values and principles of freedom of speech and also freedom of worship, freedom of religion, these things are really under attack by some quarters, by many quarters.

And again, I come back to the fact that this is something, the First Amendment is something that unites us as Americans and in this time of division, in this time of chaos, we've got to stand strong for that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Simon & Schuster isn't the government, it's a private company. But Hawley's point about the First Amendment is real. What good is free speech if you can't exercise it? But for me personally, what happened to Josh Hawley was more than an academic question.

At the time his book was canceled, I was also under contract to produce a book for Simon & Schuster, a collection of magazine journalism.

Simon & Schuster was paying me to do it, but it still seemed cowardly not to address directly what they had just done to Josh Hawley. So I called the head of the company, the CEO, Jon Karp, and I told him that I thought canceling a book for partisan reasons was disgusting and wrong, and that it set a very bad precedent for American publishing.

Then I told him I wanted to write about what he had done in my new book as a kind of snapshot of what was happening across the country. So I started to report on it.

In the end, I interviewed Jon Karp and other Simon & Schuster executives at some length and on the record. I asked them under what circumstances are you willing to censor the political views of your authors? It turned out to be an amazing series of conversations.

They were highly uncomfortable as you can imagine, but fascinating. Their answers, some of them honest, some of them lies revealed in the clearest possible way how Corporate America undermines free speech in the country itself.

Last week, Simon & Schuster confirmed that they will publish my account of their censorship. CEO, Jon Karp has said he will come on the show to explain what he has done and attempt to justify it.

We assume he will keep his word, we hope so.

That book comes out the week of August 10th. You can pre order it now.

By the way, Eric Swalwell had sex with a Chinese spy. We say that a lot. We are never that specific about what that meant. What was that like, Eric Swalwell? Not many members of Congress have done it. You're always welcome on this show to explain and we hope you'll come to.

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