The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Sun, 23 Feb 2025
Dan talks with Mike Benz about the USAID scandal, MD Rep Andy Harris about spending bills in congress, Rep. Tim Burchett on confronting lib media, and Michael Knowles about his Jubilee episode debating the LGBTQ community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the USAID scandal about?
He's probably forgotten more about it than most people know, but it's definitely worth your time. We have him on the show as often as we can. He's got a high demand schedule these days. You can follow him on X. He's at Mike Benz, B-E-N-Z, cyber. And I encourage you to do so. Mike, welcome back to the show. Good to have you.
Dan, great to talk as always.
Mike, there's no one out there who's done more to uncover the deep state money flows in you. I mean, you can be humble about it all you want, but I think everybody's starting to recognize now that's true. It's why you're in such high demand for these shows.
But this USAID scandal, I've been making the case, and I'll let you take it from here, that I think the biggest thing if we had to triage our concerns about it is that taxpayer money, very simply,
was confiscated from citizens at the end of a barrel of a gun, which is what the IRS does, you pay it or else, or you're going to jail, and was then used to fund a lot of things, ideology, overseas LGBTQIA stuff. However, it was undoubtedly used to fund censorship and regime change, both abroad and here at home against populist movements.
I see those as the top two most critical things the Democrats are freaking out about. What are your thoughts on it?
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Chapter 2: How is taxpayer money being used for political influence?
Oh, absolutely. I think what you're getting at is that there is a kind of difficult tango dance about the role of the money that the government takes from U.S. taxpayers to spend on influencing the course of events in foreign countries in order to make pro-U.S. interests promulgate there. And there's different schools of thought in terms of the morality or the efficacy of those efforts. But
The absolute drop dead, burn it down and salt the earth around it, you cannot do activity is when that goes back and directly affects U.S. domestic citizens. So the government is basically stealing their money in order to crush them with it. And this is what you saw in every single aspect of what USAID did.
USAID funded media institutions and then had those media institutions write hit pieces on U.S. citizens. USAID funded social media terms of service pressure groups in order to pressure the tech companies or pressure governments to pass laws on the US tech companies in order to censor the people who paid USAID to do that. USAID funds the unions and those unions turn around and do protest movements
and organized violence, effectively, against U.S. citizen elected governments in the form of Trump. Time and time again, USAID is supposed to support energy development projects around the world. They turn around, they fund Burisma, while that's basically the foreign policy pet project of the first family.
Everywhere you look with what USAID does, they fund the drug networks that then get imported and you end up with Kensington, Philadelphia. They fund the paramilitary groups that end up turning around and having you know, effectively, you know, being at war with our own military.
I mean, you had a funny situation where a CIA-backed paramilitary in Syria was at war with a Pentagon-funded paramilitary in Syria. And, you know, USAID has this get out of OFAC free card where they can effectively fund terrorists as long as their contractors do it, which is why I always say, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID.
We're talking to Mike Benz. He's at Mike Benz, cyber BNZ on X. Strongly encourage you to follow him. Again, PhD course in deep state logistics and how they work. Mike, I love how the media here, Margaret Brennan and these other weekend tool bags, how they're feigning ignorance about the fungibility of money. She was on with Senator Hagerty this weekend.
We played the clip at the beginning of the podcast and radio show. And she's like, well, there's no evidence they're funding sex changes in Guatemala. If she just would have looked at usaspending.gov, she could have actually seen it. But God forbid the truth gets in the way. But I focused on that before.
The UNRRA thing is critical because she's pretending that the money that wound up in this UN refugee group that the various reports and money trails, that the fungibility of money, they got money, and then you used it basically to associate with Palestinian-based terrorist groups. She's acting like it's not fungible. But this is the business model for USAID, isn't it?
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Chapter 3: What is the role of USAID in foreign and domestic policy?
It's just discreet democracy promotion that, oh, just so happens to go wrong being done by USAID. I posted an example of this from the first decade of USAID's existence. This was under sworn testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972.
When we were at war in Vietnam and Laos in 1967, the CIA's mercenary army, backed by this commander Vinh Pao, it was USAID who paid Vinh Pao to purchase two CIA aircraft from Air America and Continental Air Services, which are two CIA proprietary airlines. This is all public and declassified aircraft.
nominally in order to help economic development in the region that the CIA-backed paramilitary effective terrorist group was operating. They knew that that was where drugs were being shipped out of the Golden Triangle. So basically, USAID bought them the airplanes to be able to retail the opium from the Golden Triangle to Vietnam in order to sell them in order to fund their own mercenary army.
USAID has been doing this since the day it was born.
Talking to Mike Benz. Mike, Jerry Baker has an interesting piece just dropped at the Journal. You know, not a big MAGA guy, but, you know, that's fine. I read all kinds of sources. And he makes a really good point here. Something I kind of addressed earlier, he just says a little bit differently.
You know, the Democrats are dying on this USAID hill, not because they really care about Guatemalan sex change operations. I mean, it is fitting to their ideology, but that's not really it. What they're really defending is an unaccountable government, which is the collectivist communist dream.
I mean, when you're a communist, like most of these progressive hardcore leftists are, and you believe in government controlling the means of production, one of the best ways to do that is to fleece taxpayer money and start
Turn it over to the communists who like nothing more than the opaqueness of USAID funding and then use it to break down a merit based capitalist, a constitutional republic and populist movements around the world. I mean, they're dying on this hill to defend what I'm getting at is the unaccountability of the operation. It's not even specific things. That's what's going on here.
I definitely think that's part of it. There is another aspect of it that I think is parallel and on par with how sinister that aspect of it, which is that the cynical exploitation of race, gender, and sexual orientation and religious cleavages within countries in order to selectively rig its internal politics.
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Chapter 4: How does the Freedom Caucus view current spending bills?
Yeah, I saw that one of the numbers they're looking at for cuts. Hold on, let me get some water. You're a doctor, right? I may need you. I'm kidding. Excuse me. So one of the numbers I saw, in the Wall Street Journal column was they're looking at 4.5 trillion in cuts. That's a big number. Is that realistic? And believe me, Congressman, I'm hoping that happens.
My issue with it is every time we talk about cutting some congressman, Republican or Democrat, it's bipartisan. You've seen it. It's like, well, we can't cut that USAID program for a farmer in Accra, Ghana, because he's buying products from this congressman's district in Iowa or Wisconsin. We're going to go bankrupt if we keep that up.
Is there a feeling up there like, hey, it's time to put these parochial interests aside and do what's best for the country? Because if they're not, this thing's going to die on the vine.
Look, I think you're right. The number, you know, for the $4.5 trillion is actually the CBO estimate of what the tax cuts will cost. The number we're talking about for spending reduction is like $2.5 trillion or so. But, Dan, let's put that in perspective. That's $2.5 trillion over 10 years. So that's $250 billion a year. Our deficit's $2 trillion.
And remember, Elon yesterday at the White House said we should cut $1 trillion a year. So the numbers we're even talking about and getting hesitation from some Republican colleagues is way below the number that we actually have to do. Because like you said, we're right. We had a vote on cutting USAID by 50%, not eliminating it, 50%.
And a majority of the Republicans voted against that cut last year.
Yeah. And we're talking to Congressman Andy Harris from Maryland. You've been there. You know, you've been there. It's not your first term. It's not your first rodeo. You've worked your way up the ranks. You've sadly seen this for a long time. I mean, if I'm correct, you got elected right around the Tea Party revolution. I mean, I was in Maryland.
I don't remember exactly the year, but that's generally the timeline, right?
That's absolutely right. It was a 2010 election. It was a Tea Party election. We went to Washington to cut the deficit and restore fiscal sanity. Just to remind everyone, the deficit at that time was $300 billion, only $300 billion, and we thought that was a large deficit.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges in cutting government spending?
And, again, look, as long as they want to stay tone deaf, I'm all for it. You go ahead. I'll have a discussion any day about whether or not we should, again, be doing transgender comic books with federal taxpayer dollars in foreign countries.
Right. Congressman Andy Harris, we're talking to Congressman Andy Harris from Maryland, House Freedom Caucus. Congressman, one of the things that concerns me is you guys in the Freedom Caucus have been for a really long time fighting for some degree of fiscal sanity.
And I want to say in advance, I am absolutely on team House Freedom Caucus, period, dispositive statement, put an exclamation point at the end. However, here comes the kind of the buyer beware. We are not a majority of the majority in the House. I wish we were. It's kind of sad we're not, but we're not.
You've got a lot of swing state Republicans who will vote for any amount of spending as long as it makes them look good in their parochial district there, right? So how do we overcome that?
You know, the House Freedom Caucus, there were even some, you know, rhinos in the news media who will attack you guys as if you're the problem when I think you're the only wing of the Republican Party speaking common sense. We can't just tinker around the edges anymore.
Does the Freedom Caucus have a plan here with President Trump and the MAGA crowd who are really interested in transformational change to win the narrative war? Because sadly, that matters.
Well, I think we won the narrative war with the American people. There's no question about it. So what we need, like you say, for a year, for a decade now, it's our 10th anniversary of having the Freedom Caucus. For 10 years, we've been talking about fiscal sanity. The real change now is that we have someone like, again, Elon Musk in the Oval Office yesterday saying, oh, by the way, we should cut.
the deficit by $1 trillion next year, and the president nods in approval. The president, with us in the White House last week, came right out and said, gee, why can't you guys just balance the budget now? We're finding all this wasteful spending. Why can't you do it?
Practically, it'll take us a couple of years, but we have the oomph of Elon Musk and the president now behind what we've been calling for for a decade.
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Chapter 6: How can tax cuts impact government revenue?
They're going to put their kids through school. They're going to buy a car. They're going to achieve the American dream and buy a house and have some financial security because those billionaires that they run down, they're out there rolling the dice every dadgum day. It used to be in this country we were about entrepreneurs and people that took risks. Now it's these little...
pantyways that want to sit on the sidelines and wring their hands and talk about how awful we are.
know what i love about you you do you even have like a focus group that sits around and tells you how to talk i doubt it because if you do you ignore them and i i really love that my old chief of staff when i was my my he was my chief of staff when i was first elected congressman my press guy he said one thing i've never had to do is go behind tim and say what tim really meant to say was right right yeah no way unclear
Yeah, my dad was an old World War II Marine in Peleliu, Okinawa, 1st Marine Division. And my mama lost her brother fighting the Nazis. Mama flew an airplane during the Second World War. Kid Rock always says he's the American badass. Well, I got news for him. I was raised by the American badasses. And they didn't mince words. They were good Christian people. But, man, they would call you out.
And they believed in that First Amendment, Dan. And I'm glad it's coming back in vogue.
Well, it reflects in your leadership style. We're talking to Congressman Tim Burchett from Tennessee, frequent guest on the show. Congressman, you know, Democrat hypocrisy is nothing new. I've argued over and over that they don't care about looking like hypocrites. They don't. They care more about hierarchy and staying in power. They don't care.
They know the media will protect them from making two separate points. So I got two things for you here. Number one is now all of a sudden they don't like Elon and they don't like billionaires. They don't care about George Soros, though. They love him, actually. But they don't care about criticizing billionaire George Soros.
And secondly, I'm sure you remember, as I do, when Elon was a green champion for them through this electric vehicle car company called Tesla, they loved Elon. So nothing they ever say is true. They have based their entire political guiding ethos, their credo, on a fraud. Nothing with them is ever principled.
Nothing, as a matter of fact. Because right now, all they're doing is trying to get something that sticks, Dan. If you caught that Doge committee that I'm on, that my friend Marjorie Taylor Greene put me on, she chairs it. All they did was attack him, attack the fact they kept billionaire, billionaire. I've gotten...
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