Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Todd Starnes Show he plans to put forth a bill ending the mask mandates on airplanes.
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“You know, we’re tired of it,” Paul told host Todd Starnes. “We pay you money. We want to be treated like a customer.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH SEN. RAND PAUL ON THE TODDCAST PODCAST BELOW:
Below is a rushed transcript of Sen. Rand Paul’s interview on the Todd Starnes Show:
Todd Starnes: [01:20:24] From the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky. Always an honor to have Senator Rand Paul with us. Senator, welcome back to the program. [01:20:32][7.7]
Rand Paul: [01:20:33] Thanks, Todd. I, for one, have been texting many of his press releases and his press statements because they’re so otherworldly. [01:20:40][6.5]
Todd Starnes: [01:20:42] Well, yeah, that’s that’s a very polite way of putting it. Senator, oh my goodness. Senator, the news coming out over the weekend about this Durham report and the spying, the media, they’re just not going to cover this. They are going to pretend like it never happened. It never existed. [01:21:04][21.7]
Rand Paul: [01:21:06] Yeah. And what’s extraordinary here is that it turns out that not only were they spying on him using the government when he was a candidate using something, you know, tools of the government that were intended to be used for foreign terrorists. But then, even after he was president, they were using private companies. And I think somebody’s going to jail on this, you know, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a judge. But there were these were contractors. So a government contractor, had access to certain databases because he was a government contractor there. And the Democrats hired this contractor to then snoop on the president’s phone calls and transactions to see if he had any connection to Russia. But can you imagine being a government contractor and then spying on the president for another political party? I mean, I can’t imagine how people don’t go to jail over this. [01:21:55][48.8]
Todd Starnes: [01:21:56] It’s shocking. And when you look at the full context, you know, Greg Jarrett’s coming on a little bit later from Fox. He’s written a number of books about this. It is a reminder that the deep state senator really is a thing in Washington, D.C., [01:22:11][15.4]
Rand Paul: [01:22:13] You know, without question, my dad warned about this right after 9-11, he says, You’re going, you’re hungry to go after our enemies. I’m all with you. But he says if you pass legislation like the Patriot Act and you don’t protect Americans from this, you’re going to skip the steps of the Constitution. You know, to get a wiretap on a president or a wiretap on a presidential candidate should be a significant burden. It’s called the Fourth Amendment. But if you use terrorist warrants like the Patriot Act and you use FISA warrants, which are for foreign intelligence, all of a sudden you skip the constitution, you have a lower standard and voila, you’re spying on a president. So but this wasn’t even that they didn’t get. They skipped all the steps here. They didn’t even try to apply the Patriot Act to the president. They just did it illegal. I can see no other way that they can get out of this not being illegally done, and I can’t see how they can avoid jail time. So I really think and this is could get bigger because ultimately, who paid the bills? Did Hillary Clinton have knowledge that private contractors doing work for government were also spying on the president. You know, those questions need to be asked. I think that she should be brought in before the Durham committee. I don’t control any of that and I don’t know who they have interviewed, but I think, you know, you keep interviewing to get to the very top of the food chain. [01:23:27][74.2]
Todd Starnes: [01:23:28] It is, I mean, just the the the overwhelming attacks on Donald Trump and the amount of time and energy and effort that went into trying to stop him from being elected president. I mean, they really considered him to be public enemy number one. [01:23:44][15.4]
Rand Paul: [01:23:45] There’s also the great irony is they were accusing him of being in league with the Russians, but they actually took information or misinformation, Russian disinformation to be used against him. So the Russians produced this dossier. That’s where they got it. You know, this British, this Christopher Steele guy bought information from the Russians to the Russian, puts his information disinformation that the Clintons bought and then promoted to try to link Trump to the Clintons when the only people exchanging money with the Russians was the Clinton campaign because they paid Christopher Steele, who then paid Russians. So it just it just it completely boggles my mind that this thing went on for years and years was bought up hook, line and sinker. They made fun of President Trump when he told Lesley Stahl that, you know, they’re spying on me and everybody said, ‘You can’t say that, you can say that on CBS.’ Well, where is she now? Is she going to apologize now is the word is coming out that the Clinton campaign was indeed spying on Donald Trump? [01:24:40][55.3]
Todd Starnes: [01:24:41] And to your point, I mean, you ask a great point on on your Twitter page, you know, where are all of the civil libertarians on the left? I’d like to know where Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and some of these establishment Republicans are with their indignation over this. [01:24:57][15.6]
Rand Paul: [01:24:58] But they never Kinzinger and Cheney never were defending, you know, defending the 4th Amendment or civil liberties. But there are some on the left, and these were progressive Democrats who I’ve worked with on defending civil liberties and protecting the Fourth Amendment, protecting against search and seizure. But they became very, very quiet under Trump, and their hatred for Trump obscured any kind of fidelity to the Constitution. And this is sad, because I can tell you honestly, if the shoe were on the other foot, if it was a Republican, that had spied on Joe Biden’s presidency, I absolutely would call him out because I believe so strongly in defending us, individuals, Americans against illegal government searches that it wouldn’t matter to me which party. But for the Democrats, they have been largely quiet and very, very few of them have spoken out to say that this was an abuse of government power and abuse of our intelligence agencies to use them against a presidential candidate. [01:25:49][51.0]
Todd Starnes: [01:25:50] Senator, we had a congressman, Louie Gohmert, on in the last segment and I, we were talking about Ukraine. I just don’t get this. That does remind me of that movie. Wag the dog where you’ve got, you know, pronouncements being made. I guess they got their day planners out to decide, you know, when the invasion went to work well for everybody. This is just plain weird. [01:26:09][19.0]
Rand Paul: [01:26:11] I think nobody knows whether the Russians will invade or not. I can tell you my hope is that they don’t invade. I can also tell you that the biggest deterrent to them invading is Germans and the Europeans, because that’s who they do business with. We buy very little natural gas from Russia. We probably get some, but really the Europeans get maybe a third, maybe 40 percent of their natural gas is coming from Russia. But that doesn’t mean they’re just dependent on Russia. Russia is also dependent on those euros that they pay for them. It’s an interdependence, and I think it was a good sign that the German chancellor was going to Russia and I believe is still there in Moscow. And hopefully those conversations will bear some fruit. If we say we’re going to refuse to buy Russian natural gas, I don’t think it’s enough really to persuade them. If the Germans or the Europeans in general said that or said they wouldn’t open up one of the gas pipelines, I think they can have some deterrence. On the other side, deterrence is the stick that’s what you promised to do if they do something you don’t like. On the other side, I think that we actually should say that we’re not going to encourage Ukraine to join a military alliance against Russia. To me, it would be like Mexico joining a military alliance against the U.S. we wouldn’t tolerate. We’d be hopping mad if one of our neighbors did it. So I can understand they’re not wanting Ukraine to be a NATO, and the Ukraine should try to be more like Switzerland and have sort of a neutral sphere sphere with a foot in the East and the West. And I think they would be better off and stronger if they could learn to live as sort of a connecting point between Europe and Asia. [01:27:35][84.4]
Todd Starnes: [01:27:36] All right, Senator Rand Paul on the Patriot mobile newsmaker line. Real quick on these vaccine, a mask mandates and I don’t know if you got the Super Bowl, but that’s just what 70000 people? A good number of celebrities. No, nobody’s wearing a mask. Not even Mayor Garcetti. And yet, the poor school kids in California have to mask up. [01:27:56][19.7]
Rand Paul: [01:27:58] Well, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of L.A., I think, was holding his breath. I saw him. He looked kind of blue, and I’m pretty sure he was holding his breathe during the whole game. So there’s no way you could spread it to now. Now the masks are ridiculous. They’re not working. Cloth masks don’t work. The virus goes right through the cloth mask or around the cloth mask. Even CNN, if you watch CNN, which I don’t recommend, even the doctors on there that love, you know, this are the lap dogs for Fauci. All of them are saying that cloth masks are nearly nothing more than facial decoration, so we’ve got to quit this nonsense. I have a bill that will make it to the floor, hopefully in the next two weeks that will get rid of the airline mask mandate. Now it’s a question whether we can win or whether Biden will sign it. But even Democrat governors are finally hearing and feeling the ire of the parents. Moms and dads, regardless of parties, are tired of our kids being punished with these mass airline travelers. We’re tired of being insulted every time we get on the plane and we’re tired, you know, we’d rather have a sip of water and some peanuts and be left alone on the plane than somebody hassling us. The whole time about your mask is not over your nose, sir. Put your mask on in between your peanuts, sir. You know, we’re tired of it. We pay you money. We want to be treated like a customer. [01:29:09][71.5]
Todd Starnes: [01:29:10] It’s true. It’s true. All right, Senator, we got to leave it there. [01:29:13][3.0]