Kim Strassel: Biden and Jimmy Carter Aren’t Dissimilar… and Not in a Good Way

Kim Strassel, Potomac Watch columnist for Wall Street Journal, Fox News Contributor, and author of the upcoming book The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Year joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the Hunter Biden hearings and the unfortunate comparisons and legacy that Joe Biden is leaving behind.

Watch the Interview and Listen to the Whole Episode Below:

Full Transcript:

Guy Benson: And here with us, I believe, for the first time in studio in D.C. is Kim Strassel, Potomac Watch columnist, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News contributor and also author of the brand new book, The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years. And I’m holding it up if you’re watching on the live stream at Fox Nation. And I recommend the book not just here on the radio and in theory, I recommend the book on the book. I blurbed this book because I read it in advance months ago. Let me just read my own endorsement. Sure. Thank you.

Kim Strassel You know, it was such a wonderful endorsement. I might be better than the book.

Guy Benson: I don’t think so. But here’s what I wrote. I said “In the style of a dogged prosecutor, Strassel builds a devastating case against Joe Biden’s record, comparing it persuasively and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter’s. But she’s also correct that a guilty political verdict may not be sufficient for Republicans to secure an achievable and clarifying electoral victory. The Biden malaise is a must read ahead of 2024 as conservative voters prepare to make consequential, consequential choices. So let’s start with the first part. I was surprised that you were going to try to make the case that Biden is worse than Jimmy Carter. I was not alive for Jimmy Carter, but you just hear about you read about that era and it was bleak and he lost. He was a one term president. You go through and you say, yes, it’s an apt comparison. In fact, it might be unfair to Jimmy.

Kim Strassel That’s right.

Guy Benson: What are your big reasons why?

Kim Strassel So, as you say, you can make that comparison. And by the way, I was alive during Jimmy Carter. So I I actually do have memories of that period. But, you know, the comparisons are there. Outwardly obviously: inflation, energy, foreign policy debacles, crime, border disorder. A lot of people don’t realize that Carter had his own border problem when the Mariel B oatlift happened and there were tens of thousands of Cubans who ended up in Florida. This is why it’s unfair to Jimmy Carter, though. And I think it’s for two reasons. One, Biden inherited a much better hand. You know, when Jimmy Carter came to office, the world the globe was in the midst of the great inflation we called it. We’d had a global oil shock. There was during the Cold War, there were a lot of problems and high unemployment in the United States. And he had to try to dig out of that. He did it very badly. He imposed a lot of policies that made it worse. Joe Biden, by contrast, inherited an economy that was just about to roar back after COVID as the lockdowns lifted and vaccines went out.

Guy Benson: In many ways, the worst elements of COVID were over. Obviously, there was a lot of pain that happened for quite a while. But he inherited the vaccines. He inherited the worst of the lockdowns in the rearview mirror, and all he had to do was basically nothing, nothing. And instead, he did things and made things worse.

Kim Strassel Yes, absolutely. Also, just on that point, in terms of Jimmy Carter, what killed, you know, two years before he came to office, the United States became a net exporter of oil. Jimmy Carter loved fossil fuels. He wanted more. He understood that energy was the lifeblood of an economy. He just couldn’t get any because of America’s situation moment. And yet Joe Biden essentially launched a war on that industry. And that’s a big cause of energy prices. So that’s one thing. Real quick. The second thing I think goes to the question of intent. Jimmy Carter, for all of the mistakes and there were many. His goal was to try to fix a broken economy. Joe Biden’s intent was to try to transform the country into a European style socialism with all of these policies that he enacted. The outcome of them, which were very terrible things like inflation because of the overspending, etc., but they had two very different purposes and how they ended up in these same spots.

Guy Benson: The stakes next year are very high. Whether this crew will get four more years matters a lot. And them being terrible is not necessarily enough for Republicans to win. We just saw that a lot of places in 2022. So think hard. Choose wisely. Read all about it in the Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel. Kim, since you’re here. Yeah, and we were on the panel last night together on Special Report. You’ve had some time, some more time to digest yesterday’s hearings about the IRS whistleblowers and what we learned. I found them to be very credible. I found the Democrats to be somewhat flailing in different ways, including Dan Goldman. I don’t think he meant to admit this, but we heard it from Joe Biden as a candidate and subsequently as president. He never discussed business, international business with his son, ever. That’s what he said over and over again. And here’s a Democrat thinking he’s helping. And you can imagine the White House being like, please stop helping. This is Congressman Dan Goldman cut 15, this exchange.

AUDIO: You testified that he said to that Hunter told his dad, according to Rob Walker, quote, I may be trying to start a company or try to do something with these guys. Now, let me ask you something that doesn’t sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter Biden was doing with the CCP. If Hunter Biden is telling him that he’s trying to do business with them, does it?

No. But it does show that he he told.

His father he was trying to do business and he.

Well, that is true. Hunter Biden does try to do business. That’s correct.

Guy Benson: Well, the argument from Joe Biden himself in this categorical series of denials that he never talked about this stuff with his son. Here’s a Democratic congressman quoting the whistleblower report, admitting that those conversations did take place at the very least, because we also know there were meetings. Joe Biden showed up. Joe Biden’s name was all over the place in these documents. And the money just flowed from all over the world into the coffers of the Biden family, like nine of them, mostly Hunter and Jim, but maybe some for the big guy, it looks like. And then people down to like nieces who were in college for some reason taking Chinese or Romanian money. What he didn’t realize, maybe Congressman Goldman just did was confirm that Joe Biden has lied about a big piece about this. And if he lied about that, then the whole thing starts to maybe unravel. Right?

Kim Strassel Right. I mean, by the way, we have another person who has made that claim and has first person knowledge, which, of course, was Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who talks about the meeting that they had talking about business. I was really surprised that Congressman Goldman made that. It was a bad mistake and.

Guy Benson: Poor Juan Williams tried to dismiss it on our panel last night. I love Juan, but he had nothing because what do you say?

Kim Strassel I mean, they’ve basically been reduced beyond that. The other one that I’ve just loved over the last couple of days is, well, yes, there’s a double standard. Hunter Biden was treated more harshly than other people. I mean, I mean, they’ve gotten so good at this. It’s just like presenting up as down and front as back. It’s just… but I can’t believe that most Americans buy it.

Guy Benson: No. And here you had two nonpartisan whistleblowers arguing precisely the opposite, that they should have charged multiple felonies and they didn’t. One of the whistleblowers and I mentioned this on the air here yesterday, mentioned on the panel as well, identifies as a registered Democrat who happens to be gay. Here’s a gay Democrat. This is not someone loaded for bear against the president and his party. He just followed the evidence to the extent that he could, because as we played in the last segment, CBS was one of the only outlets that really covered this seriously at all. The whistleblower sat down with Catherine Herridge and said over and over again, we were told to avoid the hot water of the Biden family. We had roadblock after roadblock thrown up. Can’t ask those questions, he was told, especially involving anything that might lead back to then candidate and eventually president Joe biden. I guess one of the only arguments they have on the left is while some of these roadblocks happened when Biden wasn’t president yet, So that was Trump’s fault. So it really couldn’t be that bad. What’s the response to that?

Kim Strassel So the response to that, I think is to look at what else the whistleblower said. All right. And one of the things that they pointed out is that they were very frustrated because there was in the run up to the election a feeling or a belief or actually was broadcast to them from this U.S. assistant attorney Leslie Wolfe and others that were in David Weiss’s office, that because the election was coming up, we were in that sensitive period and we couldn’t, you know, pursue some of these things. Let let’s just be clear. A lot of career prosecutors in the DOJ, they’re not like right-wing maniacs, you know? I mean, a lot of them and I think David Weiss falls into this category are people that have worked under both administrations, and they’re very, very cautious not to upset anybody.

Guy Benson: Well, and he was recommended by both Democratic senators from the state of Delaware sound like he was a real Trump loyalist. And by the way, this just occurred to me, this is another obvious point to make that I’m almost embarrassed I haven’t put together until just now, which is, Kim, the idea that there were roadblocks thrown up in defense of the Bidens and the Democrats during the Trump administration, like, oh, see, Trump was president and ergo dot, dot, dot. This is the DOJ during the Trump administration that was waging war against Trump. With Russia and the collusion hoax. Yeah. All of that stuff that happened under Trump. But it was targeting Trump. I mean, that is not a useful metric or argument at all, given their track record of the FBI and the DOJ while he was president, they were at war with him.

Kim Strassel And can I repeat again that that it was in no small part because there’s an entire cadre of career prosecutors.

Guy Benson: That’s right.

Kim Strassel Who exist there. And they’re part of, to use the word, the swamp to a certain degree. And we certainly know that some of them have political leanings that are absolutely not conservative.

Guy Benson: So the text messages with Peter Strzok and his girlfriend.

Kim Strassel Exactly. Yeah. Or, you know, look at some of the guys that ended up moving over from the Department of Justice and working on Bob Mueller’s probe. And by the way, a bunch of those were not political appointees. They were careers. And then when people started digging into them they just happen to all be careers that all gave all their support to Hillary Clinton all the time…

Guy Benson: Democratic donors. So, I mean, that is yet another weak talking point. And I would encourage people to go in and watch, watch the whistleblowers, see what they were able to document, see the way the Democrats tried to fight them and just assess for yourself who got the better of the argument. To me, it’s very clear. Kim, I want to read to you and this is related but a little bit different. Here is a tweet today from the House Judiciary Republicans that control that committee and they call it big breaking news. And they’ve got documents here attached. Testimony reveals, though, this is sworn testimony reveals that the FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic. But when asked by a social media company about the laptop’s authenticity, the FBI said it had, quote, no further comment. The rest is history, writes the House Republicans and the Judiciary Committee. Journalist Michael Shellenberger summarizes it this way. He says In 2020, the FBI repeatedly warned Twitter and Facebook of a forthcoming Russian disinformation operation about Hunter Biden. When The New York Post published emails from his laptop, twitter and Facebook censored that content. Now an FBI official admits the FBI knew the laptop was real. He says this is massive. In the last point, Steven L. Miller on Twitter says, it’s amazing that the FBI had the laptop for a full year prior to the New York Post story, and when Biden had 50 intelligence officials circle a bogus letter, circulate a bogus letter about Russian disinformation that he then cited on a debate stage. No one from the FBI, including Christopher Wray, stood up and said that was false. So just to follow the bouncing ball, there’s sworn testimony from an FBI source saying that they knew for a long time that the authenticity was real of this laptop, and nevertheless, it was called Russian disinformation by the Biden campaign. They got these former intel people to sort of launder the claim using their expertise that was used as an excuse to censor the story. And at least one of these outlets, one of these social media companies, asked the FBI, hey, do you know if this is real or not? And they had no comment. They wouldn’t comment on it. And even though you had people in the intelligence community for many years, people with long careers, directors of the CIA, all this stuff, they were out there saying it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, an official presidential talking point in front of tens of millions of people in a debate, not a single person in the FBI who knew that it was real at the time stood up and said the truth. I mean, I know we are told this is a nothing story and we’re crazy for thinking this is a scandal. This is a scandal.

Kim Strassel Oh, and by the way, it’s a big enough scandal that a federal judge felt the need to put a restraining order on the Biden government to stop them from telling social media companies to censor. And interestingly, that judge brought up this episode. Now, we did get new information today, but the judge brought up the episode. It was Facebook. And Facebook, according to this, a judge actually reached out to this woman who had headed what’s known as the Foreign Influence Task Force, which is this kind of creepy organization that nobody knows much about, the Christopher Wray set up back in 2017 and asked her like, you know, is this do we know what can you tell us about this Hunter Biden story? And no comment was what she said. What we now know, interestingly, and the judge didn’t have this information, but this is now confirmation, is that the FBI also knew it was false. You know, I mean, we know they’d had it for a year. The judge mentions that in his thing, but he didn’t have a judgment on whether or not what they’d verified or not. Now we know. We know that it was verified.

Guy Benson: So the whole the whole point of this was the Biden people said, okay, this Hunter laptop has some stuff, not just the the lurid content, but emails involving Joe Biden and foreign business dealings. We don’t want this to screw up our election trajectory. Let’s just blame it on the Russians and say it’s fake. And Russian disinformation. They enlisted all these people from the intelligence community ranks, you know, veterans to come out and say, oh, yes, this is Russia. The FBI knew at the time that that was false. They knew that the laptop and its contents were real, and yet they did not say a peep about any of it as this was being fought out in the final weeks of a presidential election campaign.

Kim Strassel But can I just add one more thing about who knew what was real? Hunter Biden knew it was real. And if Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t go to the effort of verifying that with him, of course, they knew it was real, too. And the president stood out there in debate after debate and claimed that was Russian disinformation. And I think that says something very profound about Joe Biden.

Guy Benson: And he cited the authority knowing it was a lie, cited the authority of these, you know, 51 spies and intelligence community folks who really, I think, disgraced themselves, their legacies, you know, their truthfulness. And there were people who knew the truth in the government, at the FBI and elsewhere who just sat on their hands and allowed all this to happen because of the electoral interference that was happening was, I guess, electoral interference that they liked and they didn’t want to interfere back with the truth. So they didn’t. And we got President Biden, which I guess was the goal all along. And now we have the Biden Malaise, which is the topic of the book, the title of the book by Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal and a Fox News contributor. It’s available everywhere right now. The Biden Malaise endorsed literally on the back of the book by yours truly. It is great to see you, Kim.

Kim Strassel Great to see you, Guy.

Guy Benson: Good luck with the Biden Malaise.

Kim Strassel Thank you. And thanks for having me.

Guy Benson: You could probably say that to America. Good luck with the Biden malaise. We can change things next year, perhaps. We’ll take a break. We’ll come right back. It’s the Guy Benson Show.