Russ Vought
speaker
409 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Apr
Russ Vought’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I did, and I very rarely ever learned anything particularly interesting in the briefing. Is that true? Yeah. They didn't tell you who killed Kennedy, huh? They did not, right? And so, you know, I think I came away with the similar skepticism of these briefings and the information and the over-classification in the system. Yes.
They classify everything, and you're reading this thing, and you're like, you realize that's all... just normal stuff that's out in a congressional research service. Yeah, it's on Twitter. I think that's a huge thing that we've got to fix, over classification and system. But I think they both create this environment where it's very exclusive.
they are trying to bring you into their kind of priestly role so that, no, I saw the briefing. If you had seen the briefing, you would be okay with us not having a FISA warrant requirement. Exactly. You would be okay with us just another $100 billion for Ukraine. We can't have Ukraine fall. None of it is rigorous analysis. And honestly, I think that's the biggest thing that I was –
bemoaning is the extent to which rigorous analysis that I thought would be there wasn't there. What do you mean by rigorous analysis? I don't expect people to agree with me constantly. I want well-prepared memos that have a conviction to them and then support them. These are not like, I'm going to plant the flag, and then we can just say, okay, who's right, who's that, who has better support?
No, no. It's like, I'm going to give a blob an exercise to report on something, and the blob is going to kind of like... All it's not a Google spreadsheet, but it's going to all be, you know, an interactive Google spreadsheet to just spit out something that is a consensus document. And you're reading this thing.
Right.
At that point, the point is just to know what the intelligence community is writing on, because you're not going to learn anything from it.
Have you noticed that? Oh, I haven't seen it. You know, I think part of the problem, and this is endemic of not just the IC, but...
our we don't read enough in general we don't have our own convictions we don't search for understanding ourselves and so you have people go in and they're like i'm kind i kind of need this career staff to tell me what to think i don't want to look stupid right and so that has killed us on our side of the aisle the conservative side to say we don't have people that are driving policy and bringing their own opinions and their own
history and so they they are susceptible to feeling like they and they still they still believe that these people have an authoritative stance on things and they don't have enough skepticism that in fact you know there's no the emperor has no clothes right and then that is the and you've got to bring that perspective they're weak inside is what you're saying a lot of these people
I do think that's I do think that's the case, you know, and, you know, from the standpoint of the I see the other thing that they would do is they they would keep you from being briefed. Right. The briefing we've already discussed of what the brief is and sometimes like what President Trump is saying, I'm not going to necessarily get the brief. Right.
But I would find that I wasn't read into certain things until they needed my signature. Right. So once they needed some reason to get my signature, then all of a sudden I get this brief, right? And that's not the way it should be. If you're trying to provide oversight and accountability, you don't know what you don't know. And so you have to be able to have the whole entire –
uh landscape of things that you could oh that that's interesting that we we should do something that president trump wouldn't like that and i find that was very restrictive unless they needed me and so i basically said look you i'm not gonna you are not getting my signature unless you get me briefed up and i want i want to access to all of these things that i need to be able to provide oversight for the federal government and one of the things that we did tucker is that
Since the rise of OMB, that ability to turn funding on and off had always been done by a career individual, not a political appointee. And so we changed that. And it was like the world was going to end. They said, look, you're going to destroy the agency. You can't handle the bandwidth anymore. You can't handle the bandwidth. The chaos will be unmatched. And we changed it.
And next thing you know, everything's flowing across our desk. Oh, that's interesting. We're not doing that. You know, it was just amazing. And if you don't know and have that thesis that says this is what must be done, you could be the most incredible conservative in the world.
You could be the most policy consistent person with the president, but you don't know how to put your hand in the glove and use that agency for the president's behalf. The president's not going to be able to be well served at that agency.
You will certainly read on the papers like chaos. That's good. Fair. You know, as to what's what what just is normal, good government behind the scenes, managing, pushing, pushing through whatever. I think it can be done very quickly. wisely and done in a way that anyone who had a bird's eye view into that would be able to say, that's exactly what we put this administration into office.
But yeah, you're going to have to kick over people's paradigms. You're going to have to kick over people's turfs. You're going to have to change people's understanding of things that they have invested their whole life into a view of the world. And none of this is – their views of the world aren't rooted in the Constitution and in some cases any version of the facts.
But you're going to – that's going to cause a lot of turmoil within these bureaucracies and you've got to fight through it. And then they're going to overlay the aspect of, oh, my gosh, you guys are racist and you guys don't care about us as people. You're going to have to deal with that too, right? They are –
One of the arguments that they're using in the press against me right now, as they say, he he called for trauma within the bureaucracies. Yeah, I called for trauma within the bureaucracy. The bureaucracies hate the American people. They want to put a 70 year old and did a 70, 70 year old Navy veteran in jail for 18 months for building four ponds on his ranch to fight wildfires.
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