Stefan Passantino
speaker
273 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Stefan Passantino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, you would wonder why. Now, what the committee says, well, we've saved the transcript, so we didn't need to keep the video.
Yes.
Well, that's what Chairman Loudermilk has made his mission, and he has been dogged in that. And it is Chairman Loudermilk, if I can speak for him, firm conclusion that, in fact, the evidence was manipulated.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's perhaps an issue above my pay grade, but at the same time, things were destroyed. In fact, as I recall, perhaps even... This is insane.
Well, I heard a rumor, and you can tell me if it's not true, that when some of your producers first started looking through the videotape, there were all sorts of annotations and there were all sorts of cross-references to allow it to be searched. Nobody knew that it was someone affiliated with you was looking at it.
And that then subsequently when it was learned that perhaps an outside force associated with you was looking at the videotape, all those annotations disappeared. Yes. That might be false, but that's what I heard.
I think one of the lessons to take from this is that never again should there be a congressional committee that's not bipartisan. Now, if there was an error that was made, the fact you cannot have Congress running a what is quasi criminal investigation like this ever again.
I don't know. Again, I'm just reading the newspaper like everyone else at this point on those issues.
Yeah. Well, clearly that clearly anything that's conducted in the name of the people belongs to the people, just like the building in which that investigation is conducted. Oh, the people's house. Exactly. And the investigation belongs.
And I mean, again, I don't know for sure, but certainly what I had heard was that as Congress was turning over, there were a number of documents that were in the possession of Congress that. were going to be shipped off to the archives, but they knew that when the new incoming Speaker McCarthy took power, that he was just going to call those documents back from the archives.
And so what happened, and again, I don't know this firsthand, but what I'd heard was that a lot of these documents were then shipped over to the executive branch It's so corrupt, it's hard to believe this is our government. It certainly had a corrupting impact on me in terms of what happened, how government abused power in a way that should not happen.
But it also... You cannot have an ostensible truth-finding organization that has a political objective. The two are not compatible. If you're going to be searching for the truth, it cannot be... Well, and also, I mean, look, the truth is...
let me see the emails that were going on while all of the things that I was interested in were happening. And I'm getting a lot of resistance. Well, we really don't wanna, we don't think it's appropriate to turn over staff emails. It's like, Wyatt, we're the public. If there were emails about me that were being sent by official staff,
There shouldn't be some proprietary reason or there shouldn't be some Queensbury rules that says, well, we don't think it's couth for us to be turning over the private emails of our staffers. Well, when I was working in the White House, every single document that we, it was all presidential records. Everything was searchable. Everything can be, has obligated to be turned over.
Why is Congress not subject to those same rules? Why do we not have that same transparency? esoteric notion that, well, it just wouldn't be gentlemanly or it wouldn't be couth for us to reveal staff emails because then maybe they might do that to us. I was like, no, how about you guys only do things in the name of the people that you're willing to stand behind? How about that being the rule?
But that doesn't seem to be... So how is this...
Yeah, well, I mean... It's shocking. Of course, sort of the psychic break of all of that is that we had talked, we had almost the same upbringing, Washington, D.C., private schools. Everyone who was my friend were the children of people who were either in the private sector or public sector working in these revered institutions.
And I grew up and until extremely recently had nothing but the highest respect for our agencies and the media. I mean, as I said, if Walter Cronkite said it was true, if the State Department- I was class of 1984, so I'm a little older than you.
Same exact world, all of my friends, and grew up having a dad who was from that world doing work that I really respected. That was what I believed. And even while working in the White House, never had a concept that there was any sort of conflict between the institutional sort of intelligence world and us in the White House. One of my jobs, as I said, I was the compliance person when I came in.
And so we did all of the onboarding. I brought all of these folks in. And it was my job to do, hear the rules of Washington briefing for all of the White House staff. Well, I was also the adjunct to the National Security Council. So it's sort of like a intel arm advisors to the president, which are career staffers primarily. And I thought, well, we're all on the same team now.
Showing 221–240 of 273 · page 12 of 14
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