or than our middle class, and that's a country of 1.3 billion people. but even more significantly, the middle class there isn't as dynamic as ours because the government picks and chooses winners and losers. so it's not based on individual initiative, um, or, you know, you work hard, pull yourself up by the boot straps, you can do anything you want. the communist party there, um, after the massacre ofty yang man square, the communist party scratched their head. wow, we have a lot of discontent in the country, and what most people don't know when the tanks rolled in tiananmen square, they also had uprisings in hundreds of cities elsewhere. so the government moved in to suppress uprisings across the whole country. so the communist party looked in the mirror and said we have to

do something to counter this. so what they decided to do is loosen up a little, continue some economic liberalization. but the idea was specifically to increase the number of rich business people and the middle class, motto make a free -- not to make a free society, but to co-opt the educated class which had led the revolution before. and that's what they have right now. so the businessmen and the business leaders and the white collar or class all owe where they are to the communist party and are mostly members of the communist party. so you're not going to have any friction between, say, the entrepreneurs and the business owners and the party because they're, essentially, one and the same. and if anybody bucks the system, they can just be plucked out and replaced with somebody else. i guess the underlying crisis

that i address in the book is, um, and on the back of it there's this great photo. people think i'm too fixated on it, but it's the president of the united states bowing to hu jintao, the president of china. and, you know, a picture can speak a thousand words or more. you know, he's the head of state of the land of the free, and here he is in an act of subservience to the head of the communist state. so i think you have to think what that means and then look at the policies that he's implementing and wants to implement and what that means for our relationship with china and america's relationship in the world. and i think you can look at several things, but one is just the amount of debt that he, that president obama is stacking up. you know, we're at the point where our debt is about 15 trillion and growing.

i didn't check this morning, but, um, which is, you know, roughly the size of of an entire year of economic growth. so everything bought, produced, consumed, all the service of the united states which is by far the biggest economy in the world, our debt gobbles that up. a whole year's economy of the biggest economy in the world. so you have to think all these programs that obama, all these stimulus programs, i mean, where does that money come from? we're broke, we don't have it, so we have to borrow the money. and one of the biggest lenders that's happy to give us money is beijing. and people don't think about that, but eventually there are policy consequences to being indebted. can you really to continue to be the freest, most powerful country in the world if you're the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world? i think the answer is, no. and then you have to look at who you owe that money to. and in china's case, um, i think you have to put a value

proposition on who these guys are. um, and this goes back to our original gamble. if we engage them -- i mean, the alternative is another question, but, you know, if we continue to engage them and make them richer and they're not becoming freer, well, let's take apart exactly how bad these people are to see how this policy is working. and i'll just go through a few examples. um, one is -- and this is, i think, when i was promoting this book, i did tons and tons of radio, and one of the things that people hadn't heard of before is how, um, china uses the judicial system, um, to feed the black market for organs for transplants in the whole world. there's a huge demand because medical care has advanced so

much. there's this huge demand worldwide for organ for transplant. and the largest provider, actually, is china. and where they get these organs is the whole world combined two years ago executed about 700 prisoners worldwide. i think iran led with roughly 300, almost half. and this isn't, this isn't anything in capital punishment, it's just to put the numbers in perspective. china they estimate, amnesty international estimates that china executes annually between 5,000-7,000. so the whole world is 700, china is upwords of 10,000. and this can be crimes as little as a farmer being executed for chopping down trees without a permit. they've executed somebody before for evading tolls on toll roads. so, you know, you don't have to be an axe murderer in china to

be put to death. and there's no appeal in china. so if you go to court for one of these crimes and you're sentenced to death, they just take you out in the backyard, kneel you down and put a bullet in the back of your head. there's no appeal, you don't get to say bye to mom, it's all over. so, but where this gets, i think, particularly scary is, um, there is a -- [inaudible] in new york a few years ago where they had representatives of the beijing government meeting with some americans and some doctors who were posing as consumers of organ for transplant. and they had these representatives of china had a price list. and it was how much different organs can cost if you want to buy 'em. and they said we will shoot to order. so they were saying we -- you just tell us what you want, and

we'll get it for you. and investigations that have come out since then, it's been shown that prosecutors in china and judges have a list of what is in particular demand at that time. so if someone comes before a court, the prosecutor and the judge knows what the economic incentive is to convict this person and sentence them to death. so, um, i think that's just sort of one egregious example of the place we're dealing with, and this is happening right now. um, another is this idea, you know, how benevolent is our engagement, and are we just kidding ourselves? i think the 2008 beijing olympics are a great example. i was living in hong kong working for "the wall street journal" at the time, and we ran this great op-ed, great op-ed but on a terrible subject, and it was every time the

international olympic committee would visit beijing, the communist party would go crazy making the place look like disney world. they did things like would put paper leaves on trees in winter to make it look, you know, happy and not sad and depressing which beijing is in winter. they'd spray paint the grass green when the grass was dead. so they'd do these funny things. but then they'd do a lot of horrible things too. for example, they would go round up all the physically and mentally handicapped adults and children and throw them in jail because they didn't want anyone to see any sign of weakness in the chinese people. and in some of these cases, there's this one case where this 8 or 9-year-old boy didn't come home from school, he was mentally retarded. and his parents were, obviously, concerned and freaking out. and three or four years -- three or four days later the police --

and this is when the olympic committee was visiting, and they did one of these round-ups. three or four days later the boy was dropped -- dumped off on the parents' front porch, and he had just been beaten to death by police. he was a young, vulnerable person who, i guess the police were just having tear kicks and just beat up this poor little boy and dumped him on the parents' house, on their doorstep. "the wall street journal" published the story about this before beijing was approved for the olympics that year. for 2008. so this was known, the olympic committee knew about it, and beijing won the olympics anyway. i think if you're looking for an anecdote about how serious our engagement is in and if we're really trying to improve society over there, you know, everyone likes to think the olympic games are about, you know, building relationships and making the world better, and i think this is a great example of how -- and they didn't lose any sponsors either, by the way, right?

coca-cola still spent millions and millions of dollars sponsoring those olympic games even with that kind of information in hand. and i guess the last anecdote at least on the human rights issues that everyone knows about the one child policy in china where women are only allowed to have one baby in their entire life, and if they get pregnant a second time, they're forced to have an abortion and then usually forced against their will to be sterilized by the state as well. what a lot of people don't know about the one child policy is that it's not only that you can only have one child, it's that you have to have it on the government's schedule. so, um, the calendar they'll have, you know, all these villages and cit cities, went wn can have a permit to have a baby. if a woman gets pregnant not on

the government calendar, all right, you don't have a child, you get your one child but that's in five years, they'll still force her to get an abortion even though she hasn't had a baby yet. it kind of brings home how the policy's even worse than a lot of people know. i think the other thing and i don't know if i'm bumping up -- i think i'm bumping up against my time, so i'll just touch on a couple things quickly. on the trade issue is one thing is they cut every corner you can cut there. they have no -- you know, they break every law, rule, regulation in the book, and that includes health regulations. so a lot of the products that come here and, sure, it's a big flood. so you have millions of products and maybe only thousands of them are bad, but the thousands of products that are bad can have real consequences. what most people don't know

people think of toys and electronics and things like that, but china's now shipping four billion pounds of food a year to the united states which if you look at all the corners they cut on code violations, um, you know, the food and drug administration at our ports rejects more products from china than anywhere else. thomas jefferson hospital in philadelphia did a study of cook ware that's sent here from china, and 10% of it had lead in it. and that's going to all the stores you know of which i won't mention, but all the stores across the country are selling that stuff. 10% has lead content that wouldn't get approved here. the last thing i'll do, i'll say is there's kind of this myth that american power can't be superseded or, you know, i think it falls back to, i think, which is a beautiful belief in our manifest destiny. but people tend to think that

we're always going to be on top, and i think that makes us lazy where we don't have to do what it takes to stay on top. we're cutting our defense spending all the time. the current budget agreement was based on cuts, and if the cuts didn't happen, they'd automatically come out of defense. china increases their military budget double digits every year as we're cutting and investing highly in new ways, new-age weapons. and right now they have the largest military in the world. people think we do. we have roughly 1.4 million troops in uniform, and they have 2.3. so, um, if you look, i guess to wrap it up, we're receding, our unemployment's higher, debt's terrible, china's had double-digit, 10% growth for almost 20 years. we're not going to stay on top if we continue to recede and

they continue to climb. and we have to change, you know, this is an important election year, and we need to start making some changes otherwise, um, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. thank you. >> thank you, brett. [applause] questions? yes, in front. you can stand, just -- speak loudly. >> thank you so much for being here this morning with us. i'm really interested when you were talking about how much debt china's buying from us now and bowing to beijing, aware of the future that china's projected to have and our alliances with them based on the economic standpoint. what is america's alternative to allying with beijing? >> right. that's the great question. i mean, and i think that's, when you get down to it, i think that's the, you know, "bowing to beijing" is mostly the red dragon's demagoguery book. it can have another part saying china might just blow up and

collapse. i mean, you don't know what's going to happen. but i think the takeaway from it is that any of this isn't inevitable, it's just that our own policy positions are putting us in a vulnerable position. we're spending more than we have, so i think the answer is we need to tighten our belt, look in the mirror and get our act together, you know? and, you know, i think the lesson is, the financial lesson is, you know, we need to be responsible as a country again. and if we're not spending more than we have, then we don't have to borrow it from bad guys like the chinese communists. >> yes. >> my question was similar. but i would maybe have you expound on it. >> sure. >> other than the debt, because you talked a lot about human rights issues and such, what are other policy issues that you'd like to see changed, other policy directions in our policies towards china? >> well, you know, i think a lot

of it is we just have to change our policies at home, and then it won't matter. i think the only reason china's a danger is because, um, you know, we don't have our act together. if we're smart, the only thing we're just going to look at china in the rearview mirror. but, you know, i think it's always risky to, i mean, i don't know how many strings attached you want to put on policies in general. um, but, i mean, i think, you know, defense policy, we bring chinese admirals and generals over here and basically show them everything. we take them to very sensitive areas. when we have new planes or submarine, we'll show their most senior leadership, you know, sensitive information that's, you know, and weaponry that's being developed. and this is supposed to be a, you know, officer exchange. you know, they take us over there and show our generals,

like, their cafeteria and stuff like that, and we show them our new stealth fighters. i mean, i think in general america needs to be serious again, and i don't think we are. if you look at our debt and our defense policies, i think, um, it's just a -- i think we're getting a wake-up call, and we have an election. we need to address everything, basically, across the board. >> i'd like to ask you a question. um, i think your book's very important and very readable. how do you explain that our political candidates are simply not talking about china? i don't think they've read your book. i don't think they address it as an issue, and it is an important issue. >> yeah, that's a great question. i think the answer is kind of like the answer anytime anyone asks why something is or is not addressed in washington, it's all about money. so political candidates need a lot of money to run for office. a lot of that money comes from the businesses that have

interests in china. so if you, if you speak out too much against china, you get a lot of pressure right away. so -- i don't think all of it is necessarily nefarious in that until i lived in china, i kind of believed that our only option was to engage them as well. and i think it's easy to think that. but i think it's just because in the west as people, as the economy is developed people got more, more rights and more freedom, it doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the world works that way. and the government in china has -- their gamble is we won't say anything to them, and by the time we realize this is a mistake that, you know, they'll be on top. but i think the real thing is just, the typical money in

politics is part of it, and i think, um, i think we have the best is system in the world. so i think it's just people need to speak out more. it's amazing if you look at how many americans think china's a threat. it's something like 60%. so politicians who aren't talking about china, i guess, you know, they're not representing their constituents. >> well, if money is the answer to my question, money in politics, i guess that explains why the only one who really speaking out about china is donald trump. he doesn't need their money. >> yeah. he's -- [laughter] the donald's great on this issue. he actually sent me a note saying he loved the book. you know, a lot of times when people have the freedom to say

what they want, they say the right things. and mr. trump definitely is saying a lot of it on china, and i think he's bringing up a lot of very important issues on other questions as far as mr. trump is talking about the need to sort of reestablish our manufacturing base. and it's one of the things when we, when you get everything from somewhere like china is that there is a little bit of myth on some of the free trade talk in that you make decisions as a country, and if you just look at the auto try, for -- auto indus, for example, and it's easy to bash detroit for losing money and making stupid decisions. but a lot of u.s. laws actually discriminate against american manufacturers to the benefit of foreigners, foreign companies. for example, the big three is all unionized and has to use all

uaw workers, and all the owners' contracts and negotiations -- onerous contracts and negotiations that go with that. ford, for example, if they would try to break a uaw contract, you'd have nationwide strikes, it would cripple the company. companies cannot by law, they don't have the nuclear option like the unions do. so ford can't say we're going to fire everybody and hire scabs. i mean, they'd be out of business in a second. foreign companies don't have those restrictions. for example, mercedes, mercedes and bmw have factories in the south, korean and japanese companies have factories in the south, and thai not unionized. they don't have uaw labor. i mean, we have foreign companies that come to the united states sub factors, which i think is great, they're employing americans, but they have a better situation than american companies do on

american soil. and i think there's something fundamentally messed up about that when foreign companies can produce the same product in america cheaper than american companies do. and those are policy decisions. so it's not just ha that american labor is more expensive and china's cheaper and that's why we have to buy all the junk from china. we've made policy decisions that have set that up

you have this big disparity where i think the live birth for girls to boys is something like 6 to 1 in china, so you have millions and millions and millions more boys than girls, so -- i mean, one, if a man wants to get married, there's nobody to get married to. so i think you have a lot of social consequences to that. friends in southeast asia when i visit the thailand and philippines, i say, you know, they're going to invade you just for your women.

but that's going to run into a lot of problems. when you have millions and millions of more of one sex than the other, something's going to give at some point, you know? but i don't think they will just because they have this view that population is a problem and not a resource. and when you have that view, you're looking at how you can get rid of people, not how you can, you know, give them more opportunity. >> my question relates to this rhetoric you're using about china being a threat. seems like a modern stream of international relations theory defines that threats are more created when we speak about people as threats. i'm just wondering if the more we talk about china being a threat, won't they see us as being hostile towards them and that risk, well, negative consequences in the forms of, you know, trade wars eventually? maybe conflict? >> right, that's a good question.

um, you know, i think they look at us and just laugh. you know? you have the president of the united states, i mean, still technically speaking the only sort of superpower on the planet doing a full-blown bow to the president of china, and there's nothing -- i mean, you can't take that seriously. how can you take a country seriously that has a head of state that bows to, you know, people who call them an enemy or a competitor, a strategic competitor or a threat or whatever you want? he's a president of a communist state, and the president of the united states is bowing to him. i think, i think they're not worried about us at all when it comes down to it. i think they're more worried about their interim problems than they are about us -- their internal problems than they are about us getting our act together. >> um, i was just curious, obviously, the human rights issue over in china's important, but when we also have our own

human rights problem here with the trafficsing of aborted baby parts, how are we to even care about china's problems at this current point? >> i mean, i think that's a great question too, and i think we need to lead by example. one thing is after 9/11, i was stationed overseas after everyone in, -- after 9/11, and the one thing i did learn that the world is anti-u.s., is totally garbage. i actually had a member of the pla, i was going over the border into mainland china, and this is the week or two after 9/11, a pen of the red army just came and said, you know, sorry for what happened to your country. you know, we all look up to america. but everywhere you go especially in poor countries, people, people love america and look to america and aspire to be more like america is.

i think that's just a reminder that we need to be what people look up to us as being. and what we used to be we can be again, so when it comes to things like our own policies and abortion and all these horrible things, um, you know, we need to be the america that people think we are, and, you know, nobody can touch us if we have our act together, if we're doing the right things, if we're being an example to the world, if we're the shining city on a hill, we'll continue to be number one, and we'll be number one for a reason. not just because we're powerful, but because we're good. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> katie paf lick is a news editor and contributor to town hall.com and town hall magazine. she's a frequent commentator on fox news, fox business and local

radio programs. she has been a leading investigative journalist in uncovering the truth about the biggest but least reported scandals of the obama administration, fast and furious. the name of her timely book is, "and can furious: barack obama's bloodiest sand a am and is shameless cover-up." please welcome, katie pavlich. [applause] >> good morning, everyone. apparently, it's red friday. we're all dressed in red today. [laughter] lots of red in the crowd as well. i hope you're having a good time in washington d.c. the weather is holding out for you, it's not so hot today and not so humid, which is great. how many of you have heard -- what do you think of when you think of fast and furious? what's the first thing that pops into your head? >> [inaudible] >> scandal, for you? anyone think of the movie? [laughter] the series of movies. >> obama's trying to get people to think that --

[inaudible] >> right. exactly. he won't admit that his own justice department sent them to cartels to kill people. well, the embarrassing part about the name fast and furious is that the obama justice department actually named this lethal program after the hollywood movie, and i have the official government slide show, atf slide show cover to prove it. they actually took a screen shot of the hollywood movie cover and put it into their official documents as an official name. so the unfortunate thing is that this operation fast and furious isn't about racing and stealing fancy cars, it's about, um, something that the justice department claimed to be a program where they were going to allow straw purchasers who are people who go into gun shops and buy guns for people who cannot buy them. their claim was that they were going to follow these guns, allow them to be transferred to these cartel members in order to take down the big fish or what they called cut off the head of

the snake, stressing that this was a tracing program. but the problem is out of 2500 wells that they -- weapons that they allowed to go into mexico and into the hands of the same cartels who we recently saw dumping those headless, feetless, handless bodies of women and men on the sides of the roads in mexico, um, out of 2500 guns there were only two tracking devices in them, one of which was a radio shack homemade version of a device. so that doesn't sound like a very serious tracing program, in my opinion. um, and i'd like to remind president obama that successful drug cartels didn't end up slaughtering hundreds of people in mexico, and two of our federal agents, they didn't get there on their own, in the words of president obama. they got there by his justice department handing them guns. and we've heard over and over again from the media that this was a botched program, that this was somehow a mistake of a program that, you know, thousands of guns accidentally

and somehow fell into the wrong hands. but if you look at all the testimony and you look at all the documentation, the word "botched," and this being a mistake couldn't be further from the truth. whistleblowers who have been the only people throughout this process, um, who have been telling the truth with documentation to back it up have said that this wasn't a program where a couple thousand guns accidentally fell into the wrong hands, this was a program where they were mandated by their superiors -- including senior officials and the number two with man, lanny breuer, in the justice department -- to allow these guns to go to mexico, not to arrest these guys. they watched them buy guns over and over and over again and transfer them over and other again without watching them or seeing where they were going. and so now, more than 18 months later, we've seen -- and fast and furious is such a big scandal, i really don't have time to get into all the details of it, but just catching you up on the current events, we saw

the contempt charges of civil and criminal against attorneyeric holder -- attorney general eric holder, the first sitting cabinet member to be held in contempt of congress, and yet the media doesn't seem to think that this is a big deal. they've been complicit in the cover-up, they have decided that mitt romney's tax returns are more important than, you know, hundreds of people being killed in mexico and getting to the bottom of a scandal that resulted in two of the murders of our own federal agents. out of 240,000 documents that exist about fast and furious -- and, remember, attorney general eric holder claims he knew nothing about this. think about what 240,000 pieces of paper stacked up look like. seems like a pretty big case, right? yet this attorney general doesn't seem to know anything about it. but going back to the tax return argument, and i'm happy mitt romney's been bringing the this

up. he says, well, why don't you release some fast and furious documents, and then we'll talk. and the truth is, like i mentioned, out of 40,000 -- 240,000 documents they've released 7,000, most of which look like this. i'll give you a little preview. they look like this, and this is what they expect you to think is the truth. out of the 7,000 documents, you know, a lot of the redactions include redacting upcoming policy initiatives which is not something that you should be redacting. in fact, that's something at a very low level taxpayers should know about because they'll do be paying for the it, and it will effect them. and then, of course, you had the contempt charges with where chairman of the oversight committee darrell issa kept saying all you have to do is turn over 300 documents $1300 documents out of the 240,000 that exist, and we'll stop the contempt vote from going forward, we'll continue with our investigation, but we'll see

that as cooperation. they showed up to a the last-minute meeting with 30 documents, decided not to turn them over. they proceeded with contempt charges, and right before the first vote -- and i was sitting in the hearing room at in this point -- 15 minutes before the first vote came off the committee to hold eric holder in contempt, president obama asserted executive privilege. now, what's important here is from the beginning of this scandal more than a year ago the justice department and the white house have said they knew nothing about this, that this was a low-level, rogue operation, that the whistleblowers' whose claims have been proven and backed up by fact and documentation, they were crazy to even, you know, bring up the idea of gun walking into mexico. that was their argument all along, and eric holder still makes that argument. this was a low-level rogue operation. well, memos show that eric holder was briefed on fast and furious multiple times throughout 2010. he says he didn't find out about

the program until may of 2011. he uses the excuse that he doesn't read his memos. someone in his staff did and didn't brief him about this program, and that staff member hasn't been fired. nobody has been fired as a result of this program. the white house says that they knew nothing about this, and i think they're getting a free pass because they asserted the least, the executive privilege with the least amount of power. and so they're saying, well, this doesn't necessarily mean that, um, there were communications with the president about this program, but they failed to mention that at least three national security advisers at the white house were being briefed about this program. as soon as we found out about kevin o'reilly who was a national security adviser at the time of this program was in touch with the phoenix office about this, they shipped him off to iraq, and he is unavailable for comment or to answer any questions by investigators. not to mention president obama's senior adviser for latin america was also getting briefed on

program. and so why does this matter to you? why does this matter to young people, why is this a topic you should be interested in? fast and furious is, like i said, a huge scandal. it's a scandal with many scandals in a scandal. whether it's the justice department turning law-abiding gun dealers into criminals to push their own anti-second amendment political agenda, the documentation backs that up, the internal e-mails back that up, whether it's the attorney general changing his story under oath and not being held accountable for this, whether it's the whistleblowers who, like i keep saying, were the only ones who were actually being factual, having their careers destroyed. just today, actually, and this week the new atf director, you know, issued a somewhat minor threat trying to be under the radar, and i don't think he

really understands how youtube works because he recorded it and put it up for everyone to see. but he basically said if you're going to go outside of your chain of command, there will be consequences. you have to go outside of your chain of command for whistle blowing, not to mention they've been warning about corruption in the atn for years and it went nowhere. and then there's, of course, the covering up of the murder of border patrol agent brian terry, i.c.e. patrolman hey my zapata. -- jaime zapata. some of the suspects were let go and now they may be at large in mexico. so the list goes on and on and on. and it's important for -- i don't know what all of you want to do as a career path, but i mentioned the media, and we need more of you to be digging into these things because it's really difficult when there's only a

few people doing it. like i said, they're more than happy to ask mitt romney to overturn his personal tax returns that don't effect anyone, but they're more than happy to ignore the fact that there's 240,000 fast and furious documents out there and that the justice department isn't complying with open records requests, and they're, you know, this is a program that got people killed, yet they don't seem to care much. i'm glad that you guys are here. i know it's summertime, and there's lots of things you can be doing in the summer. i hope that you learned something. like i said, i can't explain the entire thing in 15 minutes, but i just wanted to come here today and let you know that this is something you should be interested in, and all of you can make a difference not only in scandals like this, but other things too. sunlight is the best disinfebruary tax, and we need all of you to start shining on it. with that i'll take your questions. [applause]

i know you have questions. [laughter] >> there's one in the back. >> um, yeah. i've seen this -- >> tell your name. >> my name's brent, i'm from -- [inaudible] university. i see this story hasn't gotten a ton of traffic in the mainstream media, and do you think there has been collusion with the obama administration on that, and if so, to what extent? >> well, i do think that there is some collaboration there, and this is the evidence i have. um, when my book first came out, there was a reporter from the freebie con to e-mailed the justice department to ask about a specific topic in the book to get some commentary, and the justice department e-mailed back and said you're going to have to refer your question to the fbi, but in the meantime, i've been instructed to give you this link. and the link was to a media matters hit job on the entire book and didn't even address the specific question that the reporter was looking for.

now, the reason that's relevant is that the daily caller did a big expose about how the white house was working with media matters on messaging on a weekly basis, and, of course, media matters pushes their talking point out to left-leaning web sites, mainstream web sites and msnbc and i'm not sure about cnn, but the fact is they're working together. so the idea that the justice department would be willing to, um, peddle this george soros-funded web site material to try and discredit the entire book, um, really shows what they're interested in. they're not interested in answering any questions, as usual they're handing it off to an outside organization. but also they are collaborating on messaging and using media matters as a way to get their talking points out to the media. >> katie, i have a question. this is such a dumb, stupid plan that anybody in this room would

have vetoed such a dumb plan as that. so that you get the impression that it's not just a food plan that made a -- a good plan that made a mistake and wasn't followed through. there must have been some important hidden purpose of it behind. >> well, and that's one thing that's important to get to the bottom of. and the reason why president obama was pushing for solyndra loans was because his motive was to get more green energy in the united states, right? so what was the motive behind operation and furious? the people i talk to said, look, they knew that gun control was a politically-suicidal issue to take up especially before the 2010 election based on the 1994 election, rahm emanuel at the time was president obama's chief of staff, he is a smart guy. and so you look at the evidence of the e-mails, the internal e-mails, the sources i've talked to, and they say this wasn't an issue of legislating gun dealers out of business, this is an effort to regulate them out of business, and the obama administration has a habit of

when they can't get something through congress, they go through regulatory agencies. this falls into that pattern. at the beginning of the obama administration, president obama right out of the gate made gun trafficking and taking on these mexican cartels a top priority. he was in mexico within three months of his inauguration. hillary clinton was there, eric holder was there, and they were all pushing that 90% of guns found in mexico and linked to these violent crime scenes come from mom and pop gun stores in the united states. well, that's not true. wikileaks, actually, released a bunch of state department cables that show that that's a flat-out lie. state department cables. hillary clinton is the secretary of state, and yet she was still quoting this pirg. this figure. and so instead of taking a step back and saying, you know, these cartels are actually getting their guns from china, central america, they're not coming to regulated mom and pop dealers to get their guns. they instead decided to flood

mexico with guns, and the way this worked was they went to the gun dealers, and they said you need to help your country by selling to these traffickers who come in to buy guns. gun dealers say, okay, willing to cooperate, but just want to make sure these guns aren't going to mexico, they're not falling into the wrong hands. they were told by these atf officials, don't worry, the guns aren't going to mexico, we're going to make sure these guys are arrested. guess what happened? did atf say, well, we didn't stop these guys at the border and we allowed them to go through, and i apologize that the gun linked to your gun store are being used to kill people? no. they turned right around in the press in public speeches and said speez cartels are coming -- speeches and said these cartels are coming to shop for guns in arizona, look at the trace data. and the trace data linked right back to the very stores who were participating in this program. so you have the evidence there, and can there's more evidence in the book of that.

but that was the motive behind this. and, you know, peter forsellly who's faced a lot of retaliation for speaking out about this said, you know, under oath in front of congress that we weren't giving guns to people who were hunting bear, we were giving people to kill other people. and so, essentially, humans were being used as collateral damage to push this agenda of we need more regulation on border state gun shops. >> but they really didn't track for guns. >> no. right. >> there was that was the whole point of it was to track the guns, and they didn't track them. >> right. the only way their traceable now, when they show up at violet crime scenes, they're left at that scene, and then they're traced back to these gun dealers in the united states who were participating in this program. and one thing i want to bring up, too, is, you know, because the media hasn't really been paying attention to this in a

way that they should be, um, they haven't really been digging into who the players are behind fast and furious. and the people in the chess game are always very important. and one person who was key to this entire thing was former u.s. attorney for arizona, dennis burke. and he worked for janet napolitano when she was the attorney general of arizona as her staffer, was her chief of staff when she was the governor of arizona, served as her senior homeland security adviser when she went into the obama administration, and president obama strategically placed him back in arizona. why do i say strategically? it's a pro-second amendment state, it's a border state, it's easy to plame the state -- to blame violence in mexico on the state. well, dennis burke just so happens to have drafted up the clinton era assault weapons ban with rahm emanuel, of course, served as president obama's chief of staff. eric holder, who's changed his

testimony multiple times, says he knew nothing about this program, right? the very same time dennis burke has this longstanding professional relationship with janet napolitano, and while he is serving as attorney in arizona, he's sitting on eric holder's attorney general's advisory board giving him direct advice on border policy on the border, yet they all claim that they never talk to each other and that none of them knew anything about this. >> ruth carlson from eagle forums st. louis. my question is, how did this catch your eye and how did it catch your eye and go into a book? >> yes, to answer your second question, first. all of you in this room are capable of doing exactly this. the reason i, this caught my eye was when the news started sort of coming out about it, my first question was why would the obama administration be giving guns to the very people they made this huge effort and this huge agenda

to stop. and it made no sense at all. and i remembered them blaming gun dealers over and over again for the violence in mexico, and it just made -- it really just didn't make a whole lot of sense. so i was in washington, d.c., um, and that was when the hearing started, and i just went to every hearing. i sat in that room for hours upon hours and listened to testimony. i went back to arizona and talked to a lot of people there and really just developed relationships and dug in to what was really going on here. and the reason it turned into a book was because you can't talk about fast and furious in whole on the radio for an hour even, you can't talk about it at all in a three minute news package which is, you know, standard for television. and so it's a very complicated story with lots of different moving parts with lots of different people, so it required a book to really give people a lot of evidence and to really put the public uses together. because there were, you know, clashing headlines, but in a

24-hour news cycle, that would go away within, you know, the next morning people would forget about it. so i thought it was important for people to know all the details of the case up to this point. it's been a while since the book came out, but i might have have to do an update. really to give people a basic understanding of what was going on here and who was involved and why when we hear these calls for, you know, political witch hunts and this is just a fishing expedition, why that's not the case. and i was happy to see that a cnn poll two weeks ago showed that 53% of voters think the contempt charges were appropriate. and that's, i think, six percentage point t higher than president obama's approval rating in general. and then that 69% of people, you know, a lot of independents were in this poll, showed that they thought the assertion of executive privilege was inappropriate and that president obama should answer all questions regarding the scandal. so i would hope, you know, the

media ignoring it is only making people angrier, and they see right through it. and the good thing is that with no media -- sorry, i keep hitting these -- new media and social media we can get stories out there in a way that doesn't require a newsroom, an editor necessarily telling you what to do and what to write. >> katie, the lesson of your book in part is so much of the washington media will ignore a good story like this, and a story that's ignored can be picked up by a young journalist with enough perseverance and run wit. and i just want to commend you for what you did, especially since you were met with a stone wall. two quick questions. the obama administration defends this by saying it's a direct outgrowth of efforts the bush administration made. secondly, i keep hearing there were other similar rumors in florida and tampa and miami, how similar were they, and are there scandals going to come bubbling

up from those cities? >> well, the answer to your first question, you know, the tactic at the beginning was deny this, act like this never happened, try to frame the whistleblowers as crazy. once they admitted that was happening, they turned to, well, this was a bush administration program, and they did the same exact thing which isn't true. the evidence that we have so far, and the justice department has been more than willing to turn over evidence about fast and furious -- or about the bush administration, but not their own fast and furious program. the evidence we have so far shows that the mexican government was working with the bush administration on a similar program, and it was probably a pretty stupid program, too, to be honest. but they would allow straw purchasers to come in and do these gun deals in similar fashion, and allow them to either transfer or take these guns to the border or over at the border. they were arresting straw purchasers, and if the guns were going to go over the border, the mexican government was informed

and told, hey, look, these guys are coming over, it's your responsibility now to take care of them and deal with them in your country. especially if this is something that you are participating in. and so, you know, once they started losing guns, the mexican government was dropping the ball -- which is not surprising considering they're one of the most corrupt governments especially in the northern hemisphere -- you know, they were working with the mexican government. now, under president obama the mexican government was left in the dark, they weren't told about any of this. indictments went to nearly zero of straw purchasers under president obama. and the atf agents working in mexico and working these blood-soaked crime scene, they're the ones that are called to go get the guns and trace them back weren't even informed about this program. so there are huge differences between the two and not to mention we have con full-termed deaths of people as a result of fast and furious including

border patrol agent brian terry, and to answer his question about multiple instances of fast and furious like programs across the united states, there's plenty of evidence to support that. this is happening in houston, texas, where the gun dealer was told to sell to these guy, and then the -- after cooperating with the federal government, they turned right around and slapped a federal investigation on them for selling to the cartels. and then in florida there's allegations of them selling to the mf13 gang and sending guns to honduras. as i said, it's difficult to keep up with all the news and evidence that's coming out, but there's definitely other programs that need to be investigated, and it's estimated that there was similar programs and at least 10,000 guns were sent south of the border whether it was into south america or into mexico under this justice department. and considering there's 240,000 documents surrounding fast and furious specifically, i don't

have any doubts about that. yes. >> okay. so what is your view on gun control? because -- just like today in aurora, colorado, the mass murder of innocent victims. >> right. a horrible situation, right? but the bottom line is whether you're an economist or whether you're a pro-gun advocate, um, when you take the right of people, law-abiding citizens to bear arms, the crime rate skyrockets. and you turn people into victims. all the economic data shows it. in chicago and new york city the crime rate is higher, washington, d.c. the crime rate is higher because the only people who are allowed to obtain guns are criminals because they don't care about breaking the law whereas law-abiding citizens are willing to obey the law, but they still have the consequences of people coming into their home or being mugged on the street.

texas and arizona are good examples of where you're allowed to carry concealed, and every state i believe you're allowed to carry concealed except for illinois, of course. and can those crime rates have gone down as a result of that, because it's a te tent. in mexico t the perfect example. i always say that president calderon claims that he wallets to take cartels on, but in my opinion he's actually on their side in a sense because he doesn't allow his own citizens to carry their own firearms or own their own firearms, so guess who has the guns? the cartels, and their mowing everyone down. libya is another example of this. what happened when gadhafi, when the uprising happened. people were getting mowed down. same thing is happening in syria. and so i'm all about people. you know, a constitutional right, and there's a reason for it. it's pretty laid out and simple. yes. >> i'm from --

[inaudible] university. what's kind of baffled me throughout this whole thing is still how eric holder has his job. [laughter] >> i don't know. >> the president's david axle rod, these are great guys, politically savvy guys. i mean, is it -- alberto gonzalez was crucified for a scandal much, much less serious. do you just think it's because the media perception is lukewarm? the stuff is being coveredded, can you offer insight into how and why eric holder is still our attorney yen? >> you know, that's a question that i get confused about a lot. i mean, i think that the obama administration but specifically the justice department, and i would encourage you to read a book by jay christian adams called injustice because it also details the way the justice department and this administration works extensively. this is when you transplant chicago-style politics into washington d.c. i really do think, you know, trying to add on as to exactly your question for months and

months and months, the media's a part of it, but i also think this administration doesn't think they're ever accountable to what they tell everyone else they're accountable there are. eric holder hasn't done that. he's changed his testimony multiple times under oath, and he hasn't been charged with perjury yet. and so, and considering, too, that the justice department decide canned before the contempt votes were even counted that they weren't going to pursue or even look into the charges against eric holder. there's a lot of corruption going on there, and i think it's just a matter of a lot of them are just covering for each other. they're all buddies, and they think if they can just hold out long enough, that they'll get away wit. i have to have faith in our system, i don't think they will. i think chairman issa's doing a great job at getting the facts for as many as he can, anyway, and there are a few select journalists who are doing the best they can, too, in exposing

what's going on. ..

share -- share articles and share information about it, to really get the information out there. and read the book. [laughter] thank you. [applause] >> well, katie is certainly an inspiration. you should know go find a scandal to investigate and write about online and get a book contract. continue as chicago politics thing could to and from the california state university wastage in laws and an economics. he was a columnist for the "wall street journal" of solid and writes articles for national review online. he's as senior editor at the american spectator. john fund is one of the concert

-- countries experts on a vote fraud and has written many books on the subject. today you tell us about his brand new book stealing elections held the overthrow of threatens democracy. please welcome john fund. >> thank you. one correction. the book is who is counting. i wrote this book for one reason , an event that may have happened and you were very young, but still resonates with a lot of americans. that is the bush and 55 for 47 days is noted the president-elect would be. we had court cases, demonstrations, charges back-and-forth that make even the mud whistling and cable television to the lipton. it was a