Several of America’s major media outlets have called the 2020 election for Vice President Biden. But the election hasn’t really yet been decided. Recounts have been requested in Georgia and Wisconsin, and there are pending lawsuits in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, with other challenges possible.
In this episode, we sit down with Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar to get his take on the current state of the election, the role of big tech, and what he believes is needed to regain the trust of the American people.
This is American Thought Leaders ????????, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: Congressman Paul Gosar, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Paul Gosar: Thank you, Jan. I appreciate being on.
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Gosar, just not too long ago, many media announced that Joe Biden is now the President-elect of the United States. I want to get your reaction.
Rep. Gosar: I find it interesting that they’re not the ones that can call it—it’s the states themselves. From that standpoint, they’ve never been a friend of Donald Trump, and I’m sure they were going to do that. So be careful what you ask for.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m here in New York. As this announcement was going on, I could see that a lot of people—just from the sounds, there were a lot of horns honking and so forth, so it seems like quite a number of people have accepted these calls.
Rep. Gosar: They may have accepted it but there’s still a lot of room out there that makes me want to make sure that there’s a fair election, that everybody’s vote was counted and recorded properly
Mr. Jekielek: Right now, you’re heading to the state capital, as I understand it. What’s going to be happening there?
Rep. Gosar: Whatever he’s doing, it’s going there to make sure that the state government, makes sure that they have a fair election, that the ballots were cast, the ballots were recorded properly. One of the things that we’re taking note of is the software. There seems to be a problem because this is the same software that was used in Wisconsin. Same thing in Clark County, same thing in Georgia, where it seems that it’s very skewed.
The president came to Arizona four times into my district—twice to Yuma, once to Prescott, and once to Bullhead City. The reception was overwhelming, was overwhelming, and so the numbers don’t seem to calibrate. So from that standpoint, I know there’s still a few ballots that are still out there, so there’s still a chance that he can still turn that around.
But we want to make sure that the American public feels, and especially the Arizona voters who I represent, can be confident that the process was done properly. If it’s an algorithm or a software glitch that is problematic, we need to find it out. I think that is required by the Constitution to make sure that sacrosanct both for one person is legally cast and appropriately tallied.
Mr. Jekielek: What reason do you have to believe that there may be some issue with the software? What are you thinking right now?
Rep. Gosar: What ended up happening in Michigan is that they saw this algorithm go into effect where it actually flipped Republican votes into Democrat votes, and it was a turn of 6,000 votes in just that area. So once again, software, if it has a glitch like that, it’s very troubling because it’s very possible that it’s in every software package that they actually put out.
This same software is throughout Georgia, it was rejected in Texas, it’s in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Only in Maricopa County, by the way, and only in Clark County in Nevada. It’s also in New Mexico, it’s also in Colorado, it’s also in Illinois. So there are a number of states here that employ it, and they’re hardly fans of Donald Trump. So this is a short exercise and a very cheap exercise to get the American public back that our elections aren’t grounded in Russia or anybody else’s influence.
Mr. Jekielek: So what exactly can be done here to assess this. What are you recommending?
Rep. Gosar: What ends up happening, we’re asking for a hand tally of all the votes, tallying both Republican, Democrats, and Independents in our case, in our state. You run all the mail ballots, you tally those, and then you compare it against the machines. That should tell you. They should be equal and the same. If they’re not and if there’s big variances, now you’ve discovered the problem.
Otherwise, what happens is you’re guessing about what the algorithm has been built into that aspect. And then it’s my understanding that there was a patch that was put on these programs just prior to going live at the general election.
Mr. Jekielek: What is your expectation of the outcome, or do you have one?
Rep. Gosar: If there is a glitch that’s built into the software system, it’ll be shown, and it’s easy to define that. It’s just time-consuming but I think, as partisan as this country is, this is a great exercise to get back the trust of the American people.
Trust is a series of promises kept. If we say that the Vice President Biden won the election, let’s just make sure that we calibrate it and make sure that we reassure people: that’s exactly what happened. But when you have time after time after time where you are promising people something and you don’t deliver on it, and people are not held accountable for their wrongdoings, like the Democrats who have charged Donald Trump, they have no trust in the system.
Unless we do this right now in this exercise, what’s going to be the trust and the validity of Joe Biden as President of the United States, especially when you have a computer out there full of Hunter Biden stuff, and emails, and pictures? Now the American public doesn’t trust any of that.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re actually calling for the governor to convene a special session of the legislature. What is that and what is the purpose of it?
Rep. Gosar: What ends up happening is by our Constitution, our state legislature is the one that has oversight of the elections when they look at all the different districts that are encompassed in Maricopa County and the influence they have in all the surrounding counties. So in our state, the governor would have to reconvene a special legislative session for that to occur, so that’s what we’re asking for. Currently, the state legislature is out. They now have got their leadership still aligned but what we need to do is have them go back to work to condone this audit and go from there.
Mr. Jekielek: Going back to an earlier question I had, my question is, do you have any concerns about the fact that the media have called the election so decisively, and quite a number of them, in terms of the impact on the American public?
Rep. Gosar: Jan, we actually said that nobody could use subliminal messages and that’s been outlawed. Tell me what the difference this and subliminal [messages] is, moving the population, saying that Donald Trump is going to be creamed all over the country, and that’s not exactly what happened.
It was a tight race regardless of what they think, and they’ve hardly been fair about the whole application: the censoring of this president, the big media push, the big platforms, push anti-Trump aspect. So I think we need to make sure that we solidify the perspective of the American public and particularly with this software that’s now shown it has a glitch, and particularly in Michigan. We need to make sure that glitch does not occur in Georgia, the implications can be actually huge, and in Arizona, and also in Nevada.
Mr. Jekielek: How much time do you expect this to take?
Rep. Gosar: As much time as needed to. I think from the standpoint, if the resources are there with the manpower, it shouldn’t take much longer than two weeks. And that’s just part of the process that they would normally do. It’s just a little bit more extensive. But most of the time, what they have to do is they have to go back to the county recorders, they go in, do a sample of each of their vote totals, and they look for some error.
This is just going a step further and saying, “We have a problem, so let’s make sure that the problem doesn’t exist all the way through the population of votes,” because an algorithm, Jan, can be actually created that skips randomly. That’s why you have to do the full audit.
Mr. Jekielek: So Congressman, I wanted to switch gears here a little bit. I saw that you were commenting on a Tweet by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that basically seemed to be calling out for people to be collecting information about people that had been in the Trump presidency, in the Trump campaign, supporters of the president and so forth, and you have some commentary on this. I wanted to get you to speak to that.
Rep. Gosar: Yes. How Marxist is that comment? Collecting information on your adversaries, that is exactly what the American public had repudiated. We can’t stand that application. From the standpoint as is, what did they do with Donald Trump?
They made all these accusations, these false accusations. None of them proved any validity whatsoever. In fact, what it actually got was Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas to start speaking up and to say the slander laws need to be reasserted so that we can look at these false accusations that are just blatantly being thrown out with no care arising.
I guess she doesn’t believe in the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, does she? That’s pretty astounding that we have somebody in that position that doesn’t believe in free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion. That shows exactly what she’s made of.
Mr. Jekielek: Someone responded to this, and I’m not familiar with the organization, maybe the Trump Accountability Project, Michael Simon is saying, we’re gonna collect every administration staffer, campaign staffer, who represented them, everyone. What is this organization?
Rep. Gosar: I don’t know. I can only speak for what I can do and how I handled myself. I find this very offensive. This is exactly the same thing that the platforms are doing, Jan. They’re accumulating all the information that you on user platforms are doing, without your permission.
That’s why I have bills to actually take this on, stop the censorship, and then also stop the data collection, stop connecting the dots. Those are important aspects to freedoms of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. That’s exactly what our constitution was all about. So this really shows her stripes as a skunk in the Marxist outfit.
Mr. Jekielek: Now, let’s talk a little bit just to finish up here about the big tech aspect. We’ve talked a bit about the media. What is your take on how big tech is involved in this election?
Rep. Gosar: Don’t have to take my word for it. The foremost expert on this issue was Dr. Epstein from Texas. And he made the comment during his Senate deposition on his hearing that during the 2016 election, over 2 million votes were pushed towards Hillary Clinton. In this election, they were going to try to push over 15 million.
Exactly what they’ve done to the recent future by censoring the president’s speech when he’s just talking about an election. How authoritarian is that? That’s exactly what Marxism is all about, restricting this speech aspects, assembly and content, and that’s exactly why we have to remove Section 230, and make sure that they’re held accountable for the wrongdoings and imposition of free speech. Now, liability is you can go to their platform, but when they act like publishers just like you, when you make false speech, you should be able to be sued.
Mr. Jekielek: In terms of the election outcomes and so forth, I was looking in the president’s Twitter feed and a great number of those posts in a row have this warning where you can’t read them until you actually quick click through.
Rep. Gosar: Once again, they can show that they can actually do what they say they can, it’s actually applying filters that you want and making sure that’s contractually obligated. So everything in my bill that talks about defining what is illegal speech and then opening it up to my ability, it makes perfect sense now.
Now they’ve shown that they can actually do the filter and they can be choreographed one on one with everybody. So there should be no contest to my bill. It should be something that both sides agree to because everybody believes in freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion.
Mr. Jekielek: Can you just tell me in a couple of sentences exactly what the bill intends?
Rep. Gosar: What it does is that it identifies a broad blanket immunity that has been interpreted by the courts but you can’t sue the platforms for anything. When they actually got that type of immunity is when they were a platform, not a publisher. They didn’t want to have liability for those contents of those things that were sold or moved around their platforms.
But now they become publishers where there’s actually the communications. This is the town square. This is where ideas are communicated. So what ends up happening, when they censor people, they’re restricting free speech. And if that’s where they’re going to go, they have to take the immunity blanket off and therefore have the same liability as you or any other media source in that public square. So if you’re making false accusations or you censor somebody’s speech, you have the ability to be sued.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of the DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Google then?
Rep. Gosar: I think it’s great. But I think the first thing that you do is, when you do antitrust before you take off Section 230, all you’re doing is you’re taking the big 5 sharks or 10 sharks that are in the platforms currently, and you divide them up into little piranhas. If they’re going to eat you up, it just depends on the bite because they still have that blanket immunity. So now what you’re doing is you’re giving a bunch of them the blanket of immunity, and that’s not exactly what happens. If you and I can’t have that immunity, why are they entitled to that immunity?
Mr. Jekielek: So Congressman, what do you expect is going to happen in the near future, basically surrounding this whole election process?
Rep. Gosar: I think what you’ll see is the media attack the Trump administration, just like they have for the last over four years, even prior to when he was a candidate. I think you’ll see the Biden administration, or the Vice President and his temporary administration, start putting people into place, that’s the perspective. If all this fails, he is then the president-elect of the United States, so you better be ready because he’s created a mess.
And then what I actually think is that depending upon how these challenges are handled, you need to build the trust in the American public or you make it worse, and then you got hell to pay in regards to these investigations into the Mueller, the Biden, Ukraine, Obama, interference with the Trump administration, and now the Biden fiasco. What happens with that? People will decry across the country, “Justice wasn’t sorted.”
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman, what would it actually look like, do you think, for the entirety of America to regain the trust of a future administration?
Rep. Gosar: I think that justice has to be served, particularly when you have now the backup emails in the computer of Hunter Biden that show that there was intentional and willing interference with the business of the United States for personal gain by Vice President Biden and his son. We also have the investigation in regards to Ukraine and Obamagate, and this Durham report that needs to come to finish.
When you stop those, the American people say, “Wait a minute. What? Whoa, whoa, whoa! If I was accused of all that, I’d already be in jail. I wouldn’t have a chance to pass go, collect $200, and not go to jail.” They want to see the evidence, and if you’re not guilty, allow the evidence to move forward.
If they’re not going to do that, I think everything needs to be made public because we’re the governed and we want to make sure that we have faith in the way that our government functions, and that the republic is functional based upon the equal application of the law, and that has to happen for our republic to go forward.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts, Congressman?
Rep. Gosar: Yes. I think we’re at a precarious moment. If things aren’t done right, we fall back [inaudible] by both sides. If we do things that start building the trust of the American people, maybe this is a new day dawning, but it depends upon how you handle these, making sure there’s transparency, making sure that you honor the promises that you made, and making sure that everybody is on target with the same goal and respect.
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Gosar, such a pleasure to speak with you again.
Rep. Gosar: Thanks, Jan. Appreciate it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
