Transcript of U.S. Hits $40 Trillion In Debt & FBI Investigates An Ex-Congressman

What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today.

The FBI intercepts former Congressman Eric Swalwell stepping off an airplane in San Francisco.

What does this mean for the former Democrat congressman, and what did the agents confiscate?

I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, August 21st. This is Morning Wire.

The US national debt reaches a staggering milestone, surpassing $40 trillion, almost doubling over two presidential terms.

The fiscal consequences, you know, were ignored. And since then, we have not really paid any attention.

And with James Fishback flopping in Florida, are the Groypers floundering? We look at the state of play in right-wing politics.

The movement that we started here in Tampa in November does not end tonight.

Night.

We merely pick up the pen and write the next chapter.

Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

I remember as a kid dreading sleeping at my grandparents' house because I would be on the pullout couch in the living room and I'd wake up at midnight to the sound of what I thought was a full-grown grizzly bear, but it was just my grandpa's snoring, which I'm confident would register on the Richter scale. So for my childhood sanity, I wish my grandpa had known about Excite OSA. For people dealing with primary snoring or mild obstructive sleep apnea, Excite OSA treats a root cause instead of just managing the noise. And you actually use it while you're awake. 20 minutes once a day. That's all it takes. Do it daily for 6 weeks and then a lighter routine afterwards to keep it. Most people notice a change in just 4 to 6 weeks. Then you go to bed like a real person. Nothing strapped on your face, nothing plugged into the wall. And in clinical studies, 90% of patients saw a reduction in snoring. You just answer a few questions online, a licensed provider reviews them, and then it ships to your door. See if it's right for you. Get Excite OSA at springsleep.com/wire and use code WIRE, W-I-R-E, for 20% off.

Again, that's Excite OSA at springsleep.com/wire. Thanks to Spring Sleep for sponsoring this episode. Excite OSA is an FDA-cleared prescription-only device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. It's not for everyone. Individual results may vary. Risks and benefits at springsleep.com.

Just days after newly declassified documents shed more light on former Congressman Eric Swalwell's romantic relationship with a Chinese spy, we've now learned that the FBI searched his home in DC and seized his cell phone.

Joining us with more is Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Brent Schuer here in the studio with us. Great to have you on.

Of course.

So I know your team has been in touch with the administration about this particular case, and there's been a lot that's gone on with Swalwell over the last year. But we've just learned this new information. So if you could, can you walk us through what happened over the weekend?

Yeah, we confirmed this with the administration that over the weekend, disgraced former Congressman Eric Swalwell was stopped by FBI agents and he had his personal phone and his laptop confiscated by the agents. He was detained, um, for a brief amount of time. At the same time that this was happening at the San Francisco airport, um, agents were apparently executing a search warrant at Swalwell's D.C. home, and there they, uh, seized additional evidence. So, I mean, already a very tough year for Eric Swalwell, but it seems like his trouble is just beginning.

And what do we know so far about the investigation, and do we know anything about his actual criminal exposure?

So the Justice Department and FBI have yet to officially comment on the raid or the airport encounter and exactly what it was connected to. Swalwell, of course, has not been charged with any crimes yet. A source, however, told the LA Times that the warrant is connected to a civil rights investigation into us— into those sexual assault allegations that were made against Swalwell. And authorities are reportedly considering multiple federal charges against Swalwell. Um, the Washington Post spoke to one of Swalwell's accusers back from April, and she said that she was also interviewed by the FBI earlier this year. So it's another piece of evidence that kind of ties it to the sexual assault allegations. And there was another woman who says she was contacted by the FBI several times regarding Swalwell. And all of this is unrelated to the news that broke earlier this week with, uh, declassified FBI files showing that the long, you know, speculated sexual relationship between Eric Swalwell and suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang, better known as Fang Fang. Swalwell admitted to authorities that they had a physical sexual relationship. So I mean, it's, it's not good for Eric Swalwell. And this— if you're Swalwell, you're happy that you dropped out of Congress and your governor's campaign back in April, because I mean It's just crazy to think that just a few months ago, this guy was the front runner to be the Democrat nominee.

Yeah.

To be California's governor.

Yeah, it really is incredible that he was the front runner, like you said. For those who haven't been tracking this, why did he have to drop out in April? What were the allegations there?

Yeah, not only was he the front runner, he was still a prominent congressman and he was still a prominent talking head on all of the channels. But back in April, he resigned from Congress after a House ethics probe into misconduct and sexual assault involving employees in his congressional office. So a former staffer told the San Francisco Chronicle that after she was hired back in 2019, she was just 21. Swalwell sent her nude photos and messages on Snapchat. A few months later, she had drinks with him. Blacked out and woke up naked in his hotel bed. In 2024, after she quit working for Swalwell, the two ran into each other at a charity gala. After the event, they had drinks again, and she says he forced himself on her after she pushed him away and said no. It wasn't the only staffer. Another accuser accused Swalwell of spiking her drink and raping her in a Beverly Hills hotel room. She said Swalwell choked her until she lost consciousness. He, of course, completely denied all of these allegations and described it as a political hit job. But it was a big enough hit job that he had to resign, and his governor run had no chance, completely plummeted in the polls.

But of course, those are not the first allegations around Swalwell. We had Fang Fang years ago, which clearly the voters have forgiven him for.

Yeah.

And this week, I mean, it came out that he admitted it. Fang Fang was kind of only a thing that existed in conservative media. But like a lot of these things, it turned out to be true. And I mean, we're learning a lot about Eric Swalwell. We will see what the FBI learns from all the materials they seized from him, both at the airport and in his office.

Like you said, really a stunning sequence of events. And we're going to learn a lot more soon. Brent, thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, of course, John.

It's the end of summer, almost fall, which means soon we get to start wearing layers and cozy clothing. And Quince is already starting to release their fall items, so now is a great time to do a wardrobe refresh. Quince specializes in quality, timeless clothing items that you can layer together and wear throughout the year. They're beautifully made but practical enough that they hold up to real life. Most items are machine washable, and everything is made of premium natural materials like European linen, organic cotton, cashmere, and real leather. Quince is able to offer really high-quality quality materials and construction for 50 to 80% less than prestige designers by using the same ethical factories and selling direct to consumers. So you're paying for quality and not middlemen and logos. And I've said this before, but my favorite Quince item— and this is a very competitive category— my favorite items are the cashmere fisherman sweaters, and I am so excited to break them out soon. So upgrade your everyday. Go to quince.com/wire for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's quince.com/wire. Quince.com/wire for free shipping and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com/wire.

There is a point in every growing company where you realize the systems that worked when you were small don't work anymore. Suddenly you've got controls in one place, vendor risk somewhere else, customer commitments buried in contracts, and someone is trying to make sense of all of it before the next meeting. This is exactly the kind of problem that Vanta was built to solve. Vanta connects your security and compliance program in one place with more than 400 integrations and continuous monitoring. It automates evidence collection, surfaces the risks that actually need your attention, and even organizes audits around your auditor's requirements. And the Vanta agent works around the clock with the context of your entire program, helping make sure that things don't quietly slip through the cracks. And the numbers are pretty impressive too. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over 3 years and pays for itself in 3 months. There's a reason that more than 16,000 companies trust Vanta. If you're spending more time tracking down information than actually using it, this is worth a look. Learn more at vanta.com/morningwire. That's vanta.com/morningwire.

A historic but not necessarily celebratory moment as the US debt crosses the $40 trillion mark. According to the Treasury Department, the national debt has more than doubled over the last decade. Meanwhile, the Treasury reported a more than $432 billion deficit in July, the highest monthly total since March of 2021.

Joining us now on the implications involved in this ballooning national debt is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Congressional Budget Office director. As someone with intimate knowledge of how the federal government manages its money, what are you thinking when you see these numbers?

Well, it's actually— I was quite struck by the, by the intro because I got skewered as CBO director because we ran a $430 billion it in a year. So that tells you where we are now. Um, I don't think people appreciate that the federal government has business as usual that consists of spending $7 trillion, raising $5 trillion in revenue, borrowing $2 trillion, a trillion of which is interest on previous borrowing. I mean, that's, that's just run-of-the-mill finance these days. It's frightening.

It's incredible. And it is almost impossible— I think it is impossible to actually understand, to calculate as a, as a regular human. We can't understand these numbers.

So because we were running up on the $40 trillion, we spent a little time trying to figure out how to illustrate how big $40 trillion is.

Yeah.

So 40 trillion feet is 5,000 Mount Everest stacked on top of each other. Some stuff like that. Unbelievable. It's a lot.

So what's the answer here? Is there a way we can get out of this cycle or, I mean, are we kind of in too deep at this point?

No, we have created this problem. We can solve this problem. The key is to do sort of everything. Step number 1 is stop digging the hole. We really are, you know, running a business as usual that adds to the debt at an alarming rate. So you have to slow down the growth of those deficits to stop the debt from growing and then put it on a downward trajectory. And that will take better economic growth. You hear that from the administration, for example, we're going to grow our way out of it. We won't. But you need, you need as good growth as you can get. You're probably going to need more tax revenue, but you can't tax your way out of it. I want to come back to that point. And then third, we're going to have to take on the spending. And the reality on the spending is that more than one half of all non-interest spending over the next 10 years is Social Security and Medicare, just those two programs. So you, you can't deal with this unless you deal with the big entitlements. And we have been unwilling to do so for two and a half decades.

Indeed. What happens to the country and to average Americans if the US were to actually default on its debt?

So this is an important point. People fear the default as somehow that's when the pain starts. We're already paying for this. We've been paying for this for the past 25 years. We have been running very large deficits even when the economy has been doing well. And in the process, that money is not available to send people to college or to train them or to upgrade your, your software, expand your business. Name the myriad uses that the private sector has for productivity-enhancing investments. They just get pushed out. And when they get pushed out, the standard of living doesn't grow as fast. And we pay for it in, in the, in real time. Growth in the 21st century has averaged a percentage point slower than growth in the 20th century. So if we had kept growing at the same rate as we did in the 20th century, all of us would have about $12,000 extra every year. I'd like my $12K. I don't know about you.

I would love that.

And, you know, the sort of loose fiscal policy has to be part of the problem. We averaged 2% of GDP in the 20th century. We're averaging over 5.5%. It's just— it's a price we're paying every day. And we shouldn't pretend that somehow it's all good now. And what we have to do is fear the default. We don't want the default, believe me, but we're already paying a price. Let's fix it.

And like we said at the top, look, doubling the size of that debt so rapidly, it just makes your head spin. Do you think that lawmakers generally understand on the consequences of our debt being this high. Will they, are any of them motivated enough to take real action?

So far, no. I think that you have to just look at the record. There's some lip service to taking action, but we talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. We put caps on quote discretionary spending and then we break those caps 'cause it's uncomfortable. And discretionary spending, the things that the Congress does every year is now a quarter of the budget. It's a sideshow. The big money's in the entitlements and no one has taken those on.

Right. They're very daunting and have a major political price tag as well. Thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

This week, James Fishback, the controversial Florida gubernatorial candidate, lost his primary for the Republican nomination to Congressman Byron Donalds. Fishback, like online personality Nick Fuentes, is a cultural leader among the groypers, That's a right-wing movement that has largely operated at the fringe of politics.

Daily Wire managing editor Dylan Hausman traveled to a small Florida town where Fishback and his followers gathered on primary night. But what he discovered about the state of the group was telling.

Dylan's piece, "Here Lie the Groypers," is live now on Daily Wire, and it's a great read, I got to say. Dylan joins us now. Dylan, welcome.

Glad to be here, guys.

First, let's start with the numbers. How did the actual vote count shake out that night for Fishback and his opponents?

Fishback got around 10% of the vote. I think it ended up finally being about 10.5%. So he was polling right around that 10% mark. That was kind of the mark people expected. He pushed some polls saying he was going to do a lot better than that, but that's about where he ended up. He was third place, well behind Byron Donalds, who won with about 50%, and Jake Holland's lieutenant governor, who was around the mid-20s.

And heading into this, there's a lot of buzz about Fishback in the sort of online reality was that he was way overperforming. That's not what happened that night, correct?

Yeah, that's why I wanted to go down there, is there's been this online energy around these types of candidates. There's been a handful of them that have run for certain offices this cycle, but he was really the main one that has seemingly the best organization behind him, the most energy. He went on Tucker Carlson, he got endorsed by Nick Fuentes. He had a real campaign operation. He was doing a lot of events. The one thing he couldn't do was raise money, but otherwise he was running a pretty normal campaign. And so I wanted to go see how does this translate to the real world? Does this online energy actually manifest itself at the voting booth. And I wanted to see it up close in person, not just relying on, you know, what the vote count ends up at the end of the night, looking at it on my computer.

And so the idea here is that there was an appearance of momentum for them over the last few years. Here's the political reality this year. Fishback being really one of the guys that best represented in the most official kind of way their voice.

Yeah, exactly. And when he actually went out into the real world, it didn't really pan out. I would say I went to two events with him. The first one was the night before election night. It was out in a rural area, and I was talking to voters there that were supporting him. Almost none of them really cared about the Israel stuff, which is kind of his main, most known issue for, for Beth Fishback when he started and for Fuentes. Very few of them seem to care about that. Very few of them talked about, you know, Jewish power, things like that that Fuentes often talks about. They cared about data centers. They cared about affordability, kind of run-of-the-mill issues. The church he was actually hosting the event at was home to a pro-Israel pastor, which is very interesting. And I talked to one of his campaign advisors after. He was an extremely pro-Israel person. So there was kind of a discongruence there between how he was running and what actually happened on the ground. At his campaign watch party on election night itself, it was a lot more of the kind of, you know, early 20s, I would say, more strongly Grover crowd, a lot of out-of-towners that had come down for this as some big event they wanted to attend.

And they were a lot more, let's say, in line with like what Fuentes would be preaching on a daily basis.

Now, Fishback has been criticized by Republicans for some of his racial attacks on Congressman Byron Donalds, but in your piece you say that he was getting guidance on his messaging approach leading into this primary night. Can you unpack that a little?

Yeah, so in his— to tackle the first part first, in his speech he said it's not personal with Byron Donalds, it's just a difference of viewpoints and they're just competing politically. And so I went up to him after the speech and I asked him, how can you say it's not personal when you've made all these blatantly racist remarks about him constantly? You accused him of being a criminal a couple weeks earlier. And he said, you know, it's kind of like when my wife and I snipe at each other, you know, it's just playful, you know, fun. It's not, it's not personal. So I found that to be a bit odd. And as I said, as soon as we ended that conversation, one of the other questions I asked him was, why are you talking about Israel and AIPAC so much less now? He talked about it all the time at the beginning of the race, and lately he hasn't been talking about it nearly as much. And when I asked him that, he answered. And then afterwards, an advisor came up to me, an outside advisor, not someone officially on the campaign, but someone who's been traveling with them talking to him, and said, the Israel stuff is dead.

We're not doing that anymore. I told him that he needs to cut that out I'm devoutly pro-Israel for theological reasons, and I would never back a candidate who's not pro-Israel. And I've been advising him to get off of that point, and he's been following my advice. And that was just really bizarre to hear, given everything the guy's done since he started running. So I think his campaign in a way kind of evolved to be, you know, try to be a little more sane, a little more normal over time. And so that's another reason I kind of suspect that the whole movement as a whole could end up going that way to some degree.

Right. It's hard not to draw the comparison with AOC saying, you know, woke 1.0 is over, this is woke 2.0, trying to adjust. But a very big difference here is that Democratic Socialists of America have really succeeded in the Democratic Party, really moved that party left, whereas it seems like the Groeper, uh, movement is really flaming out here.

Yeah, that's, uh, the biggest difference between the two parties right now, frankly, and how they're dealing with their threats from their extreme wings, that the Democrats are losing a lot of these fights and Republicans have really not— none of these candidates have really cracked more than, you know, 15-20% in any race. And again, the most prominent example here flamed out at 10%, and people didn't take him too seriously.

Been a fascinating election cycle already. I can't wait to see what happens come November. Uh, Dylan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, guys.

Thanks for waking up with us, and make sure to tune in on Monday at 5 PM for our All Access Live. As we reported yesterday, we're going to be featuring a special segment on the beloved loved cat Maga Mo. If you know, you know.

Yes. Drop your questions for our feline friend below. They wrote that for me. That's not my fault.

Reporting that fuels this show is only possible because you tune in every day and because of our Daily Wire subscribers.

To enjoy the show ad-free and join our mission, become a member at dailywire.com. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know.

Your country is beneath contempt. We who love and serve What if Allah fought back against the Americans and the Zionists from the scourge of secularism and the lands of unbelief?

Anyone gonna listen to Captain Saunders tomorrow?

The retired Delta Force soldier with the new book out?

He's the polar opposite of those brain-dead protesters.

Given the current climate, should Clay Saunders even be allowed on camera? Mr. Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman.

This is a decision I cannot fap.

There are 3 ways Islam will conquer the West. Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation's freedoms against us. Are you paying attention?

Listen carefully. The great Satan America will fall. You are infidels. The bodies of women are not pure and men's souls are unclean.

What makes them so dangerous? Their goals are not in this life, but the next.

Anyone?

I got friends here, I can't just leave.

Do you listen to me?

In the law, we cannot run or hide from what is coming. We have to fight. I will be rewarded 10,000 times in the next life.

When you die, I—

you're nothing.

Only one way to find out.

That's the American way.

What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, You can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today.