Senator Rick Scott of Florida joined me this morning:

Audio:

05-22hhs-scott

Transcript:

HH: I’m joined now by United States Senator Rick Scott of the great state of Florida. Good morning, Senator Scott, good to have you back.

RS: Good morning, Hugh. So we’ve got to get this economy going.

HH: We do. I’m going to put that in the second half of the interview, though. I want to talk about your work on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs up top and put the laser focus on General Flynn, Judge Sullivan and the D.C. Circuit. Yesterday, the D.C. Circuit issued an order to the Judge to show cause within 10 days to respond to General Flynn’s defense counsel petition for a writ of mandamus. I don’t think the Judge has an answer. I think General Flynn should have the prosecution against him dismissed as the Department of Justice moved. What do you think, Senator Scott?

RS: I completely, I completely agree with you. I mean, this is a shameful time for our country. If you look at what the Obama administration did, is they weaponized federal agencies whether going back to the IRS going after the conservative groups, and you look at what they did to Flynn, Carter Page, these things, it’s disgusting. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it. We’ve got to find out exactly what they were doing. But in the case of Flynn, this needs to be dismissed. There’s no basis for it. So the Judge has got to get rid of this. You know, on Homeland Security, we’re doing a subpoena to try to find out exactly what happened with the Bidens, and why was the Vice President of the United States focused on getting a prosecutor fired that was prosecuting a company that his son was getting paid $83,000 dollar a month from? We’ve got to get, we’ve, this is our government. It’s not some, you know, some elite group in D.C.’s government. You know, people have got to have faith in their government, and when you see things like this, you can’t have faith in your government.

HH: Now you know Andrew Weissman, right?

RS: Yeah.

HH: He was one of the senior lawyers on Robert Mueller’s, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, correct?

RS: Yeah.

HH: And he’s a very competent if dogged investigator/prosecutor. He’s got a reputation for being merciless, actually. Did he ever appear in front of your committee?

RS: No. No, he’s not appeared in front of the committee.

HH: Okay.

RS: You know, we’re just now going to get, we’re, you know, hopefully, you know, Ron Johnson, the chair of the committee, he really believes we’re going to get information hopefully quickly. We’ll find out. I hope we do, and we can get this behind us. We put it out and let everybody know what the Bidens were doing.

HH: Now Mr. Weissman is headlining a fundraiser for Joe Biden. Is that appropriate?

RS: I think you’ve got to be, no, of course not. You’ve got to be, you know, you’ve got to be, if you’re a prosecutor, you’ve got to be so careful about being, you know, you can’t appear to be biased. And when you appear to be biased, you lose all your credibility. So I mean, judges are expected to be, you know, not biased. I appointed four hundred and, I think, seven or eight judges as governor. You know, I actually never asked them their position on anything other than you understand that you are simply the judiciary? You’re not the legislative branch or the executive branch. And if they didn’t understand that, I wouldn’t appoint them. Well, the same with prosecutors. They’ve got to understand they have got to be unbiased.

HH: Does his appearance at a Biden fundraiser undermine the credibility of the Mueller investigation?

RS: Absolutely. I mean, and you’ve got to be so careful. And even in my job, you’ve got to be, I represent, I have campaigns. We have heated campaigns. When you get elected, I represent everybody in my state, everybody. I don’t just represent one party or a certain group of people. I represent everybody. And you’ve got, but as a prosecutor and as a judge, you have to be, you know, everything you do, you’ve got to say to yourself I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that no one believes that I’m, I was ever biased in the things that I’m doing.

HH: A couple more questions on Homeland Security. FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is no, I don’t know him, but I know many former judges and lawyers, distinguished members of the bar who have nothing but the highest esteem for his integrity and ability, is coming under some criticism from the center-right for his failure to clean up the 7th floor as quickly as they would like. What is your assessment of Director Wray? I think he’s doing the job that he, the best job he can do under these circumstances given federal law and personnel policies, but what do you think, Senator Scott?

RS: My, I have a very good working relationship with him. I was very focused on the FBI doing their job after the Parkland shooting, because you know, they had prior knowledge of that. They had prior knowledge of the shooting in, the Pulse shooting in Orlando. And I’ll tell you what, Christopher Wray, he, I think he cleaned it up. I went out and met with the people that run the call center. They’re impressive. After the, as soon as they found information on the NAS shooter, he called me about it to make sure I understood exactly what they were doing. My experience has been with him that he is trying to run the FBI in a manner that we can be proud of the FBI again.

HH: I believe that is correct, and I believe that a lot of folks should listen to you on that. Now I want to talk to you about, Christopher Wray was a Judge Luttig clerk. He’s a litigator, as they call them. Judge Luttig is probably the most respected former federal judge in America, along with Mike McConnell of the Stanford Law School. Judge Luttig co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on temporarily barring any lawsuits based on COVID, temporary immunity for every business, school, not for profit, everybody in America in order to keep the Plaintiff’s bar away from the recovery, stopping the recovery. Do you agree with Judge Luttig? Do we need absolute immunity for a temporary period of time from anyone for anything related to COVID?

RS: Absolutely. Think about it. Right now, our schools, we’re all, we’re still all learning about it, the Coronavirus. And everything you read is mutating. So everybody’s trying to figure out how to, you know, take care of their employees, how to take care of their students, all these things. And so why would we sit here and say oh, we don’t want you to open, or we just, or it’s okay if you get sued a lot. I mean, we want this place to open and people get back to work. I grew up in a poor family. My parents didn’t have jobs. I want these people back to work. I mean, people want to work, but if the trial bar sits there and they can sue for any little mistake you made because somebody got sick, now come on. We’re going to kill our economy.

HH: The op-ed is titled Lawsuits Needn’t Block Recovery – Congress Has The Power To Limit Coronavirus Liability While Regulators Develop Rules To Control Contagion. It’s authored by J. Michael Luttig and David Rivkin, Jr. I want to give Mr. Rivkin his due. And it closes by saying Congress just simply must put this into anything that comes forward as Phase 4. Do you think it is an absolute must-have, Senator Scott?

RS: I think it’s a must-have. Here’s what I want to do. We’ve got to get the liability protection for our businesses and our first responders. Number two is we’ve got to continue to help the people that have lost their jobs. And number three, the small businesses that don’t have the same access to capital, we’ve got to continue to find ways to help them either reopen or stay open. So that’s my priority, those things, and that’s what I’m going to work on to make sure happens. Whatever else we do, those are three things we have to do.

HH: Has the Small Business Administraiton been changing the rules on PPP? I have heard from some small business owners that they applied for the loans, they hired temporary workers to fill the numbers that they were supposed to have so that no one got fired. Now the Small Business Administration is saying no, no, no, you owe the loan. It’s a nightmare. Isn’t the whole deal supposed to be to keep small businesses going come thick or thin?

RS: It, the whole deal was to help keep our economy going and to help our small businesses so they can reopen. The, you know, clearly, there’s some abuses that have been taken, people have taken advantage of the system. You know, Planned Parenthood, it was never anticipated they would get funding. Big public companies were never supposed to get this type of funding, things like that. So we’ve got, I think the SBA and Treasury are trying to make sure that you know, it’s going to the right people. Our banks should have done first come, first served. They didn’t. But you know, we’ve got to, every day, my belief is whatever do you, every day get better at it. So I think the SBA and I think Treasury is trying to fix some of the things that probably could have been in the bill, but it was done so quickly that it was not able to get in there.

HH: I think they have to count temporary employees, people hired as a temporary employee from a temp firm as a qualifying employee. I think they have to do that, but that’s my two cents to you. Let me turn…

RS: Yeah.

HH: …briefly to some political news and then to Governor Cuomo. Political news, in Politico Florida Playbook, it says that Rick Scott, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, and Marco Rubio are Florida’s gang of four, and that you’re all eyeing White House bids in 2024. Are you eyeing a White House bid in 2024, Senator Scott?

RS: No. What I’m trying to do is I just became a U.S. Senator. I mean, I’ve spending my time trying to be the best U.S. Senator I can be, the best U.S. Senator in the United States. That’s my focus.

HH: Were you sympathetic to Ron DeSantis unloading on the White House Press Corps yesterday as driven by a “narrative” that is indifferent to actual facts?

RS: It gets frustrating sometimes with the press. And you know, they sure appear to be, you know, if you’re a Democrat, boy, they’re all in to help you. And if you’re a Republican, they’re not. So, but you know, you just, what I did as governor is what I, every day I just went out and I worked hard and I put out the facts every day. And over time, people get it. I mean, I talked to so many people while I was governor. People understood that the media sometimes was biased, so I just worked at it every day. I’m disappointed the media is biased in some of the things they put out, but that’s reality.

HH: President, General-Secretary Xi appears to be about to lead his country towards a suppression of Hong Kong which we never saw coming. The Hong Kong Index is down five and a half, six percent today. What should be the United States’ reaction if they in fact impose a national security law on Hong Kong?

RS: Well, clearly, we’ve got to continue to sanction. We have to first off, let’s all live in reality. It’s Communist China run by the Communist Party. Xi is the General-Secretary of the Communist Party. They are in for world domination. They have, they take our jobs, they take our technology, they put people in prison for their religion, and they caused so many people to die and lose their job because of this pandemic. They’re taking away the rights given to them by, when it was turned over in Hong Kong. Those citizens have rights that were given to them, and Xi is taking them away. So let’s remember. Do not buy one product from Communist China. None. Zero. None. Buy American products. We help American workers. But we’ve got to hold China accountable whether…but the biggest thing we’re going to do? We’re going to do, I’ve got bills. We’re going to vet Chinese students before they come in here so they don’t steal our technology, steal our vaccines, things like that. We’re going to make sure we create, you know, protective gear made in this country. But the biggest thing we can do, stop, stop buying anything made in Communist China.

HH: Are we in Cold War 2?

RS: Absolutely. There’s no question about it. Now they’re clearly in it. They’re in for world domination. We’ve been naïve. So we’ve got to say to ourselves, we’ve got to say to ourselves how do we take care of ourselves. Understand you have an enemy. They’re an adversary. It’s called Communist China. They’re not here to help us, all right? They didn’t, they intentionally didn’t tell us about the Coronavirus. It was intentional. It was not, you know, there was, there was nothing, oh, maybe, gosh, we didn’t do a good job. No, it was intentional what they did. You can see it was intentional. We’ve got to hold them accountable, the World Health Organization accountable. And so I’ve got a bill that says from now on, the online resellers like Amazon, you will disclose, you should be doing it anyway. Tell us where things are made so we can buy American products. Wal-Mart, Costco, show us.

HH: Last question, Senator Scott, last question. Does Vice President Biden specifically and the Democratic Party generally understand the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and the threat that they pose to America?

RS: No. No, he clearly doesn’t. I mean, so he, I mean, the, in his eight years as vice president, what, name one thing, one thing, one thing that he did to hold Communist China accountable. Nothing. He did nothing to hold them accountable. So we, this election is going to say are we going to understand that Communist China is our adversary and we’re in a cold war, or are we going to go back to letting them take advantage of us?

HH: Well said. Senator Scott, have a good Memorial Day. I look forward to seeing you on the other side it, and sometime this summer getting together. I always enjoy chatting with you. Be well, and have a great Memorial Day. Thank you. Senator Scott.

RS: Happy Memorial Day to you and your family. Bye bye.

End of interview.