In the aftermath of the shooting, which killed local firefighter Corey Comperatore, the Secret Service went mum, Johnson said. “The only reason we’ve gotten some reasonably valuable interviews is because my staff got the names of the Secret Service personnel on the ground from local law enforcement; had we not gotten that, I don’t think the Secret Service would have even given us the names of the people on the ground,” Johnson added.
While Johnson has been able to investigate the failures that nearly led to Trump’s death, he’s also angling for a promotion as chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, and Johnson does think there’s “a pretty good likelihood we flip the Senate.” In that role, he wants to investigate vaccine injuries, which he acknowledged are “real lightning rods.”
“Maybe you need to prove your case in other areas first before you really start attacking that,” he said. “But I don’t intend to wait. I just need to be in a position to be able to properly compel testimony.” Johnson’s ability to both befriend the younger Kennedy and to work with him on high-profile issues is an example he’d point to of how to overcome the greatest threat facing Americans: “that we are horribly divided politically.” Johnson has leaned on his experience in the private sector, where “you focus on areas agreement, like ‘okay, I’ve got a product. You want to buy it. We can haggle over the price. I don’t care about your politics,’” to help bridge partisan divides.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Johnson said, was a political free agent after the COVID-19 pandemic and when his presidential campaign fizzled out. “What Bobby went through at that point is what so many of us went through with COVID, where our eyes were open to the capture of our federal health agencies, and the corruption of science.”
Another pro-Kennedy figure who has fascinated Johnson in recent years is Joe Rogan, the host of the top-grossing Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which has hosted both Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio) in recent weeks. “It was a brilliant move on Trump’s part to go on there,” Johnson said, “primarily because what anybody who watched it witnessed was exactly what Trump is like if you spend a little more time with him than what you see at a rally, or when he’s in the public eye. So that is Trump being Trump.” Johnson views longform interviews on podcasts like Rogan’s as “the future of media.”
In fact, the legacy media is a major obstacle that Johnson would like to clear — and one that he thinks is holding back both Trump and the Republicans’ Senate nominee in Wisconsin, businessman Eric Hovde. “In a sane world with an unbiased media, these elections wouldn’t be close, not even close, but we have a very insane world, and our media is highly biased,” Johnson said. “That’s in the end, what Hovde is running against. That’s what Trump is running against. They’re not running against Tammy Baldwin and Kamala Harris. They’re really running against legacy media.”
Johnson, for his part, sounded eager to go on Rogan if an invite were to be extended. The pair, perhaps, could discuss Johnson’s extensive work investigating COVID-19, a topic important to both of them, or Johnson could air his grievances about some of his colleagues — gripes which are dictating how he envisions the upper chamber’s future.
Johnson sees a kindred spirit of sorts in Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), who is his choice to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) as the leader of Senate Republicans. Scott, who is up for reelection next week, is “an extraordinary individual,” Johnson told the Reporter. “You look at his background, raised by a single mom, he is a self-made man, and what he accomplished in business is exceptional, heading the eighth largest employer in America, then he transferred those skills over to an incredibly successful governorship. He’s serious about tracking these problems, and that’s what we need. And he also knows how to manage. He knows how to lead. I think it’s a very clear choice.”
Scott unsuccessfully challenged McConnell for GOP leader at the start of this Congress, and Johnson sees Scott’s leadership as a much-needed change of pace from how the Kentuckian has run the show.
“When he became Leader, we were somewhere around $8 trillion in debt,” Johnson said, when asked of McConnell’s legacy. “Now we’re $35 trillion in debt. And in all those years, there’s been one constant. In all those debts ceiling negotiations and appropriation negotiations and omnibus spending package negotiations, there’s been one constant, and that’s Mitch McConnell. So I personally think that is his legacy, and it’s not a positive one.” Johnson also faulted McConnell for the ill-fated immigration bill that died over the summer. “Nobody that I know of wanted an immigration bill. We were looking for an enforcement mechanism to force Biden to use what executive authority he had to secure the border, because we knew we couldn’t trust him,” he said.
While Johnson wants Scott to succeed McConnell, he said that his own style is unlikely to see him elected as class president. “My role in the conference is I play the role of the kid who says the emperor has no clothes,” he said.
“That kid is not really popular. It’s not really popular rubbing your colleagues’ noses in their failures, but somebody’s got to do it.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Sen. Ron Johnson, lightly edited for clarity [editor’s note: at several junctures, our call briefly cut out].
Washington Reporter:
Senator Johnson, thanks so much for chatting today. I understand you listened to Donald Trump’s recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. What did you think of that?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
It was a brilliant move on Trump’s part to go on there, primarily because what anybody who watched it witnessed was exactly what Trump is like if you spend a little more time with him than what you see at a rally, or when he’s in the public eye. So that is Trump being Trump. And I have frequently told people, both privately and publicly, that if you spend some time with Trump, you cannot not like him. He’s engaging. He’s charismatic, he’s funny, he’s knowledgeable. I think that pulse came through here too, particularly when you get into some of his areas of expertise, like construction, he’s talking about different types of cements. He’s got a lot of areas of knowledge like thatI think the public just is not generally aware of, and certainly the legacy corporate media does not give him credit for his intelligence and his knowledge.
Washington Reporter:
Tell me about your history with the Joe Rogan Experience. How did it come across your transom?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
That’s hard to say. Definitely when Dr. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone went on. My guess is I probably knew of it before that. I had listened to some segments, I listened to Bret Weinstein on it before. As a public figure who gets interviewed, I love long format interviews. You can flesh out issues. You can talk in far greater detail. It’s not just talking points. You can actually get into the substance of things, and you can understand, as a listener, kind of how somebody’s mind works to far greater extent than you can in a three or five minute cable TV hit. It’s just an excellent format. It’s interesting, I’m driving down listening to Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard right now in Madison, and earlier I was listening to Mark Belling, who is pretty much the king of conservative talk reading here in Wisconsin. He’s going to switch to podcasts. That is the future of media.
Washington Reporter:
Do you have any interest in going on Joe Rogan yourself?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
I’d love to, I just don’t think he’s particularly interested in just run the mill elected officials.
Washington Reporter:
Well, fortunately for you, you’re not a run of the mill elected official. I think that one of the commonalities that you both have was that while you were already conservative, and he was a Bernie Sanders voter in 2020 — then COVID happened, and he sort of snapped, and has been very curious and very open to conservatives, especially after he was under withering assault by outlets like CNN for having more heterodox voices on there. Your work in the Senate on topics like COVID in particular gives you a lot of stuff to talk about with him. Tell me what do you think about his success? It’s the most listened to podcasts in the world. What do you think that says about the future the media? Tell me more about how that impacts your role as an elected official, and how you get your message out to Wisconsinites.
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Well, first of all, whenever I’m offered a longer format interview, I take it. I kind of really don’t care who it is. I went on Bobby Kennedy’s children’s health defense podcast, I’ve done other ones like Dr. Kelly Victory’s and Dr. Drew’s. I’ve done a bunch of them. I’ve never done Tucker Carlson. I’ve never done Joe Rogan. I obviously would jump the chance if they’d invite me. Bob Kennedy, at the start of his presidential campaign, said that this is going to be the first presidential campaign that’s going to be decided based on podcasts rather than legacy media. I’m not sure that’s true, but I think it certainly had an impact, and I hope it will have a greater impact in the future, because again, it provides information that the legacy media, that cable news, that even a 10 to 15 minutes interview on talk radio, just does not allow you to go into the depth that’s allowed in the podcast. I think the issues facing our country are massive problems, and they are complex problems, and they’re going to require some real, thoughtful discussion and debate, which we’re not really set up for in this country right now. I’m not sure anybody ever has been.
Washington Reporter:
You mentioned RFK Jr several times now, and you, Trump, and Rogan are all very closely plugged in with him at this point. Trump, both when he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast and at the Madison Square Garden rally that I was just at, said that he wants to have RFK Jr in some sort of health policy role. What that is, is TBD. But he doesn’t want to let him touch the “liquid gold.” He doesn’t want him getting too involved in environmental policy. What do you think the role of RFK jr. and the movement of health conscious moms? What do you think these people’s role in the Republican Party moving forward is?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
There is a real alliance between Trump and Bobby Kennedy and now Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk, and possibly Joe Rogan. These are all very smart people, and they come from diverse backgrounds. They come from different ideologies, different places on the political spectrum. I ran because we are mortgaging our kids’ future. We haven’t fixed that. We’re exacerbating that. I always figured that was the biggest threat facing this nation. But the last couple of years, I would say the greatest threat is the fact that we are horribly divided politically. And in order for us to heal that political divide, it’s going to take individuals coming from different ends of the political spectrum, setting aside their differences, focusing on an area of agreement as the demonstration, this is how you heal a horribly divided nation.That’s true in the private sector, too. There, you’re dealing with all kinds of people that you don’t agree with, on a host of issues. But in the private sector, you focus on areas agreement, like ‘okay, I’ve got a product. You want to buy it. We can haggle over the price. I don’t care about your politics.’ That’s probably one of the reasons Trump was more than willing to reach out or accept Bobby Kennedy’s reaching out, as opposed to Kamala Harris, who wouldn’t do that. Pretty odd, right? I think really, really to her political detriment. Quite honestly, I think Bobby was probably open to aligning himself with either party who would basically give him the possibility of focusing on the issues that he’s been fighting for for literally decades, like children’s health. What I like about Bobby Kennedy is that he did not choose to take up the mantle or the crusade of children’s health or vaccine injuries. It was thrust on him by moms who attended his environmental speeches and who just wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t take ‘I’m not interested’ as an answer. And to Bobby’s credit, he sat down when the one mom came to his door with a large stack of research, and he read it, and his eyes were opened and he could close his eyes. So I think what Bobby went through at that point is what so many of us went through with COVID, where our eyes were open to the capture of our federal health agencies, and the corruption of science. And then just think about the same type of capture and corruption by most large industry groups over their federal regulators as well: big ag, big food processing, certainly the military industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us about, but we haven’t heeded this warning. So again, Bobby’s role, I mean, obviously I think it will start with chronic illness, but I think it could easily expand, or his work can impact and influence so many other areas of draining the swamp. Because this is a pattern. It’s the same thing has happened, which is what you’d expect to happen with big government. Someone is going to control it, and in the end, it’s going to be the powerful interest with a lot of money, and probably the ones that are supposed to be regulated and kept in check by big government, they capture it and use it to their advantage, to the detriment, probably, to their competitors, and to the public, and to American consumers.
Washington Reporter:
How do you keep these moms that you’re talking about engaged in the political process and engaged with the Republican Party for expanding the coalition long term?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Well, it does depend who wins, and who’s really in charge. I guess I’m making assumption that’s a pretty good likelihood we flip the Senate, even if it’s a slim majority. In that case, I become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, I’ll have actually stronger subpoena power that I had as chairman of the full committee, which I will use. I’ve gotten criticism, for example, the public event I held with Casey Means, Calley Means, RFK Jr, and the other social media influencers that now I’m just ignoring the vaccine and the vaccine harms, and the injury. Nothing could be proven from the truth. I think you focus on what more people are willing to accept in terms of a reality that people really don’t want to accept, but it’s kind of hard to deny it. Once your eyes are open to it and as you expose one truth, if your eyes are open, you start exploring other truths, that are just more difficult to to reveal. There is a great deal of resistance. Any question on vaccines whatsoever, even though, from my standpoint, it’s so obvious that we should be questioning how we’re handling vaccines, and it is so obvious that vaccines do cause injury. I guess the question is, to what extent? How prevalent? But we are societally, as well as the medical establishment, and most federal health agencies, are in a massive state denial on so many of these issues. Vaccine injuries are just one of the real lightning rods, and maybe you need to prove your case in other areas first before you really start attacking that. But I don’t intend to wait. I just need to be in a position to be able to properly compel testimony.
Washington Reporter:
You served with Kamala Harris in the Senate; would you advise her to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Well, first of all, I think Joe Rogan would be eminently fair. What I think sets Joe Rogan apart is that he is very knowledgeable, and doing these three hour podcasts, talking to the smartest people in the world, has made him even more knowledgeable. He may be one of the more knowledgeable people on the planet quite honestly. He has an opportunity to sit down and talk to some of the smartest and most brilliant people in the world in detail for three hours and ask the questions he wants to ask. And so he’s extremely good. And from my standpoint, my guess is, he would make her look good. She I certainly hope she doesn’t go on.
Washington Reporter:
One of the things that you say, that I think sort of encapsulates your home state, is ‘they always say Minnesota, nice. I say Wisconsin, even nicer.’ How are things going for Republicans in Wisconsin? You’re driving around the state right now. How do you feel?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
That line, I use it all the time, I heard from Charles Krauthammer first in a speech he gave in Wisconsin. He started his speech saying he’s heard about Minnesota nice, but he saw that Wisconsin is even nicer. And it is true. We’re just really nice people here. Even in our horribly divided times here, I can count on a couple of hands, the number of times that people who don’t agree with me, who just might even loathe me, have been disrespectful to me in public, so if they don’t like me, they just kind of turn away. I feel a great deal of enthusiasm, because I feel great deal of panic on the part of our side. Our people have their eyes open. They understand our nation is in peril, and I think a lot of them agree with what Elon Musk has said, because they’ve seen how Biden has weaponized the government. You can’t give a party consecutive four year terms to just ratchet up the weaponization before they completely succeed and destroy any semblance of two-party system and the possibility of free and fair elections. That’s not what they want. There’s a reason Biden issued the executive order to have his agencies and departments register voters, possibly in violation of the Hatch Act. Let’s face it, they’re not registering people on a nonpartisan basis, and then you throw open the border. These open border policies open the doors for people to come here illegally, who are highly appreciative of the fact that Joe Biden let them in the country, making it easy for them to vote. Why would you be opposed to all of these measures to restore confidence to ensure that all the legitimate votes are counted. What we need is a massive turnout to make sure that these elections are too big to rig.
Washington Reporter:
Senator Johnson, we’ve learned that the administration has wasted $42 billion trying to connect people up to rural broadband. You totally cut out on me for 30 seconds so this has to be one of the priorities for you in the next Congress is to make sure that Wisconsin is wired with good cell service everywhere.
Sen. Ron Johnson:
I’m on 151, 5G has been awful. It’s gotten worse with 5G.
Washington Reporter:
Oftentimes there are issues that you weigh in on before almost anybody else does. Another one of those is Hunter Biden. What do you think should happen with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, starting in January 2025, when they are somewhat off the scene?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
My guess is that Joe Biden will pardon him. If he doesn’t, I certainly don’t think Donald Trump should pardon him. I wouldn’t be opposed to, at some point in time, commuting his sentence, that would be, not a bad gesture on the part of Trump, but definitely not pardoned. I know somebody asked him about that and he did not rule it out, but not pardon. You can’t pardon Hunter Biden. I listened to Amaryllis Fox Kennedy and her interview with Tucker, and they were talking a lot about EMP and GMP and Tucker said, ‘nobody’s talking about this.’ Well, I held multiple hearings about it. I just couldn’t get anybody to get interested in it. The Trump administration did have some people kind of working on a strategy, but they weren’t pressing for experts to determine how many large power transformers should we buy and preposition, what’s the cost-benefit? That has been my position, by the way, in terms of offering an amendment to NDAA or the infrastructure bills, I’m not an electrical engineer, and I cannot give people warnings about this to say, ‘okay, what do we need to do? Identify the large power transformers that are irreplaceable that we need to have a backup for now,’ I just can’t get that information, but that’s what I’m hoping for. Obviously, Amaryllis has got a lot of influence with Bobby. I’m glad she’s issued that topic, and I hope that they’re working in the transition here, trying to identify people on chronic illness and hopefully other things, that they can they can also influence, hopefully, the next Trump administration to get serious about protecting us against GMP and EMP.
Washington Reporter:
Every six years it infamously looks like you’re going to lose you end up winning. What advice do you have for Eric Hovde in the final week of how to make sure that he gets the win next week?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Well, it’s ground game, ground game, ground game. For my part, we have been making sure the Republican Party of Wisconsin has the resources, working with the RNC, to ensure that all of our pleading and encouragement in terms of early voting is paying off. So it is working, but it really is ground game, ground game, ground game. I hope that Eric in the last week here, and I’ll be on his bus tour, will just go all over the state, be visible. It’s important to go to even little population areas, so that they realize that this guy’s not ignoring us. We realize we’re part of the state and will be his constituents as well. So that’d be my main advice, just be nice. Just be very visible all over the state, and really, in particular, in the far away low population areas.
Washington Reporter:
For months, we’ve been covering your work on the bipartisan assassination task force since the first assassination attempt against President Trump. What’s your sense of how that’s going and how’s that been going? How working in a bipartisan manner held you back? Has it opened a new doors for you?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
It’s definitely held me back. But listen, what we know about the assassination, and I give my staff a lot of credit, they found out, and we issued our preliminary report a little more than a week after the assassination attempt, and we’ve gotten a little more information. We’ve got some more details, but we pretty well laid it out. We diagnosed it. I mean, siloed communication, it was not a well-coordinated effort. Secret Service not showing up in security briefing at nine o’clock in the morning, just a spectacular security failure. We’re adding to it, but what we know primarily comes from local law enforcement, their body cams, the cameras and recording devices of people on the ground, not federal law enforcement. They’re doing what they always do. They hunker down. They are the law. They hold themselves above the law, and they’re just not giving us much information. The only reason we’ve gotten some reasonably valuable interviews is because my staff got the names of the Secret Service personnel on the ground from local law enforcement; had we not gotten that, I don’t think the Secret Service would have even given us the names of the people on the ground. I get so disgusted with the federal government, the arrogance of these agencies and their top people, and the people on the ground are good people. I’m not going to impugn FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line, Secret Service folks; it’s the top management that is, I think, in many cases, just rotten to the core.
Washington Reporter:
Shortly after next week’s election, you’re getting another election. You get to vote on the successor for Mitch McConnell. You’ve had a seesawing relationship with McConnell. What do you think of his tenure running the caucus?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
When he became Leader, we were somewhere around $8 trillion in debt. Now we’re $35 trillion in debt. And in all those years, there’s been one constant. In all those debts ceiling negotiations and appropriation negotiations and omnibus spending package negotiations, there’s been one constant, and that’s Mitch McConnell. So I personally think that is his legacy, and it’s not a positive one.
Washington Reporter:
What are you looking for in the next leader of Senate Republicans?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
First of all, a leader who is actually serious about tackling these enormous challenges facing this nation as opposed to someone who says that ‘we’ve got to get elected so we can do it,’ then we never do it. It’s always the next cycle, ‘we’ve got to be elected. Got to be elected. Got to stay in the majority.’ So we need a leader who’s serious about addressing these major problems. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but it starts there. A far more collaborative process. I come from the private sector where leaders have to develop a mission statement where they establish goals. Everybody knows what the mission statement and goals are. They know what role they play in achieving those goals; functioning organization does that. It’s polar opposite in terms of the Republican conference in the Senate under Mitch’s leadership. All too often, we didn’t have a clue what the strategy was. We find out only when it’s too late to change it. And by the way, a classic example of that is the spectacular failure of the border bill. What a debacle that was, that is a failure on an epic scale, and that’s because McConnell completely breached his leadership role of listening to the conference. Nobody that I know of wanted an immigration bill. We were looking for an enforcement mechanism to force Biden to use what executive authority he had to secure the border, because we knew we couldn’t trust him. Now, we would have been happy to strengthen that authority. The Supreme Court in 2018 said current law exudes deference to the executive. So by Congress passing a law, had we passed that, saying, ‘no, you don’t have that authority until we get 4,000 people a day,’ double what Obama called the humanitarian crisis, you actually would have weakened that authority by having Congress weigh in. So that was an awful bill. It tanked itself. It was dead on arrival. Trump had nothing to do with tanking that bill. I don’t know one Republican senator who Trump called to lobby against that bill. That bill was dead on arrival. I called a conference a week before, and we were able to suss out just enough from Lankford, and our jaws dropped.
Washington Reporter:
Did you have any interest in running for any of these positions yourself?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
My role in the conference is I play the role of the kid who says the emperor has no clothes. That kid is not really popular. It’s not really popular rubbing your colleagues’ noses in their failures, but somebody’s got to do it. What is so bizarre is that in the private sector, we probably spend too much time dwelling on our failures, trying to correct them. We sometimes don’t celebrate success. Here in Washington, D.C., nobody even acknowledges their failure. And instead, they’ll take something that’s basically a failure and somehow finagle people to think it was a success when it wasn’t. So I’m not a real popular guy as a result.
Washington Reporter:
You would cut out right at the beginning, you had said, you hadn’t looked at it, because you’re not the most popular kid in the schoolroom?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
I don’t think I would have a chance of being elected leader.
Washington Reporter:
So have you given thought on who you want to vote for for that?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Rick Scott, who is an extraordinary individual. You look at his background, raised by a single mom, he is a self-made man, and what he accomplished in business is exceptional, heading the eighth largest employer in America, then he transferred those skills over to an incredibly successful governorship. He’s serious about tracking these problems, and that’s what we need. And he also knows how to manage. He knows how to lead. I think it’s a very clear choice.
Washington Reporter:
That’s the race for Senate GOP Leader. The race for Republican Whip is unopposed, with Sen. John Barrasso in the driver’s seat. And then number three is Sens. Tom Cotton versus Joni Ernst. Have you made up your mind there?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
No. What we’re hoping for is a couple week process. I was really supportive of electing leadership before Thanksgiving break. I’m not happy with the fact that we’re voting right away that first week, that’s a McConnell plan. I’m disappointed, quite honestly, that Barrasso just announced that without even taking a vote in the conference.
Washington Reporter:
And is this the incoming senators who are eligible to vote for this, or it is the current Senate GOP?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
Incoming certainly should be able to vote. I know I voted when we came in, so yes, they should be able to vote.
Washington Reporter:
To tie it back all to where we started: Joe Rogan did not indicate who he plans on voting for for president, and I think he is the embodiment of a lot of similar people. What would you say as the closing pitch to people like that?
Sen. Ron Johnson:
No matter what you think of Trump, he actually has a record. He was not a dictator. He was not a threat to democracy. And the other side is orders of magnitude worse. Just look at it objectively. Look at reality, what the Democratic Party has done to this country, and just in terms of threat to democracy, they are the ones who censor speech, they are the ones who are trying to make it easy to cheat in voting so they can turn this nation into a one-party country, their open borders, the 40-year high inflation, the massive deficit spending, everything they’ve done has weakened this country and emboldened our adversaries around the world, which is why Putin invaded Ukraine. I mean, strike while the iron is hot. Their policies are why the Ayatollah thinks he can go ahead and unleash Hamas and Hezbollah, why China thinks it can do what it can do in North Korea, similarly. So, Democratic Party governance has been a disaster. In a sane world with an unbiased media, these elections wouldn’t be close, not even close, but we have a very insane world, and our media is highly biased. That’s in the end, what Hovde is running against. That’s what Trump is running against. They’re not running against Tammy Baldwin and Kamala Harris. They’re really running against legacy media.
Washington Reporter:
If the legacy media didn’t have endless problems, I wouldn’t have started a new outlet to try and combat that. If you do Rogan, you have to take me with you.
Sen. Ron Johnson:
I make no guarantees.