Interview: Jim Jordan on the Trump cabinet, the Judiciary Committee’s 2025 priorities, the Hunter Biden pardon, and how wrestling reshaped the political map
Rep. Jim Jordan rates the Trump cabinet, previews his work for 2025, discusses his wins for the First Amendment and against ESG, and explains how wrestlers changed the political landscape.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) made the most of President Joe Biden’s last two years in the White House. As chair of the Judiciary Committee, Jordan pressed the Democratic administration on “censorship and protecting First Amendment, [which] are things that American people view as really important.” Jordan also traveled the country to help maintain the Republican majority; he’s particularly excited about incoming Reps. Brian Jack, Brandon Gill, Tom Barrett and Brad Knott — a veteran prosecutor he wants to join the Judiciary Committee.
Two of Jordan’s notable wins this Congress include shutting down Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and helping to weaken the Climate Action 100+ (CA100+). Jordan went from knowing nothing about GARM to dismantling it in a matter of weeks, following a meeting in which Elon Musk explained to him that “GARM is harm.”
“I never forgot the sentence,” Jordan said. “And so we started investigating. [Musk] was 100 percent right. They're like, bad. We have a hearing, and Ben Shapiro did a great job, and one of the guys from the big media buying outfit up in New York, he testified. I felt kind of bad for him, because he got fired the next day. And then the next thing you know, they're no longer in operation.”
Jordan took a similar approach with CA100+.
“The same thing sort of happened with Climate Action 100+,” he said. “You had State Street, BlackRock, Vanguard, they all got out of the group. That's what the witness said to us. We asked her during the committee, ‘did anyone leave?’ She said ‘yeah,’ and we asked ‘anyone of note?’ She said ‘yeah.’ I asked her why’d they leave, and she said ‘because of your investigation.’”
Although Jordan wasn’t shocked by Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter, he was “surprised at the breadth of it.”
“I think everyone sort of was, because it's ten years and eleven months. And it says not just the crimes you were charged with, that you faced possibly prison time for, but any potential crime you may have committed all the way back to January 2014 and all the way through to December 2024; that’s ten years and eleven months…2014, 2015, and 2016 were when Joe Biden was vice president, you know all this; and it's more importantly when his son was getting all the money from the Ukrainian energy company,” he said. “And, of course, we all know that Joe Biden leveraged American tax dollars to get the prosecutor fired at the request of his son, we learned this from Devin Archer, to get the prosecutor fired, who was looking into the very company, Hunter Biden said on the board of, and he's pardoning any activity back to that time.”
Jordan dismissed concerns that Trump will exact “retribution” when he assumes power in January. “Was there any retribution when President Trump was in office?” he asked. “Was there any retribution towards Hillary Clinton, who paid the law firm Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired the foreigner, Christopher Steele, who put together a document that was not even close to being accurate, which became the basis to go to the court to get the warrant to spy on her opponent's campaign? And did he go after her? No. I don't get it. These guys have gone after President Trump and a bunch of other Americans.”
Under Biden, Jordan said, “[we’ve] got an FBI and DOJ that said ‘we're going to investigate moms and dads at school board meetings.’ They had a memorandum at the FBI Richmond field office that said, ‘if you're pro-life Catholic, you need to be investigated.’”
These actions are problematic, he said, but are just the tip of the iceberg. “We don't know who planted the pipe bombs on January 6,” he said. “It’s been four stinking years. We don't know who leaked the Dobbs decision. That's been two years. And we don't know who put cocaine at the White House.”Jordan has worked closely with many current and former Democrats, including Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Musk, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and of course, Trump himself, to support First Amendment freedoms. Jordan believes that Trump’s cabinet picks, like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Gabbard, and the Kennedy scion, are “consistent with what President Trump campaigned on and what the American people voted for, which is they want these agencies to work for we the people, not be political and come after the very taxpayers who pay their salary.”
“I really like Tulsi Gabbard, who is with us on the FISA issue. Kash Patel is with us on the FISA issue. They care about freedom,” he said. “RFK Jr. cares about freedom. Pam Bondi is going to be a great attorney general. I like the whole tenor and tone of what the president's doing, because it's consistent with so much of the work we've been doing.”
“I think there's an attitude coming in there that’s going to focus these agencies on what they're supposed to,” he added.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Jim Jordan, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Jordan, thanks for chatting today. For our last interview, you were driving around North Carolina campaigning for Republicans; that was indicative of your 2024, where you were campaigning across the country for Republicans. Anyone who needed Jim Jordan’s help, you were there for them. What stood out to you on the campaign trail as you were traversing America?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I think it was the same across America. The issues you hear about, border, crime, inflation, but because so much of our work on the Judiciary Committee was about protecting Americans’ liberties, and particularly this whole censorship effort. I talked about that. There was actually a survey a couple weeks before the election, and protecting the First Amendment was right behind the economy and inflation, and then the border was right there. We like to think our work had a real impact on that and the American people were nervous about the political nature of these agencies, the weaponization of these agencies against the American people. That resonates because I talked about it every single speaking day, and I do that back home as well.
Washington Reporter:
You and Donald Trump are, as I learned in our last interview, both fans of the MMA fighter Bo Nickal. Throughout the campaign, Trump was relying on the wrestling and professional fighting community to rally behind him. People like Dana White, Jake Paul, Conor McGregor, and of course, to me, most famously, Joe Rogan, were relied on either as surrogates. Since the election, we saw Jon Jones walk up and do the Trump dance after he won in a fight. Does this surprise you to see from the wrestling world? Is this a long time coming?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Now, if you remember, President Trump went to NCAA Tournament two years ago, and in collegiate wrestling there are 10 weight classes. And after he went to the final so that he got the 20 best guys, 10 weight classes, two guys wrestling in the finals. And at the end of each match, the champion went straight over to the president, shook his hand, got his selfie. The wrestling world, because it's so working class, middle class, its members are just Trump Republicans. An even better example from the campaign: remember that Penn State is a power house in collegiate wrestling right now. I think it was Dr. John Joyce who told the president backstage, ‘hey, the Penn State team is here.’ And he said ‘really?’ They've won something like 11 of the last 14 championships.
Washington Reporter:
That's because you're not coaching anymore.
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Well, we didn't win. But, the President invited them on stage. And all of them came up. He goes, it was so funny, ‘does anyone want to say anything?’ And it was funny because if you watch the video, they all kind of look at Zain Retherford, who graduated few years ago, this three time national champ. They all kind of look at Zain, and you can see like Retherford steps up and did like 30 seconds. ‘We’ve got to get out and vote. Make America Great Again.’ And I think that the wrestling community is what won it for Dave McCormick. We traveled around Pennsylvania with McCormick, we went to the Lehigh wrestling room, we went to Johnstown wrestling. We went on a bus thing with a bunch of wrestling people on one of the trip I was with him. He was the state champion in Pennsylvania, and was captain of the team at West Point. He won by 17,000 votes. Pennsylvania is the best high school wrestling state. I'm convinced that the wrestling community is what put him over the top, so it’s just kind of a funny aside, but President Trump likes those combat sports.
Washington Reporter:
As you campaigned across the country, did you come across any of your now-incoming colleagues who you are particularly excited to work with?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
There was a number from North Carolina. I did events for several down there. I did events for Brandon Gill in Texas early on. Obviously Brian Jack in Georgia is the freshman member going on steering. Brian worked for both President Trump and Speaker McCarthy. Brian is going to be a great member of Congress. I think they all are. Brad Knott from North Carolina, we're going to try to get him on the Judiciary Committee. Just sharp guy. I think he'd be great. A lot of good members; Tom Barrett ran a great campaign in Michigan. We campaigned for him.
Washington Reporter:
You're going to be chair of the Judiciary Committee, working with the Trump administration; what do you see as your top priorities going into a more friendly administration for your priorities?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Well, we're going to continue our work on the censorship. It's been labeled the censorship industrial complex, making sure we keep on that. On the oversight side, we're going to look back at David Weiss and Jack Smith, the special counsels. Judiciary always has a role historically in looking at the special counsels. We’ll do a lot of work on immigration and border security; so much of that's in our committee, and then this whole regulatory state, administrative state, how we can be helpful to Elon and Vivek in what they're doing, I think is going to be an important role for us as well. I think that’s what to look at when you're when you're looking ahead. I also think that this Congress we made a huge difference. The 51 former intelligence officials, exposing the censorship, that was used as the basis to censor the whole New York Post laptop story and others. Mark Zuckerberg wrote us a letter and told us, ‘the Biden administration pressured us to censor. Yes, we did censor. We're not going to do it again, and we regret that we did it.’ Who'd have ever thought that that would would have happened? GARM, this organization, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, is out of business. They were colluding antitrust activity, limiting the advertisement that could go into conservative outlets. So I know we made a big difference.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that there is a change, whether it's with Musk buying Twitter or with Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to you? One of the first times that we really learned about this, in addition to the letter that he wrote to you confessing all of this, was when he went on Joe Rogan and said, ‘yes, the feds called us.’ Is there something afoot going on here where at least these companies, whether it's out of principle or not, realize ‘Republicans run the show for at least two years, maybe we should try and scale back some of these things’?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I think for a lot of them it's principle. You saw Marc Andreessen on Joe Rogan. I've talked to Marc a couple times too. He's was talking about the debanking; and we just issued a report. That's a real concern, because they used the, I think misnamed, Bank Secrecy Act. Banks are compelled to issue a suspicious activity report if they see suspicious activity. Sorry, but the burden is on the bank to figure out if they see something suspicious, they do it. What's happening now is it's the government asking the banks, ‘hey, what do you think?’ The government's pushing them, and they're getting information without a warrant. And this information is then in this database that we found in 2023, you'll see this on the report, 14,000 officials, 3 million times searched this database on banking activity of American citizens without a warrant. And then we have the example from Bank of America where they said, after January 6, 2021 they sent a email to banks and said, ‘we want all debit card, credit card purchase of any customer in the in the D.C. metro area on January 5th, 6th and 7th, and then overlay that with any firearm purchase at any time. We want those names of those people, without a warrant.’ Like, what are you doing?
Washington Reporter:
The Democrats axed Biden because he was too old for the presidency. Democrats are, in essence, axing your counterpart right now for similar reasons. What do you make of the turmoil on the Judiciary Committee for Democrats?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
My attitude is, I don't care if it's Jamie [Raskin] or Jerry [Nadler]. We're gonna focus on the things that the American people send us here to focus on. Our job is our job. There were lots of times where Mr. Nadler and I disagreed, but we also agreed on FISA, on the warrant issue. Unfortunately, we lost that amendment vote 212 to 212. I think with Mr. Raskin, there'll be a lot of things that we don't agree on, but we'll find some common ground somewhere too.
Washington Reporter:
One of the other issues you were leading the way on this Congress was pushing back against the FTC’s harassment of conservatives. How do you see that agency changing in a Trump administration?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
A new chair is going to make all the difference.
Washington Reporter:
Mark Cuban caused quite a ruckus when he told us that they need to get rid of Lina Khan. During the campaign, he said that Harris would need to get rid of her.
Rep. Jim Jordan:
That's probably one thing I agree with Mark Cuban on. We need a new chair.
Washington Reporter:
Rep. Jim Jordan:
What else do you see with the Biden DOJ looking back on in the next Congress that you want to look more into?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
David Weiss. Remember with Jack Smith, one of his lawyers, Jay Bratt said to Stanley Woodward, who was representing one of the defendants in the the case in Florida, ‘hey, we thought you were interested in the judge position. We didn't know you're a Trump guy.’ You can't do that kind of stuff. So we need information on that; that's entirely just wrong. There are other concerns that we have, that's why we sent a preservation letter to Mr. Smith saying ‘preserve all the documents.’ I assume there's some report coming from Mr. Smith, that’s typically how special counsels operate. In the same with David Weiss, we deposed Weiss, but he wouldn't answer any questions because he kept saying there was an ongoing investigation. Well, there's no ongoing investigation. I think we probably want to talk to David Weiss at some point.
Washington Reporter:
I assume you weren't necessarily surprised by the Hunter Biden pardon. What do you make of the timing of it? Do you think it was an awkward Biden Thanksgiving that led to it being dropped when it was dropped?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I can only guess about the timing, but like you said, I wasn't surprised. I was surprised at the breadth of it. I think everyone sort of was, because it's ten years and eleven months. And it says not just the crimes you were charged with, that you faced possibly prison time for, but any potential crime you may have committed all the way back to January 2014 and all the way through to December 2024; that’s ten years and eleven months.
Washington Reporter:
We've seen that Anthony Fauci and other people are potentially getting pardons from Biden. What do these pardons say about Biden's decision making?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I think it just confirmed what we always say: the Democrats always accuse us of what they're doing. They said, ‘oh, there were people asking for pardons.’ Some of my colleagues, they said, were asking for pardons. I don't think they were. And frankly, was there any retribution when President Trump was in office? Was there any retribution towards Hillary Clinton, who paid the law firm Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired the foreigner, Christopher Steele, who put together a document that was not even close to being accurate, which became the basis to go to the court to get the warrant to spy on her opponent's campaign? And did he go after her? No. I don't get it. These guys have gone after President Trump and a bunch of other Americans. Back to the pardon of Hunter Biden, 2014, 2015, and 2016 were when Joe Biden was vice president, you know all this; and it's more importantly when his son was getting all the money from the Ukrainian energy company. And, of course, we all know that Joe Biden leveraged American tax dollars to get the prosecutor fired at the request of his son, we learned this from Devin Archer, to get the prosecutor fired, who was looking into the very company, Hunter Biden said on the board of, and he's pardoning any activity back to that time.
Washington Reporter:
It seems like there are Get Out of Jail Free cards being issued by the White House. Is there any crime that, if you could commit and you could be guaranteed a pardon from President Biden, that's on your mind, that you want to commit? Like pulling a fire alarm in the House of Representatives?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
No, I can’t think of anything.
Washington Reporter:
What do you make of Donald Trump’s picks for attorney general, FBI director? Have you interacted with these people on the campaign trail?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I think the picks are consistent with what President Trump campaigned on and what the American people voted for, which is they want these agencies to work for we the people, not be political and come after the very taxpayers who pay their salary. I really like Tulsi Gabbard, who is with us on the FISA issue. Kash Patel is with us on the FISA issue. They care about freedom. RFK Jr. cares about freedom. Pam Bondi is going to be a great attorney general. I like the whole tenor and tone of what the president's doing, because it's consistent with so much of the work we've been doing. I always think about how you’ve got an FBI and DOJ that said ‘we're going to investigate moms and dads at school board meetings.’ They had a memorandum at the FBI Richmond field office that said, ‘if you're pro-life Catholic, you need to be investigated.’ But meanwhile, we don't know who planted the pipe bombs on January 6. It’s been four stinking years. We don't know who leaked the Dobbs decision. That's been two years. And we don't know who put cocaine at the White House. Maybe instead of pulling up to school board meetings to see what who's in the parking lot, as one of the whistleblowers testified about in one of our hearings that FBI agents did, maybe figure out who's leaking Supreme Court decisions and who's bringing cocaine into the White House. We just looked at this: one of our members was asking about the FBI budget. They spent almost $12 billion annually. More than half of it is devoted to intelligence and counterintelligence, and more than half the people, so personnel and money. My guess is most Americans, when they think about the FBI, they think FBI is primarily engaged in traditional crime fighting, like stopping gangs and organized crime and money laundering and going after those kind of bad guys versus this surveillance of people. But that's not the case. I think there's an attitude coming in there that’s going to focus these agencies on what they're supposed to.
Washington Reporter:
We saw Avril Haines, Biden's Director of National Intelligence, say that foreign actors, specifically Iran, have been exploiting some anti-Israel, anti-American college protests. Is that something that federal law enforcement should be looking at more seriously?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Of course, yeah. But what I'm concerned about is them searching the giant database of information using your phone number, your email address, your name and doing that without a warrant.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that general domestic left-wing terrorism is something that is not paid attention to enough by federal law enforcement?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I just want the FBI to fight crime, not do surveillance on Americans and not be kicking down the door of Mark Houck’s home with his wife and kids, in a pre-dawn raid, when this lawyer said he's happy to turn himself in.
Washington Reporter:
You were talking about Elon Musk and reforming the government. Where else within the Judiciary Committee's scope do you see being able to work with DOGE? Have you ever met Musk on the trail?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
I just talked with him recently. We have talked with him a lot, because when he bought Twitter, remember what Lina Khan did to him. They sped up the approval of the consent decree, we have the emails, just so they could use it as a way to go after Musk when he purchased Twitter, and that's when they started sending him all the requests for all this information. The one that really stuck out to me was they said, ‘give us the names of any journalists you've talked to. We know you've talked to Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss.’ Wait a minute, Lina Khan, there's a thing called the First Amendment. What are you doing? He's allowed to talk to the press. He doesn't tell you what people in the press he is talking to, but they used it as a basis to go after him and harass him. There was another example in there of the accounting firm where they basically tell the accounting firm what they want the result to be.
Washington Reporter:
We’ve seen stories about how DOGE is preparing to target remote government workers. Are there other priorities that you're able to think about for the next Congress that wouldn't have been on the forefront for the Judiciary Committee without this push by Musk?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
A lot will be in the regulatory area; if we pass the REINS Act, those kinds of things. Because, making government efficient is not just cutting spending, although that's really important because government spends too much money, but it's also about the regulations that government places on entrepreneurs and on small business owners that make it difficult o to compete and grow your business and grow our economy and have the vitality that we want. That's important too. And then, of course, it's kind of hard for government to do efficient work and good work for the American taxpayer if they don't have to work. If you're all going to work remote, we may not need as many people, and we certainly don't need as many facilities. Let's lease them, sell them.
Washington Reporter:
As we think about two years from now, what are topics that will be important to continue your work on?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Censorship and protecting First Amendment are things that American people view as really important. The survey results show that. I’d like to think our committee has something to do with that, based on our work this past Congress. Who'd have thought GARM would have gone out of business after two weeks after a hearing? And to be honest, I don't think anyone ever heard of GARM. I hadn’t heard of GARM until I was sitting in a meeting with the Speaker the House, Kevin McCarthy, and Elon Musk, and we were talking about some of this stuff with the FTC, and some of the stuff with what Taibbi and Shellenberger were exposing. We got that and he goes, ‘by the way, there's this organization GARM, because GARM is harm.’ I never forgot the sentence. And so we started investigating. He was 100 percent right. They're like, bad. We have a hearing, and Ben Shapiro did a great job, and one of the guys from the big media buying outfit up in New York, he testified, I felt kind of bad for him, because he got fired the next day. And then the next thing you know, they're no longer in operation. And then the same thing sort of happened with Climate Action 100. You had State Street, BlackRock, Vanguard, they all got out of the group. That's what the witness said to us. We asked her during the committee, ‘did anyone leave?’ She said ‘yeah,’ and we asked ‘anyone of note?’ She said ‘yeah.’ I asked her why’d they leave, and she said ‘because of your investigation.’
Washington Reporter:
They would have gotten away with it, were it not for Jim Jordan.
Rep. Jim Jordan:
Well, I mean, it's our staff and the team and our members. I know we've made a difference. And then, frankly, we had Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testify.
Washington Reporter:
Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Elon Musk, and even Donald Trump. Every single one of these people is a former Democrat. Do you feel like your work on a political side is going to be helpful to the GOP in continuing to flip a lot of skeptical Democrats towards your side?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
It was one of the most popular lines of mine on the campaign. I’d say, ‘did you ever think Donald Trump, Elon Musk, RFK Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard would be on the same team?’ We invited Tulsi in to speak, she did a great job when she was still Democrat. We invited RFK Jr in when he was running for president in the Democratic Party. And I took some heat for that, but he's with us on the First Amendment. And shazam, it turned out all right. And Shellenberger and Taibbi weren't Republicans. The other lady who was really good was the journalist from Canada, Rupa Subramanya, she covered the trucker stuff.
Washington Reporter:
My final question for you: you might not feel strongly about this, but I know your constituents do. Ryan Day. What needs to happen?
Rep. Jim Jordan:
That's up to other people. I love the Buckeyes, but I really love the Badger football. Luke Fickell’s a good guy. Fickell was a really good high school wrestler, best heavyweight in the country, and he's a great guy. And unfortunately, they went 5-7. It's tough. Hopefully, they'll turn it around. And the Buckeyes, they might win the National Championship. If they win the National Championship, everything's fine.
Washington Reporter:
Thanks so much for chatting, Congressman Jordan. We appreciate your time.