INTERVIEW: Sen. Eric Schmitt on leading President Trump’s rescissions package, exposing the Deep State, and the unrecognizable Democratic Party of today

Like other young men, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) listens to the Joe Rogan Experience — and he recently heard a familiar voice on one of the world’s most popular podcasts: his own, as he read off “some of the craziest tweets” from NPR’s CEO.

The work of Schmitt and his fellow Republicans to do what many have tried to do for decades — ending taxpayer funding for outlets like NPR and PBS finally happened, and viral questioning, like Schmitt’s of NPR CEO Katherine Maher helped make it happen.

Schmitt told the Washington Reporter in an interview that people like Maher “made the best arguments for the rescission that anybody could make.”

“When you have what NPR had been doing for a long time — the totally biased reporting,” the case to cut off federal funding, especially while Republicans fully control Congress, is easy, he said. “We highlighted the CEO Katherine Maher’s ridiculous and unhinged tweets; they are a completely biased organization that looks down on at least half of America, and we shouldn't be subsidizing that. I think they made the best arguments we could possibly make of how radically captured they've been as left-wing organizations. Quite frankly, people have been trying to do this for 50 years, and I'm glad we were able to finally do it.”

Not only did Schmitt and Republicans succeed, they got a coveted shout out from Rogan, a podcaster who Schmitt himself is a fan of.

Rogan, Schmitt noted, has “got an expanded reach. I think he, and especially the people who listen to him, are part of this kind of expanded base of the people who want to vote for Republicans, and I think that is exciting.”

While Schmitt has made a name for himself dating back to his time as Attorney General of Missouri as a defender of free speech, he does not want free subsidies to liberal media outlets — and with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) closing up shop, he has his mind on other targets, like reforming the intelligence community, which he said has seen a loss of trust during the Biden years.

“The worst fears of what many people thought to be true has now been actually proven, which was that at the highest levels of government, an effort was underway in 2016 to lie to the American people, to create a predicate for FISA warrants and spy on their chief political rival, Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate,” Schmitt said, about bombshell findings released by Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

“They spied on him,” he continued. “They doctored intelligence reports. They kept that going to try to sideline a presidency to subvert the will of the American people. You had the CIA director, you had the FBI implicated in all this. And I think that absolutely, this information has to come out, and that's the only way there's going to be real accountability. People talk about the Deep State, and this is exactly what they're talking about.”

While Gabbard was confirmed without unanimous Senate GOP support, Schmitt said that her findings justify President Donald Trump’s unorthodox selection of her to serve as DNI.

“She's a reformer, and that's what President Trump surrounded himself with — people who want to disrupt and who are reformers,” he explained. “And this is what they were worried about. This is why they tried to disparage her. This is why they tried to make up stuff about her being a foreign asset. It’s because they knew if Tulsi Gabbard or somebody like Tulsi got in there, they had these burn bags and they had these documents that were out there. They knew what their vulnerabilities were. And we finally have a president and a team willing to expose that, and I think that's a good thing.”

When it comes to the Deep State, Schmitt is unequivocal: “Nobody ever elected these people to anything, and they were going about their business because they didn't like the guy, to undermine him, and that then continued,” he said of the Deep State’s efforts to sandbag Trump. “They didn't want to get him back in office. They tried to throw him in jail for the rest of his life, but he got back in office, and this reform movement now is happening. They were probably terrified of it, because they know what their vulnerabilities are, and more needs to come out.”

At this point, much is in the hands of Gabbard and of FBI Director Kash Patel when it comes to declassifying more of the Obamagate-era documents, but Schmitt has his own legislation to force Big Tech companies to respect their users’ First Amendment rights.

“In terms of the next phase, I've got legislation actually that would do a couple of things,” he explained. “First of all, if you're a Big Tech company and you're engaged in censorship, you lose your Section 230 protections. I think that would change the dynamic, knowing that they can be sued. If they want to be a publisher, go be a publisher, but you don't get to be an open platform if you're going to be engaged in censorship with the government like they were.”

“And then secondly,” he continued, “individual actors, like in the case of [Douglass] Mackey, that were involved in the censorship regime, if they violated somebody's First Amendment rights, they ought to be personally liable for it. I think that would change the dynamic on the inside, so that actors within the administrative state would have something to lose if they engage in this kind of unconstitutional actions.”

More broadly, Schmitt expects the Senate to focus next on the appropriations bills when it reconvenes, in part “because we'll have that whole funding fight.” Fortunately for Republicans, the One Big, Beautiful Bill inoculated them from some of the Democrats’ favorite “hostages” to take, he explained.

“I think an important thing to note is that one of the reasons the Big, Beautiful Bill was so important was that it front loaded the 100 plus billion dollars, not just for our military, but also on the border,” he said. “So you got money, the $40 plus billion for the border wall, the $40 plus billion for detention beds, the $40 plus billion for ICE agents, all of that's front loaded, so the Democrats can't hold that stuff hostage in a funding showdown here in September. So that is kind of a little-talked about strategic victory. Those are generally the things that they hold hostage.”

One area where Senate Democrats have been somewhat successful in hostage-taking has been with the Senate calendar, and Schmitt is out of patience.

“Filibustering on the executive calendar is almost exclusively a Chuck Schumer production at this point, it just didn't happen before,” he said. “They're really trying to gum up the works. And so either they're going to relent here for this historic and unprecedented obstruction, or we're going to move forward with, whether it's recess appointments or potentially changing it so it's not two hours afterwards, it's two minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, because we're going to help President Trump get his team in place.”

The Missouri lawmaker also reflected on what another famous Missourian — President Harry S. Truman — would think of today’s Democratic Party.

“The Democrat Party now is unrecognizable to that of Harry Truman,” Schmitt said. “They're captured by the elite, by the radical left. You look at the things they talk about, they're going after ICE agents. They're still talking about defunding the police. They had their own little internal scrap about a relatively non-controversial law enforcement legislation on the Senate floor. They talk a big game about a course correction after the election, but they're doubling down on crazy. And I think what 2024 was was a mandate for common sense. That was the focus of President Trump's Second Inaugural Address. And I think that's what we're talking about, that they don't have their bearings. They're completely off-kilter. They don't know how to identify with real people. They've abandoned the working class, and they continue to find themselves on the 20 percent side of 80-20 issues.”

Despite the Democratic Party’s historically low approval ratings, Schmitt predicted that “I don't think they've hit rock bottom yet. I think they've got a ways to go, because it's still a party that's captured by a pretty radical fringe. They're about ready to elect an actual communist in New York, and Bernie Sanders and AOC are the ones who are filling up arenas. So I don't think anything's gonna change anytime soon.”

Below is a transcript of our interview with Sen. Eric Schmitt, lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down following the rescissions package. What do you make of that?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

Taxpayers are finally getting out of the business of subsidizing broadcasting in that way. It's a very outdated thing. NPR and PBS are woke, and they don't deserve taxpayer money. I think it was very important that the president get that done. We're glad we got it done. I think it was a statement that we had the political will to find this wasteful spending, and do something about it.

Washington Reporter:

What did you make of the arguments by NPR and PBS that you're killing Big Bird, that you're irreparably harming smaller communities in Missouri by cutting the federal funding to these entities?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I think they made the best arguments for the rescission that anybody could make. When you have what NPR had been doing for a long time — the totally biased reporting — we highlighted the CEO Katherine Maher’s ridiculous and unhinged tweets, they are a completely biased organization that looks down on at least half of America, and we shouldn't be subsidizing that. I think they made the best arguments we could possibly make of how radically captured they've been as left-wing organizations. Quite frankly, people have been trying to do this for 50 years, and I'm glad we were able to finally do it.

Washington Reporter:

Another huge area of keeping promises was with recent findings from Tulsi Gabbard — not to brag, we were the first outlet to report the initial release of these Obamagate documents. What do you make of what you've already learned from these documents? And what do you want the DNI office to focus on next in terms of getting more documents to both you and to the American people?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

The American people have lost a lot of trust and a lot of faith in our intelligence community, with the FBI, with the CIA. I certainly saw some of that with the Missouri vs. Biden lawsuit, with the coordination we saw from organizations like CISA and others, which ironically, were using some of the language about critical infrastructure in that document as a way to sow doubt and a reason to censor. They were using that as a as a pretext, even in 2021 during their censorship efforts. But the worst fears of what many people thought to be true has now been actually proven, which was that at the highest levels of government, an effort was underway in 2016 to lie to the American people, to create a predicate for FISA warrants and spy on their chief political rival, Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate. They spied on him. They doctored intelligence reports. They kept that going to try to sideline a presidency to subvert the will of the American people. You had the CIA director, you had the FBI implicated in all this. And I think that absolutely, this information has to come out, and that's the only way there's going to be real accountability. People talk about the Deep State, and this is exactly what they're talking about. Nobody ever elected these people to anything, and they were going about their business because they didn't like the guy, to undermine him, and that then continued. They didn't want to get him back in office. They tried to throw him in jail for the rest of his life, but he got back in office, and this reform movement now is happening. They were probably terrified of it, because they know what their vulnerabilities are, and more needs to come out.

Washington Reporter:

Tulsi Gabbard obviously was one of Trump's more controversial picks. Some of your colleagues on the GOP side voted against her. Do you feel like the findings that you're talking about justify having a former Democrat and Democratic presidential candidate in the cabinet? Do these findings make you feel confident about the vote that you had for her?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

Yes. In fact, I think I was on Meet the Press the Sunday after she was nominated and defended her and said that she's a reformer, and that's what President Trump surrounded himself with — people who want to disrupt and who are reformers. And this is what they were worried about. This is why they tried to disparage her. This is why they tried to make up stuff about her being a foreign asset. It’s because they knew if Tulsi Gabbard or somebody like Tulsi got in there, they had these burn bags and they had these documents that were out there. They knew what their vulnerabilities were. And we finally have a president and a team willing to expose that, and I think that's a good thing.

Washington Reporter:

With your prosecutor hat on, what would you want to see come next with these people? Thanks to Trump, Obama's probably immune from prosecution here. Do you think that charges against people like James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are merited based on what you've learned so far?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

Yeah, I think that the American people want accountability here, and I think prosecutions are likely and should be forthcoming. I think when you look and see the extent to which they outright lied, doctored intelligence reports, hid the truth, you just can't tolerate that in this country. If we're ever going to have a real course correction, there have to be consequences here. You just look at the magnitude of all of this, it really does make Watergate look like a third rate burglary. It really does. If you were to tell this story to somebody unfamiliar with the facts, you would think this was happening in some third world Banana Republic, but it happened here, and George Soros worked with Hillary Clinton's campaign to start the lie. They went to President Obama, the Director of the CIA, the FBI. They lied. Then you get into 2020, they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop story. Then they try to manipulate these facts with Trump, there’s the lawfare, and they want to throw him in jail. I mean, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. So there ought to be consequences for these people, up and down for the eight year period in which all this was happening. There ought to be real consequences, including likely prosecutions.

Washington Reporter:

You just laid out what sounds like quite a compelling Tom Clancy movie. Do you have any thoughts on who should play Eric Schmitt in it? I'm thinking Brad Pitt, but I'm open for alternatives.

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

He's a Missouri guy, so I'll go with that.

Washington Reporter:

You were already talking about Missouri vs. Biden. I've seen a lot of free speech wins in the Supreme Court recently. You also met with Douglass Mackey recently, who was, as you noted, persecuted by the Biden administration for exercising his First Amendment right to post memes. What do you think is next on the First Amendment frontier?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I'm really proud of the work we did. When we filed that lawsuit back in 2022, people called it a conspiracy theory that the government was working with Big Tech. And then the discovery came out, and we knew it was real. Elon Musk buys Twitter, and then has the Twitter Files, and people see it. And now we continue to learn more and more and more. And I think Douglass Mackey's persecution was top of the list of some of the abuses that took place, that feel very much like they happened in another country, but it happened here. In terms of the next phase, I've got legislation actually that would do a couple of things. First of all, if you're a Big Tech company and you're engaged in censorship, you lose your Section 230 protections. I think that would change the dynamic, knowing that they can be sued. If they want to be a publisher, go be a publisher, but you don't get to be an open platform if you're going to be engaged in censorship with the government like they were. And then secondly, individual actors, like in the case of Mackey, that were involved in the censorship regime, if they violated somebody's First Amendment rights, they ought to be personally liable for it. I think that would change the dynamic on the inside, so that actors within the administrative state would have something to lose if they engage in this kind of unconstitutional actions.

Washington Reporter:

Do you have a favorite case from this Supreme Court that you think people should be excited about?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

My favorite decision this Supreme Court term has to be its emergency docket decision in Trump v. CASA that ended the practice of universal injunctions. We’ve seen district judges go completely rogue as they try to do anything they can to stop Trump’s agenda. This case put that to bed. It settled a long lingering issue about the limits of the Article III Judicial Power and our Separation of Powers — district courts cannot issue universal injunctions that reach far past the scope of the case before them. I also enjoyed the heated back and forth between Justice Barrett and Justice Jackson. This was a refreshing decision and a huge win for our Separation of Powers.

Washington Reporter:

On another court question, the Senate just confirmed Emil Bove to be a district court judge. I personally think that your viral Washington Reporter op-ed helped make that happen. I'm curious, can you talk about the Democrats’ obstruction with him specifically, and then more broadly with we're seeing them put up very historic obstruction against the Senate Republicans and Trump's agenda. None of it's working.

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

He's incredibly qualified. Emil’s going to be a great circuit judge, and those circuit positions are really, really important. What I'm really looking for, and where he checks all the boxes, is not someone who's just conservative from a judicial perspective, but also somebody who's tough. In the nature of the questions I asked him, he went through all of that, he had a lot of risk when he defended President Trump with all the lawfare that took place, before he got back, and that showed a lot of guts. And I think we need judges who can stand up. They're getting a lot of incoming now, and we want judges who are not just originalists or textualists or conservative, but also who have the guts to write an important dissent that might find its way in as a majority view somewhere down the road. I think he meets that criteria also. We're proud, we had the first four district court judges out of the chute going to the Eastern District of Missouri. All of them worked for me at the Attorney General's office at one point or another. So that's kind of exciting. St. Louis now will have all eight appointed by Republicans on the Eastern District of Missouri, including 7 of the 8 appointed by President Trump. I think if you want to look for a place where there's gonna be some important litigation down the road, the Eastern District of Missouri is that, and of course, you got the Eighth Circuit is incredibly conservative too. So I’m really proud of those individuals for their getting through early and being really a credit to the bench. If you put this in historical context, everybody's really familiar with the legislative filibuster, there's only three calendars. You’ve got the legislative calendar, you've got the executive calendar, you've got the impeachment calendar. Filibustering on the executive calendar is almost exclusively a Chuck Schumer production at this point, it just didn't happen before. To put that in perspective, Clarence Thomas, who was a pretty controversial Supreme Court justice as far as his nomination went in the early 90s; he got 52 votes, meaning there wasn't a filibuster to overcome 60. So think about that. So now you have all these deputy undersecretaries of different agencies who are being filibustered, every single one of them. It's never happened where every single nominee by President Trump on the executive calendar is being filibustered, and then we have to invoke cloture. Then you have a two hour time after that. So they're really trying to gum up the works. And so either they're going to relent here for this historic and unprecedented obstruction, or we're going to move forward with, whether it's recess appointments or potentially changing it so it's not two hours afterwards, it's two minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, because we're going to help President Trump get his team in place. It was never contemplated that it would take this much time to get through the general counsel for the Department of Transportation, right? The people need to be Senate confirmed. It's just never happened before, but they're in this resistance mode there. They've got some real radicals on their side. They're trying to get attention. Maybe they're running for president. They don't have a message. They don't have a leader. They're flailing. They're swinging at every pitch. They look ridiculous. Their poll numbers are in the trash can. They just can't find anything that'll stick, so they just keep doing this. And I think they look like a bunch of cry babies and it's not going to work.

Washington Reporter:

Other than nominations, what do you want the Senate to focus on legislatively when you get back in session? You enacted a lot of your campaign promises in this first reconciliation bill.

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

The next thing other than confirmations is probably the appropriations bills. That's probably next, whether we get to it now or we get to it in early September, because we'll have that whole funding fight, but I think an important thing to note is that one of the reasons the Big, Beautiful Bill was so important was that it front loaded the 100 plus billion dollars, not just for our military, but also on the border. So you got money, the $40 plus billion for the border wall, the $40 plus billion for detention beds, the $40 plus billion for ICE agents, all of that's front loaded, so the Democrats can't hold that stuff hostage in a funding showdown here in September. So that is kind of a little-talked about strategic victory. Those are generally the things that they hold hostage. Remember that I wasn't here, but in 2017 the shutdown was all related to the border wall. It wasn't a huge number to do the border wall, and the Democrats threw a fit. So we've effectively cut through that for our big priorities that I think will help strengthen our hand as it relates to negotiations.

Washington Reporter:

I want to look across the aisle and across the pond for a second. Recently, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand in their New York offices were protested by left-wing activists because they didn't side with Bernie Sanders in voting to restrict arms sales to Israel, and yet over half of Senate Democrats did vote to cut off selling weapons to Israel. What is going on with your colleagues across the aisle on this issue?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I think the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party is growing, and not just in volume. Their volume isn't just getting higher, their numbers are too, and that's concerning. And that's a lot of their base that is captured by this and it's now being reflected in the U.S. Senate. So thankfully, it's not a majority view, but it's gaining traction on their side, and it's pretty reckless.

Washington Reporter:

Is this out of sincere conviction from your colleagues who are siding with Bernie Sanders? A lot of them voted against the exact same thing last year, or is this just craven political opportunism to appease the base?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I don't know. It's probably on a case by case basis. They all have their own motivations here, but I do think that it goes back to Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor a year ago, calling for the upending of the Israeli government and for Netanyahu to be ousted. That has never happened before either. It's really radical. I think they knew that Biden's approach was a disaster, and they were trying to distract from that. I think that was a pure political move, because they knew that Biden was struggling here at home, and they wanted to try to pin things on Netanyahu. I don't know. I'm not sure. It's hard for me to figure out where it's coming from. But Israel has a right to defend themselves. They're doing that, and they ought to make sure that Hamas is completely wiped out and can never be reconstituted in a way that is a threat to them. We would do the same thing here, and they've got a right to do that over there.

Washington Reporter:

Missouri famously gave us Harry S. Truman. What do you think he would say about the situation you just laid out?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I think the Democrat Party now is unrecognizable to that of Harry Truman. They're captured by the elite, by the radical left. You look at the things they talk about, they're going after ICE agents. They're still talking about defunding the police. They had their own little internal scrap about a relatively non-controversial law enforcement legislation on the Senate floor. They talk a big game about a course correction after the election, but they're doubling down on crazy. And I think what 2024 was was a mandate for common sense. That was the focus of President Trump's Second Inaugural Address. And I think that's what we're talking about, that they don't have their bearings. They're completely off-kilter. They don't know how to identify with real people. They've abandoned the working class, and they continue to find themselves on the 20 percent side of 80-20 issues. I don't think they've hit rock bottom yet. I think they've got a ways to go, because it's still a party that's captured by a pretty radical fringe. They're about ready to elect an actual communist in New York, and Bernie Sanders and AOC are the ones who are filling up arenas. So I don't think anything's gonna change anytime soon.

Washington Reporter:

And speaking of unrecognizable, you've talked a lot about Western Europe, especially vis a vis immigration. We're seeing a lot of these liberal heads of countries, allies of America, push for some sort of recognition of a Palestinian state. Are you concerned that that is rewarding terrorism?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

I do, and I think that's just a failed scenario that can't work. I think October 7 sort of closed the book on that belief. This is what globalism kind of looks like and where boundaries don't matter at all. This is a world where where things are produced doesn’t matter. It's all about consumption. It's about mass migration. It's about a foreign policy with no restraint at all. I think at least for us, for the United States, and we've talked about this before, there was never really an adjustment after the Cold War. We were all united to defeat Soviet communism. We wanted Europe and Japan to get back on their feet. But once that happened and the Berlin Wall came down, we didn't change. We had this wandering foreign policy that led to things like paying for Guatemalan sex changes and DEI in Burma. We weren't prioritizing core American interests. We had an immigration policy under the last four years where borders were just arbitrary lines on a map; they threw up the gate, the gates were open, and we have 20 million people here illegally. It's because the people, the elites that believe this, are sort of everywhere, but they're not from anywhere. They don't actually believe in the basic concept of a nation and that kind of identity. They want to blow all that up. And so I think that's kind of where we're at as a country, where this is a fight between people who believe in America and people who believe they're global citizens and this infected, of course, Western Europe, where they let mass migration run rampant. There's been an assault on religion, there's been an assault on free speech. Now, they’re a people who kind of have been untethered from the anchors that used to hold them together. And that's a pretty dangerous place for them to be.

Washington Reporter:

And this brings us back to where we started: on the rescissions package. I'm sure you saw, Joe Rogan featured you on his podcast talking about how insane the CEO of NPR is. How did you find this out? And what do you make of the significance that people like Joe Rogan have found in the Republican Party?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

Yeah, I do listen to Rogan, but somebody did point it out to me, which was hilarious.

Washington Reporter:

What was that like?

Sen. Eric Schmitt:

It was cool. He's got an expanded reach. I think he, and especially the people who listen to him, are part of this kind of expanded base of the people who want to vote for Republicans, and I think that is exciting. Missourians always kind of distrusted a government 1,000 miles away telling them how to live their lives. This new coalition that we've got, a lot of them listen to Joe Rogan. A lot of them listen to podcasts. It's allowed us to reach a lot of people, and also it's diffused information. Getting all the way back to this government funding of media, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or these kind of middlemen that were always very liberal and biased, that's all being broken up. That's a good thing. That's a diffusion of information. People can find it on a bunch of different platforms, a bunch of different voices. And if you believe in free speech, and if you believe in people coming to their own conclusions, and not having to rely on these middlemen or the quote unquote experts all the time, this is a really good development. So it's been kind of fun to see some of the things that we're talking about end up on some of those popular podcasts, or being on those podcasts myself. You get an opportunity to kind of be yourself. And I think if you're sort of like a normal person, that comes through, which is, by the way, maybe not all that common in Washington, but I like it. It's what I listen to, and it's just kind of like when I'm just hanging out with people at home. They're talking about things that are being talked about on these podcasts.

Washington Reporter:

Senator Schmitt, thanks so much for chatting as always.