Latest / TARGET Podcast / Rick Renzi: FBI Wiretaps, Extortion Charges, and a Presidential Pardon

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Rick Renzi: FBI Wiretaps, Extortion Charges, and a Presidential Pardon · TARGET Podcast

• speaker-0: They were gonna indict my father on his deathbed in order to get me to plead. You got a system that's so strong and so big that it's easily gonna crush speaker-1: Prosecutors have a set of tools to encourage anyone they go after, any target, to plead. speaker-0: So you'd have nine agents listening to one attorney client privilege call. speaker-2: Both sides of the aisle should say, what in the world was the FBI doing listening to those phone calls with your attorney? speaker-0: I'm at my father's funeral and I'm given the eulogy. They had leaked the word of the first indictment of twenty felonies. speaker-1: If you had pled, none of this misconduct would have come to light. None of it would have mattered. speaker-2: When did you first learn that the government was targeting you in a criminal investigation? I'm Alex Little, a former federal prosecutor who now is a defense lawyer that stands on the other side of the courtroom defending clients. speaker-1: And I'm Amy Nelson, a former Wall Street lawyer and entrepreneur who never touched criminal law until the FBI knocked on my door. And I had to walk my husband through a four-year DOJ investigation. speaker-2: This is the Target Podcast. speaker-1: You're a United States congressman, you're sitting in your office, and the phone rings, you answer, you speak with your attorney, you're under investigation by the DOJ. It's a private call, one you think will be sacred. But then you later learn that it wasn't private at all, that federal agents were listening as they pursued you as a target of a criminal investigation. speaker-2: And that's the story of Rick Renzi, who we're here to talk to today. Thank you, Rick. speaker-1: So let's get right into it. And I wanna ask about a question that happened not at the beginning but in the middle. At a certain point after you were under investigation, you learned that your phone calls were being recorded by the government, not normal phone calls, your calls with attorneys. Right. Where were you when you learned that and what was that like? speaker-0: I had ended up living in a in a garage with a space heater and a and a fan. I was kind of on my own a little bit, you know. And my attorneys called and we were trying to get discovery turned over to us. And after a while they finally turned over a little bit of discovery. And in that discovery were two CDs, and the CDs were of all the wiretapped that it they had taken on me. It was called a Title III wiretap. It involved me talking to my little girl, asking where daddy was, or me talking to congressmen. They had actually even l recorded the entire Republican conference committee after the post-Obama election and what our strategy was going to be, which is illegal. So there were some calls on the discs that were on the log that were kind of blacked out, and it didn't seem right. And so I started listening to the calls. At night I would put the C D player in in my car and I'd sit there and st and started a call log. And then over time I started realizing that the blacked out logs were my attorney's voice. And they we they would click on and click off, and you could they were actually listening to my attorney client privilege calls. And they we began to ask for more and more of discovery of the fact that it came to light that you and you you they were inven actually recording my my attorney client privilege calls. speaker-2: Which is nuts. I mean the fact that one, they're doing a wiret tap on a member of Congress, they're listening to clearly speech and debate communications which the government shouldn't be listening to and then they're listening just willfully to your legal calls. speaker-0: Right, and then they started c covering it up. Once we started going to the judge and saying, Hey, we need a misconduct hearing pre trial and I fought the government for seven years pre trial and w so we had a misconduct hearing that they granted and during that they started to try and cover up and lie that they hadn't recorded the calls and we had the proof. We had the metadata. speaker-2: So obviously by this point it's nuts. You're clearly like they're after me. Right. And so going from the middle back to the beginning, mm-hmm, when did you first learn that the government was targeting you in a criminal investigation? speaker-0: A reporter called, I was on the road campaigning, and they have something called an October surprise. So you got a November election, and here we are at the beginning of October. A reporter calls and says, Hey, we hear there's this grand jury against you. what what comments do you have? And I was I was stunned. I had no idea what they were talking about at that point. We had no information. and all I knew was I was in the middle of a campaign and I had forty something days left on the road out in Arizona. My district was r rural Arizona where and all the way from the Navajo Nation, which is a large area of poverty, all the way down into Sedona, Flagstaff, John Wayne's Ranch was part of my district. And I had this area where they had said that they had discovered the largest amount of copper ore in the world, which is right next to the Apaches. And so I had begun to fight against this international copper company, which eventually became owned by the Chinese, in and backing I was backing the Apaches. speaker-2: And so at at the time and be clear, a reporter's not supposed to know about grand jury activity. Right. Right. I mean did did you even at that time understand how improper it was to get a call like that? speaker-0: I didn't. I we ended up getting an attorney quickly, to c who came on board and he started to say, Hey, there's some improprieties here. It doesn't look like this thing's being handled properly. speaker-1: And so where do you go from there? You've got the call, you have an attorney, then what? speaker-0: I've gotta finish the campaign. I've gotta finish. I've gotta I'm in I'm representing a district that was majority Democrat, and here I am a Republican conservative, twelve kids, seven boys and five girls. And I've gotta finish the campaign first. That was the first thing, my objective. And so we win, but we only win by a a fraction. We were behind in the polls because they had dropped this bomb on speaker-1: So it was public. speaker-0: it was public. speaker-2: And what did the reporting say? I mean, I know you got the call, they're investigating, but what when you started reading that paper, I assume you learned something. Right. speaker-0: They went to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and said, Is Renzi under investigation? He said yes. Wow. But don't blow his head off just yet, because we're not sure. And so we get the leak from the and then all of a sudden we're reading within a week later Robert Muller's hit on me and I'm trying to survive. Yeah. And I'm I don't know what's going on. But now that it's starting to come out that there's something to do with this Chinese copper company and these lobbyists, these democratic lobbyists that they've hired who are starting to have kind of put together this f this fake dossier. They hired a former FBI agent and he had turned it over to the Department of Justice, but then he pulled it back when it went public. He didn't want his hand involved in it. And that that they were using this dossier that they had developed using this former FBI agent and they were manipulating the Department of Justice to go after me. speaker-1: And so i you know, it sounds like the company made a criminal referral to DOJ about actions you allegedly took. And I think just even that fact for people who aren't really familiar with the system that a company can hire someone to go accuse you of a crime to the Department of Justice. speaker-0: Correct. The company had Democratic lobbyists who had been going to Congress and fighting for this copper mine that they wanted to to establish that was next to the Apache Reservation. This was Apache leap in Arizona where tradition was that the Apaches had been backed up to this cliff by the cavalry in the 1860s and that they had leapt to their death in silence and defiance of the government. and so they had these lobbyists who had hired a former FBI agent and then he was the one who developed this these lies and got it before the speaker-2: Now you didn't know that. I mean so let's kind of go back in time. You you you don't know it, but there's a a paid group of former FBI agents and lawyers whose goal is to get the FBI to charge you with the crime and put you in jail. speaker-0: Exactly. And they even brag about it on their website. speaker-2: So at some point later on you find that out. W what does that feel like? I mean, i is there a sense of just like, What in the world did I do to get in crosshairs like this? speaker-0: When I found out, we found out the about the dossier that had been turned over, had been developed by these Democratic lobbyists along with his former FBI agent. And then we found out how he tried to pull it back and replace it with an anonymous one. And so that hidden hand was he didn't want right 'cause speaker-1: We're gonna do this, but we don't want anyone to know we're doing speaker-0: what happened was is he started to dig into the facts and he found that I was innocent. He didn't want the civil liability. speaker-2: Sure. I mean defamation or false malicious prosecution, all this all that stuff. speaker-0: And if I had won my case then we were going after speaker-2: So let's talk about that. You you get to the point now we're back to the middle, you found massive misconduct. Right. How does the case continue? I mean how how does the judge allow it to go on at this point? speaker-0: We end up with this pretrial misconduct hearing, and the judge doesn't want to do the hearing, so he assigns it to a another judge, a magistrate. But speaker-2: Lower level joke. speaker-0: lower level, yeah. But we're before the magistrate, and we have the metadata, and the metadata shows that the FBI agents would come in at night and listen to the calls between me and my attorneys, and they would share it with other agents. So you'd have nine agents listening to one attorney-client privilege call. And and so As that begins to come out, we're presenting this to the judge, to the magistrate judge. He takes the prosecutor in my case back into his chambers, ex parte, and we're all stunned, because that's e that's unethical in itself. Yeah. And when the prosecutor comes out, he's as white as a sheet, and he's stunned. And we realized this this mas this magistrate actually has the courage. It looks like he might rule in our favor. He throws out the Title III wiretap. It goes up to the judge, and the judge tries to soften it a little bit, the presiding judge in my case, but it ends up holding. And so the Title III wiretap gets completely thrown out, which included exculpatory evidence. Right. And then the judge decides he's not gonna throw out not one of the twenty charges, felony charges against me, no fruit of the poisonous tree, so the case moves forward. speaker-2: Which is nuts. I mean the idea is if they base this information of the grand jury off of legally mata attained materials, you would think usually that doesn't get to happen. speaker-0: Exactly. It would be on the on the prosecutor to prove and to try to reindict the case, but he didn't. He had he just kept going. speaker-1: But then they did reindt the case multiple times, but not in the way that we would think they would after throwing out the search warrant. speaker-0: This may this may fit what you all are doing so well, which is to bring out the emotion and the and the family aspects of what happened to her. I'm at my father's funeral and I'm giving the eulogy and I look up and my chief of staff is in the back and she's looking at her phone and she's shaking her head. They had leaked the word of the first indictment of twenty felonies while I'm giving the eulogy at my father's funeral. And so they indicted me on twenty something felonies, and they offered me four years in prison, and I refused. They come back after the misconduct hearing and say, okay, you want to you want to fight us, huh? They re-indict on 30 felony charges, but this time they only offer me three years in prison, less, a year less, if and I refuse to take the deal. Eventually we fight for seven years pretrial, goes all the way to Supreme Court. They say to me, We'll offer you ten months in prison and one felony if you'll plead guilty. So I fast and pray for nine days. And all I had was God. And I say, nah I'm gonna die someday and I'm gonna die fighting. I refused their deal and they reindicted me on forty nine felonies. So I was reindicted three times, forty nine felonies and we went to trial. speaker-2: And and talk a little bit about I mean, you say the government, these folks, the prosecutors, these are some some people later on who became rather famous. Right. you talked about, you know, even the FBI director was obviously involved. You were a sitting member of Congress. W give us a sense of what that kind of looked like from a personality standpoint. speaker-0: Well, Jack Smith was a prosecutor against me. speaker-1: We all know who Jack Smith is now. speaker-0: And so right. Special counsel. And so early on in his career, he had built a reputation for overcharging people, stacking of charges, what is unethical, being very vague and broad and and and charging people with invented kind of law or felonies that were very vague and you could overcharge, you could stretch the law. Boundless interpretations as a Supreme Court. Cited against him in the Bob MacDonald case. speaker-2: I'd say McDonald would be an example of the governor of Virginia, which the Supreme Court threw out that case. speaker-1: Nine zero. speaker-0: And and and they said he has this tendency, Jack Smith has this tendency to overcharge and to just be reckless with his charging documents. And he'd had a history of that. And so when he came after me, that's what I saw early on was this prosecutor that would do anything he could to win and almost had like a bloodlust. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Did you ever get to talk to him? speaker-0: they wanted me to go in if I pled, I would have had to plead it to him personally and I speaker-1: Well it's one of the interesting things about the system, right? You think you might have a conversation, right? Like, okay, the the government thinks X happened, I think Y happened, let's have a conversation about it. But oftentimes you can't have a conversation unless you're going in and acknowledging whatever version of the story they're telling is the story. speaker-0: They had a term they called, we want to our truth, they would say. You're gonna come in here and and you're gonna say our truth. We're gonna come in here and parrot what we put on the paper. On video. Yes. speaker-2: And you're like, no. Y you mentioned you have a very large family. Dozen kids. what was it like going through this process these seven years with a family? And how did you communicate to them about what was happening? What was that like? It was proof just emotionally. speaker-0: It was brutal. My little girl would go to school and she was in a Fairfax County, Virginia school, criticized by teachers for your dad's a criminal, you know. this is speaker-2: Show the time. speaker-0: she was a little girl, she was maybe twelve, thirteen years old. And so it was very hard on them, you know, the reputation. My father had been a two star general, my mother had been a social worker. Our family had never been involved in any kind of controversy like this. Here I was a United States congressman and my reputation was destroyed. I was a father of twelve kids, and they were suffering along with me. speaker-2: How you make that decision around, okay, I I know I can end this, I can just plead guilty, I may not want to, but it may be easier on my kids versus what you did in terms of like, no, I'm gonna fight. I mean, how did you run that calculus in your mind? speaker-0: My father was dying and I had been indicted a second time. And as he was on his deathbed, he was looking at my brother and he was asking my brother, is Ricky gonna is Ricky gonna be okay? Rick Renzi. Yeah. And I was watching him, and as he died, he died like a man. And I said, You know, I'm gonna die someday and I'm gonna die fighting. And I had fasted and prayed, and I'd come to the the resolution that If I don't have the fighting s that I'm gonna be judged someday. Yeah. I'm gonna be judged by God and the court of angels and at least they're gonna see that I was tested and that I hung on to God because I had no one else helping me. speaker-1: And I think, you know, it's a b against the backdrop that something like ninety point two percent of Americans who are accused of a federal crime plead guilty because they do things like stack charges. Right. Which means you'll go to prison for a longer period of time if you are convicted. And it costs so much money. True. And I just think too, you know, aside from the impact on your kids, like what was the physical impact on you? That's a long time to go to war. speaker-0: So I'm six four, two hundred twenty five pounds, and I had gotten down I had dark circles under my eyes. I wasn't sleeping, I was down to a hundred and ninety seven pounds. And I was waking up with it and I wasn't sleeping and wasn't sleeping in the deprivation of sleep after a while my heart started to go into atrial fibrillation. And my brother in law rushed me to the hospital and they put the paddles on me. and I was awake. They had the injection, it was so critical at the point that put me to sleep hadn't occurred yet. And I I kind of sat up in bed, of course, you know, from the electrical shocks and I grabbed and I said, Roger, it's too much. It's too much to bear. But I passed out and I woke up five days later and you know and and kept I kept crawling if I couldn't run, if I couldn't walk. And in those days I was just trying to get through like an hour of the day. Yeah. Not too much. You know, as as you've talked and you've you've lived it, you can't do too much each day. You're just trying to get through the hour and not too many tasks. And if I couldn't, I would just stay still, but I wouldn't go backwards. And seven years turned into going to trial and then three years post-trial. And then the appellate court judge, who was a friend of Jack Smith, called my attorneys and had said, You got six days to go to prison. Not the not the district court judge that had jurisdiction over me, the appellate court judge who was a friend of Jack Smith's. Who eventually became a viza court judge? speaker-2: Now let me ask this, we haven't talked about the sort of details of the case itself. I think sometimes the details matter less, but could you describe what when you were told, hey, this is what we're we're investigating you for, what did you understand the government was coming after you about? speaker-0: The first call came and they said, You're gonna be it looks like they're trying to charge you with something called Hobsact extortion. And I'm and I was and so I I'm googling it. speaker-2: Now hops I extortion to be clear is what the mob used to do when they'd go around and say, If you don't pay us this monthly exact fee, we're gonna come break your window. speaker-1: We have a lot of really bad laws because of the mafia. Right. Really. Including re speaker-0: Rico was charged me with. So I was like, Well, what is that? What did it what are they saying that I did? And they're saying, Well, they're saying you stronged arm these real estate developers to buy this water and this land outside of Fort Wachuca, and that although the public interest was your public interest and it was ruled pre trial that you were acting in the public interest to save Fort Wachuca from being shut down, you were strong arming and forcing this men. And I said, it's a lie. You know, we've we've got it. We've got at meetings and we've got and sure enough, the real estate agent had said no. And the real estate developer had said no. He didn't strongise us. But that wasn't the story that they wanted. So he was going through bankruptcy, the real estate developer, and they offered him a payoff scheme in order to change his story. speaker-1: So the the real estate developer went and talked to the DOJ. They speaker-0: They went to him first. speaker-1: went to him. And so he talked to them about the allegations and what they believed to be true and he said, No, this is not how it happened. So that should be the end of it. speaker-0: that's not how it happened. That should have been the end of it. But they invested so much in it and they wanted to get me out. I d I I I controlled the Democratic district that the only way to get me out was lawfare. So he changed his story in exchange for a payoff scheme using a secret DOJ slush fund. And he told his attorneys they're offering me $25,000. It'll be a home run. It'll be like hitting the lottery And he was the key witness in the case against me. speaker-2: And do they tell you all that at the time? No. It seems insane. speaker-1: Like the DOJ can just pay witnesses. speaker-2: They can't pay witnesses. They're supposed to tell you when they pay witnesses. And they didn't tell you, did they? And speaker-0: They did not. No. speaker-2: you found out later because the witness actually wrote a letter to his attorney speaker-0: Demanding the money. What? Yeah. speaker-2: Hey I deserved speaker-1: My channel. speaker-0: I promised me. Yeah. And and then a woman in the Department of Justice turned over a box of information to my attorneys and that wasn't supposed to be in the box. And we thank her honesty and there was more in there also that showed that they had interviewed the actual field interview in the handwriting of the female FBI agent was there and so speaker-2: Which contradicted some of the reports. speaker-0: which contr which contradicted the evidence in the in the trial. speaker-1: Yeah. So you didn't have notes from the first interview where the developer told the truth. Right. You were also supposed to get speaker-0: Right. So they withheld exculpatory evidence. They destroyed exculpatory evidence. There was me talking to the developer on the phone and me talking to the investors, saying, What is it you guys are negotiating? And they said, Well, we're already negotiating with each other. And so there was exculpatory evidence that was destroyed on the wiretap. There was the call log that showed the the call between myself and the developer. in the call and then it was just white noise. It had been erased. speaker-2: Can I mean I think the part that some people might struggle if they're listening to this to understand, you are a sitting United States Congressman. Right. You know, you are a powerful person and you have allies, you've got a pl or a party who presumably can help you. I help I assume they helped you get really good lawyers. Even in that situation, the government can hide information, can lie, can break some very clear rules like listening to all your attorney phone calls. Right. and kinda get away with it. Yeah. So how do you explain that to people? How do you explain that even somebody who is not you're not just some kid who's picked up in the projects, who has no no, you know, allies. How can they do that to somebody like you? speaker-0: Alex, we even had Nancy Pelosi, who despises me. I was author of the partial birth abortion ban, 12 chili kids. She despised me. She actually had her attorney, she was Speaker of the House. She allocated the House attorneys to defend me against violations of the Speak and Debate Clause, against these violations of misconduct. I mean, she hated to do it, but they they were trying to protect the institution. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know Sometimes you're not as powerful as you think you are. When you're a Republican and all of a sudden it's leaked that you're under indictment or you're gonna be, nobody wants to sit with you on the on the floor of the house. Nobody wants to be photographed with you. Nobody wants to talk to you. You are a leper of the house. I used to call I had a chapter in my book where I was gonna title it the leper of the house. And they, you know, they want nothing to do with you. I was taken off committees immediately by the speaker John Boehner, you know, and speaker-1: He did he call you and tell you he was doing that? speaker-0: Yeah. He called me in his office, you know, and he told me he was taking me off one committee. I You can take me off all three, Boehner. speaker-2: Now at the same time that did you also get a sense you're not as powerful as you think you are, but that the government when it comes to the executive branch's ability to prosecute is much more powerful than speaker-0: They hold they they can indict your attorneys, which they did in my case and he was found innocent. They indicted my accountant and he was found innocent. They would and they were gonna indict my father on his deathbed in order to get me to plea. They have the most powerful, they are the most corrupt agency, the Department of Justice in America, because they have the power of death, of bloodlust. And they can go after you. They spent millions and millions on me. Seven years pretrial, three years post trial. With an with a second misconduct hearing as a result of the box that the that was turned over speaker-2: Somebody will say, look, you went to trial, you got convicted, that means the system works, right? Right. and what do you say to those folks? speaker-0: Yeah, you're in you're you're naive, you know. In my day the FBI had their own television show. They were golden. Yeah. So it was hard for me to say, hey, this FBI agent's corrupt. speaker-2: The same people who you see on TV, look at the Golden Boys, are actively violating attorney-client privilege by getting together and listening to these folks. speaker-1: And they know they're doing it. This is not a mistake, this is a choice. Right. speaker-0: It's absolutely these G men who were, you know, absolutely mythology in American culture speaker-1: And one thing I think is really interesting about all of this is, you know, if we go back to talking about the the plea system, right? Like we don't have a call society of jury trials anymore, we have a plea system. Right. And if you had pled, none of this misconduct would have come to light. None of it. None of it would have mattered. None of would have mattered. And so I think and so I think, you know, a lot of times we don't play by the rules of the government because no one's gonna check on us. Right. speaker-0: Right. They were so emboldened that they sponsored false testimony to the jury, which we didn't find out until I was in prison. They knowingly sponsored false testimony to the jury. And what was that? It was that the fact that the key witness in the case had spoken and already cut the deal with the with the developer, the real the farmer who owned the water, and that they had already done their deal. And and he wasn't strong armed. But they and they knew that ahead of time they had the phone log. speaker-2: How did they yeah, but explain how they knew that and why. speaker-0: They ended up having phone logs between the key witness and the farmer and that they had saw that these two were already talking to each other. It wasn't that r Congressman Renzi had introduced you to and then he strong armed you to do a deal. They had already done the deal. So it couldn't have been extortion if the deal was already done. Right. But it didn't match the narrative that they originally had pro given to the grand jury. So they stayed with it. speaker-2: How is it possible that you've got, you know, real misconduct around the attorney client privilege, not disclosing this r you know, reward they'd offered a witness to change their story? I I assume then that people must have gotten, you know, disciplined, somebody must have gotten fired, somebody must have had some loss of their license, right? speaker-0: Actually, the Arizona Bar did receive a complaint after the second misconduct hearing. They swept it under the rug. My attorneys represented the twelfth largest law firm in America, Chicago Law Firm, which is was a Democratic law firm. And one of the bravest guys who'd been with for many, many years, Kelly Kramer, he was my attorney. He wrote, along with six other attorneys, a 190-page inspector general complaint. We filed that. That was swept under the rug. speaker-2: And that's the inspector general is someone within the Department of Justice who's supposed to investigate misconduct within the Department. speaker-0: Exactly. speaker-1: It's the hen patrolling the hen house. Yeah. speaker-0: The Fox watching the hen house. I got swept under the rug. Eventually President Trump became president his first term and that hundred and ninety page inspector general complaint made it to the White House and eventually I got a presidential pardon based upon the misconduct in my case. Well you speaker-2: Pardon, we'll talk about that in a minute, but did any of the people who led that misconduct ever get in trouble? speaker-0: Never. They were promoted by Biden. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, and that's an interesting point. Not only were they promoted, but one thing that is really interesting about your experience as I've read about it is the relationships among the people who prosecuted you. Right. And, you know, there are some interesting relationships that I would think could have been a conflict of interest. speaker-0: True. The judge's lead assistant was married to the supervising FBI agent in my case. The clerk, the lead clerk. The the judge's lead clerk. speaker-2: was married to that. speaker-0: FBI supervising FBI agent in speaker-2: Why didn't that judge just say, You know what, this is not a good case for me, I'll give it to somebody else. speaker-0: No, he he wouldn't recuse himself. speaker-2: That seems unusual. speaker-0: And w the first judge did recuse herself and he was the second judge and he thought he could handle the case. speaker-1: And it is interesting too, systems of recusal in America, right? It's really up to the judge's discretion. So you're asking the judge who's hearing the case, I think you've got a problem here, Judge, so you should step away. And the dangerous part is if they don't agree with you, they've got a bone to pick now. speaker-0: True. And it and you you get the lawyers who say, you know, we don't not sure we wanna ask for it because we're gonna end up being on the wrong side from now on. Exactly. The judge tried, once he saw all the evidence, he tried to cure it by only sentencing me to three years in prison when the government was when Jack Smith was pleading for thirteen years. He tried to fix it that way. But it was so far gone and he was so far into what the government wanted him to do with so many rulings. Out of two hundred and eleven pleadings he had ruled in favor of the government like two hundred and seven times. He won like three or four pleadings, seven years pretrial. speaker-2: Yeah, I think people don't understand the degree to which the gu it's not a fair playing field at the district court. And the government wins in an order amount of times, more than you would expect, in the sense that if these really are disputed questions and they're often are disputed questions, you'd imagine that the judges might come out at an equal basis or at least some sort of bell curve. But if you take the wire fraud rulings like you talked about the governor of Virginia, well, you know, every district court said, Hey, government, you can charge it that way. We're gonna let you do all these crazy things. And it's only the cases that made it to the Supreme Court where they said, No, no, you can't do this. But that's one case out of a thousand or one case out of ten thousand. Yeah. And so you at what point did you realize 'cause we've talked about the government being stronger, you not necessarily having the power you thought you had as a congressman, at what point did you realize that the court maybe wasn't going to be able to protect you? Or speaker-0: It was speaker-2: the process, right? speaker-0: The court, when they didn't they didn't find any charges to be thrown out at the wiretap, I had this one attorney who was like, Congratulations, you know, nobody's ever been able to get a Title III wiretap thrown out. And I looked at him, I said, but no charges were thrown out. As a matter of fact, they're gonna indict me even more. I when I saw that we had evidence of misconduct, of malfeasance by the prosecution. They had lied and tried to cover up the wire that they hadn't wiretapped my attorneys. They had been caught lying. And the judge did nothing but try to he threw out the wiretap, but he kept the charges. And the charges were all based on the wiretap. That's when I realized, you're not you're not playing a r normal game. You know, I grew up playing college football. I came from an honest family. And my father was a two-star general, my mother a social worker, I told you, that served the country. And all of a sudden it hit me, you've got you've got a problem here. You got you got a system that's so strong and so big that it's easily gonna crush you. speaker-2: One of the common threads when we talk to people, especially like you, who have sort of lived a blessed life, is you likely didn't have any sense that was possible until it happened to you. speaker-0: Exactly. I was naive. speaker-2: What was what was that a w what was it like to feel that switch flip and go like, I had no idea it was like speaker-0: I was, you know, I'd gone to law school. I'd own I was a business owner. I'd made money. I've I'd been successful, you know, very successful. God been good to me, wealth wise, and I'd built a family of twelve kids, seven boys and five girls. And I was not just naive, but I went through the world as a patriot and believing in a justice and the honesty and the pillar of justice. And that and that's why if we do not reform the Department of Justice, we will lose the republic. It's gone. It's ours, you know, it's a republic if we can keep it. Yeah. And in that pillar of justice and truth, of being able to bear false witness, of a prosecutor being able to bear false witness against an innocent man, it it was shocking, and and to be honest with you, I didn't recover well from it. speaker-1: What do you mean by that that you didn't recover well from it? speaker-0: After I went to prison and I was let out, I was sentenced to prison for three years. I should have been you know, they wanted me to go the the thirteen. speaker-2: Which is insane. Let's just say thirteen years is nuts. speaker-0: Right. It it it destroys a man. Yeah. You i you are speaker-2: And it's nowhere it's not necessary for protecting the republic. It's just we can do this to you. So we will. speaker-0: Right. And when they and when you're in isolation like that, you know, I was in I got in a fight where I broke my hand and I was bit and another prisoner helped me with lime juice. We were they were sneaking it out of the kitchen. When you go through years and years of fighting the government, of being in prison and the hardship, you know, your family goes on and you end up becoming a little bit of what a PTSD and sure I ended up moving to an island off the coast of Colombia and set up some lobster traps and and walk in the beach until three, four o'clock in the morning to try and get my sanity back. speaker-1: What about your relationship with America? speaker-0: I I love America, I believe in her, but I very much only align myself with the individuals who've suffered. I think that the system is so strong and these guys are up for election every two years that they're not willing to really take on. Only a few are willing to take on the power. And the power is more, it's stronger than money in Washington. speaker-2: You mentioned pardon, so I wanna talk about that a little bit. You you know, you go to trial, y you didn't do these things. Right. Right. And speaker-0: And you're detector test. speaker-2: you're having to live through that process of what that feels like to you, being like, I didn't do these things and I I'm now going to jail. The appellate courts don't help you. No. I mean they say, Yes, that that improper activity was improper and the wiretaps, but we're not gonna save you from your conviction. You've got to serve this time in jail for something you believe you didn't do do. You have to rebuild your life. At what point did you realize, wait a minute, there's some there's this pardon I could get, I I'd like to get it, how'd you go about doing that? speaker-0: I didn't want it at the beginning. I wanted justice. I wanted the system. speaker-2: You wanted the system to fix itself. speaker-0: Yeah. And there was a congressman from California named John Doolittle, beautiful guy, and he was a little bit of a mentor for me. And John came to me and said, Look, you've got to consider the idea that you've got this hundred and ninety page inspector general complaint that's gone nowhere. Yeah. You've got fifteen congressmen who've written letters to the Department of Justice in supporting there needs to be an investigation of this guy, Jack Smith. Now this is 2015, before Jack Smith was ever appointed to be special counsel. We were talking about investigating this young baby-faced prosecutor before he grew the beard and came back from The Hague. We were saying because this guy needs to be investigated. So Doolittle said to me, look, you've got this body of of work that shows your innocence. That shows the corruption, you gotta get it to the Trump administration. And then he helped me get it to Trump as Trump was on his way out with his first term. speaker-2: Did you think that Trump would be a good audience, that he'd be open to hearing this type of concern about the Justice Department? speaker-0: We know that his chief his chief of staff wanted nothing to do with me. A female, again, and a woman in the Department of Justice was asked, did they really do this? Did they really wiretap Renzi? Did they really offer false testimony to his journey? Did they really destroy exculpatory evidence? Did they withhold exculpatory? And she came back and told the White House, Yeah, they did. They looked, they read the hundred and ninety page, they went to the transcripts of the court, they found the misconduct. And so people within the White House started to get behind me and then many members of Congress started to write letters. And then President Trump called a congressman who he knew and said, What about this guy Ramsey? And they and he and the and the Congressman boldly said, Yeah, he's innocent I speaker-1: Where were you when you found out about the parking? speaker-0: was in Columbia, I was in my cabana, I was sitting in a little wooden hut, and my brother called me at one o'clock in the morning and said, Hey, there's news that you're on this list. And I couldn't believe it. It was it was really life changing for my children more than anything else. It didn't sink into me that it this a miracle had occurred that you know, p the President Trump had given out seventy seventy one, seventy two pardons and I was one of One in a million. speaker-2: Well hold on. You got super emotional about that. And tell me about how it it it helped your kids. What was it about that for you as a father fighting for years, telling them that you were, you know, you were innocent, right? Getting someone to sort of say, you know what, this is this was wrong. Right. What was that like? speaker-0: pardoned, my name appeared next to Little Wayne the rapper. Went speaker-1: I love this for you. speaker-0: viral. And my kids all of a sudden you know, I had no idea who Little Wayne was. But my kids were like taking a snapshot of the internet posting And saying my dad was pardoned along with little Wayne and that went viral around the world. And so all of a sudden I was I was getting calls from the nav leaders of the Navajo Nation and and ex staffers who had turned over information to the FBI and said, you know, you're guilty, you're not guilty and people who all of a sudden were never in my life anymore, you know, because it was now almost eleven, twelve years since I had been first indicted at my dad's funeral, since the pardon. And so it really helped me realize that while I didn't get justice in the court system, in the court of public opinion, I was able to it mattered. And it mattered to my kids and my family. Yeah, speaker-2: He's not a felon anymore. speaker-0: th they could say, hey, look, President Trump, he saw what was true and and and provided some justice. speaker-2: I think what's interesting about this is, you know, after the Trump prosecutions and in his term, all of this, the pardons, the sort of government misconduct, who is sort of a good prosecutor or bad prosecutor, it's become really political. Everything in your case happened really before all of that. And there's, you know, nothing that I I think people who look at the case can justify about some of the things that happened, right? I think both sides of the aisle should say, What in the world was the FBI doing listening to those phone calls with your attorney? What in the world were they doing not disclosing this reward? What were they what in the world were they doing with this the way they charge the case? And I think people ignore that this systemic problem has been systemic for a long, long time. speaker-1: And that it's not just a partisan problem. That it's a it's a problem of the institution and power, and anybody can wield it like a sword. Exactly. Including in your case. speaker-0: Exactly. Until they take the Inspector General who is tasked with cleaning up the corruption in the FBI, who's who's tasked with overseeing the corruption within the US Attorney's Office, until they take the Inspector General out from underneath. He's located physically in Maine Justice in Washington DC. Until that office is removed speaker-2: And he has no power, right? He can't fire somebody. He can make a report that says you should fire somebody. speaker-0: Right. And he can't disclose who did it. They block they block out the FBI agent's name to protect them. So until the Inspector General Office is removed from the Department of Justice, is a standalone agency, is directly line item funded by Congress, and answers quarterly to Congress of a special standing committee, you you you you s research the church committee. speaker-1: Committee, this is what we're you know, I think about the church committee a lot because a generation ago, so fifty years now, you know, sitting US senators on both sides of the aisle came together and said we need to look at what the intelligence agencies are doing. Right. The FBI, the CIA, and there were massive reforms once there was a public light on what was happening. But speaker-2: Yeah. speaker-1: it's been a generation and everybody forgets. Right. speaker-2: Never been that for just the Justice Department or prosecution. speaker-1: Right. And when you when no one holds you accountable for any rules, like I have children. That's the thing. If no one's gonna punish you, you'll do speaker-2: Right. And if all twelve of them knew that whatever they did, it didn't matter. Right. That nothing could come harm them. Do you think they would grow up to be well adjusted? speaker-0: Spoil yeah. You spare the rod, spoil the child, they become criminals. speaker-2: Well, it's also civil lawsuits, right? If you if you were a company that produced a product that hurt everybody, but they couldn't sue you for it, you just keep producing the product. Exactly. You can't right now sue the people who did these things for any sort of wrong, right? Prosecutors have absolute immunity. Right. There's no easy way for you to get into court and say, Hey, I'm gonna hold you responsible for the damage you inflicted on my life. That's correct. Right. And even when they did this massive violation of your rights, sixth amendment right to counsel and listen to all those phone calls. you couldn't get a monetary award for that. They you didn't get paid back for having to vindicate your right for all the hours your lawyer spent trying to protect you. speaker-0: Right. I couldn't even get charges thrown out. No. Yeah, it's there's no accountability. And until we have an organization, an inspector general's office, a professional conduct who answers to the people, who answers to either a citizens action council, whi who works with the Congress, because Congress, you know, you you get called before the Congress and one Congressman has five minutes to and they just play the clock game. Right. So until you put together a a a true oversight accountability group. You could get citizens from around the country. They could sit on a panel and they could hear all the evidence and then Congress listens to them. speaker-2: Well I think people might Well gosh, isn't that what a jury's supposed to do? The problem is the jury only gets to hear what the judge and the prosecutors let them hear. Exactly. speaker-1: And something we haven't talked about with the judiciary and something that Clark Neely, who's an expert at the Cato Institute, talks about a lot, is that there is an enormous number of former federal prosecutors who are now the judges deciding these cases, right? They grew in the DOJ. They believe in the the presumption of speaker-2: The judge certainly knew the prosecutors on your case. speaker-0: The prosecutor, and again, his lead count his lead secretary was married to the FBI agent. On your point, one of the most powerful lobbyist groups in Washington, D.C. is the retired U.S. Attorneys Association. When Ted Stevens, when it was found, when Ted Stevens was found innocent, or his case was thrown out, they looked at what had happened, the misconduct in his case, and of course it was Brady violations when they failed to turn speaker-2: Again, for folks who are listening or watching, it's a brave violation is there's evidence which is exculpatory, it undermines the charges and it's hidden from the defendant. speaker-1: Like for example, if a real estate developer said, No, I was not strong arms Exactly. Something like that. Yeah. speaker-0: Right. So in in his t case, the it was withheld from his defense. And so Murkowski, Senator Murkowski out of Alaska, wanted to put a sunshine law together where she would require that all interviews are videotaped or all interviews are turned over to the defense. And the National Association of Retired U.S. attorneys killed her bill on the Senate side. So there was no reform even done after 10. speaker-2: A senator was subjected to that. speaker-0: Senior Senator, the line of the Senate. speaker-1: And and just to pause for a moment, right? Like local police wear cameras. Right. We expect that of our local police right. speaker-0: No, speaker-1: Right. We do now. Right. But FBI agents still don't. Right. And one of the things they do instead of recording interviews is they take notes. speaker-0: field, do field notes and then they go back to their office and type them up. speaker-2: And the field notes go away. speaker-0: Let's go where. speaker-1: Their recollection of what happened. speaker-0: They type it up and then they turn the supposedly turn that in and speaker-1: In the year twenty twenty six when we all have little devices in our pockets. speaker-0: We were never even given the source file in my case, which would have shown us that the retired FBI agent who was speaker-2: Who had a major motive. speaker-0: right, had a major who was had been hired by these Democratic or was working with these Democratic attorneys, lobbyists, had tr had be had developed this fake dossier. we were never even the source file. It was withheld from it. That's nuts. speaker-1: It's just it's unbelievable, I think. But it's interesting going back to like your relationship with America. You said, you know, it's a republic if we can keep it. Right. But when you talk about self-governance and we are an experiment experiment in self-governance, we don't have any control to try to govern the DOJ, which is one of the most powerful institutions in America. Agree. So it doesn't feel like we have the ability to control or change or reform any of it. Right. speaker-0: Right, I agree. I've seen Congress has become inept where they're not fixing anything. And so I've been pushing this idea of citizen action councils or citizen accountability councils. CAC, Citizen Accountability Council. speaker-2: And some cities have tried that with local police. They have. You get some of that somewhere, yeah. speaker-0: And so that same idea, and a lot of your best ideas are organic that come from cities and states and they rise up to the federal level. But there's so much abuse, there's so much misconduct and malfeasance within the Department of Justice right now that if we had, if we could do a breakout session where you had fifteen people from different, you know, from the Midwest working on this Midwest misconduct case with these three FBI agents and a and an assistant US attorney, and you had a group of people from the Northeast New England. Real Boston Yankees who believe in America. And you could then have them adjudicate this misconduct and then it could percolate up to the Congress. But they would put out quarterly reports, they would be funded. Then you could get control of this monasticized cancer, which is what the DOJ has become. speaker-2: President Trump obviously is in charge now. he has the ability to shape the Justice Department. People are criticizing some of the ways that he's doing that by targeting people. is there a problem with just the way that that DOJ wields power no matter who's in charge? speaker-0: I think it is. I think the the the deep state, the people who have the control that can outlast one president, who can just sit there and can say, okay, he's he's only here in another year and a half, two more years. We're gonna go about our business. After I was pardoned and had rebuilt my life a little bit, I insured many of the pregnancy care centers around America, many of the safe houses for battered and abused women and children. It was my niche. I had built a business and a life on it. After Trump pardoned me and Biden came in 35 days after, the Department of Justice in Arizona sent out a letter to my clients saying that again I was under criminal investigation and tr again he tried to destroy me and I ended up losing a third of my business. I speaking engagements were canceled. So the retaliation against me was because of the people that we're talking about who were able to stay into the system and just wait for the new the new head. The new president to take over. speaker-2: I think what you're hitting on too is the idea when people hear the deep state they think it's gonna be some guy in a black car and it's some secret society, but it's really the structures of how we've set up these pieces, right? Right. Where we've structured it so that federal prosecutors tend to become judges a lot more than anybody else, where the only people who have any ability to really discipline or to police those prosecutors are those same judges, where there is just a tendency for self protection among these groups. And where the power is really w unchecked. Yeah. You put anybody in that situation for any period of time, it doesn't sound like you're gonna get very good results. speaker-0: Power within the DOJ and these U assistant U.S. attorneys and U.S. attorneys, they've identified these choke points. For instance, state bar associations. Right. These state bar associations, when you file a complaint against an assistant U.S. attorney, because his law license is on the line because he committed mis he withheld exculpatory evidence. He destroyed exculpatory evidence. He provided a witness payoff scheme. He wiretapped your attorneys. That's the same that's one person in my case. speaker-1: In one case, and imagine how many cases. speaker-0: And that bar association swept it away. That guy, that assistant US attorney is gonna be US attorney someday. Yeah. He's with us, he's he meets our ideology, what we want to see done politically. And politics have bescome so embedded with with power and the desire to hang on to power, which is more addictive than money, that they Look the other way when it comes to their duties to honesty and accountability, and they sweep it under the rug. They look the other way, they wash their hands of it. speaker-2: Now one of the things that again you had power, you were on the House Select Intelligence Committee. I was. how did that affect the trial? Because you were privy to information that was classified. Right. Some of which may have helped you in the trial. Right. How did you have to juggle that? speaker-0: They set up a an org a group of attorneys within the Justice Department to hear classified evidence that I had as to why Fort Wachuka was key to national security and why we needed to have this piece of land that had this huge amount of water, three thousand gallons a day that would save the fort. speaker-1: So there was classified information that related to why this real estate deal that was at issue needed to get done. speaker-0: And it shows speaker-2: Which suggested it wasn't about you just trying to get some money. speaker-0: Exactly. It proved that what I was doing was in the national security interest of the United States. National security. And we they ended up looking at it and they said, Yes, Renzi was acting in the national security interest. But when it went to the judge, the judge said, No, I'm gonna spl I'm gonna say he was in the public interest, but I'm not gonna say national security so the case can go forward. So he wouldn't allow me speaker-2: Which let me tell if I'm a d if I'm your attorney at trial, I want to be able to tell the jury that you are protecting the national interest of Of course. Right. The national security interest of the company. And and if the government argues that, they get that every day. They're gonna be able to say that every day of the week. But God forbid you be allowed to do it in a manner that is true and protects. speaker-0: Alex, this is where I lost the respect for the judge. I was seven years pretrial, and I thought my judge was good, an honest man. He had been an immigration judge in Tucson, Arizona. He had done thousands and thousands of cases. He had worked hard, he was a hard worker. And I took that to heart. When the military Colonels and generals tried to come forward and be witnesses in my trial, he destroyed that. He wouldn't even allow us to bring the military in. The military was was able to say that we had identified, we had gone to John McCain and identified that water, that farm next to the fort as being critical. If you could shut down the water, we could use the water for our to for our fort. And John McCain had championed that. And he didn't allow any of that. He didn't allow those generals or colonels to testify in my trial. He destroyed that evidence. speaker-2: Even though all of that presumably would have helped you explain to the jury why you cared. speaker-0: Right. Well I cared. What was the motive? What was my motive? Was my motive to serve myself or was it to serve the country? speaker-2: Ultimately in cases like this, the the jury's main determination is, is this person acting for some illegal self interest? speaker-0: Exactly, exactly. speaker-1: It's so hard for people to understand who haven't been through the system. People will say, Well just tell the truth and everything will be okay. It's but you're not even allowed to tell the tr speaker-0: Yeah, it's one of the reasons why the jurors in my case found me innocent on the primary charges, but found me guilty on the derivative charges of money laundering, of wire of wire fraud. Right. And so if wi wire fraud as you know is so vague, if you just transfer money, you know, your own account, they can say, it was, you know, it was his money. Yeah. So it's absolutely it w it was so destructive and not allow me to bring these witnesses forward. speaker-2: And and how many counts did you go to trial on? Was it forty? speaker-0: Forty nine. Forty nine. I was facing tho a hundred and three hundred and four hundred years in prison. and then the t the c the case starts and they immediately drop all my tax charges, which were the used to stack against me and trying to get me to plead. And then I was found innocent on all any kind of theft or any kind of insurance fraud, which was my core business. They tried to destroy my core business so I couldn't finance my attor my defense. Sure. Yes. They go after your money, they see where your money is and how you're financing your lawyers and they'll go after that. speaker-2: I've multiple cases right now where they've seized just with on insanely ridiculous theories, they've seized money to try to shut down the ability for someone to defend themselves. speaker-0: one of my attorneys, who was immediately found innocent. speaker-1: Yeah. Well speaker-2: That's a shit. speaker-1: and I mean so you look at this, right? Like we I think it's helpful to look at the overall picture because we've gone through all these different points, but prosecutors have a set of tools to encourage anyone they go after, any target, to plead. Yeah. So they threatened your family members with indictment. Right. They did indict your attorney and your CPA. They speaker-2: Right. speaker-1: stacked charges. Right. Which means more prison time. Right. they went after your business. speaker-0: after my business, tried to they debanked me at Christmas time they shut down, they called over to to the bank and they shut down our accounts we couldn't buy presents for our kids. I mean they twice they did that to me. speaker-1: It's like those very small dehumanizing things and it was done at Christmas for a reason. Right. speaker-0: Right. Done at Christmas, done at my father's funeral, leaked word of the indictment at my father's funeral, you know, in order to get me to plead. Pressure and pressure and pressure you to quit, to plead guilty. speaker-1: Was there ever a point during the trial where you thought this might not go my way? Yeah. speaker-0: Really? I was we were in the fifth or sixth week of the trial and the judge was not allowing our witnesses to come forward. And one of my attorneys got up and said to the judge, You've got to allow me to win one of these objections. It's too much. And he just sat back and clinched his jaw and looked over at the jury and move on, what's who's next? He'd gotten sick of it. When one of the witnesses had come off the witness stand, And my attorney went over to him and said that witness committed perjury and there was a huge uproar in the back of the courthouse and the judge fleeed out of the courtroom and got the jury out of there so they couldn't hear the argument. Because our attorneys were essentially saying that they'd committed perjury and you knew it. speaker-2: And how they respond. speaker-0: no, it wasn't. It was they were just telling their truth. speaker-2: Their truth. Their truth. mention briefly going to prison. W what is that like just emotionally? speaker-0: It's brutal. It's the same. I was a father of twelve kids, and they'd come and see their father in the in the in the prison uniform. You know, I'd been bitten, beaten, and it is the isolation alone is so strong that you begin everyone in prison. goes into a depression. It's just how much of a spiral it is. The suicide rate in prison around the holidays is extremely high. People hang themselves. You're you're fed carbohydrates, there's not a lot of protein. I was fortunate in that there were two men who worked at the prison who were g who understood or suspected it wasn't right what happened to me. And eventually I was moved and I was able to get sleep. The sleep deprivation, when they're when you're sent to prison and you're put next to the bathroom, where they call it waterfront property, because the toilet flushes every night from so many men who have health problems, drug problems, they're getting and they're suffering themselves, they're vomiting, they're through so you don't sleep. And the deep sleep deprivation, I started to bite my tongue when I would eat unconsciously. So my tongue was bleeding and blood was running down my throat at night. so everyone talks about, You know, it's it's a luxury, it's a country club camp. I was in a F C one, I was in a where they had a hole, where they could put you in a hole. And I was in there with with people who had mental illness. You were taught by the old timers, stay away from the phone, because when they get on the phone with family and friends, they get bad news and they can get fights can break out. Don't go to the TV room, you know, they control certain groups in the prison control the T V room. And I didn't know that. And I w went into the T V room on a Saturday morning and I clicked on a football game and and I got hit in the ear, broke my eardrum. To this day I have ringing in my ears. So that's part of the that's part of the suffering you go through. The isolation is heavy on you. And then you have to find it. It's some you can't handle it, but you have to handle it. You have to survive it. speaker-2: How many members of Congress do you think have any idea what conditions are like in federal prison? speaker-0: No, I don't think they even care. I think they look at, you know, this congressman's indicted, let's get him out of the caucus. Let's vote him get speaker-1: Keep moving. speaker-0: get away from him, you know. but some of the prison reforms that you've seen come to pass ha are important. Some of the sentencing reforms I think you alluded to are so, so important. but it is Nelson Mandela says you see you know a society by looking at its prisons. speaker-2: How do we treat the least of us, right? speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: It's so interesting too, particularly in this country where all of our founding fathers were accused criminals. Right. And four of the ten Bill of Rights deal with the rights of those accused of crimes. Right. And yet our government tends to just sweep it under the rug. speaker-0: Yeah. And due process is such a founding pillar of our of our liberty. speaker-2: I if you right now met someone who was going through the early stages, they found out they were under investigation or they've been charged, they feel like something's off, what advice would you give them? speaker-0: If they're headed to prison. speaker-2: No no, just the beginning of the criminal case. Day one. Okay. Day one they find out they're a target. speaker-0: It is it's an erase of it, it's an endurance, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, it's not gonna be over tomorrow. As a matter of fact, they're gonna try and find your vulnerabilities, they're gonna find out what you love, and they're gonna go after who you love and what you love in order to break you, in order to get you to plead, in order to get you to quit. But hold on. Go through each hour of the day. Hold. Hold fast. If you can go ahead and you can help and you can be part of your c defense council, be a part of it. If you can't that day because it's too overwhelming mentally, then then just stay in the moment and pray, exercise, don't eat sugar and chocolate. Your diet's important because your ability to physically endure it, it's mental and it's physical. speaker-2: Absolutely. I mean I've people who, you know, become alcoholics or or societal issues or whatever. speaker-0: I never drank never drank, never used drugs. I went to prayer and exercise and my babies. I'd hold on my little girl in order to get through it. speaker-2: What did you learn about yourself in that process? speaker-0: I at the end now I look back on it and I'm grateful for it. It was the worst of days of my life and it was the best days of my life because I was tested. Was I really tough enough to endure it? Was I who I said I was? Was I this guy that could fight? Or was I a guy who who would break and quit under Jack Smith in the hyenas of lawfare? speaker-2: Well, it it it is the story, I think, whether it's the hero's journey, whether it's the Odyssey that was now a movie, right, whether it's the the story of Job in the Bible. I mean the story of people living through trials and tribulations that they could not imagine. Right. And coming out the other side, that's kind of the human journey. speaker-0: Yeah, it's beautiful. It really is. A brutal it's a beauty and it's brutal, but it's it's life changing. Those people who've suffered, like you have, are the best people to be around. The ones who have learned empathy and humility and who've suffered, they're the best people to be around. speaker-2: And there's not a lot of federal prosecutors who fit that bill. speaker-1: But that's a question I wanted to ask. Like we have these conversations and we talk about this and what we've been through. If you could talk to Jack Smith or any of them, what would you say? What would you want them to know? speaker-0: Your arrogance has blinded you. Your bloodlust has deformed you. You've become an instrument of this fraternal elite organization that you serve, and that you're their hitman now, and you'll be replaced. They'll they'll get somebody else to bring up into their fraternal blood lines that they've, you know, built, and you are pawned now for them. And it's too sh it's a shame because he's sharp, but he he he doesn't realize or he maybe he does. He thinks he's serving a purpose for a greater good and in in essence he he's serving the dark side. speaker-2: Yeah, I think so many people I mean you know, d do the dark side Star Wars analogy, you know, I I I've written a book and part of the book I talked about nobody thinks that they're the bad guy. True. Right. There's a whole whole I have a whole chapter. Nobody believes that they're doing things for bad reasons. True. They have their reasons. And I think part of the problem we run into is some folks don't have the imagination to realize that they might be wrong. Right. Right. They might be doing something that's improper. I think one of the things that struck me as a prosecutor, you know, I hadn't gone to jail to see what the conditions were like. I think every person who's a prosecutor no. That that's not a thing that prosecutors speaker-1: You hadn't but you could choose to, Alex. speaker-2: a hundred percent. And I mean I I remember I think I had maybe like four years into it, I met with a witness in jail doing a proffer, right? Right cooperating witness and and i I was just shocked at how just terrible the place was. Just truly terrible. Yeah. I mean you know academically that it's terrible. And I remember thinking, you know, people in my office and every one of these US attorneys' offices is going into court and asking for this number of months. I want 120 months. In your case they wanted 15 years. So 180 months, whatever it is, some some insane number. And they have no idea what that means in human terms. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-2: So the difference between a hundred and twenty, a hundred and eighty, two hundred and forty months is a sentence that they can put in a press release. We got fifteen years against Rick Renzi, which they didn't, but that's what they wanted to say in the press release, versus what that actually means to do to another human being. Mm-hmm. You know, you hadn't committed a violent crime. You know, you hadn't killed anyone, even if everything they said was true. There's no world in which fifteen years in the prisons that we have would be an appropriate response. True. But that is just not a thought that our prosecutors even have to really confront in their day to day lives. True, right? speaker-0: The the the the meat that they serve you, it says on the box, not fit for human consumption. speaker-2: It's expired. I mean we have prisons expired or spoiled. I mean it's just speaker-0: Right. Bernie Carrick, who was the police chief up in New York under Giuliani, said before he died that going to prison is like dying with your eyes open. Wow. It is a death that you have to survive it. You've got to get through it. And thank God God helped me. You know, I was let out after seventeen months. I was only I supposed to serve three years. And the people in the prison were the the guys that were really had been there. these two mountain men up in West Virginia who they realized they had researched my case and it was God had sent them and they were good for me, helped me get through it. speaker-2: I mean, even the darkest places you can find sort of allies and angels, right? speaker-0: Amen. You find light in the darkest of spots. speaker-1: I wanted to ask one last thing. Please. 'cause I know you wrote a book. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: Why did you want to tell your story? speaker-0: I wanted my grandkids, I have 18 grandchildren. I wanted them to know the truth of what was done. Because as generations go on and then you die and you get forgotten, all that they have now is the internet. And the internet doesn't go away, it doesn't get corrected. And they're gonna look up and research their great grandfather someday and they're gonna see, you know, who was this congressman? He was the son of a two-star general. His mom was a great, great woman. Why did why did he go to prison? And so the book was really written for my grandkids, the ones that I love, the generations to come to read. I'm I'm selling it only on my website and it's only gonna be really it was only done for my family. speaker-1: And it's named after the Apache. I love that. speaker-2: What do you want that that grandchild to take away when they say, My grandfather was blank? speaker-0: that he fought, that he went up against the po most powerful government since the Roman Empire, and that though they broke him and beat him down, and that his they had to put paddles on his heart to bring him back, that he didn't quit, that he believed in God, he feared only God, and he never quit. speaker-2: Pretty good epitaph. speaker-1: Well, I think that I think that's the truth. speaker-0: Amen. Yeah, I speaker-2: Thank you so much. speaker-0: enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. speaker-1: The thing I walk away with today from talking with Congressman Renzi is the blast range of simple allegations and how they can spiral into something so much bigger than what we could ever imagine. And to hear it from somebody who was sitting in the halls of Congress with that power is all the more stunning. It doesn't protect you. speaker-2: And I think whether we're talking about the procedure, whether we're talking about the facts, I think the real point of this podcast is the emotional impact and the way that it does affect entire families, people well beyond the target. and I think if people can see that just brutal impact across the board, I hope it opens some eyes. speaker-1: I hope so too.