SEKULOW

Logan Sekulow: Welcome to Sekulow. It's Thursday. We're live. 1-800-684-3110 if you want to be on the air today. That's right. If you're listening to us on the radio, you can call in. If you're watching us on YouTube, or maybe you're watching us on the Salem News Channel, however you're watching us, we're live right now and we want you to be a part of the show at 1-800-684-3110.

It is a packed one today. We've got John Solomon coming up a little bit later, and then of course, our friend Rick Grenell will be joining us as well because we're going to flash over to the state of California in a newly recently surfaced interview. And again, we say that, we're only talking about a couple years ago. We're not talking about flashing back 20 years. We're not talking about flashing back even five years. We're talking about taking you to the year of 2022.

Gavin Newsom has always been teasing a potential run for President of the United States. As that has happened, people have started to go back, as they do opposition research. You have all the people going through and saying what could be some problems that could hang up this campaign. An interview with local news in California—this was on Fox LA, Fox 11 LA on a segment they have called The Issue Is—Jennifer Newsom, who is Gavin Newsom's wife, decided to take a direct shot, and I mean this, this is not some hyperbole clickbait. Not just at pro-lifers, but specifically at evangelical Christians, evangelical conservatives.

And again, when this happens, it feels like this always has to come from a place where someone's running for President and of course when you're President, your hope is that they will be representing everyone. But when you have this kind of rhetoric specifically centered around the conversation of life, I'm just going to let you hear it yourself. This is Jennifer Newsom on Fox 11 just a few years ago. This content is being combed through now. Here is Jennifer Newsom.

Jennifer Newsom: But again, the folks on the far right, what they're missing is they're living in this silo, this evangelical conservative silo that ultimately is just pulling us back as a country to a time and a place where we don't deserve to be and we're not going to be. Because honestly, young women and fathers of daughters are awake now and they're woke and they're not going to let us go back. And so I have so much hope because of that and obviously California has a huge responsibility to lead.

Logan Sekulow: California's huge responsibility to lead. Of course, discounting a huge population, many of you are probably listening right now, maybe on KKLA or any of the stations that we are on or maybe you're watching on YouTube in California. Our first or second, depending on the month, biggest supporter base for the ACLJ is from the state of California.

You know what those are? Evangelical conservative Christians, because you've got a pretty big state that has a lot of people who disagree with not only the governor's point of view, but clearly the governor's wife's point of view when she says this evangelical conservative silo that ultimately is just pulling us back as a country. We don't deserve to be there according to Mrs. Newsom, the First Lady, first partner. By the way, that's what she refers to herself as, the first partner of California.

What do you think about this? Is this becoming of a potential presidential candidate? I want to hear from you. 1-800-684-3110. We're having a lot of conversations about spouses of mayors, spouses of governors, but this one hits a little closer because they specifically talk about leading California, which would be also leading the country if he becomes President of the United States. And of course Gavin Newsom, as of today, probably the leading candidate for the Democrats in 2028. Give me a call. Joined by John Solomon and Rick Grenell a little bit later.

Logan Sekulow: Welcome back to Sekulow. Once again, eyes are starting to turn to 2028. It is not that far away. You've already heard a lot of people who are considering runs. Of course, the leading candidate for the Democrats would be Gavin Newsom. Preferably, it'll be Stephen A. Smith, but if it's not going to be Stephen, who is calling for Nashville to get an NBA team, so he's pretty close to having my vote.

Will: Is that really your single issue voter?

Logan Sekulow: If you will bring an NBA team to Logan's town, you have whatever position, even if it's county commissioner, he'll vote for you. And I don't know the guy, but I'm a step away. He's always ragging on Sean Hannity. Sean's one of our good friends in a fun, playful way, so it could happen. But the eyes are turned to Gavin Newsom in 2028. It's just the truth. He's making tour stops.

He was here in Nashville just a few weeks ago, lines out the door. He of course was making those statements in Georgia claiming, I'm just like you. I can't read. I have a low SAT score. Insulting people over and over again, insulting people who have learning difficulties or whatever it may be. Even if he includes himself in that, it was a ridiculous moment. Of course, we've been at court with Gavin Newsom here at the ACLJ with the state of California.

At the time when his wife was making appearances and doing the rounds on the media talking about how insulting evangelical Christians are, talking about how they're holding us back and they're not going to hold us back because we have awoken to whatever their version of being a pro-lifer is. And of course, they talk about things like prenatal care. They talk about postnatal care. They talk about formula, all those different things, daycare, childcare. I know things that pro-life pregnancy centers offer.

But of course in states like California, we know they're trying to shut those people down. We know they're still trying to collect fines, over a million dollars in fines from COVID era from Calvary Chapel in California, and the ACLJ has been fighting that.

Will: That's right. And actually, today is a very important day when it comes to that. We filed our cert petition, as you remember, in December, and then California got an unprecedented two extensions in their ability to file their reply to our cert petition. One is normal, people ask for an extension all the time, but they got two. So they asked for it twice to move this deadline back.

Today is the deadline. They have until the end of the day to file their response to our cert petition asking the Supreme Court to hear this case where they are still trying to get $1.2 million from Calvary Chapel San Jose. This was over their allegations of violating COVID restrictions. Meanwhile, California was handing out exemptions to every business under the sun except for a church. Gavin himself was breaking those rules.

And once again, why does this all matter? Well, because Gavin Newsom and the first partner were in office at this time. They are the ones that oversee all this. And why would they be going so hard against a church? Well, maybe because the first partner, the first lady of California, Jennifer Newsom, believes that evangelical Christians and conservatives are in this silo that is pulling this country back.

Logan Sekulow: A lot of you are just joining us right now, so I think we should play this clip once again. We're not going to play it ad nauseam. You're probably going to hear it when we have Rick Grenell on a little bit later because that'll be in about 30 or 40 minutes, so you got time. But I do want to make sure there's a lot of you who are just joining us right now.

And again, I encourage you if you're brand new, hit that subscribe button. But if you're watching on YouTube, hit that thumbs up, throw in the comments, let me know where you're watching from, especially you Californians that I see in the comments right now. I know this doesn't represent you. Sometimes we take New York and California and it feels like conservatives often write off those areas. I do not subscribe to that.

I think we should have a thriving California, Southern California, Northern California. It's some of the most beautiful places in the world. Places that need to be protected, places that need to have proper representation. New York City, the capital of the world. I believe it should be treated that way. We should have respect for it and it should be clean and safe and all of these things that should be happening for people. But of course right now, the leadership is in chaos. But you wouldn't know it because the media loves to present them as these heroic figures.

We want to make sure you know what we're talking about here. And when you look at the state of California, you watch Gavin Newsom, you may feel one way. You may see that he had someone like a Charlie Kirk on his podcast, so maybe this guy is really willing to reach across the aisle, maybe he could be a good leader and a good bipartisan president.

And then you listen to the rhetoric coming out of him and now unearthing this interview from just a couple years ago of his wife talking specifically about pro-life evangelical Christians. And look, I'm not putting those terms into her mouth. Very rarely do you hear people slam the word evangelical Christian when they're leading a state. Especially a state that was probably the leader in the evangelical movement, starting during the Jesus revolution that happened in the sixties and seventies, all the way through the Christian music movement, all the way through TBN and the creation of Christian television. A lot of it started in Southern California. But of course, this is how California decides they are going to treat their very large and thriving conservative evangelical space. And remember, this is how it will be if they are treating the entire country this way as the leaders. Take a listen.

Jennifer Newsom: But again, the folks on the far right, what they're missing is they're living in this silo, this evangelical conservative silo that ultimately is pulling us back as a country to a time and a place where we don't deserve to be and we're not going to be. Because honestly, young women and fathers of daughters are awake now and they're woke and they're not going to let us go back. And so I have so much hope because of that and obviously California has a huge responsibility to lead.

Will: We know that they are going after churches, they are trying to get these fines. But also, I want to play another comment from Jennifer Newsom because she was talking about pro-life issues, something that we fight for and care very deeply about here at the ACLJ. California is a state where we have had to fight in court to get them to stop targeting pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

They had a law that our suit was against Kamala Harris because she was the Attorney General at the time, where they forced pro-life pregnancy resource centers to advertise for abortion. They had to post a sign and the law dictated the font size, the wording that told people that went into pro-life centers where you can go get an abortion. But here is the wordplay and the twisting of meaning that you are seeing out of the governor's office and the governor's wife. This is bite seven, that same interview.

Jennifer Newsom: So many progressives are leaning into the redefining what pro-life is really about and that's what we're doing in California. Pro-life is about prenatal care and universal preschool and universal after school and universal health care and taking care of foster kids and feeding universal meals, childcare. That's pro-life. It's not conception.

Will: Part of that I agree with. And I don't think she realizes that she agrees with conservatives that that's what a lot of these pregnancy resources do, prenatal care. That's where you can go and get free prenatal care. Access to prenatal care, that's their claim of all the claims against pro-life pregnancy centers. I think if you are planning on keeping your child, pretty much that's what they offer is prenatal care.

She's wanting the state to provide it. But what she doesn't realize is that the very centers that they despise, that they tried to get to post advertisements for abortion clinics just a few years ago that we had to fight, those are the clinics that without government funding are trying to do that hard work, trying to help mothers be able to care for their children even after birth. They tell lies and they say that it's just a center to coerce people into having a baby. They've never set foot inside of one. They don't understand the good work these people do that we fight for every day here at the ACLJ.

Logan Sekulow: We are going to pivot a little bit, but stay on hold. If you're on hold right now, phone lines are almost completely jammed. We got one line open. 1-800-684-3110. Two things: I want to encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ. Of course our teams, if you're talking about Gavin Newsom today, as we said, today is the deadline for California and Gavin Newsom to respond to our Supreme Court case against their attempt to seize millions of dollars from Calvary Chapel San Jose.

You can be a part of that ACLJ team right now by going to ACLJ.org. And when you do it today, it is part of our Double Your Impact Drive. All donations are matched and doubled. So I encourage you to go to ACLJ.org. Have your donation doubled. Have your tax-deductible donation doubled during our Double Your Impact Drive. Now we'll be coming up in the next segment. We've got our friend John Solomon. Will, give us a little bit of a preview.

Will: Just the news has uncovered that we've heard of Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost. The FBI had two additional named investigations against President Trump. We're going to talk about that as well as some other things from Just the News.

Logan Sekulow: Join us today at ACLJ.org. We'll be right back with John Solomon. Later on, Rick Grenell and of course your calls and comments when we get back.

Logan Sekulow: Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines are almost completely jammed. We've got one line open. In the next segments, we're going to be taking your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. We're joined by our friend John Solomon from Just the News. Will, I think you wanted to set this up a little bit for us.

Will: That's right. So this is a couple big topics over at JusttheNews.com, which is one of the first places we look every morning when we are planning out this show. John, this came out a couple days ago on Just the News. We've heard about Crossfire Hurricane, we've heard about Arctic Frost, but under the review from Director Kash Patel, they have uncovered two more named investigations targeting President Trump that also swept up hundreds of Americans and violated their privacy rights. But this is all coming from these prohibited access designations the FBI was using. Can you tell us about what you found at Just the News and what this means?

John Solomon: Basically, what it means is that there was a secret system that put Donald Trump under consistent nonstop counterintelligence investigation along with many of his followers, hundreds of his followers, from the summer of 2016, which is when Crossfire Hurricane occurs, all the way to January of 2025 when he takes his second oath of office as the 47th president. We've known about Crossfire Hurricane for a long time. That's long now been debunked. There never was any evidence, according to the special prosecutor who looked at it, that Donald Trump conspired with Russia. It was a made-up allegation by Hillary Clinton's campaign and her researchers.

We heard about the last one more recently, Arctic Frost, and we knew that that targeted people on the notion that it was a criminal conspiracy to offer the United States Senate alternate electors in a disputed election. Now, that's interesting that that became a criminal conspiracy because twice before in history, in 1876 and in 1960 with John F. Kennedy, candidates did the exact same thing. Tilden in 1876, Kennedy in 1960—they weren't prosecuted. It wasn't even considered a criminal act then, but in that case President Trump was treated as a criminal threat.

In between those two, we now have learned about two new operations. Plasmik Echo looks at the possibility that President Trump took classified documents to his home in Mar-a-Lago, and that is an investigation that swept up some pretty important phone records, including those of his future Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and his future FBI director Kash Patel. It's pretty hard to understand why they would be targeted, but apparently they were and other people were as well. And then the one that may draw the most concern, and we know the least about now because it's highly classified. We expect that to change in the next few weeks when declassifications occur. It's called Round River.

Will: John, that is one of the biggest concerns obviously for the director as well, the ways that they shielded these investigations from even the FBI itself. Once again, hopefully we will learn more about this Round River investigation, which does seem like it could be concerning for hundreds, if not thousands of Americans, the way that they were targeting even partially our First Amendment rights through that. I also wanted to quickly pivot here because there's also a piece up because Joe Kent, who has now departed the National Director of National Counterterrorism, and he appears being reported that may also be under investigation for classified documents leaks. Could you give us a brief update on that?

John Solomon: This is an investigation that stretches back several months. It began way before Joe Kent contemplated or sent in his resignation letter Monday and what became a big legacy media story. And it may explain some of the friction that was going on in his career behind the scenes that we couldn't see. They are looking at some information about classified leaks. This has been confirmed by multiple officials I've talked to.

We expect that case to come to a resolution in the next couple of weeks, so there'll be some clarity about what it is, what he did, what he didn't do, whether he's going to be charged or not charged. But it does give some context about something we didn't know when the resignation letter was suddenly sprung upon us on Monday. Now, he's a hero, 11 times deployed into combat during the Iraq and Afghan war. He lost his wife in combat. She also was a brave Navy officer.

He has a wonderful career, he served his country bravely and proudly and with great sacrifice. But when you move into these civilian jobs, you have certain responsibilities and the question that we'll have to wait and see is, was there evidence of some classified leak? Was he in some way involved in it? I think we'll get some clear resolution in the next couple of weeks.

Logan Sekulow: John, I appreciate you calling in and being a part of the show today. I do think there's always a lot of people watching and they're looking for different news sources and news outlets. We always say we provide the one hour a day where they can get a lot of information in a lot of different topics. But we always go to Just the News first because your information is so well thought out and so well researched. Tell people why Just the News has become such a force and why people need to be checking it out.

John Solomon: Thank you for saying so. I love your show. I listen as often as I can. We trust the reader to make up their own mind. We don't have an agenda of trying to lead you to certain conclusions. In fact, what we do is we put up all of our documents. When we break a story, we embed the documents, the video, everything that was in our reporter's notebook you get to see because we want you to not take our word for it, we want you to be able to explore it yourself.

That transparency has allowed a lot of people to say, that doesn't sound like a right story. Oh wait, I read it, oh, it's there. That voyage of self-discovery with journalism sometimes require. I think it's worth exposing and so we require all of our reporters to put as much of the research that they have that they can make public along with the story. That lets everybody make up their own mind and we're very proud of that approach. We have a thing called the Dig In tool and that's where you can quickly click and see all of our research and it creates a bond of trust with our readers.

Logan Sekulow: John, thank you so much and we appreciate it. We agree with John, so always check out Just the News when you're looking for incredibly researched substance. Like he said, provides all the data, everything that you need is there at your fingertips. Thanks John for joining us today. Look, we got a second half hour coming up. If you don't get us on your local station, you can find us broadcasting live each and every day, 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern time.

That's on ACLJ.org. That's on YouTube. That's on Rumble, Facebook, however you get your podcasts, really we are there. If not, you can catch us later on archived. You can find us there on your favorite player or social media platform. We are available at ACLJ.org and through the ACLJ app as well. Support the work of the ACLJ. Let's put that QR code up on the screen if you're watching at ACLJ.org. Do it today, have your gift doubled. It's matched dollar for dollar with a tax-deductible donation. Second half hour coming up. Don't go anywhere.