Explore every episode of the podcast The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

“Tooth and tail.” That’s the phrase new defense secretary Pete Hegseth uses to describe how money is spent (and wasted) by the Pentagon. It captures the difference between spending money to support warfighters and spending it on the mushrooming support operations that are supposed to keep the troops ready.

In the annals of government reform efforts, the efforts of Elon Musk and his task force of DOGE techies are more than tough love. Because the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has (mostly) been given access to the books of government agencies, it has spotted billions of dollars in questionable grants, make-work programs, and outright gifts to politically connected activists who provided political support to their government paymasters. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss a few examples, but also address a deeper question: “So what?”

Bill and Hillary Clinton were once masters of the “dark arts” of politics – spinning history and enriching themselves while running a global charity that became famous as a grift machine. Their skill even had a name: “The Clinton Blur.” Though long out of office himself, former President Bill Clinton is at it again. “The news for GAI is that Bill Clinton is back,” says author Peter Schweizer, whose 2015 bestseller Clinton Cash exposed the financial shenanigans behind the Clinton Global Initiative. “Bill’s back, he’s mad, and he’s mad at me!”

The cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has produced some ugly reactions. Liberal politicians and commentators seized upon Thompson’s murder as an excuse to complain about insurance companies. But their outrage should be directed at the federal government, says Seamus Bruner on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.

Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of his son, Hunter, was really a proxy pardon for the whole Biden family that hamstrings ongoing investigations into Biden family influence peddling schemes, according to Peter Schweizer.

In the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, Schweizer points out that the schemes implicated not just Hunter but Joe himself, his brothers Frank and James, and other members of the Biden family. The pardon, “historically unprecedented” in its scope, is “a stunning acknowledgment of how corrupt this family is,” Schweizer says.

Storming the Ivory Tower - A Call for Educational Reform with Richard Corcoran

The election was a week ago, and we know a lot. But we still don’t know the results of 17 congressional elections across the nation, half of them in California. On The Drill Down podcast, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss why California is so far behind other large states in completing the counts of its congressional races. Schweizer notes that the 13th Congressional District has only counted 61.6 percent of its votes, a full week after the election.

The Rightward Shift - Analyzing National Trends

He’s the man with the biggest influence over the last several elections that you’ve probably never heard of. His influence over how Americans vote, and how those votes are counted, has made him a Democratic “super-lawyer,” and his handiwork has been on elections around the country for more than a decade. He is a man who understands that elections can be won in the days or weeks after voting has completed. He is Democratic election law specialist Marc Elias, and he’s the topic on the last pre-election episode of The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.

The Deep State's Role in Modern Politics

A Deep Dive Into Election Integrity

The Politics of Disaster Relief

The New Face of Resistance - Lobbying Against Trump

Smurfing the Election - What does it mean?

With Joe Biden forced out of the presidential race, why should anyone still care about the corruption story that implicated him, his brothers, and his son, Hunter Biden? Because “the same people in the same crooked institutions that protected him and allowed him and his family to do business and make millions of dollars from our adversaries, particularly from China, are still there,” journalist Miranda Devine declares on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. “They're still committing bad deeds. They still have mal-intent and they still don't have America's best interests at heart,” Devine tells co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers.

The Battle Over Truth in Politics

In yet another strange turn in this strangest of political seasons, former President Trump touched on a claim that has been making the rounds on social media posts showing video footage of Springfield residents complaining that Haitian refugees are dining out on the local goose and cat population. The city manager of the town, who is also responsible for running the refugee resettlement program that brought the Haitians to Springfield, has denied the problem exists. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers consider the Springfield issue in the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. While they take no position on the cat-and-goose claim, they note that there really is a problem in Springfield for which the Biden-Harris Administration bears some responsibility. The co-hosts noted that the Biden administration placed 20,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, a town with a pre-refugee population of 59,000.

Hot Yoga or NASCAR Voters

Kamala Harris's Connections and Integrity

Big Government Intrudes on Everything

“Big Balls,” Chris Coons and a “constitutional crisis.” For out-of-power Democrats and many in the press, the pace of Donald Trump’s new administration has them shouting, “It’s the end of the world as we know it!” Drill Down host Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers feel fine, but as Elon Musk’s small posse of DoGE analysts, including a 19-year-old hacker who goes by the name of “Big Balls” online, continues to find large examples of fraud and wasteful spending in federal agency budgets, Eggers suggests another song by the band R.E.M. for angry Democrats: “Everybody Hurts.”

As the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. goes to the full Senate, healthy food activist and entrepreneur Vani Hari is thrilled by the attention his focus on “Making America Healthy Again” is getting.

Through her blog, called FoodBabe, she and has been a relentless advocate for healthier, safer products from America’s largest food companies, and frustrated by the capture of the Food and Drug Administration by lobbyists for Big Food.

Is DeepSeek really a deep con? A psyop tossed out to shake up the financial markets?

The release of a Chinese-made artificial intelligence engine called DeepSeek sent a bulldozer through Wall Street this week. Rival AI companies lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value after sell-offs, once the new kid came on the block. But as Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers note on this episode of The Drill Down, the timing is suspicious. “This could be a replay of the lab leak back in 2020,” Schweizer says. “We're going to simply discuss the reality of how this thing unfolded, the claims that were made, the claims that are not true.”

On his way out the door of the White House, former President Joe Biden pardoned five members of his family not named “Hunter.” All five – brother James and his wife, Sara; sister Valerie and her husband, John; and brother Frank – were implicated in various influence-peddling schemes just like the previously pardoned Hunter. It was Joe Biden’s last act of loyalty… to his family co-conspirators.

Schweizer: The Only Opinion on TikTok That Counts is China's

It’s a tale of three attacks. The murderous rampage through the French Quarter, the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, and the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. To a former FBI and Justice department guy like Kenneth Strange, who spent time on the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), each of those incidents are very different, with unique causes and motives. Strange believes the FBI has lost its way and allowed political pressure to distort how it allocates its resources. He joins Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.

Pictures make ideas real. And portraits make people real. Artist and photographer Dan Fleuette joins the Drill Down to describe how he creates art through personalities on the political right. A self-described “art school lunatic,” Fleuette was the artist that turned Peter Schweizer’s bestselling investigative book Clinton Cash into both a documentary and even a graphic novel.

The Trump administration’s fight with elite universities might be its toughest yet because it’s about money—federal research funds that have been given to major universities for decades. On the most recent podcast of The Drill Down, host Peter Schweizer approves of the effort: “We say that’s a good thing.” President Donald Trump’s budget hawks seek to cut wasteful spending, but that is only part of their goal. What they really want is to see elite universities return to merit-based admissions and viewpoint diversity in faculty and students, an end to campus antisemitism and elimination of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

No one likes tax time, but one fresh character might offer at least some entertainment.

Former congressman Billy Long of Missouri, who famously deployed his skills as a professional auctioneer on the House floor during a debate, is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service after its acting director Melanie Krause’s resignation over the administration’s effort to use tax information to identify people in the country illegally.

On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers take a post-tax filing deadline look at the history of the IRS being used to go after political opponents.

President Donald Trump unveiled a full slate of eye-popping tariffs on countries large and small last Friday, and the reactions over the weekend have been intense. Welcome to “Tariff Panic Week.” Many people have noted the precipitous drop in the stock market and their own IRAs since the tariffs were announced. One reporter who questioned Trump aboard Air Force One over the weekend even asked him whether he’d call off the tariffs if the Dow Jones index kept dropping. “That’s a stupid question,” Trump snapped.

What do Big Pharma ads on TV and Diet Coke have in common? Both are targets of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new head of the Health and Human Services department. In his early efforts to press the “Make America Healthy Again,” Kennedy has singled out two seemingly different issues: those ubiquitous television ads for pharmaceuticals, and whether people on federal food assistance programs should be able to buy soda and junk food on the taxpayer dime.

The new administration of Donald Trump has been a whirlwind of activity in its first one hundred days but is running into resistance from men in black – activist federal judges.

As DOGE’s efforts shift to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in social welfare problems including SNAP, Social Security, and Medicaid, The Drill Down podcast welcomes a nationally recognized expert in spotting how those programs are rife with fraud. Andrew McClenahan is, among other things, intergovernmental committee co-chair for an organization called the United Council on Welfare Fraud, and has investigated fraud in the food stamp program, including one bust several years ago that stopped a $100 million fraud scheme in South Florida. The group is made up of welfare fraud investigators from every state.

If you think you know how bad things are in California, you don’t. If you think you know how corrupt the state’s leading politicians are, it’s worse than that. Sticky-fingered pols pushing woke policies have turned the Golden State into fool’s gold. That’s the title of a new book out March 11 by two investigative reporters—Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics, and the Government Accountability Institute’s own Jedd McFatter. Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All exposes the shocking truth behind California’s fall from grace, and how progressives want to do it to the rest of the nation. The book exposes the corruption of California’s leading Democratic lights—Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Adam Schiff, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The current state of civil rights in America with Harmeet Dhillon

While recent news of former President Joe Biden’s dire cancer diagnosis certainly inspired sympathy, it also has raised suspicions about the timing and motivation of the disclosure. As Peter Schweizer notes on the most recent episode of The Drill Down, the lack of honesty about Joe Biden’s health and the media’s coverage of it extends even to a new book by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios. “We have lies upon lies upon lies upon lies,” says Schweizer, who exposed the Biden family’s influence-peddling back in 2018. “Even by Washington standards, these are some serious whoppers.”

Qatar vs Qvar

Clinton Cash - A Decade of Impact With Special Guest Steve Bannon

Even for non-Catholics, the pope is a figure of world significance who can affect politics in every nation around the globe, as Francis, the first pope from Latin America, clearly did. On the latest episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers of the Government Accountability Institute avoid theology but instead follow the money the church received from the Biden administration, and it leads to the church’s role in the immigration crisis in the US.

As the riots raged in Los Angeles, four things became clear – LA’s leaders are feckless; foreign money is behind the rioters; protesters are expressing a soup of different grievances, and all this may happen elsewhere. As with the BLM riots in 2020, the LA disturbances are not spontaneous or chaotic. They have been planned, supported, and even staffed by activist organizations whose goals have nothing to do with immigration law or the plight of day laborers lingering in Home Depot parking lots. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers break down these connections and follow the money to Mexican cartels, China, taxpayer-funded NGOs, and even teachers and service employee unions.

Congressman Chip Roy on Fiscal Responsibility

Experts are on a run of bad luck lately. Climate change predictions, Covid vaccine promises, jobs statistics, and economic analysis of the effect of the Trump administration’s tariffs. What’s the problem with the experts? Do they really know what they say they know? Do they know how much they don’t know? On their most recent podcast episode, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers of The Drill Down take the experts out to the woodshed.

Margaret Roberts - FBI's Role in Domestic Terrorism

Legislative Priorities on Capitol Hill Post-Major Bill Passage With Congressman Wesley Hunt

Marking the first anniversary of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., the US Senate released two reports on failures by the Secret Service both during and prior to the attempt. The level of incompetence shown in the reports has caused some to wonder whether Secret Service was really even trying to prevent it.

Whatever the truth may be about Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide or “client list,” he was engaged in the business of human trafficking and that leaves a paper trail. As Peter Schweizer noted on the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, Investment bank JP Morgan Chase turned over the records it had, worth over 1 billion dollars, to the federal government in 2019. Why haven’t those records been released? “We have more than $1 billion were used for purposes of human trafficking,” JP Morgan wrote to the Justice Department after Epstein’s death, Schweizer says. As Eric Eggers notes, we “follow the money.” So, why has no one else been investigated in light of JP Morgan’s disclosures?

Jason Chaffetz - How Deep State Spies, NGOs, and Woke Corporations Plan to Push You Out of the Economy

President Donald Trump just blew up Iran’s nuclear program. That was the easy part. What Trump has done in arranging a tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel, after hammering the table with 14 MOPs dropped on Iran’s most critical underground nuclear enrichment plants, is “a return to 19th Century Great Power projection,” says author and investigative reporter Peter Schweizer on the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast. Co-host Eric Eggers adds, “the rizz is back.”

No Kings? No problem. The weekend protests called “No Kings” produced crowds of a few thousand in some reliably “blue” cities like Portland, Boston, Seattle, and others, but not much else. Tragically, though, a killer who was once a political appointee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz shot and killed the former state House speaker and her husband and seriously wounded a state senator and his wife – and killed his dog – in an act of politically motivated violence. On the latest episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers look at the protest campaign and follow the money behind it.

On Power with Mark Levin