FBI Wiretaps, Extortion Charges, and a Presidential Pardon

Rick: They were gonna indict my father on his deathbed in order to get me to plead. You’ve got a system that’s so strong and so big that it’s easily gonna crush you.

Amy: Prosecutors have a set of tools to encourage anyone they go after, any target, to plead.

Rick: So you’d have nine agents listening to one attorney-client privilege call.

Alex: Both sides of the aisle should say, “What in the world was the FBI doing listening to those phone calls with your attorney?”

Rick: I’m at my father’s funeral, and I’m giving the eulogy. They had leaked the word of the first indictment of 20 felonies.

Amy: And if you had pled, none of this misconduct would have come to light.

Rick: None of it.

Amy: None of it would have mattered.

Rick: None of it.

Alex: 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.

Amy: And I’m Amy Nelson, a former Wall Street lawyer and entrepreneur who’d never touched criminal law until the FBI knocked on my door and I had to walk my husband through a four-year DOJ investigation.

Alex: This is the TARGET podcast. 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.

Amy: And that’s the story of Rick Renzi, who we’re here to talk to today. Thank you, Rick. 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. Where were you when you learned that, and what was that like?

Rick: Right. I had ended up, uh, living in a, um, in a garage with a space heater and a, and a fan. I was kinda on my own a little bit, you know? And, um, 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 wiretap that it, they had taken on me. And it was called a Title III wiretap. It involved me talking to my little girl asking where Daddy was or me talking to, uh, congressmen. They had actually even l- uh, recorded the entire Republican Conference Committee after the post-Obama election and what our strategy was gonna be… which is illegal. So there were some calls on the disc that were, uh, on the log that were kinda, uh, blacked out, and it didn’t seem right, and so I started listening to the calls. At night, I would put the CD player in in my car… and I’d sit there and s- and started a call log. And then over time, I started realizing that the blacked out, uh, logs were my attorney’s voice, and they, we, they would click on and click off, and you c- they were actually listening to my attorney-client privilege calls. And, um, they, we began to ask for more and more of discovery of the fact that it came to light that you and, you, they were inve- actually recording my, my attorney-client privilege calls.

Alex: Uh, which is nuts. I mean, the fact that, one, they’re doing a wireta- 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.

Rick: Right, and then they s- started c- covering it up. Once we started going to the judge and saying, “Hey, we need a misconduct hearing pretrial,” and I fought the government for seven years pretrial, and 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.

Alex: So obviously by this point, it’s nuts. You’re clearly like, “They’re after me.” And so going from the middle back to the beginning when did you first learn that the government was targeting you in a criminal investigation?

Rick: 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 the beginning of October. A reporter calls and says, “Hey, we hear there’s this grand jury against you. Uh, 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. Uh, and all I knew was I was in the middle of a campaign, and I had 40-something days left on the road out in Arizona. My district was r- uh, rural Arizona. Ran all the way from the Navajo Nation, which is a large area of poverty, all the way down to 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-

Alex: Oh, wow

Rick: … which is right next to the Apaches. And so I had begun to fight against this international copper company, which e- eventually became owned by the Chinese and, and backing, I was backing the Apaches.

Alex: And so a- at the time, and be clear, a reporter’s not supposed to know about grand jury activity. Right? I mean-

Rick: Right. We didn’t le-

Alex: Did, did you even at that time understand how improper it was to get a call like that?

Rick: I didn’t. I, we ended up getting an attorney quickly, uh, to, w- 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.”

Amy: And so where do you go from there? You’ve got the call. You have an attorney. Then what?

Rick: I gotta finish the campaign. I’ve gotta finish. I’ve gotta, um … I’m in, I’m representing a district that was, um, majority Democrat. And here I am a Republican conservative, 12 kids, seven boys and five girls. And, um, 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 me.

Amy: So it was public.

Rick: It was public.

Alex: 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.

Rick: Right. They went to-

Alex: What did that-

Rick: … Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and said “Is Renzi under investigation?” He said, “Yes.” “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 Mueller’s hit on me, and I’m trying to survive. 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 kinda 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.

Amy: And so it, you know, it sounds like the company made a criminal referral to DOJ about actions you allegedly took. And I think i- 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.

Rick: 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-

Alex: Oh, wow

Rick: … by the cavalry in the 1860s, and that they had leapt to their death in silence and defiance of the government. And so that defiance eventually became my, uh, my call to myself for my own courage. Uh, and so they had these lobbyists who, um, had hired a former FBI agent, and then he was the one who developed this, these lies and got it before the-

Alex: Now, you didn’t know that. I mean, so let’s kinda 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 a crime and put you in jail.

Rick: Exactly, and they even brag about it on their website.

Alex: And so at some point later on, you find that out. Wh- 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?”

Rick: 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 this 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 something that w-

Alex: They didn’t want people to know that they-

Rick: Yeah, he didn’t want… Right

Alex: … had been the one doing this.

Amy: We’re gonna do this, but we don’t want anyone to know we’re doing it.

Rick: Because 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.

Alex: Sure. I mean, defamation or false, malicious prosecution, all those all that stuff.

Rick: And if I had won my case, then we were going after him.

Alex: So let’s talk about that. You, you get to the point, now we’re back to the middle, you found massive misconduct. How does the case continue? I mean, how, how does the judge allow it to go on at this point?

Rick: We end up with this pretrial, uh, misconduct hearing, and the judge doesn’t wanna do the hearing, so he assigns it to a, um, another judge, a magistrate. But we’re before-

Alex: Lower level judge, essentially, yeah

Rick: … 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.

Amy: Ugh.

Rick: So you’d have nine agents listening to one attorney-client privileged call. And, and so as that begins to come out, we’re presenting this to the judge, uh, to the magistrate judge. He takes the prosecutor in my case back into his chambers ex parte, and we’re all stunned ’cause that’s i- that’s unethical in itself.

Alex: Unethical.

Rick: And when the prosecutor comes out, he’s as white as a sheet and he’s stunned, and we realized this, this mas- this, um, 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.

Amy: Ugh.

Rick: And then the judge decides he’s not gonna throw out not one of the 20 charges, felony charges against me. No fruit of the poisonous tree, so the case moves forward.

Alex: Which is nuts. I mean, the idea is that they base this information to grand jury off illegally mater- obtained materials. You would think usually that doesn’t get to happen.

Rick: E- exactly. It would be on the, on the prosecutor to prove and, uh, and try to re-indict the case, but he didn’t. He, uh, he just kept going.

Amy: But then they did re-indict the case multiple times-

Rick: So-

Amy: … but not in the way that we would think they would after throwing out the search warrant.

Rick: 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 me. 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 20 felonies while I’m giving the eulogy at my father’s uh, funeral. And so they indicted me on 20-something felonies, and they offered me four years in prison, and I refused. They come back after the misconduct hearing and say, “Okay, oh, you wanna, you wanna fight us, huh?” They re-indict me 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 10 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 re-indicted me on 49 felonies. So I was re-indicted three times, 49 felonies, and we went to trial.

Alex: 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. Um, you talked about, you know, even the FBI director was obviously involved. You were a sitting member of Congress. Give us a sense of what that kind of looked like, um, from a personality standpoint.

Rick: Well, Jack Smith was the prosecutor against me, and-

Amy: We all know who Jack Smith is now.

Rick: Right. And so-

Alex: Special counsel.

Rick: 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, uh, cr- Invented kind of law or felonies that were very vague, and you could overcharge. You could stretch the law. Boundless interpretations as the Supreme Court cited against him in the Bob McDonnell case.

Alex: Let’s say McDonnell would be an example, the governor of Virginia, which the Supreme Court threw out that case.

Amy: Nine-zero

Rick: 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 blood lust.

Amy: Mm-hmm. Did you ever get to talk to him?

Rick: Uh, i- they wanted me to go in. If I pled, I would’ve had to plead to him personally, and I refused.

Amy: 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.

Rick: They had a, 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.”

Alex: And you’re like, “No.” Well, y- you mentioned you have a very large family.

Rick: Yes. 12 children.

Alex: A dozen kids. Um, 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-

Rick: It was brutal

Alex: … just emotionally?

Rick: It was brutal. My little girl would go to school, and she was in a Fairfax County, Virginia, school, criticized by teachers for, “Oh, your dad’s a criminal.” You know, uh, “This is what he-”

Alex: How old was she at the time?

Rick: She was a little girl. She was, uh, maybe 12, 13 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. And I was a father, 12 kids, and they were suffering along with me.

Alex: How do you make that decision around, okay, 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?

Rick: 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?” Um, my, Rick Renzi. And, um, 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, 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. 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 onto God, ’cause I had no one else helping me.

Amy: And I think, you know, it’s a bit against the backdrop that something like 98.2% of Americans who are accused of a federal crime plead guilty, because they do things like stack charges which means you’ll go to prison for a longer period of time if you are convicted, and it costs so much money.

Rick: True.

Amy: 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.

Rick: Right. So I’m 6’4”, 225 pounds, and I had gotten down… I had dark circles under my eyes. I wasn’t sleeping. I was down to 197 pounds. And, um, I was waking up with it, and I wasn’t sleeping, and wasn’t sleeping, and the deprivation of sleep after a while, my heart started to go into atrial fibrillation. And, um, my brother-in-law rushed me to the hospital, and, uh, they put the paddles on me. Um, and I was awake. They hadn’t… The injection, it was so critical at the point that the, to 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 him and said, “Roger, it’s, 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- 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. 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 to Jack Smith, who eventually became a FISA court judge.

Alex: Now, let me ask you this. We, we haven’t talked about the sort of details of the case itself. I think sometimes the details matter less, but w- 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?

Rick: The first call came, and they said, “You’re gonna be, it looks like they’re trying to charge you with something called Hobbs Act extortion.” And, um, and I was… And so I, I’m googling it. What is-

Alex: Now, Hobbs Act extortion, to be clear, is what the mob used to do when they would go around and say, “If you don’t pay us this month-” “we’re gonna come break your windows.”

Amy: We have a lot of really bad laws because of the mafia.

Alex: Yeah, it’s-

Amy: … really.

Rick: Including RICO, which-

Amy: Right, including RICO

Rick: … they were, they were gonna charge me with. So I was like, “Well, what is that? What did I, what are they saying that I did?” And they’re saying, “Well, they’re saying you strong-armed these real estate developers to buy this water and this land outside of Fort Huachuca, and that although the public interest was your public interest, and it was ruled pretrial that you were acting in the public interest to save Fort Huachuca from being shut down, um, you were strong-arming and forcing these men.” And I said, “Oh, it’s a lie.” You know? “We’ve, we’ve got it, we’ve got it 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 strong arm 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.

Amy: So the, the real estate developer went and talked to the DOJ about-

Rick: They went to him first

Amy: … they 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.”

Rick: No, that’s not how it happened.

Amy: So that should be the end of it, right?

Rick: That should’ve 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 law fair. 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.

Alex: And did they tell you all that at the time, that they were offering that?

Rick: I found out when I was in prison.

Alex: So talk to me about that. So I mean, it seems insane.

Amy: But wait, hold on a second.

Alex: It seems insane.

Amy: Like, the DOJ can just pay witnesses?

Alex: They can pay witnesses. They’re supposed to tell you when they pay witnesses. And they didn’t tell you, did they?

Rick: They did not, no. I-

Alex: And you found out later because the witness actually wrote a letter to his attorney?

Rick: Demanding the money.

Amy: What?

Rick: He, after, when I was in prison, he said, “I see that Renzi’s in prison. I think it’s time that I deserve-”

Alex: I get paid. I, I did my part.

Rick: “I, I deserve to get the payment of money you all promised me.”

Amy: Where’s my check? Yeah.

Rick: And, uh, 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.

Amy: Ooh.

Rick: And we thank her, uh, honesty and there was more in there also that showed that they had interv- the actual field interview, uh, in the handwriting of the female FBI agent was there. And so there were-

Alex: Which contradicted some of the reports

Rick: … which, which con- which contradicted the evidence in the, in the trial.

Amy: So you didn’t have notes from the first interview where the developer told the truth.

Rick: Right. We didn’t have any.

Amy: I mean, you were also supposed to get that.

Rick: Right. So they withheld exculpatory evidence.

Amy: That’s, like, basic.

Rick: 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. There was the time of how long it was on my cellphone, which matched the time in the call, and then it was just white noise. It had been erased.

Alex: H- how can… I mean, look, I, I think the part that some people might struggle, if they’re listening to this, to understand, you are a sitting United States congressman. You know, you are a powerful person, and you have allies. You’ve got a, a, a party who presumably can help you. I hel- 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 and kinda get away with it. And so how do you explain that to people? How do you explain that even somebody-

Rick: Alex

Alex: … 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?

Rick: Alex, we even had Nancy Pelosi, who despises me. I was author of the partial birth abortion ban, 12 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 Speak and Debate Clause, against these violations of misconduct. I mean, she hated to do it, but they but they were trying to protect the institution.

Alex: Of the Congress.

Rick: Yeah. So, you know, sometimes you’re not as powerful as you think you are. Y- when you’re 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 s- 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 so you’re-

Amy: Did he, did he call you and tell you he was doing that?

Rick: Yeah. He called me in his office, you know, and he told me he was taking me off one committee. And I said, “You can take me off all three, Boehner.”

Alex: 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 you expected?

Rick: It’s, 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, they were gonna indict my father on his death bed 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 blood lust. And they can go after you. They spent millions and millions on me. Seven years pre-trial, three years post-trial, with an, with s- a second misconduct hearing as a result of the box that the, that was turned over to us.

Alex: Now, some people will say, “Look, you went to trial. You got convicted. That means the system works, right?”

Rick: Right. That’s-

Alex: Uh, and what do you say to those folks?

Rick: Yeah. You’re in, you’re, you’re naive, you know. In my day, the FBI had their own television show. It was golden. So it was hard for me to say, “Hey, this FBI agent’s corrupt.”

Alex: Right. The same people who, who you see on TV, look like the golden boys, are actively violating attorney-client privilege by getting together and listening to these phone calls.

Amy: And they know they’re doing it. This is not a mistake.

Alex: Not a mistake.

Amy: This is a choice.

Rick: Right. This is absolutely, these G-men who were, you know, absolutely mythology in American culture.

Amy: 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 cul- society of jury trials anymore. We have a plea system. And if you had pled, none of this misconduct would’ve come to light.

Rick: None of it.

Amy: None of it would’ve mattered.

Rick: None of it. It would all have been buried.

Amy: 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.

Rick: 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.

Alex: And what was that?

Rick: It was that the fact that the key witness in the case had spoken and already cut the deal with the, um, 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-

Alex: But how did they get-

Rick: … they had the phone logs

Alex: … how, how did they, yeah, but explain how they knew that and why.

Rick: 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- uh, Congressman Renzi had introduced you two 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. But it didn’t match the narrative that they originally had, uh, pro- given to the grand jury, so they stayed with it.

Alex: 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? Uh, 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?

Rick: Actually, um, the Arizona Bar did receive a complaint after the second misconduct hearing. They swept it under the rug. My attorneys represented the 12th largest law firm in America, m- a Chicago law firm which is, was a Democratic law firm. And one of the bravest guys who’d been with them for many, many years, Kelly Kramer, he was my attorney, he wrote, along with six other attorneys, 190-page inspector general complaint. We filed that. That was swept under the rug.

Alex: And that’s the, it’s, the inspector general is someone within the Department of Justice who’s supposed to investigate misconduct within the department.

Rick: Exactly. He has-

Amy: It’s the hen patrolling the henhouse.

Rick: Yeah, the fox watching the henhouse. It got swept under the rug. Eventually, President Trump became president, his first term, and that 190-page inspector general complaint made it to the White House, and eventually I got a presidential pardon based upon the misconduct in my case.

Alex: Well, you got a pardon. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but did any of the people who led that misconduct ever get in trouble?

Rick: Never. They were promoted by Biden.

Amy: 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. And, you know, there are some interesting relationships that I would think could’ve been a conflict of interest.

Rick: True. The judge’s lead, um, assistant was married to the supervising FBI agent in my ca-

Alex: The clerk. The clerk.

Rick: The clerk, the lead clerk. The, the judge’s lead clerk-

Alex: Was married to the FBI’s-

Rick: W- F- supervising FBI agent in my case.

Alex: Now, 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.”

Rick: No, he, uh, he wouldn’t recuse himself.

Alex: That seems unusual.

Rick: Yeah. And w- the first judge did recuse herself-

Amy: Ah

Rick: … and he was the second judge, and he thought he could handle the case.

Amy: 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.

Rick: It’s so 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.”

Alex: Hard thing to say, “Hey, Judge, we think you’re not fair.”

Rick: Right. 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 13 years. He tried to fix it that way, but he was so far gone, and he was so far into what the government wanted him to do with so many rulings. Out of 211 pleadings, he had ruled in favor of the government, like, 207 times. He only won, like, three or four pleadings. Seven years pre-trial.

Alex: Yeah, I think people don’t understand the, the degree to which the go- it’s not a fair playing field at the district court, and the government wins in an inordinate amount of times, more than you would expect, in the sense that if these really are disputed questions, and they often are disputed questions, you’d imagine that the judges might come out at a 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 1,000 or-

Rick: Oh, yeah

Alex: … one case out of 10,000. And so you, y- 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?

Rick: It was the-

Alex: Or the process, right?

Rick: The court, when they didn’t, they didn’t find any charges to be thrown out at the wiretap, um, I had this one attorney who was like, “Congratulations. You know, nobody’s ever been able to get a, a Title III wiretap thrown out.” And I looked and 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 that, of, of misconduct, of malfeasance by the prosecution, they had lied and tried to cover up the wire, that they hadn’t wiretap 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, oh, 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, uh, 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’ve got, you’ve got a system that’s so strong and so big that it’s easily gonna crush you.

Alex: 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.

Rick: Exactly. I was naive.

Alex: What was, what was at a, w- what was it like to feel that switch flip and go like, “I had no idea it was like this”?

Rick: I was… You know, I’d gone to law school. I’d al I was a business owner. I’d made money. I’ve, I’d been successful, you know, very successful. God had been good to me wealth-wise, and I’d built a family of 12 kids, seven boys and five girls. And I was not just naive, but I went through the world as a patriot and believing in the justice and the honesty and the pillar of justice. And tha- and that’s why if we do not reform the Department of Justice, we will lose the Republic. It’s gone. It, it’s ours, you know, it’s a republic if we can keep it. And, and 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.

Amy: What do you mean by that, that you didn’t recover well from it?

Rick: After I went to prison and I was let out, I was, uh, sentenced to prison for three years. I should have been, you know, they wanted me to go th- uh, 13.

Alex: Which is insane.

Rick: Which is insane. I-

Alex: Just saying, 13 years is nuts.

Rick: Right. It, it, it destroys a man. You, you, you are-

Alex: And it’s nowhere it’s not necessary for protecting the republic. It’s just, “We can do this to you.”

Amy: So we will. So we will.

Rick: Right. And then 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, um, 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, uh, goes on and, uh, you end up becoming a little bit of what, the PTSD and I ended up, uh, moving to an island off the coast of Colombia… and set up some lobster traps and, and walking the beach until 3:00, 4:00 o’clock in the morning to try and get my sanity back.

Amy: What about your relationship with America?

Rick: I, I love America. I believe in her, but I very much only align myselves 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, in Washington.

Alex: You mentioned pardons, so I wanna talk about that a little bit. You, you, you go to trial. You didn’t do these things. Right? And, and you’re ha-

Rick: Passed the lie detector test

Alex: … and you’re having to live through that process of what that feels like to you, being like, “I didn’t do these things, and, uh, I’m now going to jail.” The appellate courts don’t help you. I mean, they say, yes, that, that improper activity was improper, the wire taps but we’re not gonna save you from your conviction. You’ve gotta 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 so- there’s this pardon I could get, I w- I’d like to get it. How’d you go about doing that?

Rick: I didn’t want it at the beginning.

Amy: Why?

Rick: I wanted justice. I wanted the system.

Alex: You wanted the system to fix itself.

Rick: To fix it. And, um, there was a congressman from California named John Doolittle, beautiful guy, and he was a little bit of a mentor for me. And, um, John came to me and said, “Look, you’ve gotta consider the idea that you’ve got this 190-page inspector general complaint that’s gone nowhere.” “You’ve got 15 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 that, “This, 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.

Alex: Did you think that Trump would be, um, a, a good audience, that he’d be open to hearing this type of, um, concern about the Justice Department?

Rick: We know that his chief c- uh, 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 r- 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 190 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, Renzi?” And the, and he, and the, and the congressman boldly said, “Yeah, he’s innocent.”

Amy: Where were you when you found out about the pardon?

Rick: I was in Colombia. I was in my cabana. I was sitting in a little wooden, uh, hut, and, uh, my brother called me at 1:00 o’clock in the morning and said, “Hey, there’s news that, um, you’re on this list.” And I couldn’t believe it. It was, uh, it w- it was really life-changing for my children more than anything else. It didn’t sink into me that it, this miracle had occurred, that, you know, the President Trump had given out 70, 71, 72 pardons and I was one of them. One in a million.

Alex: Well, hold on. Y- 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-

Rick: Right, right

Alex: … getting someone to sort of say, “You know what? This is w- this was wrong.” What was that like?

Rick: I was pardoned. My name appeared next to Lil Wayne, the rapper.

Amy: I love this for you.

Rick: And it went viral. And my kids all of a sudden, you know, I had no idea who Lil Wayne was. But my kids were, like, taking a snapshot… of the internet posting and saying, “My dad was pardoned along with Lil 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, “Oh, you know, you’re guilty. Oh, you’re not guilty,” and people who all of a sudden were never in my life anymore. You know, ’cause it was now almost 11, 12 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-

Alex: It mattered

Rick: … it mattered, and it mattered to my kids and my family, ’cause they’re now-

Alex: You’re not a felon anymore

Rick: … yeah, th- they could say, “Hey, look, President Trump, he saw what was true and, uh, a- and, and provided some justice.”

Alex: 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, a bad prosecutor. It’s become really political. Everything in your case happened really before all of that.

Rick: True.

Alex: 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?

Rick: True.

Alex: 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 charged the case?” And I think people ignore that the systemic problem has been systemic for a long, long time.

Amy: 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 including in your case.

Rick: 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 U.S. Attorney’s office, until they take the inspector general out from underneath he’s located physically in main justice in Washington, DC.

Amy: Doesn’t make sense.

Rick: Until that office is removed out-

Alex: Well, and he, and he has no power, right? He can’t fire somebody. He can make a report that says you should fire somebody.

Rick: Right, and he can’t disclose who did it. They blo- they black 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 s- researched the Church Committee.

Amy: The Church Committee, this is what we’re… You know, I think about the Church Committee a lot because a generation ago so 50 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.” The FBI, the CIA, and there were massive reforms-

Rick: Right, and, and-

Amy: … once there was a public light on what was happening

Alex: Tons of laws passed to sort of fix things.

Amy: But it’s been a generation, and everybody forgets.

Alex: But there’s never been that for just the Justice Department or prosecution.

Amy: And when you, when no one holds you accountable for any rules, like I have children-

Alex: Well, that’s the piece, I-

Amy: … if no one’s gonna punish you, you’ll do what you want

Alex: … I was gonna ask you, you know, Rick, i- if, if you never could punish your 12 children and if all 12 of them knew that whatever they did, it didn’t matter they, nothing could come harm them do you think they would grow up to be well-adjusted?

Rick: I think they’d grow up spoiled, yeah. You spare the rod, spoil the child, they become criminals.

Alex: 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. Right? You can’t right now sue the people who did these things for any sort of wrong, right? Prosecutors have absolute immunity. 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.”

Rick: That’s correct.

Alex: A- and even when they did this massive violation of your, uh, rights, Sixth Amendment right to counsel and listened 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.

Rick: Right. I couldn’t even get charges thrown out. You know, it’s, um, there’s no accountability, and until we have an organization, an inspector general’s office, a professional conduct, um who answers to the people, who answers to either a citizen’s action council wi- who works with the Congress. ’Cause Congress, you know, you, you get called before the Congress, and they, and one congressman has five minutes to, and they just play the clock game. So until you put together a, a, a true oversight accountability group, you could get citizens from around the country that could sit on a panel, and they could hear all the evidence, and then Congress listens to them.

Alex: Well, I think people might say, “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.

Amy: And something we haven’t talked about with the judiciary, and something that Clark Neily, 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 up-

Alex: They come out of the office, yeah

Amy: … in the DOJ. They believe in the, the presumption-

Alex: And I presume your, the-

Amy: … of regularity

Alex: … the judge certainly knew the prosecutors on your case

Rick: … knew the prosecutor, and again, his lead coun- his lead, uh, secretary was married to the FBI agent. On your point, one of the most powerful lobbyist groups in Washington, DC 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, o- o- or the misconduct in his case, and of course it was p- Brady violations when they failed to turn over-

Alex: Just again, for folks who are listening or watching this-

Rick: Thank you

Alex: … a Brady violation is there’s evidence which is exculpatory. It undermines the charges, and it’s hidden from the defendant.

Amy: Like for example, if a real estate developer said, “No, I was not strong-armed.” Like, but something like that.

Rick: In my case. Right. So in, in his t- case, the, um, it was withheld from his defense. And so, um, uh, 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 Ted Stevens-

Alex: After a senator was subjected to that.

Amy: And, and-

Rick: A senior senator

Alex: … yeah

Rick: … the lion of the Senate.

Amy: And, and just to pause for a moment, right? Like local police wear cameras. We expect that of our local police force.

Rick: Right. We do now, right?

Amy: Right, we do now. But FBI agents still don’t. And one of the things they do instead of recording interviews is they take notes.

Rick: They field, do field notes, and then they go back to their office and type ’em up.

Alex: And the field notes go away.

Amy: Yeah, like their-

Rick: And the field notes go where?

Amy: Th- their recollection of what happened.

Rick: Right. They type it up-

Amy: Right, like-

Rick: … and then they turn the, supposedly turn that in and…

Amy: In the year 2026 when we all have little devices in our pockets

Rick: … right. We were never even given the source file in my case, which would’ve shown us that the retired FBI agent who was hired-

Alex: Who had a major motive

Rick: … right, had a major, who was, had been hired by these Democratic or was working with these Democratic attorneys, uh, lobbyists, um, had tr- had b- had … develop this fake dossier. Uh, we were never even, even the source file was withheld from us.

Alex: That’s nuts.

Amy: 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.” 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.

Rick: Agree.

Amy: So it doesn’t feel like we have the ability to control or change or reform any of it.

Rick: 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-

Amy: Hmm

Rick: … accountability councils, CAC, Citizen Accountability Councils.

Alex: And some cities have tried that with local police.

Rick: They have.

Alex: You get some of that somewhere, yeah.

Rick: And so that same idea, and a lot of your best ideas are organic, they come from cities and states and then 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 15 people from, uh, different, you know, from the Midwest working on this Midwest misconduct case with these three FBI agents and a, and an assistant U.S. 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 metastasized cancer which is what the DOJ has become.

Alex: President Trump obviously is in charge now. Uh he has the ability to shape the Justice Department. People are criticizing some of the ways that he’s doing that by targeting people. Um, i- is there a problem with just the way that the DOJ wields power, no matter who’s in charge?

Rick: I think it is. I think the, the, the, the deep state, uh, the people who have the control that can outlast one president, who can just sit there and can, uh, say, “Okay. He’s, he’s only here an- another year and a half, two more years. We’re gonna go about our business.” After I was pardoned and I 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 f- 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 to tr- again, 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.

Alex: Well, 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? 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. You put anybody in that situation for any period of time, it doesn’t sound like you’re gonna get very good results.

Rick: The 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. These state bar associations, when you file a complaint against an assistant U.S. attorney, ’cause h- 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… Uh, that’s one person in my case along with Jack Smith.

Amy: And in one case.

Rick: In one case.

Amy: Like, in one case, and imagine how many cases there are.

Rick: In one case, and that bar association swept it away. That guy, that assistant U.S. attorney’s gonna be U.S. attorney someday. He’s with us. He’s, he meets our ideology, what we wanna see done politically. And politics have beco- come 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.

Alex: Now, one of the things, uh, that, again, you had power. You were on the House Select Intelligence Committee.

Rick: I was.

Alex: Um, h- how did that affect the trial? Because you were privy to information that was classified some of which may have helped you-

Rick: It would

Alex: … at trial. H- how did you have to juggle that?

Rick: They set up a, a, an org- a, a group of attorneys within the Justice Department to hear classified evidence that I had as to why Fort Huachuca was key to national security and why we needed to have this piece of land that had this huge amount of water, 3,000 gallons a day, that would save the fort.

Amy: So there was classified information that related to why this real estate deal that was at issue needed to get done.

Rick: And it showed, it proved-

Alex: Which suggested it wasn’t about you just trying to get some money.

Rick: 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 c- case can go forward.” So he wouldn’t allow me-

Alex: Which, let me tell you, if I’m gonna, if I’m your attorney at trial I want to be able to tell the jury that you are protecting the national interest and the national security interests 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-

Rick: Alex, this is-

Alex: … that truly protects you

Rick: … 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’d 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 at my trial. He destroyed that evidence.

Alex: Even though all of that presumably would have helped you explain to the jury why you cared.

Rick: Right. Why I cared, what was the motive, what was my motive? Was my motive to serve myself? Or was it to serve the country?

Alex: ’Cause ultimately in cases like this, the, the jury’s main determination is, is this person acting for some illegal self-interest?

Rick: Exactly. Exactly. And the-

Amy: 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.”

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Amy: But you’re not even allowed to tell the truth.

Rick: 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. And so if … W- wire fraud, as you know, is so vague.

Amy: Oh, my gosh.

Rick: If you just transfer money, you know, uh, uh, your own account, they can say, “Oh, it was, you know, it was his money.” So it’s absolutely … It wa- it was so destructive in not allowing me to bring these witnesses forward.

Alex: And, and how many counts did you go to trial on? Was it 40?

Rick: 49.

Alex: 49.

Rick: 49. I was facing thou- 100 and, 300 and 400 years in prison. Um, and then the t- the ca- the case starts, and they immediately drop all my tax charges, which were used-

Amy: Oof

Rick: … to stack against me in trying to get me to plead. And then I was found innocent on all, any kind of theft or any kind of, uh, insurance fraud, which was my core business. They tried to destroy my core business so I couldn’t finance my atter- my defense. They go after your money. They see where your money is and how you’re financing your lawyers-

Alex: And they seize

Rick: … and they’ll go after that.

Alex: Oh, I’ve got multiple cases right now where they’ve seized just w- on insanely ridiculous theories, they’ve seized money to try to shut down the ability for someone to defend themselves.

Rick: They indicted one of my attorneys who was immediately found innocent.

Alex: Yeah. That’s just insane.

Rick: It was-

Amy: Well, 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. So they threatened your family members with indictment.

Rick: Right. My father.

Amy: They did indict your attorney and your CPA.

Rick: Right, my CPA.

Amy: They stacked charges which means more prison time. Um, they went after your business.

Rick: Went after my business. Um, tried to … Uh, they, uh, debanked me. At Christmastime, they shut down, they called over to, um, to the bank, and they shut down our accounts. We couldn’t buy presents for our kids.

Amy: I mean …

Rick: They … Twice they did that to me. Um-

Amy: It’s like those very small dehumanizing things. And it was done at Christmas for a reason.

Rick: 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.

Amy: Was there ever a point during the trial where you thought, “This might not go my way”? Really?

Rick: I was, uh … We were in the fifth or sixth week of the trial, and the judge was not allowing our witnesses to come forward, and, um, 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 clenched 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, uh, courthouse, and the judge fled 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.

Alex: And how’d they respond?

Rick: Uh, no, it wasn’t … It was, they were just telling their truth.

Alex: Their truth.

Amy: Their truth.

Rick: Their truth.

Alex: Yeah. Um, you mentioned briefly going to prison. W- what is that like just emotionally?

Rick: It’s brutal. It’s the s- I was a father of 12 kids, and, uh, they’d come and see their father in, in, in the, in the prison uniform. You know, I’d been bitten, beaten. And, um, 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. Um, 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, uh, when they’re, when you’re sent to prison and you’re put next to the bathroom well, they call it waterfront property ’cause 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 thr So you don’t sleep. And the deep, um, 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. Um, so everyone talks about, oh, you know, it’s, it’s a luxury, it’s a country club camp. I was in a FC1. I was in a, where they had a hole, where they could put you in a hole. And, um, 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 TV room, and I didn’t know that, and I w- went into the TV 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 s- you can’t handle it, w- but you have to handle it. You have to survive it.

Alex: How many members of Congress do you think have any idea what conditions are like in federal prison?

Rick: No, I don’t think they even care. I think they look at, you know, uh, “Oh, this congressman’s indicted. Let’s get him out of the caucus. Let’s vote him out.”

Amy: Keep moving.

Rick: Keep m- get, get, get away from him, you know? Um, but some of the prison reforms that you’ve seen come to pass have, ha- are important. Some of the sentencing reforms I think you alluded to are so, so important. Um, but it is, uh… Nelson Mandela says, “You see, you know a society by looking at its prisons.”

Alex: That’s abs-

Amy: It’s so in-

Alex: How we treat the least of us, right?

Amy: Yeah. It’s so interesting, too, particularly in this country, where all of our Founding Fathers were accused criminals. And four of the 10 Bill of Rights deal with the rights of those accused of crimes. And yet our government tends to just sweep it under the rug.

Rick: Yeah, and due process is such a founding pillar-

Amy: Ugh. Huge

Rick: … of our, of our liberty.

Alex: 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?

Rick: If they’re headed to prison?

Alex: No, no. Just in the beginning-

Amy: The beginning

Alex: … of a criminal case.

Amy: Day one.

Alex: Day one, they find out they’re a target.

Rick: It is, it’s an end race of a, 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 counsel, be a part of it. If you can’t that day ’cause it’s too overwhelming mentally, then, then just stay in the moment and, um, 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.

Alex: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’ve seen people who, you know, become alcoholics or just or-

Rick: I never drank in my life

Alex: … have real suicidal issues or whatever.

Rick: Right. Never drank, never used drugs. I went to prayer and exercise and my babies. I’d hold onto my little girl in order to get through it.

Alex: What did you learn about yourself in that process?

Rick: I, at the end, now I look back on it, and I’m grateful for it. It was the worst days of my life, and it was the best days of my life ’cause 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 and the hyenas of Lawfare?

Alex: Well, it, it, it is the story, I think, whether it’s the hero’s journey, whether it’s, uh, the Odyssey that it’s now a movie whether it’s the, the story of Job in the Bible. I mean-

Rick: True

Alex: … the story of people living through trials and tribulations that they could not imagine and coming out the other side, uh, that’s kind of the human journey.

Rick: It’s beautiful. It really is. A bru… It’s a beauty, and it’s brutal, uh, 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.

Alex: And there’s not a lot of federal prosecutors who fit that bill.

Rick: No. They’re the most arrogant.

Amy: 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?

Rick: Yeah. Your arrogance has blinded you. Your bloodlust has, uh, 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, uh, bloodlines that they’ve, you know, built, and you’re a pawn now for them. And it’s too sha- 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, um, a purpose for a greater good, and in, in essence, he, he’s serving the dark side.

Alex: Yeah, I think so many people, I mean, you know, do, do the dark side Star Wars analogy. You know, I, I, I’ve written a book, and part of the book I talk about nobody thinks that they’re the bad guy.

Rick: True.

Alex: Right? There’s a whole, whole, I have a whole chapter. Nobody believes that they’re doing things for bad reasons.

Rick: True.

Alex: 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? 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-

Amy: You hadn’t?

Alex: No. That, that’s not a thing that prosecutors do.

Amy: But you could choose to, Alex.

Alex: 100%. 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? A, a cooperating witness, and, and it, I was just shocked at how just terrible the place was, just truly terrible. I mean, you know academically that it’s terrible, and I remember thinking, you know, people in my office, in every one of these U.S. Attorney’s 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. So the difference between 120, 180, 240 months is a sentence that they can put in a press release. “We got 15 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. 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 15 years in the prisons that we have would be an appropriate response.

Rick: True.

Alex: But that is just not a thought that our prosecutors even have to really confront in their day-to-day lives.

Rick: That’s true. The, the, the meat that they serve you, it says on the box, “Not fit for human consumption.”

Alex: Or it’s expired. I mean, maybe prisons are s- expired or spoiled. I mean, it’s just… Yeah.

Rick: Right. Bernie Kerik, who was the police chief up in New York under, uh, Giuliani, said before he died that going to prison is like dying with your eyes open. It is a death that-

Alex: That’s very cool

Rick: … you have to survive it. You gotta get through it. And thank God, God helped me. You know, I was let out after 17 months. I was only… I was supposed to serve three years, and the people in the prison were, uh… 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, uh, it was… God had sent them, and they were good for me, helped me get through it.

Alex: Well, I mean, even the darkest places, you can find sort of light.

Rick: The allies and angels, right?

Alex: Amen. You find light in the darkest of spots.

Amy: I wanted to ask one last thing.

Rick: Please.

Amy: Um, ’cause I know you wrote a book. Why did you wanna tell your story?

Rick: 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, we only had done for my family. What do you want that-

Amy: And it’s named after the Apache.

Rick: Apache Leap Lawfare.

Amy: I love that.

Alex: What do you want that, that grandchild to take away when they say, “My grandfather was blank”?

Rick: 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.

Alex: That’s a pretty good epitaph.

Amy: Well, I think that, I think that’s the truth.

Rick: Amen.

Alex: Thank you so much.

Rick: I enjoyed it.

Amy: Thank you.

Rick: Thanks for having me.

Amy: 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-

Alex: It doesn’t protect you

Amy: … is all the more stunning. It doesn’t protect you.

Alex: 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 a- and the way that it does affect entire families, uh, people well beyond the target. Um, and I, I think if people can see that just brutal impact across the board, uh, I hope it opens some eyes.

Amy: I hope so, too.