♪ >> tucker: a fox news alert, president trump has just finished speaking to the heritage foundation in washington where he has promoted a republican plan to reform america's tax code. good evening and welcome to "tucker carlson tonight." in just a minute we will talk about a meeting at the weinstein company in los angeles today. also, there is no information about the laws of vegas security guard who apparently vanished into thin air, one of the rare eyewitnesses inside the hotel, the latest on that. but first, here's part of what the president just said about his tax plan. >> our framework provides a one time, low tax on profits currently sitting on the shores so that this money can come back right where it started, come

back home to america where it belongs and believe me, we could use it in this country. we need it so badly for so many things, including infrastructure, which we will be doing. we will eliminate the penalty on bringing home -- and we have to do that, future earnings. my council of economic advisors estimates that this change, along with a lower business tax rate, would likely give the typical american household around a $4,000 pay raise, and that's money that will be spent in our economy. our tax plan will ensure that companies stay in america, grow in america, and higher in america. >> tucker: for reaction to the president's address and as text when we're doing tonight by fox chief political analyst brit hume. thanks for joining us.

it seems like taxes may be the last issue that most republicans in the congress can agree on. they are all for tax cuts, that's part of what it is to be a republican i think. is there anyway that this this doesn't pass? >> a very narrow majority in the senate, there are benefits in this tax code now that would have to be stricken to make room for the cuts, so you don't have a big blowout in terms of the budget and so they will be fiercely supported and defended by those affected. it won't be easy, not with a narrow majority of the kind that we have now among republicans. democrats by large do not favor tax cuts, particularly tax cuts they will inevitably say benefit the rich. it's not that easy sl for this reason. for one thing, every time you pass tax cuts and you are the president tonight say they're going to increase the number of people in the zero bracket, you

have fewer and fewer people actually playing texas. that is fewer and fewer people who stand to gain when taxes are cut because it is simply a mathematical truism that when you taught, cut taxes, the people who benefited the people who pay taxes. as the population shrinks, the constituency forced tax cuts rings with it. this is not such an easy deal. i would say, however, prevent momentum is provided by a certain republican desperation to get something done because they failed so spectacularly on obamacare repeal. this is the other big-ticket legislative item and i think there's a widespread feeling in the republican caucus in both houses that they need to get this done. >> tucker: so the debate among republicans i think outside of the congress is, does this make good on the president's promises to his core constituency, the american middle class, during the campaign? will this, from what you can tell so far, benefit that group, middle-class americans? >> there are two ways to look at tax cut benefits, tucker.

there's the indirect kind of benefit where you pay a certain amount taxes this year and because the new law comes along, your taxes will be reduced by x amount. that's one way you benefit. the principal purpose of a large tax cut of this kind, especially where you are also cutting the corporate rate, is not just to put money in the pockets of consumers to spend it. it is to encourage investment and growth in the economy, which benefits everybody. i think it's fair to say that the principal benefits, the major benefits, the most important benefit in economic terms of a big stack cut is to stimulate the economy. people benefit indirectly, that is to say, jobs are created, this competition for hiring. wages go up. and there is a possibility of a rising tide that does lift all boats. but when you are selling at tax cut, as you can tell by what the president was saying tonight, you often have to focus on the narrower question of how much

does this constituent or that constituent get in savings. >> tucker: do you think that ordinary republicans still believe that a rising tide lifts all boats? because certain boats -- ordinary republican voters who voted for trump, who was a departure in what he said on the campaign from the classic republican orthodoxy on economics. you've got the sense that there were a lot of crossover voters who what supported sanders and voted for trump. i wonder if the view among ordinary republicans is different from viewing washington on this. >> i think that by and large, broadly speaking, tax cuts tend to be popular, even democratic voters would like to have their taxes cut. everybody wants their taxes cut and you consider the growth of the federal income tax over the years, most people think they pay too much, although as i pointed out earlier, a lot of people are paying very little in federal income taxes.

they pay social security, state and local taxes and so on. everybody has taxes they would like to see cut. i think the constituency for it is still there. the constituency for the kind of tax cuts the president is selling, or you are reducing the rates, where you can point to people and say look at this guy, he's got -- he's going to get millions and benefits. that's because he pay so much. we live in a country, after all, or 10% of the population, the richer 10%, pay about 70% of the taxes. it figures that when taxes are cut, they will benefit the most, because they pay the most. that is not a particularly good selling point to an ordinary taxpayer. >> tucker: but that is math. brit hume, thank you. >> you bet. >> tucker: one of the most famous economist in the world, worked in a break in administration during the last great overhaul of the tax code. president trump just tweeted about him saying "art just said he doesn't know how a democrat could vote against the big tax cut reform bill and live with

themselves. art laffer joins us tonight. we'll be agrees with that. thanks a lot for coming on. >> thank you, talker. watch your show all the time, i love it. >> tucker: thank you. the central question i think of the last couple of years, certainly the one that drove the last election, what do you do about a middle class that is getting smaller and poorer because wages have risen in a lot of cases in 50 years, does this help, specifically does it help them? >> this helps a lot. what i think the president said is correct. the corporate tax rate reduction expands wages and it expands employment dramatically. most economists agree that the real key to getting economic growth is bringing that corporate rate down from 35% hopefully to 15%, but 20% is where they propose it now. that should be an enormous elixir to economic growth and create jobs. literally get people off the dole and put them on the jobs and raise wages and increase the number of people working.

it will be a great thing for the u.s. >> tucker: judging by the equities market corporations are making a lot of money. the problem is not corporate profit and you still have close to 100 million americans unemployed and the stagnant wages. why, if that hasn't worked previously, when it work now? >> the corporations that have lots of cash on hand and all that don't find it available -- of valuable to invest in the future. they invest overseas, but once you bring that rate down to below -- we are number one highest tax rate. corporate tax rate. that means all these other countries are a tax haven for american companies and that's why there is so much money abroad. this money will come back, they will create jobs here and hopefully if we get it low enough we can become for tax payment and their jobs will come here. it will be great, just the way it should be, just the way we did it in 1986, the president cut the highest rate from 46% to 34%. that really rocket at the end of

the economy. when we did that, at 90 voted for that bill, including all but three democrats. this is a bipartisan policy that should lead to enormous economic growth and prosperity for the middle class. >> tucker: did the bush tax cuts were? >> very slightly, but they did work a little bit. a couple of them did, but they phased them in over a long period of time and there were anything like i would like to have seen, but they did work a little bit and then the second term of bush completely overturned that and it was a terrible administration the second term and then of course you had obama, who destroyed a lot of the good economic prosperity. >> tucker: financial collapse as well. >> it was terrible, the whole thing. >> tucker: it sure was. if the recovery is not complete, far from it. >> we are really low. we are way below where we should be. if we had the same employment to population ratio today, we have

11.8 million more jobs. we had the same employment to population as when clinton left office. >> tucker: exactly. the president's plan to encourage companies to bring that money back on shore. if that were to remain part of this bill and it passes and becomes law, how much are we talking about coming back from united states? >> i don't know what the exact numbers would be but it would be a lot. let me just say if we had territoriality before, none of it would have left the u.s. what territoriality means is if you pay foreign taxes, you don't owe any additionally taxes, trump was clear on that in his speech that he has just put in proposed territoriality as opposed to liable for u.s. taxes as well. that doesn't make any sense at all. we can't compete with a german company and ireland if they pay 12.5% and we have to pay 35%. >> tucker: is the united states the only country that does that? >> where the only one in the oecd that does that.

in the oecd, of all the major countries, we were the only country that had global taxation. we have the highest tax rate and just for the record, just so you know, in the year 2000, the u.s. was seventh highest out of the countries in the oecd and i was the very highest. every country in the oecd cut their corporate tax rate dramatically in the last 17 years except the u.s. and of course hungry, which raised their tax rate from 18% to 19%. all of them lowered it to get a more competitive. we are just keeping up with the joneses. >> tucker: really quickly, when i was born this country was two-thirds middle-class, a middle-class country. two years ago at the middle-class became a minority in this country, that seems like the central problem. you sincerely think that this tax plan would help change that? >> yes. this tax plan will help change this. one of the things about the corporate taxes as it stands now in the u.s. is that a lot of

companies shelter their income, they choose different corporate tax -- if they do all of this other stuff that is not productive trying to get around taxes. when we lower that tax rate they won't shelter their income as much anymore. there will be far less tax evasion, they won't choose these forms, companies will come back and you will see tax revenues rise dramatically over the next ten years. i'm estimating that this will raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 trillion net, which will allow us to do all sorts of other things for the rest of the country, especially the middle class. >> tucker: i hope that's true. i'm rooting for that. i have to say. thank you. >> thank you. >> tucker: great to see you. is this the end of the weinstein company? new information on today's board meeting, apparently harvey weinstein was there. details next. ♪

>> tucker: looks like carma congressman anthony weiner will be headed to prison soon, but the saga continues. the fbi now says it has found huma abedin's files on his computer and will release all of them by the end of the year. the president of judicial watch, his lawsuit against the state department caused those documents to come to light and he joins us tonight to explain what they mean. thanks for joining us. >> to mike sorry to superimpose against a picture of anthony weiner's chest. what's the significance of these documents? >> they are new documents, we don't know what's in them yet. huma abedin had an email account on hillary clinton server. the emails from hillary clinton server. they were on anthony weiner's laptop. the fbi picked them up last year, the end of last year, highlighting the fact that they found this information.

it turns out they had nearly 3,000 of them, government records on the laptop. we will get access to them by the end of the year. >> tucker: they were government records? >> they were, they acknowledged that. based on the other abedin emails that we have which involved classified information, hillary clinton emails that we hadn't seen before that she didn't turn over and try to delete. i suspect there will be classified material among these new records. this is another example of top government officials like huma abedin and hillary clinton having classified materials and places they weren't allowed to, which are grab potomac violations of criminal law despite mr. comey's appendage to the contrary. >> tucker: moreover, we spent the last year talk about russian hacking, clearly it's not safe to keep government data on a private computer. the larger question was why are we learning about this now? >> it took them forever to get them to us. >> tucker: i thought we had a

freedom of information that requires the government -- >> the only reason we are getting this information is we are in court and we demanded access to the information because we wanted abedin's emails from the secret account. the fbi found these records last year, they took forever to turn them over to the state department, the state department got them last june. >> tucker: do they belong to the fbi were the american people? >> the fbi found them they found that they were state department records, they turned them over to the state department many months ago and now we are finally learning the analysis has been done because there are records we won't get because they may be actual personal records of miss abedin or weiner or whatever. >> tucker: it seems like i have the same story all the time, the government has a legal requirement to turnover nonclassified documents when citizens requested, when journalist requested. and they don't, again and again. how do they get around that? >> they ignore it and you just

have to push in the courts four. this comment to me, is an opportunity for president trump to kind of initiate a transparency revolution by getting this information out as quickly as possible. we know the fbi went and found the emails that mrs. clinton tried to delete and they found some of them or recovered them in the state department has them. we don't know when we will get those. at the current schedule, the state department wants to release all of mrs. clinton's emails to us, but they still haven't had a release at a rate that would make them -- at a rate that would allow us to finally get them all in the year 2020. >> tucker: so there are still thousands of documents being withheld from the kennedy assassination, or 50 years ago, the cia is now -- we are doing a story on this tomorrow, that they need to hold them for another 25 years? if people knew the amount of information that belongs to them, being held by bureaucrats and officials, they would freak out. great to see you. >> thank you. >> tucker: doing the lord's work. it's been 49 weeks and counting

since the 2016 election, the hunt is still on for proof of russian meddling. did putin get trump elected? we still don't know. we did recently speak to progressive analyst glenn greenwald, who was at the is replacing good reporting with inaccurate scandal mongering. watch this. >> just to get to the facts of this story, it is conclusively shown that the story about the 21 voting systems being hacked is untrue, correct? >> it's false in two ways, one is that several of the states included in the list, such as wisconsin, california, and texas, said that the websites that the homeland security department cited had nothing to do with voting systems, they are entirely unrelated. and it's false in a second way, which is a lot of the stories, most of them said that russia try to hack into the voting systems when in fact even homeland security, it can only show that what they did was scan those computer systems, which is basically casing something to say for vulnerabilities and made

no attempt to actually hack into them. it was false on various levels. >> tucker: you when i don't agree on a lot of issues but i think we share the same concern about the story, american journalists are being manipulated for whatever reason by the intelligence community in the united states, and i'm wondering why after years of having this happen to american journalists, they are allowing this to happen again. >> that's the thing i would refrain that a little bit. i don't actually think so much that journalists are the victims in the sense of that formulation of the. how much they are being manipulated. at best we can say is they are willingly and eagerly being manipulated. what you see is over and over they publish really inflammatory stories that turn out to be totally false and what happens in most cases? nothing. they get enormous benefits when they publish it recklessly. they get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of retweets, huge

amounts of traffic, they end up on tv. they get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this russia and from story and one their stories get completely debunked it just kind of -- everybody agrees to ignore it and everyone moves on and they pay no price. at the same time, they are feeling and pleasing their sources by publishing the sources that the sources want them to publish. there's huge amounts of career benefits and reputational benefits and very little cost when they publish stories that end up being debunked because the narrative they are serving as a popular one, at least within their peer circles. >> tucker: that is so dishonest. i think all of us and journalism have gotten things wrong, i've i certainly have. if you feel bad about it, you really do and there's a consequence. do you really think there's that level of dishonesty in the american press? >> i think what it is more than dishonesty is a really warped incentive scheme bolstered by this very severe groupthink that social media is fostering in

ways that we don't yet fully understand. most journalists these days are in congressional committees or at zoning board meetings or using -- they're sitting on twitter talking to one another and this produces this extreme groupthink where these orthodoxies arrive in deviating from them or questioning them or challenging, believe me, results in all kinds of recrimination and scorn. embracing them produces a sort of in group mentality where you are rewarded, and i think a lot of it is about that kind of behavior. >> tucker: that his ability. if you live in a foreign country, i'm not on social media, maybe we have a little bit of distance from this, where do you think the story is going? what's the next incarnation of the? >> the odd part about it, and about the inpatients that journalists have in trying to just jump to the finish line is that there are numerous investigations underway in the city, including by credible investigators, including senator burr and warner and the

senate intelligence committee, which most people seem to trust and certainly robert mueller, and everyone is really eager to lavish with praise. we are going to find out presumably one way or the other soon enough. one thing that is so odd to me is that this is been going on now for a year, this accusation that the trump administration of the trump campaign colluded with the russians to hack the dnc and john podesta's email and we know that there are huge number of people inside the government who are willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes in order to undermine trump and there have been no leaks so far showing any evidence of that kind of collusion leading one to wonder why that is. i hope that everybody is willing to wait until the actual investigation reveals finally the real answers. but it doesn't seem that will be the case. >> tucker: 's bravery is when you disagree in public with your peers. by that definition you are a very brave man. thanks for joining us tonight. appreciate it. >> thanks for having me.

>> tucker: the drug epidemic in this country killed more people in the last 12 months than the entire 11 years of the vietnam war. what is congress doing? is congress making it worse?

>> tucker: america, unfortunately, it is losing war against drugs and overdoses are the evidence of that. according to new cdc numbers, drug ods killed 62,000 americans just last year, that's more than died during the entire vietnam war. the biggest driver of those deaths is growing addiction to opioid painkillers and street alternatives such as heroin and fentanyl. it's one of the greatest crises in american history and get congress seems mostly oblivious to it, at best slow and indecisive. could big pharma's lobbying efforts be the reason why? met murphy was once chief of

pharmaceutical investigations for the dea, it is now president of a former compliance group. thank you for joining us. >> thanks for having me come up later to be with you tonight. >> tucker: those numbers, they are almost hard to believe, over 60,000 americans dead in one year of drug o.d. which of the congress be doing? >> they shouldn't be enacting laws that take the authority away from the drug enforcement administration, they should be enacting laws that provide resources to law enforcement to dismantle the target and dismantle organizations, criminal organizations that are distributing these prescription drugs throughout the country. >> tucker: when you were working for the dea and seeing this crisis unfold in real time, did it surprise you that policymakers see mostly unaware of it, or not panicked by it, not upset? >> it did. it surprised me quite a bit.

politicians didn't get law enforcement efforts until this problem was well down the road. it became what is now known as an epidemic. it didn't happen overnight, there were stories written every day, folks like yourself that are articulating the issues out there that are happening in the country as it pertains to the misuse and abuse of prescription drugs. it did surprise me. >> tucker: it would read the stories or you would hear stories about pill mills, particularly in the state of florida, kentucky, or people could just walk in and walk out with a script for an addictive opioid painkiller. i've never understood, why weren't those places shut down immediately, obviously the dea knew about them. >> many of them were shut down and people were prosecuted and went to jail that owned and operated those what you referred to as pill mills, which is

appropriate. this problem started before pill mills. they were a reaction to when we shut down internet pharmacies. there wasn't any law at the time that prevented a person from taking a credit card and going online and googling hydrocodone without a prescription and hundreds of websites with pop up and they can order vicodin or hydrocodone online, the brand name for that is vicodin. that would be shipped to their house and the person who ordered the drugs wouldn't have to leave the house. the legislation was passed and that mandated at least one face-to-face doctor-patient visit before a prescription for a controlled substance could be issued and that was a case of where the technology got ahead of the law and subsequently the logic catch up and when the internet pharmacies domestically put out of business the pain management clinics popped up because the pill mills had a doctor on site.

there would be lines out the door. >> tucker: would have never understood is the online pharmacies in the pill mills don't manufacture these drugs, they are manufactured by pharma companies. didn't they notice that there drugs were being sold illicitly? >> of course they did. it manufacturers as well as the distributors they know, every medication that they either manufacture or distribute, whose shelf it ends up on at the end of the day. of course they knew where their pills ended up and they know if that town or geographic region can support the amount of pills that are being distributed to those areas. that being said, i want your viewers to understand something else about this problem, very comprehensive and complex. there are practitioners and or pharmacists. they have a corresponding responsibility to ensure that every prescription they write for practitioners, and phil for pharmacists, are written for legitimate medical purpose. if they are not written for

legitimate medical purposes like there's a doctor in the neighborhood is writing the same prescription for everybody that comes in the door, they shouldn't be filling those prescriptions and the doctor should be writing those. >> tucker: they should be punished because it's a violation of decency among other things. in queue for all your efforts to hold people like that to account. disgusting. >> thank you. >> tucker: two big mysteries dominate the news today, as they have for the past week. it why did so-called feminist lawyer lisa bloom help harvey weinstein? what was she being paid for that? new reports that the vanishing las vegas guard may have used a stranger's social security number to work at mandalay bay. new details on both

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>> tucker: there's at least one great mystery at the heart of the harvey weinstein scandal, why did so many vocally liberals supposedly pro-women individuals assertively cover for his behavior? lisa blount's example a, she made a career as a champion of women who faced sexism and sexual assault. she is now of offering to bribe one of weinstein's accusers, someone who accused him of rape. how did that happen? tammy bruce is a radio show host and she joins us to unravel this. what is this about? >> this is something that we've been hearing about -- rose mccowan is clearly an actress and one of the heroes of the story. she is alleging that during this, just as before "the new york times" profile expose on mr. weinstein was going to be released, miss mccowan alleges that lisa bloom contacted her agent and said that there could be a lot of money for her if she would get on the harvey has changed bandwagon.

this is from an assertion from miss mccowan saying at first they offered a million dollars and then i got up to $6 million and she says i can't be bought. that's obviously a lot of money, it would change people's lives of course. she went on, publicly talked to miss bloom through twitter and i think her facebook saying we know who you are now, you've betrayed individuals, he tried to bribe me to do this. we supply them, keep in mind, has denied any of that occurred. what we also know is while she was representing harvey weinstein, she says that was a mistake. she said she had no idea how bad it was but at the same time, she was also on the defense team for roy price, the now-disgraced head of amazon studios, who has been indefinitely suspended for sexual harassment case. in that case of miss bloom, accused by ken masters, a well-respected journalist of threatening or effectively with lawsuits, which is what lawyers do, but also saying that she

would be exposed for doing this to mr. price because amazon wouldn't find a radio program that she had, which she says is completely false and is somewhat ironic since miss bloom at a business deal for a miniseries with harvey weinstein. you've got this interesting attempt in both cases to either silence women through money or to threaten them with it. >> tucker: and to profit from it herself in the process. if that's not the definition of corruption, i don't know what is. that's not her only mystery tonight. it las vegas. shrouded in mysteries, getting more confusing by the day. the mandalay bay security guard, all set to talk to the media, including sean hannity last thursday and then canceled and apparently disappeared. now mgm reports appears to be issuing statements on his behalf requesting privacy. meanwhile, cops still can't find a motive for the rampage. and we are learning that he may

have used someone else's federal i.d. what does this add up to, if anything? can you make heads or tails of this? >> his union when he first bailed on a series of interviews, it said we don't know where he is, he has just disappeared. then his union leader said without a text that says he went to an urgent center and now he's really does appear, we don't know where he is. this is what's troubling, there's already a lack of trust from the american people from big government. with that fake news and the conspiracy theories. here you've got a man who was effectively the only eyewitness in the moment on the floor, and he was shot. he was shot enough i, a security guard. and we now know for a period of time, we didn't know where he was but now mgm, his employer is saying we know where he is, he wants privacy. his union before said he wants to speak to people and let them know what he knows. at this point we have this major witness, we don't know where he is, the law enforcement is not

speaking about anything at this point in the american people are hearing so many different stories. this is what adds into and creates some fakeness. it can encourage conspiracy theorists. what we would hope for is the fbi should have more of a handle on this. >> tucker: yeah! >> whether or not he is an illegal alien. at this point, this transcends his status. we have a responsibility to let him know that. >> tucker: it does transcend that, i think that's right, but there's a report finally that he used someone else's social security number. do we know that? >> all of this, once again moves into gossip. we have no transparency, but this is also not a debated environment. we know exactly what happened. we know who did it in the moment. if you notice who also is out of the news, the girlfriend. when was the last time you heard about the status of the woman whose information he allegedly used ticket into the hotel and in some ways that he used it in

some fashion for some purchases, the american people -- it's important that we know because we are told by the government all the time that they know what's best that we have to follow their rules. >> tucker: i totally agree. i don't know what's going on but i have a pretty good nose for b.s., i know something is going on. thank you. >> thank you, tucker. >> tucker: up next we will close up the greatest revelation of the philosophical works of

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a hundred orders come in, a hundred orders come in, but then you realize i've got a hundred orders i have to ship out. shipstation streamlined that wh the order data, the weights of , everything is seamlessly put into shipstation, so when we print the shipping ll everything's pretty much done. it's so much easier so now, we're ready, bring on t. shipstation. the number one ch of online sellers. go to shipstation.com/tv and get two months free. >> tucker: the close, an important stream of consciousness thoughts from chris cuomo about taxis and shoes. it's s s s s s s s s s s s s s . it's because not partisan. it's not about being that or shoemaker. if you want to say something to me? everything else is just noise. taxes, morality. it's about helping the working class that make those the headline provisions. we haven't seen that with the

president's plan. >> tucker: he makes a powerful point. what does it mean? literally no idea. doesn't make it any less great, though. that's it for us tonight. tune in every night for the show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink. sean hannity is next. >> sean: thanks, tucker. welcome to "hannity." explosive new evidence. the biggest scandal or one of them in american history. something we've been saying would be exposed for months. according to new reports tonight from john solomon and sara carter, brand-new fbi documents that show the russian nuclear industry officials kicked back millions and millions of dollars to the clinton foundation all while hillary clinton was secretary of state and helped approve the uranium one deal which gave moscow, russia, vladimir putin control of 20% of american uranium