quickly heating up this week as republican candidates begin firing shots at one another over who is the right person to lead the party against president biden in the 2024 election. but is the gop primary already shaping up to be a two-person race before former president trump and florida governor ron desantis? or is there a dark horse candidate voters should pay closer attention to? we re going to discuss that coming up. speaker mccarthy and i have had several productive conversations. our staffs continue to meet, and they re making progress. it s crunch time. it s not easy. we re going to make sure we re not just trying to get an agreement. we re trying to get something that s worthy of the american people. i thought we made progress yesterday. i thought we d make progress again today. i want to be able to solve this problem. we begin with the debt ceiling negotiators trying to finalize a deal with six days to go before the u.s. government faces a potential default.
mccarthy giving them four days to read it. they ve got to get something done quick. yet everybody is leaving town right about now, except for us. we re here. i think it s a little naive about how willing some of these agencies were to try to intimidate reporters. this is quite brazen, what they re doing. i mean, they had to know that this was going to come out. that s journalist matt taibbi telling us about the irs launching an investigation into his tax filings last year. this began about three weeks after he first published the twitter files. that was the expose in which he alleged coordinated efforts across the federal government to censor content on social media. we bring in the president of americans for tax reform. he has a lot to say about this. grover, essentially matt alleges this was retaliation for his reporting. the biden administration says
like that. democrats are saying, nope, we re not going to go for that. let s listen to congressman graves. are you willing to drop that, work requirements and hell no, hell no. not a chance. hell no, not a chance, they re going to drop the work requirements. republicans go back to the 1990s, 1996, when bill clinton signed the welfare-to-work bill, and bill clinton said this is a step ahead in fixing welfare, that part of the entire social safety net system, that it rewards work, it brings respect to people. now democrats are saying, no, no, work requirements, we re not going to do that. it s interesting, because everybody is touting how they re inching closer to a deal, but that s far from the only sticking point. there s still pentagon funding on the table. there s still irs funding out on the table. these are significant issues to be all or nothing on, zero-sum.
filings, and they were looking into things that you just mentioned, the whole laundry list of his permits, you know, his gun registration. while i have you, i want to ask you about the debt ceiling, on everybody s mind right now. on the table is $80 billion on the table for irs. republicans are try to claw some of that back. they say the last thing this administration, this agency needs, is more money to pursue what they re calling a partisan agenda. what do you say? well, it s quite correct. there s been a series of problems, where they ve violated people s privacy, where they ve leaked contributions they ve made to charities to embarrass people, where they leaked thousands of tax returns, the bloomberg s tax returns were handed to a left wing group so they could do stuff with it. none of this has been fixed. none of this has been explained. they want $80 billion. there s no reform in this
quote, high-level case that sources say is related to hunter biden. david, what might be happening behind the closed doors today? he s been with the irs for 14 years, behind the closed doors, as you say, for several hours. he s meeting with staff members on the house ways and means committee, because we re talking about an irs investigation. no members are there, i m told, by a source, because this is the friday before memorial day, but their staffs are there. he wanted to meet with members of the senate from the senate side, but there s nobody from the senate side there today, however in this meeting with staff members he s talking to both republicans and democrats. they have even time, important to note. now we could know that he will only call it a high-profile investigation, but multiple sources say it s clearly the hunter biden tax probe underway since 2018. he started on the team, john, in 2020. he says when he spoke up about