Summary:
In this episode I address the curious circumstances behind the rushed arrest of George Papadopoulos. What is the Mueller probe hiding? I also address the response by Ben Shapiro to yesterday’s show. Finally, I address the key takeaways from yesterday’s ruling in the gay marriage wedding cake case and some critical new economic figures.
News Picks:
Why was the arrest of George Papadopoulos rushed? What were they hiding?
More revelations from George Papadopoulos’ wife.
Ben Shapiro’s response to my show yesterday.
This piece provides a strong synopsis of the gay marriage wedding cake case.
Some good news and bad news about the recent job numbers.
Two Hillary Clinton tweets from before the election that indicate she was already prepared for the “Trump/Russia” story.
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Get ready to hear the truth about America with your host, Dan Bongino.
Alright, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Oh, we got a monster here, Dan!
Just a monster!
The show is gonna be stacked today.
I have to get right to it.
I don't want to screw around at all because I have so much to cover today, including Ben Shapiro's response to the show yesterday, very gentlemanly done.
Some people had problems with the tone of the show, said I apologized too much.
I am sorry.
I'm sorry.
I like Ben.
It's just the way it is.
I feel like we can have a civil discussion about this, and he's handled it nicely.
He wrote a nice piece.
We'll address that today.
Major league discovery last night, Joe.
I know I say that a lot, folks.
I mean, I'm in the business of content production.
I get excited about things.
Maybe it's the Queens New Yorker in me.
But I saw something last night in a piece.
Jeff Carlson at The Market's Work has been just crushing it.
I think his conclusion's a little off, and it's not personal towards Jeff.
Again, it's a minor disagreement on things.
But I saw something last night about Papadopoulos that sparked something I'd heard a while ago.
And I put two pieces together.
It's going to be great.
So don't go anywhere.
All right, let's get right to it.
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Okay, so let me just get first to this Papadopoulos stuff because this is crazy.
So I have a piece by this, I think it's Jeff Carlson, I'm sorry if I got his name wrong, but he's a really, he does some really great work.
I will link to it in the show notes from The Market's Work.
And I saw something I had been clued into a while ago by Let's say someone else.
Let me explain to you first how the federal system differs in contrast to the state system when it comes to arrests and prosecution because this is going to be important.
And why we're addressing it is because I had to put the question at the top.
Folks, the question you should all be asking yourself right now is why the rush to shut George Papadopoulos up?
Now George Papadopoulos is the Trump campaign staffer who has been the central focus of this entire investigation.
George Papadopoulos is the guy who meets with Alexander Downer.
In this bar in London, and this is alleged to be the cause of the entire FBI investigation because Papadopoulos is supposed to have talked to him about some information the Russians had on Hillary.
So the FBI, oh wow, a Trump person has information on the Russians and Hillary.
We got to investigate that.
Well, that whole entire story is falling apart.
I'll get to that in relationship to Ben Shapiro's response in a little while.
But this is important.
Why the rush to shut him up?
In other words, if Papadopoulos is the key to this whole thing, and he is some Russian colluder colluding with Russians to obtain negative information on Hillary for use in an election to immorally and illicitly overturn election results, or whatever it may be, or to influence people, or to steal information for the Russians and get it out there on behalf of the Trump team, You know, why the rush to shut him up so quickly?
Now, I'm going to answer that question for you.
First, keep that in the back of your head.
And when I say the rush to shut him up, he's arrested on a return trip home for a trip from Germany.
This is what I was reminded of, but then there's something else that cued me in.
He comes back from Germany, gets off a plane, he's arrested.
He makes his initial appearance the next day.
He's processed late, late at night.
Why the rush?
Now, you may say, well, what's the difference?
You know, why get them in?
It's the way they got them which elicits a lot of suspicion on my part.
Now, in the federal system, when you're a local police officer, Joe, the system typically, not all the time, but the system typically works in reverse when you're a local police officer like I was with the MIPD.
What do I mean?
If I see Joe Armacost in the middle of the street, you know, punching somebody in the face, I arrest Joe.
The charging documents for Joe typically come later.
Well, why?
Because I can't write up a document about you assaulting someone.
I didn't see it until I was driving by you in my patrol car and saw it.
I see you punch a guy in the face, Joe.
I then write up the complaint report and the charging document later says, I, Officer Dan Bongino, witnessed Joe Armacost in an act of felonious mopery punching some guy, you know, Joey Begadonuts in the face.
So witness the crime, make a probable cause arrest, There's no warrant, right Joe?
We can agree.
I arrested you because I watched you punch him in the back.
I made a probable cause arrest.
There is no... Folks, please keep this in mind.
This is important.
This is a major league thing I uncovered reading this guy's piece and I thought, gosh, that guy just... Yes, now it makes sense what I was thinking.
That's called a probable cause arrest.
No warrant.
Perfectly legal, by the way.
A police officer can arrest you based on probable cause.
How do I have probable cause?
Joe punched the guy in the face.
I witnessed it!
I saw it!
The federal system works a little differently.
Not all the time, but I'm talking about as a general rule.
When I was a federal agent, the way it works is typically the opposite.
I will get a tip about Joe.
Hey, Joe Armacost, you know, is printing counterfeit in his house, okay?
How do you know that?
Well, I'm his neighbor.
I saw him come in the house with a bunch of printing ink.
I noticed a bunch of suspicious purchases.
One day, I looked inside and he slammed the door and I noticed he was looking at some money and it looked fake.
You see what I'm saying?
You get a tip.
The federal system, PC arrests are rare.
They happen, but they're very rare.
In other words, for me to just show up at the house, Joe's house, that day, based on a tip, and arrest him on a PC arrest, if I can gather the probable cause without a warrant, Joe, is very rare.
The United States Attorney's Office, which is ultimately going to prosecute these cases, folks, please bear with me, because this is super important to this case.
The United States Attorney's Office hates probable cause arrests.
If you show up to the U.S.
Marshals In the detention facility and the courthouse with a perpetrator in tow.
And you have no warrant.
And it was a PC arrest.
It's perfectly legal if the probable cause was there.
Say you do some other homework and you find out Joe may have, in fact, been printing counterfeit.
I'm telling you right now as a matter of procedure, the AUSA and the Marshals are going to be pissed.
And every federal agent listening, you know what I'm telling you is true.
I did this for 12 years.
I've arrested tons of people.
I'm not trying to impress you.
I'm just, again, establishing bona fides here, okay?
You generally don't do it.
The local system's different.
Arrest people, bring them in, you file the paperwork later.
The federal system, file the paperwork, get the warrant, then go arrest them.
Okay?
That's important.
Why do I bring that up?
As Jeff Carlson's piece points out, and I please encourage you to read it, The Market's Work.
It'll be in the show notes today at Bongino.com.
Please read it.
It's really, really good.
I think his conclusion's a little off, though.
George Papadopoulos was a PC arrest at the airport.
He was?
Wow!
That's interesting.
Now again, if you're not a federal agent, that probably means nothing to you.
But if you were, I know for a fact the federal agents listening to this are going, wow, that's a big piece of information.
Why?
Folks, if George Papadopoulos holds the keys to the kingdom, and George Papadopoulos, as the FBI, according to a number of leaks in the New York Times, believed that Papadopoulos' information about the emails, and I'll get to that in a minute, that he exchanged to Downer in the London bar, if they believed this guy had the keys to the kingdom and they had all this information that he was going to be the key to unfolding this massive scheme to collude with the Russians, Then why the rush to arrest him?
No warrant, nothing?
You don't have anything prepared, Joe?
You have no warrant prepared?
You have no charging document?
You have no complaint?
You have nothing?
Now, there are a few different ways to do this.
You can get an arrest warrant via complaint, or you can go to a grand jury.
Getting a complaint, a federal complaint, now, folks, you may be saying, well, I don't understand, what's the big deal here?
Getting an arrest warrant via a federal complaint, issuing a complaint, and bringing it to the AUSA's office to get a warrant, swear to it in front of a judge, folks, it takes nothing.
Nothing.
It's a simple procedure.
It's not hard, especially in a case, Joe, you would think involved international collusion to overthrow an election.
Joe, you write out what you have.
Folks, it's this simple.
Joe is a federal agent.
He goes to his desk.
He pulls up a template.
He deletes the information in the template.
I mean, just the word template I'm talking about, not like, you know, some sensitive file.
You know, they usually have a template and it's like, you know, it's fake.
It's like, you know, Joey bag of donuts and it's just meant to keep the form structured.
You delete the paragraphs.
You fill it in with your information.
George Papadopoulos did A. George Papadopoulos did B on this date.
George Papadopoulos did C. You go to the AUSA, the Assistant United States Attorney.
He or she reads it over.
Hey, Agent Joe, nice work here.
Hold on, let's get in front of the magistrate.
When I was in Eastern District of New York, you walk downstairs, or upstairs, I forget, it was a big building, you go in front of the judge, the judge reads it, swears you in, you swear this is true, it's true, stamp, here's your warrant.
The whole process, if it's not too busy, two hours tops.
Why didn't that happen with Papa Dizzle?
Why?
Well, as Carlson magnificently points out in his The Market's Work piece, something, again, I always give shout-outs when deserved.
I miss this.
That was the same day, Joe, the day Papa Dizzle's arrested at the airport with no warrant, by the way.
Very unusual, especially in a big case like this.
Is the same day the Inspector General Horowitz, who's investigating all the malfeasance in the Clinton email, he's like the internal affairs guy, is the same day he notifies the Mueller investigation about the existence of... Pregnant Paws!
The Stroke Page Texts.
This reminds me of that movie Girls' Night, where the lady from From Grey's Anatomy with the red hair, the doctor, I forget her name.
She keeps doing these pregnant pauses and annoys the hell out of her client.
She's like, and they're gonna offer?
And the lady's like, just tell us, you idiot!
Folks, you don't find that odd?
The same day the Inspector General notifies Mueller about the existence of this body of text messages that are absolutely damning between the two primary people on the legal and investigative side and the FBI investigating both Hillary and Trump and his team.
He finds out about these text messages.
He notifies Mueller.
Well, he knew about it, but he notifies Mueller.
And on the same day, the Mueller team, in a sprint to the airport, goes, picks up Papa Dizzle at the airport, and shuts him right down.
Right there.
No warrant.
Zippo.
No coincidences.
Joe, listen.
Yes, there are in life, not in this case.
I'm done with it.
I'm done accepting.
We have given you now from episode 628 on, what, five or six hundred coincidences?
Listen, it's beyond a reasonable doubt at this point that there was something, just that the evidence of felonious mopery here is deep.
What do I think happened?
Because this still might not make sense to you and I don't want to Leave it up in the air.
Oh, by the way, this is fascinating.
Who signs off on the complaint?
Who is the special counsel team member that signs off on the complaint?
This is a joke.
Jeannie Rhee, who was once the legal counsel, the lawyer for the Clinton Foundation.
Folks, listen, again, I know I had some kind of back and forth with Ben.
This is not Conjecture.
These are facts.
Now the evidence, those are facts.
The evidence that's factual.
What you conclude from it, I get still at this point, may not be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but there's no denying anymore that this is evidence.
This is evidence that there's something going on here.
I'm telling you as an agent that that is not how these things work.
PC arrests in a case of this magnitude are almost unheard of.
Why?
Joe, why would you... What happened that day that made them violate... I'm telling you for a fact, okay?
I've done it.
I've been there.
This is experience in the real world.
You do not make PC arrests as a matter of policy and procedure if you don't have to.
You just don't do it.
The United States Attorney's Office hates it.
You know why they hate it?
Because if you show up, Joe, and you didn't have probable cause, you're going to be laughed out of court and there's going to be a whole lot of explaining to do.
They want the complaint and the charging documented in advance to make sure Joe is not an idiot.
Like, this agent brought in this case and the probable cause is nothing.
Now we got to dismiss this thing.
We're going to have all kinds of legal complications.
They hate it.
The U.S.
Marshals hate it.
Why?
Because the U.S.
Marshals are responsible for the detention of that person when you arrest them if he's remanded to the custody of the court.
They want to plan out the workday like everyone else.
You don't just show up unplanned.
Folks, listen, whether you like this or not, this is the way it works.
I was there.
You call up the marshals.
You go, hey, Marshal Joey Bag of Donuts.
Here's how this is going to go down.
Dan Bongino with the Secret Service.
I've got two bodies coming in today.
We're going to make the arrest at 11.
We're going to be in at noon.
All right, we're ready for you.
That's the way it works in the real world.
You may say, well, what happens if stuff happens, you know, late at night?
It does, but it's rare.
Why is it rare?
Because we're not police officers.
We're not patrolling the streets.
Police officers see things at 2 o'clock in the morning.
Why?
Because they're out on the street on patrol.
Federal agents don't do that.
They're home sleeping.
No, we are.
We work 9 to 5.
Unless there's some protection op or surveillance or something else going on.
Joey, you see the difference?
Big time, man.
Yeah.
We are not patrol officers.
We are investigators.
It's different.
Patrol officers show up with PC arrests because they witnessed a robbery in the middle of the night.
FBI agents don't do that.
They're not patrolling the New York field office in the middle of the night looking for robberies.
They plan this stuff out in advance, they get tips, they do big elaborate investigations, they bring a charging document, they get an arrest warrant, they call the marshals, they call the AUSA, especially on significant cases to make sure the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed.
I have never in my life heard of a case like this where a PC arrest in the middle of the night in an airport occurs with a guy who's supposedly the key player in a major international collusion operation between the Trump team and the Russians.
It makes no sense.
Even worse, Joe.
Papa Dizzle had no attorney at the hearing on July 27.
What?
Yeah, what?
Folks, another thing.
Not completely unheard of?
But, again, in my experience, incredibly, incredibly rare.
He had no attorney?
No kidding.
He had no attorney present, Joe, at the hearing.
I've never heard of such a thing in such a big and prominent case.
Why the rush?
Why not just wait to get a warrant?
I promise I'm gonna answer, but it's important you understand how odd this is.
Why not wait for his attorney to show up?
What's the rush?
All right, I'm gonna get to some more of this in a second, all right?
Because this is just mind-blowing stuff here.
Folks, let me answer your questions because I'm gonna debunk a lot of this in a minute, too.
That Papadopoulos here was the key to this whole thing.
There's something going on here.
The rush to the airport, I'm starting to believe more and more every day.
Was a rush to shut Papadopoulos up because when they saw these texts between Stroke and Page, remember now, he's notified the same day, Mueller hears about these texts, all of a sudden, oh, let's go get Papadopoulos at the airport.
Do we have a warrant?
Not yet, doesn't matter.
Does he have a lawyer?
Not yet, don't worry about it, go get him.
A lot of these texts, which are starting to come out now, and a hat tip to a number of people on the internet, I'm sorry guys, I've received it from so many different people on email, I'd be sitting here all day doing hat tips, but again, Culling through the files there and the texts, there are some fascinating, fascinating texts out there about OCONUS lures in December of 2015 between Page and Stroke, two of the lead people on this Clinton email investigation and the Trump investigation.
Remember, the case isn't opened officially, Joe, until July of 2016.
Oconus lores.
What are those?
What's Oconus?
Oconus is outside the continental United States.
Right.
Meaning foreign countries.
Lores?
Lores like bait?
Who are they talking about?
Agents.
Quite possibly so, Joe.
You're darn right.
I don't plan this with Joe in advance.
Now, Oconus lores.
Don't you find it odd that in that thing they're talking about, you know, there's Oconus Laws mentioned, these are in the text, all of a sudden there's a rush to shut Papadopoulos up?
Who did Papadopoulos, when he comes into the meeting with the FBI that day, they grab him at the airport, who does he mention?
He mentions Mifsud.
Joseph Mifsud.
This Maltese professor.
He mentions it!
Papadopoulos!
He mentions Mifsud.
Mifsud is the professor who's alleged to have told Papadopoulos about Hillary's emails.
Okonis lures, like a spy overseas, trying to lure people into something.
All of a sudden, they go pinch Papadopoulos in the airport in a rush.
In the airport, Papadopoulos, or when they arrest him and they're interviewing him, excuse me, you have to pinch him at the airport on a PC arrest, which again, I've never heard of in a situation like this.
Papadopoulos mentions Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who told him something about Hillary's emails.
And next thing you know, there's this rush to get him in the court system and shut him down.
Keep in mind, he's told to shut his mouth as a condition of his release.
He doesn't even have a lawyer at the arraignment it happened so fast at the initial appearance in front of the
judge.
Now, as it's starting to make sense when I keep telling you about how we've been focusing on the poll the whole time,
we've been focusing on the use of informants and spies.
guys.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
According to the New York Times, who's already outed, de facto outed Halper, Stefan Halper, in Chuck Ross's reporting, which has been fascinating about Stefan Halper, the use of this guy Halper as an asset for the government, a spy in normal speak, to pull information from the Trump team.
He's emailing the Trump team, hey, what do you guys know about Hillary?
You getting this, Joe?
Joe, what do you know about Hillary's emails?
What do you know about Hillary's emails?
They don't know this guy.
This guy Halper we now know is working for the government in an effort to pull information about Hillary's emails out of the Trump team.
I've repeatedly said to you we have to stop for a moment focusing on the poll and start asking about the push.
The poll part is bad enough.
The fact that a government informant, spy, human asset Was trying to interact with the Trump team on behalf of an opposition political party in power to pull information out of it is disturbing enough?
I've told you that what's more disturbing would be the narrative that would come out if it was learned that the information they were trying to pull out wasn't even their own.
That it was pushed in by another federal government asset or foreign asset on behalf of our government in an effort to pull it out in what we would call an entrapment operation.
Simple story.
I have nothing on Joe Armacost.
I want to get Joe Armacost for conspiracy to commit bank robbery.
Joe's never robbed a bank and has never thought about robbing a bank.
I pay an asset.
To go knock on Joe's door, to befriend him.
Hey, buddy, I want to clean out your gutters.
I'll give you... Joe all of a sudden takes this guy in, whatever.
You see, you know, he's using him around the house.
Three, four days in, guy starts talking about a bank robbery.
Joe laughs him off.
Four or five days later, he mentions it again.
Joe thinks he's kidding around.
A couple days later, Joe's in a coffee shop.
Some guy befriends him again.
Different guys.
Hey, Joe.
What do you know about robbing banks?
Ah, nothing, but I heard a guy once, a guy cleaning my gutters, talking about robbing a bank.
Next thing you know, Joe's in handcuffs for conspiracy to rob a bank.
He's like, what did I do?
It's not the guy who pulled the information out of Joe.
It's the guy who pushed it in.
If we find out later that the guy who cleaned Joe's gutters was really a local police officer or FBI agent trying to entrap Joe.
In other words, Joe had no intention whatsoever of robbing a bank.
The idea to do so when the information was planted.
Do you understand how this is it?
This is the real?
This is the story.
This is why I can't emphasize enough in cable news appearances that, not that we have to completely stop focusing on the pull, that's part of it, but an entrapment operation is a push and a pull.
It is a push of information into an organization or a person that wouldn't have been there.
They weren't going to rob a bank.
They weren't going to kidnap anyone.
They weren't going to do anything.
It was pushed in.
They entrapped them for the purposes of pulling it out later to entrap them in a conspiracy that never would have existed in the first place.
Papa D gets off the plane from Germany in a hasty, I've never heard anything like it, arrest.
Nope.
By the way, by a prosecutor who worked for the Clinton Foundation.
It's a fact.
Jeannie Rhee.
They arrest him at the airport, a PC arrest.
The prosecutor stamps this thing, signs this thing.
They show up at court.
The guy doesn't even have a lawyer.
They interview him.
He makes the mistake, Joe, of mentioning Mifsud.
You think it's possible that the federal agents interviewing Papadopoulos already know who Mifsud is?
Now, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said something fascinating on the Laura Ingraham radio show yesterday.
Forgive me for not having the cut.
It's been a busy morning, and folks have been dealing with a lot of stuff, but this show is important to me, and I was up all morning doing this.
I just didn't have the time, but in a nutshell, and I know I have a lot to get through, so gosh, we're already half an hour in.
Mukasey said something fascinating on Laura Ingraham's radio show yesterday.
He's like, why isn't anybody asking why Stefan Halper, a Central Intelligence Agency asset, he was a CIA asset.
How'd he become an FBI asset?
Joe, such a simple question.
Again, forgive me.
I had missed.
He is an asset for the CIA.
How did he become an FBI asset all of a sudden?
In a law enforcement investigation.
How did that happen?
You think John Brennan may have known something about that?
You think the director of the CIA may have known how a CIA foreign intelligence asset became a spy to target an American in a law enforcement operation?
You say, oh, it was a CI investigation.
Really?
Because George Papadopoulos was arrested on federal law via... George Papadopoulos wasn't arrested for being a terrorist.
George Papadopoulos was arrested on a standard 1001 lying to federal agents crime.
The federal equivalent of jaywalking.
How did that intersection happen?
Folks, let me suggest to you that paragraph one of this report May describe an entrapment operation, an operation to push information into the Trump team via various sources, and when Papadopoulos returns and mentions one of those names, the efforts to shut him up, given that the IG notifies Mueller of the presence of these stroke page texts which describe good portions of this operation,
The efforts to shut him up become grave.
Where is he?
He's coming back from Germany tonight.
Do we have a warrant?
Just go get him.
We'll draw up the complaint afterwards.
Folks, again, hat tip to Jeff over at The Markets Work.
Read the piece.
He has a different conclusion.
I mean, I shouldn't say conclusion.
He's not positive, but he has really good questions.
I don't mean to, I'm not in any way trying to disparage the man's work.
I believe, and it's tough for me to... Jeff, by the way, I know you tweeted me.
It's tough for me to see his tweets because I hate to say it, it sounds jerky, but I have too many followers now, so if you're not very... It doesn't show up in my timeline often, but I'm going to look for it today.
If you want to email me, my email's on the website, Jeff.
I'd love to hear your response to this because he does great work.
His conclusion's a little different, Joe.
I believe he thinks Papadopoulos may have been...
Working for the Bureau himself.
And that hasty arrest may have been an effort to shut him up.
I gotta tell you, I don't believe that.
And I'm gonna get to why in a second.
This is super important.
Again, hat tip to Chuck Ross who did some great work on this.
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Okay, so just let me wrap this up because I want to move on to a couple things I want to address, Ben, some things by Shapiro, his response.
Here's why I don't think Papadopoulos, so I think, and Jeff forgive me again if I'm speaking at a turn, please send me an email and I'll address it on tomorrow's show, but I think he believes Papadopoulos may have been working with the government.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe it because His wife now, Papadopoulos' wife, Simona Mangiante, excuse me if I'm saying the name wrong, is now speaking out.
Tucker Carlson had an incredible interview with her last night on his show, and she also gave an interview to Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller, which I will link to in the show notes today, again, at Bongino.com.
Mangiante said something, just a couple bombshells in there.
Number one, that it was Papadopoulos in the interview with the FBI who introduces Mifsud's name.
In other words, Joe, think about it.
If you're Joe Armacost and you're working with a Russian agent, which is what the Democrats are alleging Mifsud was, that Mifsud, the guy who told Papadopoulos allegedly about Hillary's emails and the Russians having them, if this guy was authentically a Russian agent and you're working with this Russian agent to collude on behalf of Donald Trump to win an election, right, the whole bedrock of their case, why would you introduce the guy's name in an FBI interview?
I don't think I would.
Of course you wouldn't!
You'd hide it!
That would be the one piece of information you wouldn't bring up.
It was Papadopoulos who volunteered the name.
Does that sound logical to you folks?
Secondly, Papadopoulos' wife, please read the piece by Ross, it's good, says he was threatened with additional charges of being, this is incredible, an Israeli spy if he didn't fess up.
Do you believe this?
If this is true, do you believe this?
That the guy was threatened with being an Israeli spy if he didn't fess up to false statements charges and start talking?
Ladies and gentlemen, this case by the day gets worse.
So now you have a guy There's a distinct possibility that some intelligence entity pushed Mifsud into contacting Papadopoulos, who could be innocent in this thing.
Papadopoulos repeats the charge to a guy named Downer later, slips it through a back channel.
Papadopoulos finds himself potentially in prison for six months.
After fully acknowledging the guy's name in the interview according to his wife?
And in order to get him to talk, by the way, they're threatening him with being an Israeli spy?
Folks, come on.
Come on, man.
You understand what's happening here?
They had to shut this guy up.
Why?
They want to shut up Papadi, because Papadi is the key to Mifsud.
Boom!
You're darn right!
And if Mifsud is not a Russian agent, and is an agent of someone else, by the way, people who know Mifsud, as I described last week, I didn't discover it, described it.
People who know Mifsud, his friends, say he's an ally of Western intelligence agencies.
Now does it make sense why they need to shut this guy up?
The push may have come from friendlies, not from the Russians!
That's the problem!
It's the push!
The push matters!
If the Russians did not push the information into Papadopoulos' head, and friendlies did, you have the biggest case of entrapment in American history!
Let's rush to the airport.
Get the Smith & Wesson bracelets out.
Handcuffs.
Oh, man!
Folks, listen, I don't... Really, I'm done with the coincidences at this point.
I'm done with it.
Okay.
Let me do this one last week, because then I want to motor through the rest of the show, because I really do have a lot to talk about.
I still want to get to Shabir.
Joey, we may go a little long today.
You okay with that?
Yeah, I'm cool.
It's an important show today.
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All right.
I'm going to get to Shapiro in a second.
Just some quick points on the Masterpiece Cake Shop case yesterday, which was the Baker case.
The cake in a gay wedding.
It was described by liberals as a narrow ruling, which is odd because it was a 7-2 ruling in the Supreme Court.
I don't know exactly how that's narrow.
I get it, they were talking about the scope, but David French has a really good piece in National Review That I encourage you to read that will be in the show notes, which describes how, yes, it wasn't exactly that wide in scope, the ruling, Joe, that we're all going to be protected against religious discrimination against us, but it wasn't as limited as people are describing it either.
A couple of points on this.
There were two components to the case.
There was a case in Colorado.
A gay couple walked in.
They wanted a custom-created cake for their gay wedding.
The baker said, listen, I'll sell you any cake you want, but I'm not going to create a unique expression of my artistic abilities in a cake.
You can buy anything else, but I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that because I consider a participation In it and against my religious beliefs.
So he made two claims to Baker.
That one, it was protected expression and this was compulsion.
In other words, someone was compelling him to create something against his religious beliefs.
That was claim number one.
Claim number two, that the Colorado Civil Rights Division violated his free exercise of religion.
On claim number one about protected expression, the court kind of punted a little bit.
If you read French's piece, he goes into it a little more detail.
But the court had basically said that there is a continuum of expressive content, Joe.
In other words, if the gay couple just walked in and said, hey, we want a red cake done creatively, there may have been an issue with the guy saying no.
But if you were to walk in and say, hey, we want a rainbow cake and on the top, you know, an expression about how the benefits of gay marriage or whatever it may be, that that's a different degree of expressive content.
Make sense, Joe?
But the court kind of punted on that.
They just basically said that as the degree of expressive content goes up, the degree of constitutional protection kicks in.
So it pretty much makes sense.
But it wasn't conclusive on that.
Secondly, on the free exercise of religion, the court jumped on this and was all over it.
The court condemned the anti-religious comments of the Colorado Civil Rights Division.
They were disgusting.
People on the Colorado Civil Rights Division attacked this Baker Phillips.
They had called his religious expression despicable.
They had made comments about the use of religion to discriminate against people.
Some of the comments were really unbelievable.
The court, Anthony Kennedy included, absolutely filleted them on that note.
There was one line in there, and this is where the liberals stop.
They say, oh, well, okay, it was narrow, and a lot of liberals are interpreting this as meaning, Joe, well, if the Civil Rights Division, Colorado Civil Rights Division, which went after this baker for not baking his cake, just would have done it and not said, hey, basically your religion stinks, everything would have been okay.
French points out in a well-done piece, no, no, that's not exactly what happened, Libs.
There was more to this.
They pointed out The Supreme Court.
That, interestingly enough, the Colorado Civil Rights Division, when people who were religious walked in and wanted a cake that, whatever, said something like, hey, we respect the man and woman, male-female marriage only, that's not accepted.
But you get the point.
That was pro-traditional biblical marriage.
That when bakers didn't want to bake that cake, the Colorado Civil Rights Division did nothing against the baker.
You get my point, Joe?
So, in other words, you want a pro-Christian cake, Christian marriage?
No, no, no.
I'm not gonna bake it.
Colorado Civil Rights Division does nothing!
But when a gay couple walked in and said we want a pro-gay marriage cake basically in your expressive content and you say no then they said no it's quote offensive.
Now French again eloquently points out that the government doesn't get to decide what is offensive.
Clarence Thomas piled on and absolutely correctly said hey listen Clarence Thomas obviously who's black says you know what I find interesting here?
That when the Ku Klux Klan and a bunch of clown white supremacist losers, we'll leave it at that, wanted to burn a cross, the court said, hey, you can burn a cross.
You can.
You don't have the right to stop them from doing stupid stuff.
So now all of a sudden, we're not worried about offensive there, but then the government gets to determine what's offensive when it comes to the definition of gay marriage?
I don't get it.
So you can offend black people, but you can't offend gay couples?
Joe, do you see where they're going with this?
The government doesn't get to determine what's offensive.
You do.
You want to, sadly, sadly, you want to become an a-hole, I'm sorry, white supremacist and do dumb stuff, like, I mean, outrageously offensive stuff like burn across, unfortunately a lot of that stuff is protected.
I mean, listen, unfortunately people do it, but it is a better way, it's a more precise way to say it is, it's protected.
But it was interesting in that the Civil Rights Division got to determine what was offensive in regards to whose cake was offensive and who wasn't.
And the court ruled, Kennedy included, by the way, that no, that's not the way this works.
So French says, this is actually a bigger ruling than you think because now they're not going to be able to, they have to find a new reason.
And if it's not offensive religion, well, what else are you going to say?
Right?
You see the point, Joe?
Oh yeah, big time.
Good piece.
Please read it.
It's very well done.
Secondly, I talk about the work of Lewis Woodhill a lot.
He's at, gosh, real clear markets, right?
I have a piece from him in the show notes.
He's really good in the economic numbers.
Really, really good.
Short, sweet, to the point.
Just a couple things to point out before I get to Shapiro.
On the bad news side, the job numbers were great.
223,000 jobs in May.
Great job number.
Really, really big production of jobs under the Trump economy.
But he says, listen, bad news first.
Adjusted for labor force participation.
Remember, we're dealing with a percentage in the unemployment rate, Joe.
But when you talk about the actual number of people working, the unemployment rate, Joe, looks quite different.
You know what it is?
No. 10.3%.
Yeah, I know.
I see the look on your face.
Yeah, that's actually not that great.
I'm not doing whataboutism, but it was far worse under Obama.
And the labor force participation rate, the higher the better, by the way.
You want more people participating in the workforce, working.
It is going up under Trump.
But, again, bad news first.
He points out we have to be, you know, let's not do what liberals do and lie about stuff.
The adjusted for labor force participation unemployment rate is still high.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for that that are beyond the scope of this show.
Maybe I'll go into it in a little more detail tomorrow or later in the week.
One of them being the extensive welfare safety net.
People have job availability now.
The job market's super hot.
But Joe, if you can make $30,000, $40,000 sitting on the sidelines, how much do you need to make to get back in the workforce?
The answer is not $40,000, because I can do nothing and make $40,000.
The answer is probably closer to $50,000 or $60,000.
Right?
If I can do nothing and get 30 or 40, I don't need 41 to get back in the workforce, I need about 50.
So the welfare state is unquestionably adding to a really low labor force participation rate.
And by the way, that's been the problem of Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats far worse, but Republicans too.
We can't deny the fact that, you know, swamp rat Republicans have contributed to this problem.
He points out some other things here.
That under Bush and Obama, labor force participation fell by 4.3 points, meaning 11 million people fell out of the labor force.
Folks, that's a lot of people.
The country only has 300 million people.
To lose 11 million people from the workforce is nothing to sneeze at.
That's a lot.
That's a big number.
And by the way, for liberals who respond, oh, yeah, well, a lot of that happened under Obama, but it was all retirees falling out of the workforce.
Wrong!
As Woodhill again points out in the piece.
Labor force participation of 25 to 54 year olds.
In other words, not retirees for liberals who have trouble with math.
That labor force participation rate fell by 2.5 percentage points.
So it is not just retirees.
People in the Obama and, you know, into the Bush years too, fell out of the workforce in historically high numbers.
They just stopped working.
Now, the good news.
I was going to say good news photo.
What?
Joe's like, what do you mean?
Yeah.
I put, I take snapshots and screenshots of things.
Right.
And it says good news photo, meaning look at the photo.
But I was going to read good news photo.
Because I'm so in his zone today.
Here's from Lewis Whithill's piece.
Again, it's at the show notes.
Here's the good news.
Job growth has also improved under Trump.
The number of full-time equivalent jobs, Joe, has risen by an average of 213,000 per month.
That's great, folks.
Compared with, just so you have an idea because you're a liberal friend, Obama.
What was Obama's number?
93,000 per month.
We're talking about doubling it.
Oh, and you say, well, Obama handed him off a great economy.
Well, not really.
He handed him off $177,000 per month during his final 17 months, a little over last year in office.
So even saying, oh, well, okay, Obama was dealing with a recession, but his last year in office, he handed Trump a real winner.
Well, Trump's winning even more.
So by any metric, you lose.
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
Yep.
Obama's average job growth for a month of full-time equivalent jobs was $93,000.
Trump's averaging $213,000.
And Obama handed him $177,000.
By any measure, Trump's doing better.
Those are just the facts.
What you do with them libs is entirely up to you.
And he writes Lewis, but wait, there's more.
That's him in there.
Like I'm making a joke on that.
Wait, that's that guy Fritz from the infomercials, right?
On June 1st, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is now cast of real GDP in the second quarter of 2020.
Real GDP ticked up to 4.8%.
Expansion at this rate during the second quarter would bring trailing 12-month real GDP growth up to 3.27%.
Meaning the last trailing 12 months, the Trump administration economy, real GDP is 3.27%.
The comparable number for Obama's final calendar quarter in office was only 1.84%.
1.8?
We may need Jay's abacus sometime soon, Joe.
Yeah, don't worry, not today.
So Obama handed him 177,000 jobs, full-time equivalent per month.
So Obama handed him 177,000 jobs, full-time equivalent per month.
Trump bumped it to 213,000, an average, which is much higher.
Obama handed him a real GDP growth of 1.84.
Trump's average is 3.27% growth.
Those are just the facts, Libs.
I know you have a tough time with that stuff, but, you know, chew on it.
I'm sorry.
I don't know what, you know, I don't know what to tell you.
Obama, Trump is dramatically improved on what was a dreadful Obama economy.
Those are just the facts.
Whether you like it or not is up to you.
Again, that article is in the show notes.
I encourage you to check it out.
All right.
Sorry for the delay on this.
I know I got a ton of feedback on the show on the Ben Shapiro show yesterday.
He put together a very gracious response.
I want to thank him for that.
I thought it was nice for him to take the time.
He wrote a piece at the Daily Wire, basically a comeback to my show yesterday about his show.
I will put that Daily Wire piece in the show notes.
I strongly encourage you to read it.
I tweeted it out.
It's good.
He makes some points in there.
Some stuff Yeah, I disagree with, and I don't want to make this like a back and forth between me and Ben.
Again, I think for those of you objected to the, some said the unnecessarily conciliatory tone, I'm sorry.
There are people, and I'll be candid with you, there are people in this movement I don't like.
Joe knows who they are.
I think they're jerks, and I think they do little for the movement.
I think they just You know, they just are vile and they think tankers.
And anyone who says something without their imprimatur, they squash.
Ben's never been like that with me at all.
And although we disagree on a lot of Trump stuff, I think he's done enormously positive work annihilating liberal nonsense on the economy, health care.
Folks, that's a benefit.
We don't need to be at each other's throats.
I'm sorry.
And I'm just not going to do that.
He's a good guy and I think he's got a good heart and his heart's in the right place.
Having said that, I still think he's wrong on this job thing, and I'm sorry.
So he addresses my three points in pretty good detail.
Again, check the piece out at the show notes.
But let me just break down basically what he says.
Let me pull up his piece here.
So, number one, I said I had some issues with...
Just to be clear on what his point is, he still questions a lot of the Spygate scenario that the Trump team was targeted.
And one of the reasons he had said is, well, if that was the case, why wouldn't the government have released damaging information on Trump during the campaign?
If they were in fact targeting him to hurt him.
Does that make sense, Joe?
Yeah.
Which is a reasonable question.
In other words, if I'm targeting Joe Armacost, Joe's running for president, I'm the sitting president, I'm weaponizing the FBI and the CIA to target Joe Armacost, then why not release the information during the campaign to make sure Joe doesn't get elected?
That's right.
But he did.
The Obama administration, in conjunction with the Hillary team, did release the information.
Now, in the show notes today, and I was a little confused as to what he meant, he clarified, so this part you can just chalk up to me not understanding, but I said that on yesterday's show, I wasn't clear what he meant by that.
Now I get what he's saying.
If they were targeting the Trump team, why wait till after the election?
They didn't.
They didn't wait till after the election.
Matter of fact, they waited until eight days before to do maximum damage.
I have two tweets linked in my show notes today at Bongino.com.
I strongly encourage you to look at.
They are tweets by Hillary Clinton.
One is a tweet of a speech she gave.
The speech is, interestingly enough, about Trump and Russian collusion, and the speech is fascinating.
She talks about the intelligence community confirming direct cyber attacks on the U.S.
election.
She talks about Trump's extensive business dealings with the Russians and insinuates that these are corrupt.
How would she know any of that?
Now, you may say, all right, well, that's not really releasing sensitive information.
Oh, but as Fritz from the infomercials would say, wait, there's more.
And Lewis Woodhill in his Real Claim Markets.
There's another interesting tweet eight days before the election about information that's fascinating that Hillary Clinton got a hold of.
She tweeted, and I will provide the link again in the show notes, from Hillary Clinton's account eight days before the election.
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russia-based bank.
She accompanied it with a press release.
How would she know that?
By the way, there's credible allegations in multiple reports by multiple people that this Russian-based bank that was linked to a server or a computer in Trump Tower was the subject of a FISA warrant show against the Trump team in the summer that was denied.
How would Hillary know that?
So, fair enough question, have I been.
Why didn't the FBI or anyone release the info?
By the way, I'm not, I want to be clear, I'm not, this is about the Obama administration.
I can't, I'm not making this all about the FBI.
There were multiple players in this.
That's obvious at this point.
John Brennan, GCHQ, the FBI, the Obama team, Susan Rice.
There's, this is, there are multiple players.
Let's not make this about the FBI.
So if your question is why didn't the current administration and the Hillary team release information if they were working together to target Trump, the answer is they did.
I have the tweet.
They did release what they had.
Now, you may say, well, why didn't they release more?
Because they didn't have anything else.
They tried to entrap the Trump team.
They had the Trump Tower meeting.
They had other stuff.
None of that, nothing came to fruition.
There was no evidence they could put out there that would be credibly reported by a media outlet.
Also, why didn't they report on the dossier?
Because the dossier could not be corroborated.
It's obvious.
So to address these points, this is very simple.
Point number one, the information they had about the Russian bank and the server in Trump Tower, which by the way, was entirely debunked.
It was a spam thing.
There was no criminal charges leveled from that at all.
That's a fact.
There are multiple reports that that was the subject of a FISA inquiry that was denied by a judge.
Somehow Hillary Clinton gets a hold of that information.
How do we know she has a hold of it?
Because it's in a tweet eight days before the election.
So to answer your question, why didn't they release the information?
They did!
What they had, and what at a minimum they could corroborate as being basically factually correct, which there was some connection between some Russian bank and a certain, but it was a spam thing.
It wasn't some kind of illicit communication operation.
Joe, is this making sense?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I feel like, and I'm not knocking Ben or anything on this, but I feel like we're getting lost in wonkery, and I get it that details matter, but The storyline matters here, too.
If the line of inquiry, Joe, in other words, is why didn't the Obama team release the information proactively before the election?
Somebody did.
Hillary Clinton got the information, released it in a tweet eight days before.
The link is in the show notes.
Is that alright?
Yep.
Good.
Doing good.
Okay, second point.
He brings up a point about Flynn.
Why not bring up the Flynn information sooner?
They didn't have anything on Flynn.
The fact that Flynn may have committed a FARA violation with the Russians was not a crime.
It was not evidence of any collusion or anything like that.
The Flynn stuff didn't come out till after the election because the recording of the Flynn call with Kislyak wasn't done till after the election.
And that was the premise of a Logan Act investigation, which has never been investigated in U.S.
history.
So on the Flynn stuff, there was nothing on Flynn.
What were they going to release?
There was nothing to release on Flynn that was going to be damaging in relationship to Russian collusion.
They didn't have anything.
That didn't come about until after the unmasked recording of Flynn's phone call with the Russians, which was after the election.
So you can't, I mean, there's no way to, it didn't happen after the election.
Okay.
Um, another thing he takes up, he says, listen, if there was evidence of this entrapment operation, I'm happy to entertain it.
But he says, there's not a lot of good evidence that this Trump tower meeting was in fact an operation to entrap Trump.
I strongly, strongly, strongly dispute that.
Now you, Ben can dispute the conclusions, which is fine.
He's a smart guy.
He's a trained lawyer, right?
But you cannot, this is not, he says at the end, this is conjecture.
Folks, this is not conjecture.
These are facts.
You can get a different conclusion from those facts, granted.
And I am not claiming to be clear that this evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt.
But you cannot claim that there is no evidence at all that there was an operation in place by someone To entrap the Trump team.
The evidence there that something happened and there's a connection to the Hillary team is there.
Yeah.
Whether you conclude that the Hillary team guided it, yes, I will grant, is up to you at this point.
Let me give you the actual evidence and you can draw your own conclusions.
One, Hillary was already using backchannels.
Hillary's team and consiglieres, known associates of Hillary Clinton, were already using backchannels to flush information into the FBI for the purpose of weaponizing the FBI to target Trump.
That is not in dispute.
Jonathan Weiner, a Hillary associate, has already written an op-ed in the Washington Post admitting That he got information from these dossiers and the work of Christopher Steele, which they passed to the FBI, that none of that's in dispute.
Sid Blumenthal, Cody Shearer, already identified in the House investigation, known associates of Hillary Clinton, have already admitted to preparing dossiers, passing that information on, having that information potentially used by the FBI.
We already know that Hillary's operation was circumventing back channels, because I think one of Ben's challenges is, well, are you saying that the FBI sent those people into the Trump Tower organization?
No!
I'm saying someone did, with the intent of making it appear that Trump was colluding with the Russians, and that that information was later used by the Democrats.
How do I know?
Because they're using it now!
They're saying now, oh, Trump, they're still saying this was some kind of evidence of collusion.
Point number one, again, Hillary was already using backchannels, we know that.
Point number two, the dossier was already being used tactically.
It was being used tactically in a court system to get a FISA warrant against Carter Page.
The dossier had not been corroborated.
How do we know that?
Because Jim Comey himself said it was salacious and unverified.
That's not how you describe a corroborated document using efficient and well-prepared evidence.
The dossier was already being used.
A dossier unquestionably prepared by someone paid by lawyers, paid by the Hillary team.
The money trail is conclusive, not open for interpretation.
The Russian lawyer who shows up at the meeting at Trump Tower is working with the organization paid by Hillary Clinton to gather negative information on Trump.
Again, that's not in dispute.
She's working on the Prevezon case with Fusion GPX.
She meets with Fusion after and before the meeting at Trump Tower.
Folks, that's not in dispute.
That's evidence.
What you conclude from that evidence is up to you.
But that is real.
The person she brings in the meeting with her is a guy with significant ties to Russian intelligence.
The guy's lawyer is a friend of the Clintons.
That's a fact.
This, again, is all evidence.
Now, you may say, oh, it's all circumstantial.
Cases are built on significant amounts of circumstantial evidence.
The guy she brings with her is a Russian intelligence agent.
Her lawyer, the guy's lawyer, is a friend of the Clintons.
He's also admitted on the record that he knows people in the Clinton team.
The translator they bring into the meeting.
The translator has done work for Hillary's State Department.
Of all the translators in the world, this guy shows up?
Finally, the Russian lawyer could not get a visa into the United States.
They still can't explain how exactly she got a special exemption to get into the United States for this specific meeting.
Folks, if the Democrats weren't using this meeting as evidence of their whole case, I would say he was right.
Alright, maybe it was just all a coincidence and all these people knew Hillary, knew people who worked for Hillary or were working for companies working for Hillary while they're meeting with Donald Trump Jr.
But the Democrats use this Okay.
Now, he brings up another point, too, about Halper, the spy, saying how, well, listen, you know, this isn't... Let me just get him to see exactly what he said on that.
He said that, as for the spy targeting Team Trump, Stephen Halper was asked by the FBI to meet with Carter Page and Papadopoulos after Papadopoulos bragged to the Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer about Hillary's emails.
Alright, that's just not true.
I addressed that on yesterday's show.
Downer has now come out publicly and said that that's not what he said.
He didn't mention anything about emails.
That's a critical miss.
Because if this entire case is about the Russians hacking the DNC emails and working with the Trump team to get the negative information out there, and then you're alleging you opened the investigation and spied on a guy because he mentioned said emails, and then the guy you're using says, oh no, he didn't mention emails.
That's just not, that's, that's just, I'm sorry, but that's just not correct.
And also, and he says, and after Page organized a visit to Moscow, I went to Moscow.
I'm curious, and I'd like to get, if he has the time to respond, I'd appreciate it.
Are you suggesting we should employ human intelligence assets?
A CIA asset that found its way to the FBI?
To attempt to interact with presidential campaigns?
Based on a conversation about emails that even the source says didn't happen?
And secondly, over a trip to, there's nothing illegal, but I traveled to Moscow.
Obama has traveled all over the place when he was a candidate.
I don't understand.
I just want to make sure we're arguing the same thing here.
Are you suggesting that we should employ human intelligence assets by our intelligence and law enforcement entities because a guy traveled to Moscow and because another guy can't recall a conversation correctly?
Downer's already said it wasn't about the emails.
He says one more thing here.
He says the fact that he was asked to do so before the formal opening of investigation into Trump-Russian collusion doesn't mean much.
That's just not right.
That's just factually wrong.
I'm sorry.
He says in law enforcement scenarios informants are sometimes utilized prior to opening investigation openings.
I'm sorry, that's not true.
This is very rare where this happens, and I document this out in my book.
I'm running out of time here, but there is an official, both FBI and Denise McAllister covers this in PJ Media, my co-author, in detail.
It's in last week's show notes.
There is a procedure for employing the use of human intelligence against United States citizens in a case like this.
That procedure is not.
This is factually incorrect.
Stage one.
There is an initial assessment, there is a preliminary investigation, all done before there's human intelligence gathering against a U.S.
citizen.
That's just the way it works.
Besides, in my experience as a federal agent, I've never seen anything like that.
Before even having a case file open, you're employing a human intelligence asset against an opposition political campaign team member?
I'm sorry, but that...
I've never heard of such a thing in my life.
If you can show me evidence that's happened anywhere before in U.S.
history, I'll happily consider it.
But that is simply not accurate.
At all.
Alright, one more point.
He gets into some semantic stuff.
Listen, I wasn't taking issue with his comments about Trump saying on Lester Holt That he fired Comey because of Russia.
I was taking issue with him saying he literally said that.
He did not literally say that.
I quoted him.
So that's, again, I'm sorry, but that's just not literally what he said.
And there's, you know, Trump tends to speak sometime in word salads.
I'm not apologizing for him, just saying.
He makes disjointed statements, he marries them together, and there seems to be connectivity.
Trump did not say in that Lester Holt interview, the quote's the quote, there's no changing it, that he fired him because of Russia.
He said there was no good time to fire him, and then he mentions the Russia thing being a hoax.
Now, if you could show me evidence somehow that you can read his mind or something like that and you prove that, but otherwise, there's no evidence you can show me that he said that because he didn't say that.
That's just a fact.
You can interpret it a different way, but that's your interpretation.
I don't interpret it that way.
If he said it, I'll happily admit it, but that's not literally what he said at all.
And then I'm confused about another argument he makes.
In one point Bennett said that, you know, Trey Gowdy said they weren't investigating the Trump campaign.
Gowdy did say that, that they're not investigating Trump, not investigating the campaign.
But that's not true.
Gowdy's not telling the truth.
Comey himself had specifically said they were investigating Russian government contacts between him and the campaign.
I don't know, I'm confused.
He says, he tries to make an analogy between, it's like saying they wiretapped Russian government contacts with Trump Tower rather than Trump.
I don't get, I'm confused by that.
I'm just making a simple point.
Gowdy said they were not investigating the Trump campaign.
That's just not true.
And there's no verbal judo that's going to make it true.
Everybody knows they were investigating the Trump campaign.
The FBI director himself said it in March 20, 2017 testimony.
I quoted the testimony.
That's not, there's not a, there's, there's, that's the point.
So again, I appreciate his commentary.
I will put it up in the show notes.
I tweeted it out yesterday, and I appreciate him getting back to me, and I'm glad we can have a pretty cool and candid conversation about it.
It's just an important issue, and I do want to emphasize that I think he's doing really terrific work.
We'll continue to quote his work.
I always love this debate with the young turd.
That's one of my personal faves.
He does great work, but I guess we'll continue to disagree on this.
Again, I want to get into extended back and forth, and we've both got other Stuff going on too, but I think his piece made some good points, but I think some of them are just simply not accurate.
There was no conversation about emails.
That is definitely not standard operating procedure at all to employ human assets against a presidential campaign without following specific DOJ and FBI stepped procedures for employing human intelligence, no less than a politically sensitive campaign.
I mean, just one quick example before we go.
When we had treasury check cases in the Secret Service, If they involved a sensitive local councilman, you had to notify the AUSA first, because it was political sensitive.
If he got his tax checks stolen, to employ a human intelligence asset, in my experience in the federal investigative domain, against a presidential campaign, who was a CIA asset moving over into the law enforcement arena?
No.
No, no.
You're not doing that without opening a case.
I'm sorry.
That is definitely 100%.
I will go to the grave on it.
Not SOP.
And you are not doing that without some kind of official case opening if you're not trying to hide something.
No way.
All right, folks.
Thanks again for tuning in.
Went over a little bit today.
I really appreciate it.
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