In this episode I address the attempted coup against Donald Trump, which was described in a 60 Minutes interview with Andrew McCabe. I also address the victories in the border wall funding fight and the reasons President Trump won the fight.
News Picks:
The White House issues a fierce response to discredited former FBI agent Andy McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview.
Here’s the real reason President Trump won the border funding fight. Timing is everything.
This Lawfare piece addresses the President’s victory in the border wall fight.
This piece addresses the positives in the border bill.
President Trump was right, the border wall did work in El Paso.
Five reasons President Trump has already won on the border fight.
Were two Cabinet officials plotting against President Trump?
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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
All right, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
I'm doing all right, governor.
How are you?
Starting with a bit of a chuckle.
Yeah, it was a great week.
Got to go up to D.C., meet with the president on Friday, which was a lot of fun, folks.
That was great.
Thrilling to be back, if you'll allow me a personal aside.
Kind of got me a little choked up on You know, on Friday, being back in the White House for the first time as a civilian and not a Secret Service agent.
And, you know, I said to the President at one point, it's pretty interesting.
I used to stand at that post right outside your door seven years ago as an agent.
Now being inside, it was an emotional moment.
So what a really great guy.
It was a real thrill.
I've got a lot to get to, including the disastrous interview by Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, in 60 Minutes, where he basically admits to a coup.
And I also want to get to, I almost wanted to do a weekend special about this, how I finally got the probe, Joe, probed through the border bill, and how, at a minimum, on the money issue, on the money for the border wall, which was the big hang-up, remember he wanted 5.7 billion, they gave him 1.375.
Right, right.
If you actually read through the bill, which I got to do in some detail now, I pointed out on Fox & Friends and others, Trump clearly wins on this.
It's a simple math question.
Alright, I'll get to that.
Let's get to the show today.
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Okay.
So, yesterday's interview, we now have the full interview at 60 Minutes with Andrew McCabe, and there are a number of profound takeaways from it.
I'm going to play a couple cuts for you, but before we get to that, I want to start off with how we should be analyzing this interview and why it's important.
The McCabe interview is stunning because, number one, it's a softball interview by Scott Pelley, who, candidly, should be kind of ashamed.
It was a terrible journalistic endeavor.
He's a journalist.
He's not an opinion guy.
And he asks none of the questions that matter.
And here's what I mean, Joe.
If you notice during the entire interview at 60 Minutes, McCabe keeps talking about what's been referred to numerous ways by Jim Comey and John Brennan as these articulable facts.
In other words, very simply in common sense language, what the heck were they investigating the Trump team for?
What was, as we've said on the show, Joe, how do we describe it?
Paragraph one.
Yeah.
What was paragraph one of the investigative report written covering why they were investigating the Trump team?
Paragraph one in federal investigations, which I used to be a part of as an agent myself, usually lays out why they started the investigation and how.
I always give the example of this bank fraud case.
I got a call from a bank fraud investigator, this guy Bob, who called me and said, hey, Dan, I need you to look into these fraudulent charges.
It started a $300 million massive case we looked at for almost a year and a half.
But that was paragraph one.
If you read the report, it makes sense.
It's clear as day why I investigated this subject.
Nobody, two years later, has yet to articulate a clear reason why the Trump team was being investigated.
Nobody!
I want to give you now the euphemisms used to describe how this case started.
Andy McCabe yesterday in the 60 Minutes interview, Joe, says, we had a bunch of articulable facts.
So articulate them!
Please do!
Yeah!
Right?
Can you please articulate them?
That's what articulable means.
Articulable facts.
Meaning he has them and he could articulate them, but what?
He chooses not to?
Why were you investigating this guy?
This was described by Jim Comey.
In his interview with Bret Baier.
A while back, six months ago, you get the joke, where he described to Bret Baier, Joe, a mosaic of facts.
What is the mosaic of facts?
Is anyone ever going to tell us?
It was described by John Brennan as the... I always laugh because John Brennan always tries to sound smarter than he really is.
I spent some time around this case.
He's a goof.
He's described it as the corpus of intelligence.
Is anybody ever going to describe what this is?
Joe, just put yourself in Trump's shoes, right?
You're being investigated as a potential traitor to the United States for colluding with a foreign power, right?
And every time you ask why you're being investigated, someone goes, it's the corpus of intelligence.
It's the mosaic of, it's the mosaic of facts.
It's the articulable facts, baby.
This is like the Austin Powers investigation.
I'm waiting for Dr. Evil to put his pinky up to his face.
Yeah, baby.
It's the articulable facts, Mr. Powers.
It's the mosaic of facts.
It's the corpus of intelligence.
As he's petting that bald cat.
Remember Dr. Evil?
It's the Corpus of Intelligence, Mr. Powers!
Nobody's yet described what it is!
Nobody!
And Scott Pelley, instead of asking real questions, listen, I don't know this guy and I don't like to do silly pylons for no reason, but this guy had the opportunity to pin Andy McCabe down for the first time on why exactly they were investigating the president's team during the campaign in 2016.
And he totally punted!
He punted!
He walked off the field, he punted, and he walked off.
Matter of fact, he walked out of the stadium and asked him a bunch of softball questions.
Folks, I was on Fox & Friends this morning in my regular Monday morning appearance, which I always encourage you to watch because I'm always kind of feisty, even when it's 6.30.
Sometimes I do it a little later, but typically it's 6.30 in the morning.
The president actually retweeted that, which I thought was interesting, where I indicated this was a coup, but I brought up this important point.
This is the top-level lead takeaway from this interview.
The predicate crime that led the FBI to investigate the Trump team still has not been explained.
Now, why is that, Joe?
Because you and I know what the predicate, quote, crime is.
It's the dossier.
Andy McCabe has already admitted as such.
Andy McCabe is already on the record indicating that the only reason they were investigating Trump, Andy McCabe, let me be fair to McCabe, McCabe's on the record as saying that the FISA warrant to investigate Trump, which gave them the power to do it basically, Joe, to monitor him.
Would not have existed without the dossier.
McCabe has already admitted that.
So why are they constantly ducking the question with the mosaic of facts?
Because there is no mosaic, there is no corpus, and there are no articulable facts.
There is only the dossier.
Folks, let me just ask you this one simple question to all the libs who listen to the show.
If there was really a mosaic of facts that are articulable and comprise a corpus of intelligence, don't you think at this point sleazeballs like Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Andy McCabe, Jim Comey, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, and others, and the people at CNN who are knee-deep in this collusion hoax, don't you think they would have put it out?
Let me ask you a better question, Joe, maybe better for you.
What do you think they're hiding it for?
Why?
Oh, because they like Trump, Joe.
Yeah, that's it.
They like Trump.
They're covering up for Trump.
Right?
They're giving him some time to put a defense together because they love him so much.
I said this morning, not that repeat of Fox and Friends appears, but some of you didn't see it.
I brought up on Fox and Friends this morning.
Joe, do you know what a MacGuffin is in a movie?
No, I don't, Dan.
A lot of movies, dramas, adventure movies and stuff, they have a MacGuffin.
It's something someone in the movie is chasing.
It gives the movie a reason for being.
In Indiana, Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's the Ark of the Covenant.
In Pulp Fiction, you've seen Pulp Fiction, right?
The glowing suitcase.
They're always chasing something.
They call it the MacGuffin in a movie.
The joke I made this morning is, Trump-Russia collusion evidence, which there is none, it's the mosaic and this other stuff, it's the Pulp Fiction MacGuffin.
In other words, you see the briefcase in Pulp Fiction and it glows, but no one ever tells you what's in it.
This is the Pulp Fiction MacGuffin.
You keep hearing about the mosaic and the corpus and the articulable facts, but no one ever tells you what it is.
Because there is none.
This is the MacGuffin.
And nobody, nobody ever puts him on the spot.
Scott Pelley had the chance to hammer this guy.
Alright, let's get to some of the cuts.
Because they're pretty damning.
Let's play cut one.
This is Andy McCabe again, trying to dance around the question of why they were investigating Trump at all.
There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts to open the investigation.
The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt.
Russia is a ruse.
I have nothing to do with Russia.
haven't made a phone call to Russia in years.
Publicly undermining the effort of the investigation.
The president had gone to Jim Comey and specifically asked him
to discontinue the investigation of Mike Flynn, which was a part of our Russia case.
The president then fired the director.
In the firing of the director, the president specifically asked Rod Rosenstein to write a memo justifying the firing and told Rod to include Russia in the memo.
Rod, of course, did not do that.
That was on the President's mind.
Then the President made those public comments that you've referenced, both on NBC and to the Russians, which was captured in the Oval Office.
Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed.
The President may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey.
Do you notice what this knucklehead does?
Did you catch this?
It doesn't require a strong degree of legal sophistication to analyze this.
I don't want this to sound in any way pretentious at all.
But maybe because I've done this and interviewed bad guys in the past, I can see right through what this guy's doing.
Joe, look at what he did.
Let's lay it out line by line here.
He's asked there what's going on with the Trump team, why they suspected him of the Russia thing.
Pelley never pins him down as to paragraph one.
He lets him filibuster.
And what does he do?
He lays out what he calls the things and the reasons, which he later describes the articulable facts.
Joe, This is not a trick question.
Do any of those things he described, did any of them happen during the campaign or after?
Listen, you may have been producing, because I know you're going to... They were all after!
None of them were predicate facts!
Predicate!
So let me, again, maybe it makes more sense through analogies here.
If I accuse Joe of colluding with Russia based on fake information that's not real, therefore I know it's false.
Joe Armacost was not colluding with Russia.
No.
And after I accuse Joe of colluding with Russia, Joe goes on a Twitter tirade insulting people about it or whatever.
I'm not trying to knock the president.
I'm just trying to give you an example that maybe will make more sense.
Joe says, these guys who are accusing me of this are insane.
I'm going to shut this crap down.
I had nothing to do with this.
You can't then go back and use Joe's Twitter tirade after he's been falsely accused as evidence that the accusations are true.
Joe, as the audience on Budsman, does that make sense?
It's a reply.
It's, yeah, it's nothing.
It's a rebuttal.
He's using Trump's rebuttal to being falsely accused and set up as evidence that the setup was real.
Let's go through it one by one.
What he said.
He spoke about the investigation in a derogatory way.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Time out, everybody.
Yeah.
T.O., let's get this straight here.
Is the former deputy director, at one point acting director of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the known universe, the FBI, Seriously suggesting, this is why I'm telling you this guy's an idiot, McCain, in a nationally televised interview, Joe, that if you feel you've been falsely accused by the FBI, the president, or any other free citizen, the president's still a free citizen, folks, in case you didn't know,
And you speak about it in a derogatory way?
That this is justification for a Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Investigation?
Yeah, that's what hit me first.
Yeah, just that.
I know it did, because I saw your response.
Ladies and gentlemen, is this an Aldous Huxley brave new world here?
Because if we are in this unbrave new world, where criticizing the FBI is evidence For an investigation later on, then I've got news for you, ladies and gentlemen.
We don't live in the country we once thought we did.
And if you think for a second people like me, and I know you in my listening audience, are going to shut down legitimate criticisms of upper echelon members of the management of the FBI because we're going to be intimidated by hack goons, police state tyrants like Andy McCabe, you're crazy.
Oh, we should respect his service.
No, no, no.
I don't respect this man at all.
Not a bit.
Not one bit.
Not an iota.
This guy went on national television, advertised his efforts in a coup attempt on the President of the United States, and then tried to justify it ex post facto with nonsensical data points that have nothing to do with why he started the investigation in the first place.
So that was point one.
He uses the president's comments about being targeted by the FBI as evidence why they target him.
Secondly, he brings up the Flynn investigation.
He told us to drop the Flynn thing.
He did not say that.
The president did not tell Jim Comey, order him to drop the Flynn thing.
Joe, how do we know they didn't drop the Flynn thing?
It's not a trick question.
Because they didn't drop the Flynn thing!
This was not a trick!
I feel bad for jokes.
Joe's trying to produce it, I always set him up.
Flynn, how do we know that he didn't... Donald Trump, who could have, by the way, as a unitary executive, demanded that they drop the Flynn thing.
The FBI works for Trump, the FBI's not the other way around.
Right.
How do we know he didn't order Jim Comey to drop the Flynn case?
Because they didn't drop the Flynn case.
Mike Flynn already pled guilty.
What Trump said is, I hope you can make this go away.
The president, out of some loyalty to Flynn, who makes a comment to an FBI director hoping that an investigation can go away, is not obstructing an investigation that continued.
Especially when it's already been documented that the president told Jim Comey in the White House That if he had any evidence of any of his satellite people acting in cahoots with the Russians, that he wanted them investigated.
The media never reports that, folks.
Trump asked Comey, he was genuinely curious, if there was someone on his team involved with the Russians, because if there were, he knew nothing about it.
He asked Comey to investigate it.
So McCabe, again, suggesting that after all of the investigations had been ongoing into the Trump team, that Trump's comment about hoping it would go away for Flynn was a reason to start the investigation in the first place?
Is this police state hack, Andy McCabe, trying to reverse engineer a reason for an investigation he knows is corrupt?
He goes down again and says, well, the firing of Comey, that's another one of his, Joe, articulable facts.
His mosaic, according to Comey, the corpus of intelligence, according to Brennan.
No again!
Comey was fired after they started the investigation into Trump, just like the Flynn comments were after that, and just like the derogatory comments McCabe cites by Trump about the investigation, were after they started the investigation.
Not before!
They can't possibly, by looking into a simple timeline of events, been a reason to start an investigation into Trump.
By the way, the very notion that an FBI employee, Andrew McCabe, is going to start an obstruction of justice investigation into Donald Trump because he made a personnel decision by firing Jim Comey.
Joe, do you understand the damage that would do if this was allowed to stand?
Think about this, Joe.
Man.
Again, sometimes stories and analogies work better.
I want you to ask your liberal friends this.
Say Donald Trump was to uncover some massive corruption through someone on his national security team, the source, the media, whatever it may be.
Massive corruption at the upper levels of the FBI.
Let me suggest, for example, the deputy director and the director, I'm not impugning Christopher Wray now or his deputy now, but it's just a story.
That they were taking bribes for information, they were shuttling off to whatever, the Vietnamese or the Indonesians or whatever it may be.
That's not happening, but you get the point, right?
Right.
Are they seriously suggesting that if the president were to fire them because he believes they were corrupt, that other people in the FBI can then open an investigation into the president for obstructing justice?
Now, you may be saying, well, that's ridiculous.
This was an investigation involving the president that he may have obstructed.
How did he obstruct it, ladies and gentlemen?
Flynn pled guilty to a charge the FBI didn't even think he committed.
So they couldn't have possibly obstructed that investigation.
Secondly, the investigation into Trump is still ongoing.
How is he obstructing it?
You have no evidence that any of this is true.
McCabe is just making this up and trying to reverse engineer a reason why they're investigating this guy because he's panicking.
Finally, and the most absurd reason of all, and he says, when you put all these together, this is my justification.
This guy really is a moron.
I'm not kidding, folks.
The fact that he just laid out a bunch of nonsense reasons, says this guy may be one of the dumbest guys on the planet.
His final reason is, oh, well, his public comments to NBC, where McCabe seems to indicate he told Lester Holt in an NBC interview that he fired Comey because of the Russia thing.
That's not what he said.
He said he fired Comey for these reasons, and then he said, and the Russia thing was on my mind.
He did not say he fired Comey for the Russia thing.
And even if he did fire Comey for missteps in the Russia investigation, it's still not obstruction.
The FBI works for Trump.
We don't elect the FBI.
We elect Trump.
There's a way to get rid of Trump.
If you want to impeach him, they got to impeach him.
You want to get him out of office electorally?
You don't vote for him.
The FBI does not make that decision.
They don't override the will of hundreds of millions of voters.
Not to mention, folks, one more thing.
The insurance policy text.
Remember the insurance policy text?
The lead investigator in the case for the FBI, Peter Stroke, is texting an FBI lawyer he's having an affair with, Lisa Page.
This is in August of 2016, Joe, in the middle of the campaign season.
He says, hey, I want to recognize that thing you threw out in Andy's office, obviously talking about Andy McCabe.
It's like an insurance policy in case we die before 40.
What is he talking about?
Do you notice all these things McCabe referenced as a reason for starting the Trump investigation happened way after that August 2016 text?
Joe, McCabe's in deep trouble.
Yeah.
My guess about McCabe, and I can't get in his head, is he's a lot dumber than we gave him credit for, number one.
We gave this guy some credit for being somewhat smart and conniving.
I don't think that him.
I really think he's an idiot.
Because he nearly indicted himself on 60 Minutes last night, laying out his role in a coup attempt to take out the president via the 25th Amendment.
I'll get to that in a second.
But I think McCabe is in a world of trouble, Joe.
I think McCabe knows he's under grand jury investigation, which he is.
It's been confirmed by multiple outlets.
And I think McCabe is sensing jail time in his future.
McCabe is in a world of trouble.
One more comment before I get to the second cut here.
You know, in this next cut, he talks about the 25th Amendment, where the cabinet and the vice president can remove a president from office who's physically or mentally incapacitated.
Completely ridiculous does not apply here at all.
But he describes his discussions here.
But what's fascinating here, Joe, is McCabe When McCabe was being investigated by the IG for lying to FBI agents who interviewed McCabe.
Follow me here, Joe.
Okay.
McCabe lied to FBI agents about leaks to the media.
He was the source on these very specific leaks about the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Right.
He lied three times, Joe.
McCabe's reasons for lying, which Pelly again glosses over last night.
He gives the reason, but he just moves on.
He was confused by the questioning.
Now Joe, simple question to you.
If you're the source for the FBI on a story, let's say the Washington Post for a story at the FBI, you'd probably remember when the story ran that you were the source, right?
Because you said it?
I would think so, yeah.
You would think so, right?
It was the Devlin Barrett piece in the Wall Street Journal.
McCabe was the source.
McCabe lied three times.
McCabe knows he was the source.
But when asked about it, he says, well, I was confused by the questioning.
I find it awfully ironic, I said this to a friend last night on the phone who called me about it, he was on the West Coast, and he interviewed an Erdo much later, so he wanted to get the skinny on him.
I said, one of the more fascinating pieces, other than McCabe's stupidity in admitting his role in a coup attempt, is McCabe acknowledges that he's too stupid to figure out when he was the source on a case or not, He says, I was confused by the question.
No, you weren't.
You either were the source or you weren't.
So he's too dumb to figure that out, Joe.
And by the way, he mentions he couldn't figure out the electoral college thing in North Carolina.
At some point, apparently Trump brings up his victory in North Carolina and McCabe's like, I don't get that stuff.
Like, I was confused.
So this guy's really dumb.
He admits to a coup attempt, doesn't understand the Electoral College, and doesn't even understand basic questions about when he's a source, but this is the guy we're relying on in conjunction with Rod Rosenstein, Joe, to overturn the will of hundreds of millions of Americans who voted Donald Trump into office through the 25th Amendment and through wiring up, apparently, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to get them on an obstruction of justice case for firing Jim Comey.
This is the guy we're relying on.
Who's too stupid to figure out when he lied or when he didn't?
What a knucklehead.
All right, before I get to this next cut with McCabe, let me get to this.
Really, I've got so much on this.
I got to get to the border funding thing, too.
It's just going to be a stacked show today.
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Okay, let's get to this second.
Soundbite.
Because again, it describes this guy's duplicity.
He's just a really, really awful guy, and he's not that bright.
Because here he describes partaking in potentially traitorous, treasonous conversations with Rod Rosenstein.
Play that clip.
The discussion of the 25th Amendment was simply Rod raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.
I didn't have much to contribute, to be perfectly honest, in that conversation.
So I listened to what he had to say.
But to be fair, it was an unbelievably stressful time.
I can't even describe for you how many things must have been coursing through the Deputy Attorney General's mind at that point.
So it was really something that he kind of threw out in a very frenzied, chaotic conversation about where we were and what we needed to do next.
What seemed to be coursing through the mind of the Deputy Attorney General was getting rid of the President of the United States.
In one way or another.
I can't confirm that, but what I can say is the Deputy Attorney General was definitely very concerned about the President, about his capacity, and about his intent at that point in time.
How did he bring up the idea of the 25th Amendment to you?
Honestly, I don't remember.
It was just another kind of topic that he jumped to in the midst of a wide-ranging conversation.
Seriously?
Just another topic?
Well, finally, Joe, Scott Pelley tries to do some journalism there.
I'm not giving this guy a pass.
I think it was a terrible interview.
But did you notice he finally figures out how to do basic journalism?
So let's just be clear, Joe.
You're the Deputy Attorney General.
Let's role play for a minute, right?
I'm the Deputy Director of the FBI.
Jim Comey's just been fired.
And we're having a conversation in the office about invoking the 25th Amendment.
To remove a duly elected president from office for absurd, outrageous, potentially treasonous means, right?
To falsely invoke a physical or mental incapacitation and to invoke a soft coup amongst the cabinet to get the president out.
And Joe, McCabe doesn't remember any of the specifics.
Yeah, I don't remember how it started.
We were having this conversation about my... I have a Tony Gwynn rookie card from 1983, and I put it on eBay, and you know, I got $4.25, and I thought Gwynn was worth $8, and we were having that conversation, and then this thing came up with the 25th Amendment, and I don't remember!
I don't remember how it happened.
Yeah, but you remember the Tony Gwynn bit?
Yes, I remember that.
Are you serious?
Listen, Joe and I are friends off the air, but Joe and I have some pretty up-and-down conversation.
We get feisty about stuff.
I can remember every conversation I've had, not every single word of it, but the genesis of every conversation I've ever had with Joe, where me and Joe were like, no, we got to do this.
And he was like, no, we got to do that.
Every one of them.
And folks, I promise you, neither Joe nor I have never mentioned removing Trump from office from the 25th amendment.
Can you imagine this?
Folks, this is absurd.
This is so stupid.
The very idea that McCabe doesn't recall how it was brought up, again, indicates that this guy is either one of the dumbest people who's ever served at the upper echelon ranks of the FBI, or he's a liar.
Or a combination of both.
Now, there are two things, two things in that cut I want to point out that I hope you didn't miss.
McCabe understands he's got to bring up this 25th Amendment thing.
Why, Joe?
He's selling a book.
McCabe is selling a book right now, and McCabe needs money.
McCabe needs money for legal defense.
McCabe knows he's probably going to jail.
McCabe knows he's being investigated by the grand jury.
And McCabe knows he's finished.
He will never get a security job.
Yeah, granted, he can do the talking head stuff later.
CNN will probably welcome him with open arms.
But McCabe's legal bills are going to be dramatic.
Of all the people of the three-letter agencies I believe have liability here, which I've been consistent on from the start, I think McCabe and Comey are the ones in the deepest of trouble.
I have no doubt there will be some form of a prosecution at some point brought against McCabe, and the legal bills are going to be tremendous.
So McCabe's in a pickle here.
Follow, folks.
Here's what's going on.
He's got to bring up this 25th Amendment because he knows it's controversial.
At the same time, and it sells books.
Copy Joe?
So that's point one.
Point two, McCabe, who's a moron, is not so stupid that he doesn't realize that he's indicting himself in a potential coup attempt against the president.
He's not that dumb.
So what does he do, Joe?
He creates some form of articulable Get the pun there.
Psychic distance between him and Rosenstein.
I have no doubt this conversation happened.
None.
Zero doubt.
So he says two things to distance himself from the conversation.
Make no mistake understanding that he's talking about his efforts in a coup attempt.
First, he says, well, I didn't feel like I had a lot to add to the conversation.
Oh, really?
Really?
So you're in the office talking about removing the President of the United States.
You're the acting head of the FBI, and you have nothing to add?
Like they're talking about, you know, the metrics.
Remember metrics?
Hey, I used to take that metrics, that was the greatest thing.
Hey, Ron, they act like they're having a conversation about the final few plays in the Super Bowl.
They're talking about removing the president and McCabe's just sitting there?
Like it's a conversation about traffic in the parking lot at the 7-Eleven down the road from my house?
You know, really, I gotta get some more parking over there.
He doesn't remember any of this?
He had nothing to add.
Folks, you actually believe this?
You believe Andrew McCabe in a conversation about a coup?
A cabinet-level coup they're trying to incite.
That's what, make no mistake, that's what this is.
That McCabe had nothing to add?
Joe, you believe that?
No, Dan, I don't believe it.
Of course you don't!
He's saying that, Joe, to create distance from himself and the coup backers.
But he said something else.
He's like, yeah, listen, I can't really comment on the specifics of how all that would have went down.
You can't comment on it.
Again, this is him.
Him saying that he had nothing to add and he couldn't comment really on what was going on and what was going on in the conversation.
Him trying to pull himself out of it while talking about it simultaneously to sell books on this controversial coup attempt that happened.
That's why he's putting the blame on Rosenstein.
There were two specific points here where he removes himself from the conversation, almost speaks about it in third person.
Well, I can't really comment on how the conversation started.
I don't remember.
I wouldn't be surprised if McCabe had some role in initiating the conversation.
And secondly, oh, I didn't really have anything to add.
Sorry, folks.
I don't believe either one of those things.
Now, I've got a couple more things to get to here.
So before I get to that, I want to bring up a brilliant piece by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.
I believe it was put out this weekend.
She writes for Potomac Watch.
It's a really good site in her op-ed column.
Kim Strassel is up there with John Solomon and Byron York.
I got Jeff Carlson over at Epic Times and Chuck Ross, people I want to give a hat tip to, been doing really terrific work on this case.
It's not just us, folks.
I mean, I appreciate all your accolades for our book and everything, but we're a small piece in a really big, one spoke in a big wheel.
Strassel writes kind of about what I hinted to before, folks, that if we're in this unbrave new world where the FBI single-handedly can remove a president they don't like, attempt a cabinet-level coup, initiate investigations because they just don't like the president's comments about their investigations, investigate the president because of a dossier and political oppo research, if we're in this place, these are the questions Kim Strassel asks in her piece.
So let me read from the piece.
She says, And she lays out the questions we all need answered.
Whether the Justice Department and the FBI's most controversial actions were appropriate.
Is it acceptable for the FBI to use oppo research as an excuse to surveil a political campaign?
To use back channels to stay in touch with sources it fired?
Remember, they fired Chris Steele.
Deemed him unsuitable for use.
That's their quote, not mine.
And then brought him back to talk to Bruce Ohr in the Department of Justice to shuttle back to the FBI.
Back to the piece.
To open counterintelligence investigations as opposed to criminal ones into political figures?
Why would they open a counterintelligence investigation, Joe?
And not a criminal one?
Because a counterintelligence investigation can leave it almost open-ended, ladies and gentlemen.
They never have to produce articulable, pun intended, facts that actually lead to an indictment, a complaint, or an information that has to go into a court of law that would be disclosed to the public.
Those documents would be disclosed to the public.
In other words, their lack of information in a criminal case, in an indictment that was clearly nonsense, Was crap, was garbage, would be disclosed to the public.
Not so, Joe, in a CI investigation where it goes into a FISA court where the proceedings are what?
Secret.
Yeah.
She goes on.
To actively hide those investigations from congressional oversight.
Remember, the quote we've played multiple times.
Jim Comey in front of Elise Stefanik in the Congressional Oversight Committee, where he's supposed to notify Congress about investigations that are sensitive every three months.
He waits eight months to notify Congress after Trump's elected because he clearly knows that now they know about it.
And when asked why he didn't notify Congress quarterly about this investigation of the Trump piece, he says, well, because it was sensitive.
That's the reason for the notification, knucklehead!
She goes on.
To hold meetings about removing presidents?
This is what we're doing now?
Folks, we need answers to these questions.
If the answer to any of these is yes, Americans deserve to know that this is the brave new world they live in.
Amen, Kimberly Strassel.
What an excellent, excellent piece.
I cannot recommend her column enough than Potomac Watch.
Listen, I know with the Wall Street Journal, sometimes there are You know, they can be a little left to center on immigration issues and others.
That's fine.
I mean, subscribe, don't subscribe, do your thing.
You know, disclosure, I do work for Fox News and Fox News Corp owns the Wall Street Journal, but I have no business relationship with the Wall Street Journal whatsoever.
But some of the columns in there, especially hers, are definitely worth your time.
I can't say that enough.
Really, really good stuff.
Alright, I've got a ton of other stuff to get to, including the border patrol spending, which my wife heard me on Fox on Friday and she thought I was confusing.
And like Joe Pesci, Joe, I'm here to un-confuse you about why Trump won this.
I'm just going to give you simple math.
If you believe in math, you'll see why Trump completely smoked out the Democrats on the border wall funding.
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All right, on the border funding issue.
Did some appearances and was talking about how he completely smoked him out on the border funding issue.
Let's set the parameters and let's get the lead out front.
Here are the parameters of the fight.
The marker for success we had used for border funding in Trump's fight versus the Democrats over border wall funding was that $5.7 billion figure.
Where did that come from?
That $5.7 billion figure came from border experts at CBP, ICE, and others in the Department of Homeland Security, Joe, who had determined there was 230 miles of border that were out of our, you know, thousands of miles of border that had to be secured now.
We already built about 700 miles of fencing, but this 230 miles was drug-sensitive areas, a lot of populations of illegal immigrants coming across.
So, in other words, triaging their needs, Joe, They said this is our priority, this 230 miles, and to get that 230 miles built, we need 5.7 billion.
Right.
Now, Pelosi had clearly stated, it's out there on the record, you can watch it on YouTube yourself or any other place, had stated what Joe?
Not one dollar!
We're not gonna, that's her exact quote, we're not gonna give him one dollar for this border, this 230 miles of fencing or wall that had to go up.
Not a dollar.
Well, in the budget, Trump got $1.375 billion.
And a lot of conservatives out there And listen, the bill wasn't great.
Trump has even acknowledged that.
The overall bill, I already discussed some of the pitfalls, section 224, about how you can now sponsor an unaccompanied minor and walk in and you can't be deported.
That was definitely a bad deal.
But a lot of the other poison pills, which I have in the show notes today, check out my show notes.
The articles on this are really terrific.
I have one at Lawfare Blog and one at the Washington Examiner, which lays this out, that are really good.
Yeah, Paula put it up there, by Paul Bedard.
A lot of the poison pills were taken out.
The restrictions on ICE detention beds, Joe, not only weren't there anymore, the bed limits were up 44%.
The cap on ICE funding was dumped.
ICE funding, ICE CBP is up 7%.
Two huge wins.
But on the real fight, where conservatives were like, we got smoked, Joe, the Democrats beat us, we only got 1.375 billion in funding and we needed 5.7, We lost.
So I started looking through the bill, reading some pieces, dealing with my audience over email, which is always good, and pointing out some stuff.
And Con Carroll, hat tip Mike Lee's office, had a fascinating thread where he pointed out some interesting little tidbits I looked up, Joe.
So, keep this in mind.
The sequence of the spending matters here.
The order of the spending.
So we're trying to get to 5.7 billion.
He's already got 1.375.
He's already said, pursuant to his 31 U.S.C., United States Code 9705, Treasury Forfeiture Authority, that he is going to take $600 million from there and spend it after he spends the $1.375 billion.
So keep in mind, Joe, we've already got at least $1.3 billion worth of wall, no problems, no lawsuits, no nothing, going up, money not in dispute, okay?
That's going to take a while to build.
The sequence matters.
Say it takes, I'm just throwing this out there, I don't know, three months, six months before that spending's gone.
Now we have the $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.
Again, no lawsuits.
Well, no credible lawsuits, I should say.
Let me be clear on that to be precise.
There's not going to be any credible lawsuit.
Trump has the legal authority, 31 U.S.C.
9705, to take that seized money, $600 million, and apply it towards specific sections of the wall.
Copy, Joe?
Now we're up to what?
We're up to roughly 2 billion.
Right.
They say, all right, Dan, we're still short.
Are we?
Because Trump, under 10 U.S.C.
284, perfectly legal, 10 United States Code, you can look this up, 284, has the authority and the MilCon budget, the military construction budget, To move money to prioritize military projects, even if they are at the border.
Those funds, Joe, again, you check out the Washington Examiner piece, add up to $3.5 billion.
Joe, notice what we haven't even gotten to yet.
We're now at $5.5 billion, roughly.
Right around what he said he needed.
We have not even discussed a dime of disputed funds yet.
These are not disputed funds.
Yes, the legal authority is there.
Even the hacks in Congress on the Rhino side and the Swamp Rat Democrat side have already acknowledged that these funds are not in dispute.
So we're already at the number before we even got to the national emergency.
Brilliant!
Which is potentially two to three billion, if not more, in additional funds.
Now, again, I owe you an opinion.
I'm not a big fan of the emergency funding moving around.
Now, Trump's ability to declare a national emergency is not in dispute either.
1976 National Emergencies Act.
The president has the power to declare a national emergency.
Nobody disputes that.
They will not be sued over that.
You may say, well, what are they talking about, Dan?
The Libs are going to sue Trump over the national emergency declaration.
Not the declaration.
They're going to sue him over moving the money.
But Joe, the sequence matters, buddy.
By the time that, this is where Trump constantly smokes these idiots out, by the time he's even gotten to that lawsuit and that disputed money for the National Emergency Act moving the funds around to spend them on the border, he's already spent the 5.5 billion he needed to build the wall he told you he was going to build.
Folks, listen to me.
I am not some acolyte here.
Just read.
I'm giving you the facts.
I gave you the bill.
I gave you the titles of the United States Code and the sections you can read yourself.
I gave you the amounts of money.
This is all publicly out there.
He already won that fight.
Please tell me using simple mathematics, if you wouldn't mind, how he lost a fight for $5.7 billion if he's already within striking distance of that number dealing with a Democrat Congress before one lawsuit's even been filed over the funding.
Now, here's where it gets better.
The sequence of the spending, Joe, matters.
Now, Joe, you're not a lawyer, I'm not a lawyer, but, you know, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand the basics of legal theory, right?
This is common sense stuff.
You can't sue, and read Lawfare Blog, I'll have it in the show notes today, right?
You cannot sue regarding the expenditure of funds That haven't been spent.
So where Trump has them in the corner again, is by the time he spends the allocated funds, 1.375 billion, no dispute.
The 600 million in treasury funds, again, no dispute.
The 3.5 billion in military construction funds, again, no dispute.
Folks, Trump could be in his second term of the presidency with a Republican Congress back and these lawsuits won't even matter because what he can do, Joe, is he can decide at that point he doesn't need to move those funds around and he can just go back to the standard appropriations procedure.
How do you like that corpus of information?
How do you like that mosaic?
How do you like those articulable facts?
How do you like that?
What was the cat's name?
Do you remember the cat's name?
I don't.
Like Mr. Giggles or something.
Now I'm going to get a thousand emails today.
Captain Giggles or something.
I used to love those movies.
They were hysterical.
How do you like those articulable facts?
He's already beating these idiots.
It's obvious.
Just do the math.
It's simple math.
He got... Nancy Pelosi's position was clear.
You are not gonna get a dollar.
Trump's position was clear.
I need 5.7 billion.
The bill passes, Trump gets $5.5 billion before one lawsuit can even be filed because you can't file a lawsuit about the national emergency funds before they're spent, and they won't be spent probably for years.
And at that point, Trump could be out of office.
He already got his thing.
I don't think he will be.
I think he's going to win re-election.
I think we get back the House too, hopefully.
But at that point, he just goes back and gets more money from the Republican House.
This is not hard.
Now, this is where I always laugh.
You know, you get the goon squad, like, you know, the homophobic Rick Wilson and all of his acolytes out there, the anti-Trump loser brigade.
You know, Rick's upset because he gets destroyed on Twitter every day and makes dopey comments.
These are the ones, when I say things like this, they're like, oh, Dan Bongino.
He's just trying to, you know, look at him backing up Trump no matter what.
Number one, I like the president.
I support what he's done.
I think his record after two years has been incredible.
But Joe, how do you dispute the common sense math I just laid out?
You're just making yourself look like a fool.
The border fight, he clearly won.
There's no doubt.
The funding matters.
But having said that, the overall bill, there were issues.
And you can refer to my show on Friday with section 224, which could be trouble.
But the Trump administration is saying that 224, which allows people to bring in unaccompanied minors, claiming to be a sponsor and they can't be deported.
The Trump administration is saying now that they are gonna be very, very strict on who can be defined as a sponsor.
So we'll see.
But I think this was a huge victory on the funding issue.
Okay.
I want to play, speaking of the border, a great kind of guy who's become a friend, a really, really nice guy.
Have you seen Mark Morgan, Joe, on Fox?
You probably have, you may not remember the name, but he was one of the border chiefs under Barack Obama.
Yeah, I remember.
Yeah, you've seen him.
He's been on a lot lately on Fox and he's very good, extremely articulate with the articulable facts, but this guy actually has articulable facts.
He knows his stuff.
He's been on Fox and I was talking with him a little bit and he decided to do a hit on CNN, which I was like, wow, why'd you do that to yourself?
But the hit turned out to be great.
It's a long one, But Joe edited it down to about a minute and a half where the CNN interviewer tries to, and keep in mind, this guy was one of the border chiefs under Obama, so nobody knows the border better than him.
He's also a former FBI agent, and I believe he was a Marine, too.
He's a really bright guy.
Again, I've come to consider a friend.
This is the CNN woman, forgive me, I don't remember her name, trying to confront him, the border expert, on drugs and interdiction at the border, and it doesn't end well for her.
Play that cut.
The president said it's wrong, that it's a lie, that most drugs come through ports of entry.
Sure, we do know there are drugs that are coming as well across the border in between ports of entry, but it's DEA.
It's customs and border statistics that tell us otherwise.
Do you have a problem with the president misleading the public on this?
Again, maybe he's twisting the facts here.
There is some we know of drugs coming across in between ports of entry, but that's not the majority.
So that's false.
So actually your previous guest is twisting it.
So let's break that down a little bit.
So the statistics, we're talking about those drugs that are actually interdicted.
And if you include, so if you look at meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, the majority
comes, this interdicted comes into ports.
But if you throw in marijuana, which a lot of people don't want to talk about, pound
for pound, the overall drugs, more are actually seized in between the ports.
The other element that no one ever talks to, especially on this show, is the fact that
the border is 60% porous, meaning there's not enough technology, personnel, or infrastructure
to adequately safeguard the border.
60% on it.
We don't know what's getting through.
So the experts will tell you, for every pound of narcotics that's seized in between the ports, there are countless that's getting through that we'll never know.
So the president is right on that.
I really appreciate your perspective.
Thanks for smoking me out on my own show and making me look like an idiot.
So, you know, I said to Mark, why'd you do it?
But now I'm glad he did.
So, Mark, I know you listen to my show.
Thank you for doing it.
Maybe you should go back and do that some more on some of these liberal shows because that woman looked really awful.
Really, she looked terrible.
She was made to look like a fool on her own show.
But, Mark, the reason I wanted to play that cut Was because this is something I wish talking heads in this space, I don't mean that as a pejorative, but people go on TV and espouse a conservative position.
I wish they would do more.
Joe, there's a thing in economics that goes, you can't prove a counterfactual.
In other words, if I were to ask you, Joe, right now, well, what would the economy look like if Trump hadn't cut taxes?
You can speculate all you want.
I mean, right?
Fairly enough.
But you have no idea.
Why?
Because he did cut taxes.
You have no idea what would happen.
In other words, you can't prove a counterfactual.
I can't prove to you what would have happened if Glass-Steagall wasn't revoked.
What would have happened if the housing crisis?
Nobody knows.
You understand by tautologically, it's only a guess.
Joe has no idea what would have happened if Trump didn't cut taxes.
Because he did!
You can guess, you can make assumptions, but it is a guess.
It will never be a fact.
I wish more people would call out attempts to prove counterfactuals, like Mark just brilliantly did on CNN, where the anchor of the show makes a really stupid point.
Hey, listen, you know, we know a lot of the drugs that are interdicted or stopped, they're stopped at the ports of entry.
So?
Mark makes the point, how do you know about the drugs that are getting in through the porous border?
The answer is we don't because they're not interdicted!
Joe, are you tracking?
Yeah, yeah.
She's asking him to quantify the amount of drugs that would be stopped not at ports of entry, in other words, at our open border, despite the fact that we didn't stop them.
I have no idea how many piles of fentanyl, weed, cocaine, processed cocaine, crack, I don't know, opiates are coming across our southern border.
Why?
Because we haven't stopped it and we didn't catch them.
Do you understand, like, this is a bit of a nuanced point, I don't mean to try to get overly wonky with folks, but it's a common thing in economics, where people comment on things they can't possibly prove and try to prove it counterfactual.
But it's done in debates all the time by liberals.
Liberals who go, Hey, well, and the reason she's doing that, to be clear, is she's talking about the ports of entry because they don't, in other words, where, you know, cars come into the country and there's CBP and there's a CBP station and there's officers there.
Because they don't want a border wall.
The woman's clearly a liberal.
They don't want to stop illegals because they want illegal immigrants in the country.
So what they do is they constantly emphasize security at the ports of entry, Joe, only because they don't want security anywhere else.
So they say stupid things like, well, there's not really a drug problem between the ports of entry on our open borders because most of the drugs are stopped at the ports of entry.
No kidding!
No Sherlock!
We don't know how many piles of drugs are getting in and unsecured, but because they're unsecured!
Mark's a smart guy, and I'm really glad he caught this.
I'm just encouraging you out there, those of you who do TV, Listen to the show and who debate your liberal friends to point out you cannot prove a counterfactual.
You making a statement like drugs are a bigger problem at ports of entry because they're caught there and not in our open borders are making one of the dumbest points I've ever heard in the history of humankind.
Of course, because we're not catching it at our open borders because they're open.
Please quantify to me how many, in your counterfactual, how many pounds or kilos of cocaine would have been stopped at the border.
Tell me.
I don't know.
Well, why don't you know?
Because it wasn't stopped!
Oh, man, this is just so stupid.
Alright, well, one last thing.
Really good article up at Legal Insurrection today, hat tip, William Jacobson runs that site, really great site.
I have one of his articles in the show notes where he lines out, folks, what's happening with the MAGA movement right now, the Make America Great Again movement.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a warning, and I encourage you to read the piece.
The same thing happened to the Tea Party movement, the movement that drove me into politics as well.
Jo, remember the early days of the Tea Party movement?
Everything was evidence of Tea Party racism and as what William Jacobson calls, Tea Party eliminationists.
In other words, people in the Tea Party wanted to knock off and get rid of anyone else and were going after liberals.
Well, most of those stories that made it into media were later debunked as being media fairy tales about Tea Party people.
Remember the Gabby Giffords shooting?
Tried to blame it on the Tea Party guy.
The Boston Marathon bomber tried to blame him on right-wing violence.
The same thing's happening now with the MAGA movement.
We've seen it with this Justin, Jussie, I don't know his name, Smollett, which now looks like a hoax.
We've seen it with the Covington kids.
All the false stories about Don Jr.
Read the legal insurrection piece, ladies and gentlemen.
It's happening again.
And how we fight back is we constantly discredit these media loons who, again, I will openly and vigorously defend a free press, even when they're unfair.
But when they're unfair, we will discredit these lunatics and make them the tabloid journalists they are.
Because they're hacks, and they're trying to pull the same crap again with the MAGA movement.
Read the piece, check it out, it's a good one.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I really appreciate it.
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