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April 17, 2020 - The Dan Bongino Show
40:05
Spygate Interview With John Solomon (Ep 1230)
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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.
Hey, thanks for tuning in to my interview show today.
I got John Solomon, the great John Solomon, one of the finest investigative reporters out there, just conducted the interview.
I always do the intros afterwards to tell you what's in him.
John has a couple of tactical nukes he drops in this, including some dates and some connections between Steele and Jim Comey.
And the date Steele first walked into the FBI and what happened on that date, things I hadn't thought about in a long time.
We get into who really wrote the dossier.
Did they ever believe this case was real?
What was the role of John Brennan?
I think you're really going to like this.
It runs about, what, Paula, 40 minutes or so?
I think you're really, really going to like this interview.
Stay tuned to the end.
He's got some great information in there.
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Without further ado, John Solomon.
All right, welcome back to the Dan Bongino interview series.
I always say Dan Bongino as if there's going to be another Dan Bongino walking in here, but as per viewer demand here, we got the great John Solomon, one of the finest investigative journalists out there.
I get a lot of emails about you, John.
My audience loves you.
You have obviously been at the tip of the spear.
Good to be with you, Dan, and thank you for all the attention you've given these stories.
reporting extensively both at the Hill and now with your new venture, JustTheNews.com.
Your reporting has been great. Welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time today.
Good to be with you, Dan, and thank you for all the attention you've given these stories.
Without that bullhorn, the American public would never have known what a ruse this was.
Yeah.
No, you're not kidding.
You have a new podcast as well on iTunes, John Solomon Reports.
I've listened to it.
It's terrific.
He has one up in China up now, folks, on China, which is very, very good.
Let's get right to it.
So you have a piece up.
It's from a few days ago.
I covered it actually on my podcast, but I want to cover it again with you here.
The 13 revelations showing the FBI never really had a collusion case to begin with.
And it's a great piece, John, because we've got to kind of ground ourselves once in a while and go back to the basics that the initial allegation was Trump colluded with the Russians, the Russians helped him win the election.
None of that's actually true.
And reason number one, or one of the 13 revelations you cite, which is, you know, now takes on new meaning with the declassifications is, They were warned, the FBI, back as far back as 2015, based on the Stroke page text.
You can see them.
They're warned about the potential for Russian disinformation.
In other words, the Russians feeding us nonsense to interfere with the election, and they fell for it anyway.
They did, and the question is, did they fall for it because they wanted to fall for it?
There is a lot of evidence of willful hiding of bad information about Steele.
Let me give you one example.
Every counterintelligence agent I've ever met in my life told me the first thing you do when you open up a source is you check their Delta file, the file that the government has on the person to see are they credible, do they have problems.
The FBI's excuse to the IG is, as important as Steele was, as big as this case was, we forgot to look at the Delta file and, oh, what was in it?
The possibility that he was actually a Russian disinformation target.
Just unbelievable.
It's actually, it's unbelievable.
The FBI doesn't make those sort of mistakes on a daily basis.
Yeah, the Delta file is kind of important in this case, especially given Steele's known interactions with Deripaska.
Now, one of my concerns, I'm not going to go through all 13 because they're all very good.
I'm going to post the article, but I have so much stuff to get to here.
But one of the things that concerns me, though, Is given these newly declassified footnotes we've seen there's a lot of information there obviously John but I've seen some kind of fall for this story now this kind of aw shucks story like oh man the FBI just fell for this Russian story and I'd love to get my listeners though they've heard my take on this
My sources are telling me, John, this was not Russian disinformation.
There are slivers of it in there.
There's no question the Russians knew what Steele was up to.
But the dossier is a lie.
It was always a lie.
And there were real Russian names attached to the lies to make it appear real.
And my concern is by falling prey to this, oh, the Russians got us off Shuck's line, it makes it look like misfeasance rather than malfeasance, which I believe it was.
Your take on that?
Yeah, listen, there's no excuse in the FBI whether it's wrong information or disinformation to fall for.
We have all the tools we need to decipher very quickly whether someone like Christopher Steele is credible or not, and every red flashing light that the FBI had from the summer of 2015 forward said Christopher Steele is not a credible source.
I'll give you one example that just shows up in the notes that a normal FBI agent would have said, wait a second, we're not touching this guy.
He can't even get his title and his rank right in the MI6.
When they interviewed Steele's boss in November of 16, They asked him, he described himself as a senior official, and they said, no, no, he was kind of like semi-moderately senior.
He wasn't in the upper echelons.
The man didn't even get his rank right at the MI6, and the FBI doesn't see that as a red flag not to trust this guy with all the things we know.
He was biased against Trump.
He was prey to Russian oligarch disinformation.
His own source disowned everything that they attributed to him.
Another one of his sources was a Hillary Clinton supporter.
What the heck was going on here?
The FBI turned a willful eye to not look at these allegations because they wanted Christopher Steele's story to be true because somebody wanted Donald Trump defeated.
Yeah, no question.
You talk about number two, another reason that senior Justice Department officials knew back in August of 2016, 2016, that Steele had political motivations.
And if I may add to that and get your take on it, not only did senior DOJ officials know about it, but one of those officials was Andrew Weissman, who later became Bob Mueller's lieutenant To go and investigate Donald Trump.
I mean, this is hard to believe.
It's unfathomable you would take a guy who was briefed that Donald Trump was basically a, you know, the victim of a political attack, who's then investigating Donald Trump for an alleged political attack on Hillary Clinton.
It's absurd.
It is absurd.
And also, one of the things that is almost equally absurd is the fact that Bob Mueller's final report simply didn't address anything about Christopher Steele, the man that gave us this entire story.
And it's as though Robert Mueller forgot his name.
In fact, in the famous hearing, he actually feigned that he didn't know he never heard of Fusion GPS, which seems implausible if you're in charge of this investigation.
Fusion GPS was the genesis point of this investigation.
The Bob Mueller report suffers from such terrible omissions That it really did a disservice to the country.
Instead of giving us the unvarnished truth, it gave us little tidbits here that made Trump look bad, despite the fact that the evidence was supportive of him.
It's a joke of a report as we look back at it now.
And John, now that we've seen the declassified foot, some of them, not all of them, but we've seen some of the redactions lifted in the inspector general's report looking into this whole spying scandal on Trump.
One of them that came out that we've now seen, which is very disturbing, is footnote 350.
The one where they mentioned specifically that the FBI was aware of the potential here for Russian disinformation.
Now, this is more of a question.
Sometimes I know the answers to these questions.
I want to just get your take, but this one I really want to pick your brain on.
If the FBI as far back as 2017 and early 2015, to be honest, we knew about the potential for Russian disinformation, but at least we know the latest 2017, they know for sure that Russian disinformation could have seeped its way into this dossier.
Then what the hell was Bob Mueller doing investigating Donald Trump, when they knew for a fact that the Trump colluding with the Russians thing was a hoax, but they had on good information that the Russians were potentially using Steele to filter disinformation in the real collusion scheme?
What was Bob Mueller doing?
It's unclear.
And at the end of the day, from his testimony, it didn't appear that Bob Mueller knew what he was doing.
He was so confused in those hearings.
I think that he was basically taken for a ride by Andrew Weissman.
It's clear that Weissman was not a Trump supporter at all, was looking to put the pain on Donald Trump.
And really what happens with the Mueller investigation is they change the football stadium.
We were playing football.
They moved to a soccer stadium.
Oh, well, yeah, there was all this collusion stuff.
It's not true.
Let's look at him for obstruction of justice of a case that didn't exist.
I mean, it's a remarkable abuse of of the Justice Department and the justice system.
And you can now see why Attorney General Barr made the comments he made last week.
The Attorney General Barr chooses his words very carefully.
He said, no, I agree with you.
There was no good basis.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Go ahead, John.
Yeah, no basis to open the investigation.
Not some, we had some ideas, but there was zero basis to open the Russia collusion case.
That is the most damning indictment anyone has said of the FBI investigation and the DOJ investigation so far.
No, I'm glad you brought up those key words, obstruction of justice, because the sources I've been using have been telling me exactly that, that there's a strong likelihood now that Mueller didn't seem to have his arms around really what was going on.
It's not an excuse for Mueller, but it's really Weissman running this show.
And Weissman's aware from the start that this investigation is based on a hoax.
I mean, he's not a dumb guy, Weissman.
His motives may be questionable, but he's not stupid.
And that they were setting up early on an obstruction trap, which also explains their moves later on.
The arrest and prosecution of Papadopoulos.
The arrest and prosecution of Mike Flynn.
Efforts to poke Donald Trump into doing something like firing Jim Comey and other things, which then in turn elicited an obstruction of justice response, which really makes you think, gosh, how devious these people were.
Investigating a fake crime.
To get the victim of this fake crime to respond so you can then charge him with another crime or impeach him in the case of Trump.
It's really grotesque.
Yeah, now that's really what the picture is becoming clear.
And now the question is, what accountability will finally be meted out?
It's great that we fired some people who lied and cheated.
We haven't prosecuted anyone, even though there's clear evidence of crimes, including altering an official government document to deceive a court.
That's clearly a felony.
Knowingly certifying that the FISA warrants were verified when they were not verified.
In fact, they were debunked.
At the moment, the FBI certified they were verified.
Their own evidence of their own files showed the information was wrong.
Now, it's great we know this body of information, and shaming is always the first great punishment.
But at the end of the day, if there's not accountability in the legal system, the temptation to do these very same crimes to another president in the future will remain very high.
And I think that's what all of us who've worked the case are most concerned about.
There doesn't seem yet to be the sort of accountability that would deter this from happening in the future.
No, you know, you're right, John.
On a personal note, listen, I'm a conservative.
You're a reporter.
I'm an activist at heart.
I don't hide that.
But you've been a reporter.
You've covered corruption on both sides of the aisle.
I don't think you have a dog in this fight politically.
But for me, although I don't hide my conservative stripes, You know, I was speaking out against the Patriot Act running for office.
I didn't care that Bush signed it.
This is a genuine concern for me.
And, you know, I get it.
I know there are going to be liberals who don't believe that.
But if a Republican president did this to a Democrat, believe me, from the bottom of my heart, I'd be saying the same thing.
I mean, the shreds, I mean, the shredding of the constitutional republic that happened here and just the way the Fourth Amendment was treated so cavalierly.
We're not going to have a republic if we don't do something about this.
And thank God for your work.
I wanted to pick your brain earlier on.
When I say earlier, I mean years ago, when I first read one of your stories, when you were writing at the Hill.
I have a theory on this case that's backed up by a lot of strong evidence, notably the testimony of Lisa Page to Mark Meadows when she goes up on the Hill.
Mark Meadows asks her a very critical question.
Republican congressman now, of course, acting chief of staff for the President of the United States.
He says to Lisa Page, one of the lead FBI lawyers working the case, he starts asking her about John Brennan and John Brennan's sources.
And he says to Lisa Page, you know there are multiple sources, right?
She says, yes, I know that.
And she seems rather perplexed, though, that Meadows hints to her that some of the information she has may have been given to John Brennan through Steele's network.
And she says, well, if that happened, it would have been very unusual.
I bring this up to you because you wrote a piece at the Hill, gosh, a long time ago.
I was at my sister's house in Oklahoma when I read it and it blew my mind.
And you got some emails.
And in those emails, Stroke and Page are talking about scrubbing the lists right after the election.
Matter of fact, the day after Trump wins the presidency, they're talking about scrubbing the lists and negative CI information.
Do you think, I've never asked you this either personally with us on the phone, do you think that could be related that after the election the FBI is concerned that the information stream they think is coming from Steele and theirs is theirs alone was going to the CIA too?
There clearly was a worry about the CIA, and you first see this in their text messages in late July, early August of 2016, where they're talking about politicalization, White House pressure, and the CIA has its own sort of agenda.
In fact, for a period of time, Stroke and Page were afraid, it appears, if you believe their text messages, to let the CIA know that the Operation Crossfire Hurricane had been opened yet.
They feared that the CIA was so aggressive on this issue, They might take advantage of it.
And so that became a very big issue in the course of their text messaging.
By November, I think two things are going on.
One, they know that there's a very small window for the Democratic administration to put one final hurt on Donald Trump.
And that's going to be the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment.
That's going to pretend that Donald Trump was the target of victory.
The Russians wanted him to win.
We now know that's absurd from these declassified notes.
The second thing was, I think they were doing an all-call to every informant that every FBI had, which is, the guy just got elected now, find out anything you can find on dirt on Donald Trump and get it in the door now because we have a very small window to execute against this guy.
I've always wondered that.
I read that article back then and there's another interesting nugget in that article where you talk about the selection of this FBI individual with expertise in cyber surveillance who is assigned to this critical position in the White House.
I've always found that fascinating too, given we know the fact Anthony Ferrante, who had connections to Jim Comey, was a member of the FBI.
Ferrante is assigned to the National Security Council, is well connected to Jim Comey, and Ferrante from the FBI is also the point man on that Presidential Directive 41 About the cyber security intrusion incidents.
And it's just like this is a little too convenient that the FBI seemingly keeps placing these people inside of the White House.
And then you have these texts, of course, about, you know, Katie's husband, where they're talking about clearly Mike Pence's chief of staff.
It seems like the FBI, and tell me if I'm wrong from the text, there appears to be a lot of evidence that the FBI was using their access to the White House to spy on Donald Trump.
Well, one episode that's irrefutable, it's now in the public, it's been documented, is that Agent One, one of the early counterintelligence agents working for Stroke, inserted himself into a presidential briefing in August of 2016.
This is a place where you're trying to build a trust with the future president of the United States.
And he's there not to give the president the sort of briefing that he's there.
He's there to get a read on Mike Flynn and Donald Trump in case they have to open up criminal cases against them.
That's the sort of deceit that they were using to do these things.
And remember something that a lot of people have never explained the real reason.
We know in November of 2016, right after Trump won the election, he moved out of Trump Tower very abruptly and went to Westminster and kept his transition team away from Trump Tower.
My sources tell me he was warned, or his team was warned, that there may be friendly, not foreign or adversarial, friendly surveillance going on in the Trump Tower that they couldn't stop.
That tells you that at that moment, when the all calls going out to confidential sources, the FBI was probably trying to find anything they could, in any manner they could, to find dirt on Donald Trump and stop him from becoming president.
Yeah, I've heard that same thing about Trump Tower and every time I say it, I get a lot of interesting feedback on Twitter about that.
A couple other things I have for you here.
Do you think Christopher Steele wrote the dossier?
Again, my people on my end shaking some trees here have always told me That steel is actually a small component of this dossier.
Some of them have spoken about it publicly.
Svetlana Lakova, who was a victim of this scandal early on with the Mike Flynn incident back in 2015, I've spoken to her at length about this.
And her, along with others, believe that a lot of the input into the dossier was from, in fact, possibly Halper or Simpson himself, which steel is the front.
The reason being obvious that Steele had a history of working the Russia desk for MI6 and would have some kind of face or patina of credibility to give to the FBI as a source.
Do you put any legs on that turkey there or do you think it was Steele who was the primary input into this dossier?
It's funny, I know some people that right now are doing a linguistic study of the Steele dossier to see if it matches his other writings in public, because he has other dossiers that he wrote for other clients, and to see if there's a similarity or a diversion of the literary writing style that's here.
So this issue is clearly out there.
There are people in Congress and others that are looking at this issue.
I think a more likely scenario, from what I know from my reporting, is that Steele was willing to take anything from anyone That would give him dirt on Donald Trump, and he just cut and pasted into his document.
In the footnotes yesterday, there was a revelation that we had never heard that for three years.
It's the first time I heard this, that the FBI was aware that one of Steele's sources, a subsource that he put information, inserted information into the report about, was a Hillary Clinton supporter.
That raises a big concern.
Did someone in the Hillary Clinton campaign or in her orbit give Christopher Steele something?
Did he just cut and paste it into the document?
These new documents give us a lot of answers, but they also raise a lot of new questions.
I don't think we know the full breadth of where Christopher Steele got his sources from.
What we do know, where he got his information from, what we do know is the ones he did get it from are very troubling.
They were not credible.
They were not honest.
His main subsource, let's think about two things about his main subsource.
First, the main subsource says, I disown what he said.
I didn't say those things to him.
That's not true.
That's not what I told him.
And then two, Person one, who was like the main subsource's primary source, that man was under counterintelligence by the FBI in another case.
The FBI thought person one was a bad guy, so much so they were investigating him.
And yet they were allowing Christopher Steele to plunk his garbage into his dossier to try to go get Donald Trump.
It's remarkable.
And they knew it.
That agent Piantka knew person one was under investigation.
There's no longer, that's not a secret anymore.
They knew it.
It's not that they can claim ignorance.
One point on that, and another point you brought up, which is, I was communicating on email by, through a friend of ours, let's say, I don't mean like in a mob way, but a guy you and I both know, deal with that Fox today, about what you said before as well.
That one of the subsources was a, Associate of the Clintons, and although they don't name that person, we do know as a matter of fact, I'm not making the connection directly yet, but we know as a matter of fact that Sid Blumenthal and Cody Shear, two Clinton acolytes, I mean big Clinton army folks, they've been in there for years,
That they, in fact, were dealing with people within the State Department and giving them information, a lot of it which married up with information which appeared in the Steele dossier.
So that would be kind of a stunning reveal if we found out that, again, Clinton not only paid for the dossier, but essentially some of her lieutenants wrote some of it, by default wrote some of it, too.
Would be pretty devastating.
But you know what is John, everything in this is such a, I hate to say the word bombshell, that the word bombshell loses its meaning because I'm just, nothing really surprises me anymore.
You know, like even today, I was going to get to this.
I've got so much for you.
I'm sorry.
I don't want to hold up.
I don't want to keep you here forever, but another footnote, footnote 347.
Declassified.
We now find out that one of Steele's primary subsources was dealing with the Russian presidential administration and found out that this person was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton.
I mean, I thought we were told this was an effort to support Donald Trump.
I mean, did you see this one, Nick, in 347?
I read it.
I'm like, this is unbelievable.
This destroys their whole narrative.
It is.
Well, there's two things I have to confess to.
I was really wrong about this story.
It was way worse than I ever reported when I started.
This thing is way worse than anything I could have imagined our FBI doing.
And let's think about one thing that really stands out why it's likely the FBI turned a willful and blind eye.
There is a warning.
That in January of 17, I believe it is, that the FBI knew that the Russians had figured out that Christopher Steele was involved in an election investigation inside the United States.
What does that mean?
It means the Russians knew he was a perfect target to feed misinformation about Donald Trump to the FBI.
Think about the consequence of that.
John Brennan, Jim Clapper, all the leftover Obama people, when they went out the door, they wrote a very rushed intelligence assessment saying Russia hacked the Hillary Clinton emails.
I think there's pretty strong proof to that.
The second part of it was Russia's sole intention was to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump president.
If the Russians were trying to elect Donald Trump president, why were they feeding dirt to someone who was leaking it and harming Donald Trump's potential presidency or campaign?
The intelligence community, I believe in, we're all done.
We'll have to revise that assessment.
The evidence in the FBI files make very clear Russia was trying to smear both candidates, not just Donald Trump.
And that's why the Steele revelations are so embarrassing to the FBI.
I'm going to take a quick break.
We're talking to John Solomon, the founder of a great, I can't say this enough, great new website, justthenews.com.
This is actual investigative journalism, quality work John has a reputation for, justthenews.com.
And go to iTunes or Apple Podcasts, forgive me now, it's Apple Podcasts.
John Solomon reports.
This is a new podcast.
Excellent.
We'll be right back with John Solomon.
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Now back to John Solomon.
We're back with John Solomon, founder again of justthenews.com.
Terrific website.
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And John Solomon reports the new podcast on Apple Podcasts.
John, one of the reasons I just want to kind of go back to a question I asked you before, because it's important to me.
Obviously, we've been told Steele wrote the dossier.
It's called the Steele dossier.
I just Don't believe it for a number of reasons.
I think he has input in it, but he does make that perfect face for it, given his experience on the Russia desk.
But something a source clued me into, which really rang my bell.
If you marry up Stefan Halper, who is the spy in this case, who the FBI basically sicks on Papadopoulos and Page, and who's now been outed in a number of different ways.
You know, I don't get into the euphemism game.
Call him whatever you want.
He's a guy who's a spy.
When you marry up his requests, His request from the Pentagon, from the Office of Net Assessments.
When you marry them up with the dossier, the timelines are really suspicious.
I'll just give you two quick examples, which say to me that either he's feeding the information to Steele, or Steele's just copying and pasting information he's sending him in emails or whatever it may be.
One of them is, Right around the time Carter Page goes over to this Moscow trip, you start to see information about Carter Page creeping its way into the dossier memos around the same time Halper is requesting money for all of this stuff.
And secondly, that June 26, there's a dossier June 26, the dossier memo that appears, and it starts talking about Russian cyber influence in the election.
Well, what conveniently comes out on July 26 as well?
Or maybe June 26th.
Presidential Directive 41 from Obama about cyber intrusions and how they're going to cooperate with foreign partners.
In other words, what I'm getting at, not to be too circuitous, is the timing is way too convenient.
You know, the Obama administration wants to make a play on this and this.
Cyber security is a big deal in elections.
We're going to work with foreign partners.
And all of a sudden, a dossier appears magically about Russian cyber influence.
But that's not the only time, John.
In August, on August 10th, the FBI claims they opened up on three people, Manafort, Page, and Papadopoulos.
August 10th of 2016.
On August 10th of 2016, when they don't open up on Mike Flynn, what appears?
Magically, a dossier appears, talking about Mike Flynn and how he's connected to the Kremlin.
And who's the only guy who would experience Mike Flynn at this point?
Stefan Halper, who's been targeting him since basically 2015.
So the timeline here is awfully coincidental, and that's why I asked you that question before.
Your thoughts on that?
Yeah, those are all great points and all great fact points.
There was a community of people.
Nellie and Bruce Orr were part of it.
Stephen Halper was part of it.
It's possible some of Stephen Halper's associates at Cambridge University were part of it.
They were Russophiles.
They were people who were interested in Russia and traded tidbits and rumors and always had a thought that the Republicans were somehow In bed with Russia.
It's kind of funny because Donald Trump has been harder on Russia than Barack Obama ever was in sanctions and other dealings.
It's almost hysterical, the miscalculation they had about Trump.
But I think when we're done, the most valuable thing that John Durham and Bill Barr will do for us We now know everything that happened or most everything that happened from July 2016 through the end of the investigation in April of 2019.
We still have very little visibility to that December 2015 to June 2016 time frame.
Remember, Halper can't be a controlled informant for the FBI in the Russia case until after July 31st when they open the file.
Yet in May, his associate is sending an invite and luring Carter Page over to Cambridge, where we know, you know, some information was learned.
I suspect that what we're going to learn is that there was a private began in December of 2015, maybe a little bit earlier, but certainly December 15, to spy on all these characters.
And then at some point when it got enough of the tentacles that these people wanted, they were going to walk it into the FBI, to the State Department, to the CIA, and try to get a criminal probe investigating.
And the real trigger for that, something that really stands out that people lose the significance of, the day that Christopher Steele first walked into the FBI is July 5th, 2016, just a couple of hours after James Comey announced that Hillary Clinton was off the hook on her email capers.
That can't be a coincidence that the chief researcher for Hillary Clinton walks into the FBI with a dossier on Donald Trump to change the narrative in America between Hillary Clinton's problems to Donald Trump's on the very day the FBI gives her a pass.
I think we're going to learn that this was a planned and long orchestrated campaign, probably started in the private sector.
Then worked with Five Eyes components and then eventually gets walked into the FBI and the FBI takes the bait and puts this country through two and a half years of an unnecessary investigation.
Oh, that's gold.
That is, you know, that I never, that connection between the steel entrance into the FBI and that, I've never put that together.
That is just pure gold right there.
I agree with you.
I've been hearing that a lot myself.
I forget the exact characterization by a friend of ours on this, someone we both know, who said to me that yes, this likely started as a money-making operation, a private sector entrepreneurial enterprise that they figured out they could capitalize on based on people's political ambitions, which snowballed into the collusion hoax mixed with a little bit of hatred for Donald Trump at all levels.
But remember, when you follow the money here, the title of my next book, which I'm going to launch after your book.
I already told my publisher, John, because we're going to do your book first when it comes out.
We're going to make sure you get to number one.
But my book after that, there's a couple of lines in there that follow this exact track.
And I'm glad you brought up this period because this has been a fascinating period for me too, because you're right.
The FBI has persistently said, We did not start this operation until July 31st, but the evidence, John, and when you read the text, is just not there to support that.
And I'd like to, maybe I'll make this the exit question, if not the penultimate, and I'll let you run here.
They've told us from the start that they didn't get the tip about Papadopoulos's alleged statements to Alexander Downer, where they allegedly talk about the Russians have an info on Hillary.
They've been saying they didn't get that till the late summer.
June or so.
But when you read the stroke page text, the meeting happens on May 10th of 2016.
When you read stroke and page text from May 11th, the next day after the meeting, remember the FBI saying we didn't know anything about this meeting until June, July.
We didn't know anything about it.
You read the text the next day.
They're talking about Andy, the Deputy Director of the FBI.
He's on the phone with the State Department now.
The Deputy Director says, we got something really juicy.
Now, there's no smoking gun.
They don't say, hey, we've got Papadopoulos.
But it seems awfully suspicious that the State Department's talking about something juicy right after this meeting with Papadopoulos they claim they hadn't heard about.
Keep in mind, there's another big event, May 8th, which is two days before Downer interacts with Papadopoulos.
You know, Papadopoulos thing was, this was a forced interaction.
It wasn't casual.
They sought me out.
May 8th, Bill Priestap, Pete Stroke's boss, where is he?
He's in London, meeting with our allies.
So two days before the Downer interaction.
This very well could have been a false flag operation that the FBI was aware of.
It could have been done by our foreign allies, but it could very well be a false flag operation.
It has some of those indications from the documents we have.
Pre-STAP's in London, then Downer makes his contact with Papadopoulos, and the next day, Stroke and Page are aflutter about something going on overseas.
And when Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan asked Bill Pre-STAP, what were you doing in London on May?
He said, oh, I can't talk about that.
That's Russian Bob Mueller.
I can't talk about that.
We need to know what Bill Pre-STAP was doing in London on May 8th, just before the Downer interaction.
That's going to be one of the key things that I think John Durham will be able to answer for us.
Yeah, really destroy it.
If he was doing something related to this, it just destroys their whole narrative.
It started July 3rd because May is obviously, you know, for some of the people who have a tough time with a calendar, some of the liberals watching here, May is before.
I'll keep you out of the politics.
That's not what you do.
All right.
One last question.
I'll let you run because you've been so generous with your time.
Again, we're talking to John Solomon from justthenews.com and his new Apple podcast, John Solomon Reports.
Please check it out, folks.
It's really terrific.
Can't recommend it highly enough.
I haven't heard you talk about this much, maybe because it's just in the political realm and not so much the investigative reporting realm, but it is interesting.
President Obama's lawyer, who was given the name The Fixer by the media, not by me, Catherine Rumler, that was his White House lawyer, just a matter of fact.
The media, if you look up The Fixer, Obama, Rumler's name, it's not my nickname for her, but she was kind of like that character in Scandal, the Kerry Washington character who just fixes everything for the fictional president in that show.
Rumler seems to appear magically after the Obama administration leaves office in all of these suspicious cases involved in Spygate as the lawyer.
I'll just give you two.
She appears as the lawyer for George Nader, who was accused of some nasty stuff involving some sexual things, just gross kind of stuff.
Accused, of course, you know, innocent until proven guilty.
But Nader's lawyer, Nader becomes a source for Bob Mueller.
Nader is at the meeting between Eric Prince and this Russian that's used by Mueller.
Again, Eric Prince is the brother of a Trump cabinet official, long and short of his.
That's used as more evidence.
Look, Trump associates are colluding with the Russians.
And the lawyer for the guy who sets it up is Obama's fixer, which is kind of weird.
And then we see recently, I have a chapter in my new book on this coming up.
She shows up as the lawyer for the DNC and Perkins Coie because Carter Page is suing the DNC and Perkins Coie.
I mean, honestly, you're not going to hurt my feelings.
Is this just me being weird about it?
Or is that just strange of all the lawyers in the country?
Obama's fixer just keeps randomly showing up here.
Yeah, Bill Proxmire, the famous Wisconsin Democratic Senator, when I first came to Washington in 1991, said, son, I'm going to give you the best piece of advice you're ever going to get in Washington.
Nothing is a coincidence in Washington.
Nothing.
And I've kept that in the back of my head all my career.
Now, she's a very good lawyer, and she's a heavy-hitter lawyer, and if you're in a criminal position and you've got something, you're going to turn to someone like her.
But I think this gets to the two or three remaining questions that we need to get answers to to have a full understanding of Russiagate.
One of them is, what did the Barack Obama inner circle team know?
What did Susan Rice know?
What did President Obama know?
What did Joe Biden know about the fact that the FBI was looking at the Republican opponent to Hillary Clinton on his watch?
They've never answered that question, and there's that famous memo from Susan Rice where she writes herself on the last day saying, we did everything by the book.
That's not an accident.
That's definitely not a coincidence.
I think the second place, and I think it's going to be a place where we may see criminal action or potential criminal investigation ongoing now and over the next few weeks, is did the Obama administration try to goose the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment, to make Trump look worse than the facts deserve?
Beyond the fact that there was no collusion, the idea that they wanted to set up the picture that Russia was Donald Trump's preferred candidate, we now know that not to be true because they wouldn't be doing the things they did with Steele if they were trying to help Trump.
I think there's a real question about whether the Obama team, on the way out the door, tried to goose the ICA to give the American public and the intelligence community a false assessment that Donald Trump was in bed with Russia.
And then I think the third part is, as this case starts falling apart in January, February, March of 2017, are there former Obama officials, former Clinton officials, that are trying to keep the fire alive, throwing new kindling on there, throw anything at Donald Trump because the core allegations are falling away faster than a sand clock?
Those three things I think John Durham can bring a lot of clarity to.
I think we're going to find out there's been wrongdoing or unusual activity in all three of those areas of the investigation.
And of course, we have the emails and the texts.
You know, the White House is running this.
The POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
We even have the email.
There's one that always escapes scrutiny, by the way, between Page and McCabe, an email where they talk about going to the White House with the CIA deputy director to speak with one voice on this.
Again, all of this just, you know, evidence.
I don't want to get ahead of the story, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming.
John, what's the title of your new book?
Do you have a release date yet?
We're going to announce it in a couple of days, so I will come back.
It's called Fallout.
Nuclear bribes, Russian spies, and Washington lies that enriched Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
It's going to be a great story.
It's going to take a 10-year look at how the Russian reboot by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led to all these crazy scandals that we ended up in right through and including impeachment Big revelations, new declassified documents.
We're really excited about it.
We're going to announce it.
I'm going to tweet it out in a couple of days once the site's set up, and I'd love to come back on your show.
And also, congrats with your new book.
I'm excited.
I'm going to be reader number one on that one.
Oh, thank you.
Thanks, John.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've got to support guys like John.
I know John personally.
He has been at the forefront of this fight, keeping a lot of stuff out of this show, but he's taken a lot of incoming from a lot of people who see him as an existential threat because he's been proven right.
And it really is driving a lot of people crazy.
We've got to support warriors like this out on the front line.
Again, justthenews.com, support John's new site.
You'll get actual news and John Solomon reports on Apple Podcasts.
Download it, subscribe, become a listener.
John Solomon, we really appreciate your time.
As always, you knocked it out of the park.
Thanks so much.
We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks, Dan.
Much appreciated.
You just heard The Dan Bongino Show.
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