Andrew Klavan dissects James Comey’s post-FBI revenge plot, his CNN employment, and politically charged memoirs that triggered Mueller—contrasting Nixon’s self-awareness with Comey’s partisan leaks. He exposes double standards: the IRS scandal under Obama went ignored while Trump faced scrutiny over payoffs or Syria strikes, and Andrew McCabe’s perjury was excused. Klavan ties Scooter Libby’s prosecution to a fabricated Plame scandal, praising Trump’s pardon over Bush’s commutation, and slams Hollywood’s Fair Game as left-wing propaganda reshaping history. The episode culminates in a defense of Pompeo against "woke" attacks, framing Trump’s presidency as a fight against media-bureaucratic collusion. [Automatically generated summary]
A disgruntled former federal employee opened fire at the White House last night.
Ex-FBI Director James Comey had reportedly been mulling angrily on his termination for months.
In the words of one law enforcement official, quote, I guess he just finally snapped and went out to get revenge, unquote.
Local residents said Comey was a quiet neighbor who mostly kept to himself, but that he had recently begun brooding over being fired and he started plotting the White House attack.
Fortunately, no one was injured during the fuselage.
Police wrestled Comey away from the scene and he was later given a job at CNN.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
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Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
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It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
What a clavinless weekend it was.
I turn my back on you guys for two minutes and the entire political scene just evolves into stupidity and bombing Syria and James Comey talking nonsense.
We'll talk about it all and Michael Knowles, who you remember from our last Monday, will be here to discuss the Scooter Libby Partner, which is actually a much bigger story than it's been given credit for.
It's actually a really interesting story because of the background.
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James Comey's Leak00:15:39
So I was watching James Comey, and he was obviously the FBI director that Trump fired.
And he basically claims that this was a form of obstruction of justice.
He released his memos to the press.
He leaked them to the press through a friend at Columbia University.
And that is what started the special counsel investigation, which, according to Comey, in his testimony, he said, that's why he did it.
He did it to get Trump investigated.
So a very, very adept political operator.
But what I was thinking at, I was thinking about Richard Nixon, because everybody always says this scandal is worse than Watergate.
But to me, you know, you look back at Watergate, and Watergate really was a kind of bunch of minor crimes and misdemeanors.
Nothing, nothing at all like the IRS scandal under the Obama administration.
The only difference being the press didn't cover the IRS scandal.
I mean, to take the most powerful agency in the country and silence your political opponents with it during an election year.
I mean, that is a major, major American scandal, but they just ignored it, so it didn't matter.
But they got Nixon.
There was a higher level of honor.
It was before we discovered that the bar of honor only applied to Republicans, not to Democrats.
Once we discovered that, it all kind of became a little bit adjustable.
But Nixon stepped down because he didn't want the country to descend into a constitutional crisis and impeachment hearings and so on.
Nixon said this in his final speech as he was leaving the office, as he was leaving office.
And Nixon, in those days, was just an utter figure of disdain, hatred.
Everybody hated him.
The press had ginned up all this hatred against him.
But he was an interesting, a dark figure, but an interesting figure.
And he made this final comment, which has always stuck in my mind.
Always remember, others may hate you.
But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them.
And then you destroy yourself.
And he was referring to himself.
I mean, it was a very self-aware thought that he was saying he had come to hate the people who were attacking him, and that was why he was destroyed.
And as they frequently said with Watergate, the cover-up was worse than the crime.
And it was the fact that Nixon couldn't concede to his enemies that he had made mistakes, that he had done a couple of bad things, that it all kind of got out of hand, and there was all this, you know, all these cover-ups, all this illegal action to keep the news out of the press.
And he just appeared to the people as a liar and a kind of a crook, as he himself said, as a crook.
I worried during the primaries that we were doing this with Donald Trump, that Barack Obama had gotten us so ticked off, and the press had gotten us so ticked off that we were essentially had come to hate them and were throwing Donald Trump at them like a bowling ball.
The attitude basically being, we gave you George W. Bush, one of the most decent men, you know, whoever was president, and you called him Hitler.
We ran Mitt Romney, one of the most decent men in the country, and you told us, oh, he bullied someone in high school.
He put his dog on the roof, and maybe he was responsible for a death that happened when a company closed.
I mean, you just made him out to be a criminal.
And eventually we just thought, okay, if those are the rules, if Barack Obama can abuse the IRS, if he can lie and lie and lie, if he can do all the things, and he can say he's going to fundamentally transform this country that we love, that we don't want fundamentally transformed, if that's okay and Mitt Romney is the bad guy, here's Donald Trump.
Eat this.
And I was afraid that this was going to destroy the conservative movement.
And there's still that concern.
There's still the concern that basically he's going to alienate so many young people from Republicanism, from conservatism, that we'll never get them back.
However, however, the one thing about Trump is that Trump equals Obama in the talent of making his enemies ticked off.
And I have noticed again and again, and I've spoken about this many times on the show, that the people who come after him destroy themselves.
Marco Rubio with the fingers, you know, talking about the fingers.
One after another, the people who come after him, I mean, can anybody deny that Donald Trump has undermined the credibility of the press, not by his tweets, not by the shouting and the screaming and the yelling, but by what they've done to him.
I mean, a year and a half of Russia investigation with nothing to show for it.
You know, who would trust these people again?
So I was thinking about this as I watched James Comey on TV.
They've been building up and building up his book that he's putting out, and it's this book about how virtuous he is.
But really, there's not that much news in it.
I mean, even Maggie Haberman, a Clinton loyalist at the time, said this.
There's not that much news in it.
It's like he says he has the story of Trump asking for his loyalty, which Trump says is untrue, but he's told that story before.
He compares him to a mob boss.
I mean, this is just, it's just vitriol.
I mean, you know, listen, we have a quote, just a little bit of this.
George Stephanopoulos, who was interviewing him, asked him about comparing him to a mob boss.
And listen to what Comey says.
How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?
Very strange.
And I don't do it lightly.
And I'm not trying to, by that, by the way, suggest that President Trump is out breaking legs and shaking down shopkeepers.
But instead, what I'm talking about is that leadership culture constantly comes back to me when I think about my experience with the Trump administration.
So I'm not doing it lightly, but it doesn't mean when I say he's a mob boss, it doesn't mean he's a mob boss.
I mean, mob bosses kill people, they rob things, they ask for protection money and things like that.
But no, he's not meaning any of that.
He just means that he demands loyalty to himself.
And he says it's all about the family, the family, the family.
So when you start there, you just think like, it's just pure vitriol.
It's just, I was fired and I hate this guy.
And, you know, again, not a lot of news.
He talks about the Russian collusion story.
He says, well, it might have happened.
These things might have happened.
Maybe the Russians had something to blackmail him with, but I could say that about anybody.
Maybe the Russians have something to blackmail Comey with.
A guy like this who's so political, when he walked in to Donald Trump and he said, I just want you to know that there's this story about you with Russian prostitutes.
Trump probably wasn't savvy enough at the time to think about it this way, but Trump may have thought like, oh, Mike, this is like J. Edgar Hoover coming into me and saying, don't step out of line because I've got information on you.
I mean, the guy was obviously playing the game for himself.
So here was the big quote as far as I was concerned, where he asked, Stephanopoulos asked Comey if Trump was unfit for office.
And this is Comey's response.
And I don't think he's medically unfit to be president.
I think he's morally unfit to be president.
A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they're pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person's not fit to be president of the United States on moral grounds.
Our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country, the most important being truth.
This president is not able to do that.
He is morally unfit to be president.
I'm sitting there thinking about this, and I think, okay, treats women like meat.
I would say that that sounds pretty true.
Some of the things, crude things he said, some of the abuses he has, some of the affairs he's had with women, or at least they allege he's had with women, but also true of Bill Clinton, right?
I mean, that was something that was true of Bill Clinton with the girl, you know, young enough to be his daughter on her knees in the Oval Office with all the girls here, with the one woman he was accused of raping, all the girls he was accused of grabbing, treated women like meat.
Then he says he lies constantly about matters big and small.
And I thought like, yeah, like if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
We waited until there were moderates in Iran before we started negotiating with them.
That was a lie.
Bill Ayers, I mean, I'm talking obviously about the lies from Obama.
Bill Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood, not a terrorist who helped me start my political career.
I never heard Jeremiah Wright say nasty things about America after 20 years in the pew.
You know, I mean, these are things that can be held against people.
And I'm not saying that Trump is a good guy.
I'm not saying that he doesn't have a case against him.
I'm just saying when it's all on one side, it makes you just look like a political operative.
And, you know, in terms of Charlottesville, which I think Trump gets hit on this again and again and again, when you go back and look at the transcripts, Trump was in Charlottesville, was talking about people who wanted statues torn down versus people who didn't want statues torn down.
He said you had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
when he said that there were good people on both sides, those were the people he was talking about.
It's very clear.
And it's just, was it tone deaf?
Yes.
Was it not the right way to put it at the moment?
Yes.
But that's what he was saying.
And I just think that the politicizing of this from James Comey is just purely manipulative and political.
And we know he's a political guy from the fact that he leaked information in order to get in order to get a special counsel to investigate the guy who had fired him.
We know that that's the truth.
You know, I mean, this is, it really is interesting.
The Inspector General report on Andrew McCabe came out, the other fired FBI guy.
And remember, the press was weeping and moaning that he wasn't going to get his full pension and all those.
And it says, the IG report says, we concluded that McCabe lacked candor on four separate occasions in connection with the disclosure to the Wall Street Journal.
Three of those occasions involved his testimony under oath.
So he lied under oath, but no one has talked about bringing criminal charges against him.
No one has talked about that.
He lied under oath, but no one is talking about perjury.
The AP reports this, and I'm getting this from newsbusters.
The AP reports this.
The Justice Department watchdog says fired FBI director Andrew McCabe misled investigators over his role in the news media disclosure.
And they talk about the lack of candor, but they do not put together the fact that he was lying under oath.
And so all I'm saying is I admit that James Comey putting out a book is news.
You want to hear the vitriol, but that's all it is.
All it is, is vitriol.
And let's not forget, let us not forget that when James Comey reopened the Clinton investigation during the election, remember at the last minute he said, I've found some new emails on Anthony Weiner's computer and I have to look into this.
The press went nuts.
I mean, the press just hated them.
This is cut number 10.
James Comey is getting horrible advice.
He is interfering in this election.
I don't understand what the guy's doing, but just from pure political point of view, it is a nightmare for the Clinton administration, the Clinton campaign.
I know why they're upset.
They should be.
I think what Jim Comey did was to throw overboard Justice Department procedures because of political reasons, his own internal politics, because of the hatred for Hillary Clinton within the FBI.
This is just the worst possible situation for the FBI, for the country, for Hillary Clinton, certainly.
Why throw that stink bomb in the middle of this, you know, at the very end of the campaign?
I think that's a real big problem.
It does seem like we have a problem with the FBI director.
Comey has said high-profile investigations make him feel pressure to do things quickly and do it well.
Tonight, his critics are wondering if he has failed on both counts.
What we're talking about here is we're talking about being reactionary.
We're talking about having a knee-jerk reaction to everything that happens according to what side you're on.
And this is what I was talking about during the primaries with Trump.
Are we being reactionary?
Are we getting this guy who is a great big animal who's going to tear things down because we're so angry at Barack Obama and we're so angry at the press.
The press, I mean, the press does it to you.
There's no question about it.
The press makes me angry with their constant lies, their constant one-sidedness.
But it's just, you know, when you are watching partisan politics, this is what's happening.
You should know all the time that that's what you're watching.
And when the press is, as we now see they are, Democrat operatives with press cards, as Glenn Reynolds calls them over at Instapundit, when we see their Democrat operatives with press cards, we just remember they are reacting all the time.
And Trump has this kind of magical power to make them overreact.
I mean, even the Democrats, the Democrats, remember, at this moment, hated James Comey.
You know, the RNC has put up a sign called Lion Comey, a site called Lion Comey.
And so they put together this montage of Democrats hating on Comey.
That's where the danger music comes from in the background.
But the montage is perfectly fair.
Democrats have been very critical of James Comey, and many of us did call for his resignation.
Well, I was appalled by what Director Comey did.
Comey acted in an outrageous way.
He made a mistake.
Maybe he's not in the right job.
Howard Dean, former Democratic candidate for president, says, quote, he may have destroyed the credibility of the FBI forever.
This was a very serious error in judgment.
The president ought to fire Comey immediately, and he ought to initiate an investigation.
What he did was unprecedented and outrageous.
Damaged the institution of law enforcement in this country.
The lowest moment in the history of the FBI.
I found it hard to believe that Comey, who I thought had some degree of integrity, would do this.
All I can tell you is the FBI director has no credibility.
That's it.
So what you're hearing is you're hearing Democrats say that stuff.
The press gives them the echo chamber and then Comey comes out and attacks Trump and it's ah Comey, love that Comey.
Comey is, you know, really, I mean, you can just see, here's, let's play cut number four.
There's a CNN panel.
Just listen to the difference in tone suddenly now that Comey is attacking Trump.
We have been waiting for this interview to happen.
Finally, James Comey is speaking out.
This is the man who used to be the head of the FBI, one of the highest offices in the government, calling the president of the United States mortally unfit.
Your reaction.
Look, I mean, this is something that in any other time would be seismic.
And I think even in this time where it's easy to kind of lose sight of things that are enormous, enormously out of bounds and enormously unusual, for an FBI director,
even though he was fired and he has, you know, he certainly feels a sense, he says, of higher loyalty, but some retribution, let's face it, to say the things that he did about a sitting president of the United States is absolutely extraordinary.
It is extraordinary, but is it extraordinary vengefulness, pettiness, ego, or is it an extraordinary revelation?
I mean, this is the whole thing about Trump is like, what has he done?
If Mitt Romney is a criminal because he ties his dog in a crate to the top of his car when he's traveling on a trip, if that makes Mitt Romney, one of the most decent people in the country, a criminal, don't they have to cite something that Donald Trump has done?
Don't they have to say when you say he's morally unfit to be president and all you can cite are things that other presidents have done before him, but they just happen to be Democrats, you know, when you're caught lying while being a Democrat, then it's not as bad.
Don't you have to say like, well, come on, you've got to produce the goods.
You've got to produce the goods.
And Comey kind of says that at one point, which to me turned the entire interview, the entire event on its head.
Comey says we shouldn't impeach Trump.
Mission Accomplished Lies00:10:51
This is cut two.
I'll give you a strange answer.
I hope not.
Because I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they're duty bound to do directly.
People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values.
And so impeachment in a way would short-circuit that.
So James Comey is going to explain to us, this FBI guy who got fired for leaking stuff, he's going to explain to us what our moral duty is.
I mean, where do these guys get the gall?
You know, where do they get the gall?
Where do they think their position comes from?
So now, you know, everything that Trump does is wrong.
And even, you know, he sent a retaliatory strike against Syria over the weekend, almost immediately, the minute the Clevelandless weekend began.
They launched missiles.
I think in Syria they should say, oh, no, a Clevelandless weekend.
Oh, my God.
And you know, the story is, the sourced story that was in the Wall Street Journal is that Trump wanted to go much harder.
He really wanted to dislodge, make some political hits, and maybe even dislodge Assad and make strike on his compound.
But James Mattis talked him out of it and said the ramifications with the Russians and the Iranians would just be too much to handle.
We'd end up having to go in.
We don't want to do that.
Let's keep it steady and just bomb one of their chemical factories, which they did.
Oddly enough, nobody, it sounds like one person was killed.
I mean, don't they, was nobody guarding the chemical factory?
Did they call them up ahead and say there's missiles coming your way?
So, and then he gets it from both sides because he put out a tweet that said mission accomplished.
And they start saying, oh my God, that's what George W. Bush said.
And the mission wasn't accomplished.
But this mission was accomplished.
I mean, listen to this mission accomplished.
This is a montage.
They just seize on this one thing.
The tweet says, a perfectly executed strike last night.
Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine military that France and the United Kingdom joined in.
Could not have had a better result.
Mission accomplished, right?
Makes perfect sense.
Here's the press discussing it.
Trump said the strike was perfectly executed and that the mission was accomplished.
But some in Congress say the strikes didn't go far enough.
Kristen, this morning we've already heard from the president doubling down on his mission accomplished line with Syria.
I know they believe the tactical mission was a success.
But do we know what the strategy is on Syria going forward?
I mean, mission accomplished is a short-term declaration.
And when you tweet about it, this is not the substitute for either a message or a strategy.
Mission accomplished.
Those are loaded words in American politics and dangerous to use when no one believes one night of military strikes will dislodge the Assad regime or bring order to one of the world's most cruel and deadly places.
Well, George, I think it is generally not wise to use the term mission accomplished in an ongoing conflict.
But if what you wanted was a limited, punishing strike as safe for U.S. and Allied forces as you can possibly make it with no unintended casualties on the ground and no escalation in the conflict, then the mission was accomplished.
So it's like the commentary is the mission was accomplished, but was the mission accomplished?
Because it was accomplished, but is accomplishing the mission actually mission accomplished?
Or is accomplishing a mission not an accomplished mission?
In which case, it's not a mission.
You know, and the thing, and the entire, here's the thing about the way this narrative works.
The whole thing with George W. Bush standing on that troop ship where they had put up the sign, mission accomplished, and he was just making a speech, and so the camera caught that with the sign behind them.
That itself was created by the press, right?
If that had been Obama, do you think they would have made a big deal over the mission accomplished sign?
No, of course not.
Of course not.
And then they say those are loaded words in American politics.
Who loaded them?
Who loaded them?
They did.
So it's all their narrative playing back in this endless loop.
It's in this endless loop.
Not to say, however, that Trump didn't get some flack from the right.
There's this whole kind of isolationist body on the right.
Why isn't he building the wall?
Why is he going into Syria?
These things have to be dealt with.
You can't just sit by while they use chemical weapons.
You can't sit by and let people be destroyed without at least making a comment, which is essentially what's sending a couple of rockets over there is to say, we're not going to stand for it.
This is beyond global norms.
You can't do that.
So there does have to be.
But a lot of people were upset about this on the right.
No one more upset than our friend Alex Jones at Infowars.
Listen to this.
And then they sit there and they're like, you know, if you just turn against Trump, things will be better.
But he was doing good, and that makes it so bad.
I love the guy next to him.
I know.
Oh, and that's what makes it so bad.
Peter made a piece of crap from the beginning.
Would be so bad.
But we made so many sacrifices.
And now you're crapping all over us.
makes me sick.
If you can't see that, if you're just listening, the guy sitting next to him, Owen, I guess his name is, has this look on his face like he just sat, like he's on a subway and there's nowhere to move and a lunatic just sat down next to him.
His eyes are about the size of a saucer.
He's going, what is happening to this guy?
So Alex Jones is weeping for Syria.
Weep for Syria, Alex.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
And I'll finish with this and then we'll talk to Knowles.
You know, they had this raid on Trump's lawyer, right?
Trump's personal lawyer.
They had a raid.
And what it seems that they're investigating is that this lawyer, Michael Cohn, made some payoffs to women who were threatening to talk about their affairs with Donald Trump during the election.
And they seem to believe that Cohn got the money to make these payoffs.
He got the money to make these payoffs by applying for a house loan to the bank and then using the money for that.
And that's bank fraud, okay?
So that's what they're talking about right now.
That's everything I know from reading the newspapers, basically, that they have.
So you're talking about the president of the United States.
You're talking about the last president used the IRS to silence his political opponents.
You're talking about presidents who have done things in terms of when Clinton was in office in terms of China that bordered on the very suspicious, you know, very suspicious stuff that he did, the money he took from Russia while Hillary Clinton was doing favors for the Russians.
All this stuff that doesn't count, it doesn't count.
But they're going to go after Donald Trump for some payoffs to some women, which is probably pretty common in politics to begin with.
How do we trust them?
How do we trust them?
And so there's this ping-pong ball going back and forth of this ping-pong ball of reactionary hatred between the left and the right.
And I don't see how it doesn't just keep getting worse and worse and worse until somebody says, until somebody, by accident almost, gets elected who actually has honor and decency and can start to talk to people the way people should be spoken to.
I mean, I'm not defending Donald Trump here.
I'm not defending his attitude.
He had all these tweets against Comey where he called him a slime ball.
And he kind of stooped to his level.
Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack.
He is not smart.
He will go down as the worst FBI director in history.
Comey Drake.
He says he's guilty of many crimes, which that doesn't seem to be true to me.
I'm not sure what Comey did that was criminal.
It is this kind of dialogue where when only one side is expected to be civil, namely the right, ultimately that's just not going to work.
And so we have this reactionary ping-pong game going back and forth.
So if the left doesn't like Donald Trump, I mean, my attitude toward Donald Trump is his lifestyle has been egregious.
He cheats on his wife almost surely.
You know, the way he talks is egregious.
He has a bullying style.
But his governance is fine, right?
His governance has been fine.
He's been governing like a kind of typical Republican to the right, a little bit more conservative than the typical Republican.
He hasn't done anything authoritarian, hasn't stretched the norms of constitutional governance.
So as far as I'm concerned, I'm not inviting him to my house, but he's been a good president.
He has been a good president.
If the rules are, according to James Comey, that he has to have honor, that he has to always speak truthfully, that he can't treat women badly, then those rules have to apply both ways, okay?
Then the lies of Barack Obama have to come home to Roost.
Then the treatment that Bill Clinton dealt out to women have to come home to Roost.
And Hillary Clinton's fronting for Bill Clinton has to come home to Roost.
Until that moment comes, this is just going to be a ping-pong game of lower and lower degradation as we react to each other.
I just think like the press, it's all about the press.
It's all about the press because if the politicians were doing what they do, which is defending their partisan position, and the press weren't only playing for one side, it would be a much, much different scenario.
So, anyway, I think we should go back to Nixon and remember the people who hate you can't destroy you unless you hate them, and then you destroy themselves.
And that seems to me to be going on a little bit on both sides, but maybe right now, just a little bit more on the left.
All right, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to the dailywire.com, listen to the rest of the show.
I think you can listen on YouTube too.
But, but if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you could watch the whole show right on thedailywire.com.
If you subscribe for a lousy 100 bucks, you get the whole year plus the leftist tears tumbler.
And you know, it is magic.
It is a magic tumbler because it fills up automatically with leftist tears whenever I speak.
And then you drink them and it cures your eczema.
All right, Michael Knowles, speaking of XMI, Michael Knowles is coming up right now.
There he is, Knowles.
There you are.
Oh, I can't hear you.
Can you hear me?
Now I got you.
I got you.
Now you've got me.
Speaking of the eczema comment, it was no joke.
I was out at the beach over this weekend.
Yeah.
And of course, look, I have bronze Sicilian skin, so I don't usually lather up the sunscreen.
Right.
And I am just a blister.
You really were out there.
I'm a human blister right now.
So fortunately for the entire audience, nobody can see that right now past the paywall and I'm wearing clothing.
In fact, just imagining it is worse than I do there.
You know, it's fun.
I have this too.
Mine are a desert people, and so I go out and I think I don't need sunscreen.
But now I've just got spray.
I hate that gum.
Oh, yeah.
So I just spray myself every time I go out and there's just a hail of disgusting stuff.
Let's talk about Scooter Libby.
Remind people who Scooter Libby is and how he got in trouble in the first place.
Valerie Plame Affair Context00:10:39
Well, it all goes back to James Comey.
It actually does.
That's right.
It does.
It does.
Oh, my gosh.
Because James Comey, in 2003, James Comey was the deputy attorney general, and this was the first time he royally screwed something up.
There was the Valerie Plame scandal, and he appoints a special counsel to invest, blah, And Scooter Libby was Dick Cheney's chief of staff, chief of staff to the vice president of the United States.
There was something called the Valerie Plame affair.
It basically only existed in the mainstream media in the imagination and fever dreams of the mainstream media.
It existed to attack George W. Bush because George W. Bush was right about something.
It's because he was right and because he didn't have actual scandals, so they had to gin this one up.
It basically all happened because Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative.
She was married to Joseph Wilson, who was a former diplomat.
And so Wilson went on a fact-finding mission to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Niger.
He comes back and writes an op-ed in the New York Times and said, absolutely not.
They wasn't doing that.
And one of these reasons for the Iraq war just wasn't true.
Turns out that al-Dud was not true.
Saddam Hussein absolutely was trying to get uranium from Niger.
This was widely accepted by the international intelligence agencies and the U.S. intelligence agencies.
The only other explanation for a 1999 high-level Iraqi trip to Niger would be that they were, I don't know, just on vacation or something.
Niger doesn't export anything.
It's just uranium.
We know that this is true.
By anyone who has even looked into this for eight minutes, that is now accepted.
Now, it didn't, yeah.
Yeah.
Just to break in here, people have to remember, because people don't remember, they're too young to remember, that the press hated George W. Bush.
You know, they say, oh, it's all about Trump.
It's all about Trump.
No, Trump is different.
Trump is different.
Well, maybe Trump is different, but they hated him.
And the idea that the New York Times had run an op-ed and had got him and then got wrong-footed drove them insane.
So we just have to put that in context.
This is not new with the press.
They hate Republicans no matter who they are.
I know it's confusing because now they love George W. Bush.
They always love the last Republican.
The last Republican.
They always really love him.
But at the time, the anti-Bush hysteria was just as bad as the anti-Trump hysteria in most ways.
People forget about that now.
So they thought they had him.
They were so excited that they had him.
And they were wrong.
They were just dead wrong about it.
So at a certain point, the identity, the covert CIA identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is leaked.
It was a columnist basically saying, you know, he just mentioned it as he was proving that George W. Bush was right.
That's right.
He mentioned Valerie Plame's name.
Novak, writing in the Washington Post, referenced her position with the CIA.
And this became a big scandal.
Now, this is where Comey comes in.
Comey, as Deputy Attorney General, appoints a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate all of these nefarious dealings because the Democrats were hoping that the White House leaked it as retribution for Wilson's op-ed.
There are a lot of moving parts here.
But if you look even slightly beyond the surface, none of that holds up.
The White House didn't have to get back at Wilson for anything.
Wilson got it wrong.
The truth validated the White House.
So there's an investigation into all of this.
Scooter Libby, who was the only guy who was sentenced to prison and fined for this whole thing, was never even indicted.
He was never indicted for it because it was absurd to think that he leaked it.
He did not leak it.
We know that he did not.
We actually know who did leak Valerie Plame's information, and it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
So he had nothing to do with Cheney, right?
And that was the big one.
It didn't have anything to do with the White House.
He was at the State Department.
And so Richard Armitage, who, by the way, opposed the Iraq Commission.
That's right.
He opposed the Iraq Commission.
He opposed the Iraq where he had no reason to get revenge on Wilson or on Valerie Plame.
It just came out as these things do.
People don't know what's covert, what isn't covert.
So we know that Richard Armitage leaked it.
He never went to jail.
He was never sentenced to anything.
They get Scooter Libby because they wanted to get the White House.
They got him on a procedural crime of making conflicting statements to investigators and this, that, and the other thing.
He had absolutely nothing to do with Plame.
He gets sentenced to a quarter million dollar fine and two and a half years in jail.
So very similar to what happened to Mike Flynn in this Russian collusion investigation.
No Russian collusion.
They haven't found a thing, but they got a couple of guys who made conflicting statements.
When they say to you, you lied to the FBI, you've got to decide whether you're going to face a long time in prison or you're going to plead guilty and get a deal.
I mean, that's what you have to do.
That's exactly right.
And they're going to squeeze him.
And look, you can indict a ham sandwich.
And they basically said, look, we're going to get you.
We're going to get you for something.
So we thought we were going to get you on this.
Obviously, that didn't happen at all.
And actually, we already knew from Richard Armitage that he was the guy who leaked it.
But you're going to jail, buddy.
So George W. Bush at the time, despite Dick Cheney begging him to pardon Scooter Libby, as he should have done, George Bush said, no, well, he did do this little procedural crime.
And so I'll commute his sentence, but I won't pardon him.
Donald Trump just pardoned Scooter Libby, justice prevailing 11 years late.
And I got to tell you something.
I like George W. Bush.
I think in many ways he was a good leader and a moral guy.
This was a moral miscalculation on the part of George W. Bush.
And crazy as it sounds, this was an absolutely correct moral judgment made by Donald Trump.
Justice finally prevails 11 years later, 11 years too late.
Well, it's like it is kind of like an Aesop fable of why Trump is in the White House in a way, because the fact that George W. Bush was so in love with maintaining the honor of the office.
Remember, Bill Clinton had dragged the office of the presidency through the muck.
I mean, people used to think conservatives used to talk about how Ronald Reagan wouldn't remove his jacket and tie when he was in the Oval Office because that's how much he respected it, where Bill Clinton was removing his pants in the Oval Office.
He was building human humidors.
There were a lot of things going on.
A lot of things.
Exactly.
And so, you know, George W. Bush, for conservatives, came in with a mandate to restore the dignity of the office.
But in doing this, in not pardoning Scooter Libby for this completely created scandal, a scandal that actually didn't exist.
Because Valerie Plame was not out there in the field, like the girl on homeland, arresting terrorist.
She was already basically back home.
It was not endangering anybody.
So for this completely meaningless leak, they developed the scandal simply to silence the fact that George W. Bush was right.
He was right.
And so it really is, it shows you why conservatives are fed up.
Now, they actually made a movie about this.
I've only seen bits and pieces of it.
What was it called?
Fair Game.
It's this movie with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
Sean Penn, that should tell you all you need to know about the movie, shouldn't it?
But suddenly she was like, you know, Naomi Watts, a beautiful and talented actress, and suddenly that's Valerie Plame, and she's a big spy, basically.
Right.
And basically everything in the movie is untrue.
And the movie also covers up the fact that George Bush was right, that the intelligence was right.
And it gets a little confusing because there was some disinformation about Niger to try to discredit this trip, to try to discredit Saddam Hussein from Saddam Hussein trying to get uranium from Niger.
There were forged documents and all of that.
But the actual facts on the ground that Saddam Hussein wanted uranium from Niger, that was correct.
The movie glides right over that, says no, no way.
And this is what the left always does.
When they can't have the facts on their side, which is frequently, they create fantasies in Hollywood.
So that's all people will remember.
I mean, even for me, I'm a conservative.
I'm a Republican.
I remember this scandal.
I've read a lot about this scandal.
Some of the facts get a little, they're a little confusing.
You have to check some dates.
People are going to remember the movie JFK, where it wasn't a communist, it was some right-wing conspiracy.
They're going to remember Fair Game.
These are the guys who are writing history.
It is a real assault on history, and it's a way that the left always wins the culture.
This is, you know, Joseph Wilson, the guy who wrote the original op-ed, right?
He wrote the original op-ed, and he hadn't really done any investigation.
And they said to him, nobody's going to go see a movie, Fair Game, about this scandal.
And this is a direct quote.
This is what Joseph Wilson said.
He said, for people who have short memories or don't read, this is the only way they will remember the period.
And they do it all the time.
I mean, this is what it means to control the narrative.
It's just this is, you know, even if you get it wrong in the moment, you can get it wrong by making a movie about it that is the only thing, as he said, that people will remember.
Because, I mean, even as we're talking about it, right, it's a minor, weird story.
Who can remember where Scooter Libby was?
And, you know, who can even remember the vice president half the time?
Right.
You know, we remember Dick Chamey because we loved him, but like, still, you know, like, who can remember these things?
But it is exactly what has happened to Donald Trump.
It is this absolute barrage between the bureaucracy, which is like a sort of a system for rejecting anybody who tries to come and get it.
You know, it's like a, I'm trying to think, immunities, an immune system that says that we will kill you if you come and try and fire us.
But it's also the press in Hollywood backing them up.
And this is why when we complain about this stuff, this is why, because they win history even when they lose the truth.
I told you, I got to meet Scalia a couple times before he died.
We asked him, what do you think is the greatest threat to American liberty?
He said, the headless, unaccountable bureaucracy.
Really?
Yeah, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy.
And other reasonable people might say, well, the press.
The press is really lying and covering up for people.
And what we see now is that the press, the mainstream media, utterly one-sided, are lying and covering up for the bureaucracy.
I mean, that is a really unholy alliance, and it's a real threat to liberty.
It's really hilarious to me when I think of all the flack that J. Edgar Hoover got for being a dishonest FBI guy who would come to you.
He would come to you and say, yeah, you don't want to do that because we have documents on you that show you were with Russian hookers, so you don't want to do what you want to do what I want to do.
It's hilarious to me to see journalists, so-called, saying, oh, wow, you don't want to destroy the people's trust in the FBI.
And my feeling is, wait, you're a journalist.
That is your job.
Corey Booker On Gay Rights00:05:18
Do you remember?
You see this from a certain brand of conservative who doesn't like Donald Trump too.
All of a sudden, the federal bureaucracy is just sacrosanct.
Wonderful.
Are you kidding me?
Well, Bill Crystal said, if I have to choose between the deep state and the Trump state, I'll choose the deep state.
And my feeling is everything you say after that sentence is meaningless.
Well, have you looked at this Twitter timeline recently?
So you and I are both walking out of this building after this and going on a trip.
I'm going to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix to talk about Christianity and the culture.
Where are you going?
I was going to speak at the University of Phoenix, I thought.
You know, the online one.
And I don't know.
I haven't gotten my invitation.
I'm going to Alabama.
I'm going to speak to the Alabama Policy Institute in Mobile, which should be a lot of fun.
And then on Thursday, I'm going to Trump University itself, the University of Pennsylvania.
I'll be speaking in John Huntsman Hall.
He's the ambassador to Russia.
I will be colluding with the Russian ambassador, and the speech will be on the topic of reasons to vote for Trump.
There you go.
This is the place where he learned all the best words.
That's right.
Yeah, it's going to be a real come on.
Maybe I'll have a little art of the deal with the protesters.
We'll see how it goes.
All right.
Michael Knowles' show is coming up, and we will talk to you when you get back.
All right, see, Drew.
All right.
Our crappy culture.
So in all of podcasting, is there a smoother segue between Michael Knowles and between Michael Knowles and our crappy culture?
I mean, I think when you're talking to Michael Knowles, our crappy culture just comes to mind.
So Mike Pompeo has been chosen by Donald Trump to replace Rex Tillerson as the Secretary of State.
And you all know what the Secretary of State does, right?
He is our chief diplomat.
He goes around the world.
And Corey Booker decided to question him on one of the truly important issues that comes up when the Secretary of State is going from place to place trying to stop wars from happening.
And this was the moment.
Is being gay a perversion?
Senator, when I was a politician, I had a very clear view on whether it was appropriate for two same-sex persons to marry.
I stand by that.
So you do not believe it's appropriate for two gay people to marry.
Senator, I continue to hold that view.
It's the same view.
And people in the State Department, I met some in Africa that are married under your leadership.
You do not believe that that should be allowed.
Senator, we have, I believe it's the case.
We have married gay couples at the CIA.
You should know.
I treated them with the exact same set of rights.
Do you believe that gay sex is a perversion?
Yes or no?
Senator, if I can, if you're a person, if you believe that gay sex is a perversion, because it's what you said here, Senator, in one of your speeches.
Yes or no?
Do you believe gay sex is a perversion?
Senator, I'm going to give you the same answer I just gave you previously.
My respect for every individual, regardless of their sexual orientation, is the same.
Now, as you know, the Constitution forbids religious tests for appointments, and yet we've seen Dianne Feinstein complaining about someone believing in Catholic dogma.
And this, again, he's saying in terms of his practice as a diplomat and as a CIA director, he treats everybody the same.
His personal beliefs are really his own business.
And yet, of course, the press, the press comes up and they back up Corey Booker in this moment.
Here is CNN Wolf Blitzer and Nia Malika Henderson, Cut 13.
That was a very strong exchange.
Yeah, tough exchange.
In some ways, an expected exchange.
Corey Booker is the progressive on this panel.
You've had a lot of gay rights groups raise these concerns about some of the comments that Pompeo has made in the past.
So you saw some of that exchange come up there and Pompeo essentially relying on the same answer, which is that he treats everybody fairly, that people in the CIA have same-sex partners and he didn't treat them any differently.
But I think there is that issue again.
Can you promote human rights and equality in the way that typically secretaries of state have done and presidents have done if you do personally have this belief that same-sex marriage shouldn't happen and that essentially that people who are gay and lesbian aren't as equal.
And he stood by that.
Unbelievable, unbelievable that it is not enough for a man to treat each person equally.
This is something, I'm going to talk about this more as we go on.
Woke culture, as they now call it, woke culture is racist culture.
Woke culture is anti-religious culture.
Woke culture is sexist culture.
Woke culture is all the things we climbed out of the mud and built this country to get away from.
Woke culture, which pretends to be progressive, is the most regressive culture imaginable.
And it defines everything with which it disagrees as hatred.
And everything it disagrees with is out of bounds.
And so it encloses itself in a cyst of ignorance.
Because if you can't hear people you disagree with, you can never change your mind.
You can never learn new things.
This was appalling.
Pompeo should have ripped into him.
I know he wants the appointment.
And I know you don't want to say to a senator or a congressman, you don't want to say, you know, basically go screw yourself.
But I think that they deserve it.
And we really should be hammering them every single time, every single time they go after an appointee for his religion.
It is unconstitutional.
All right, we will be back.
Really Interesting Conversation00:00:59
I'll be on the road tomorrow, but I will be here.
We will somehow, through the miracle of modern technology, will somehow get me on the air.
Do we have a guest?
Yeah, we're going to have Joseph Tartatovsky.
Oh, yeah, Tartatovsky was on talking about, he has a new book about the Constitution and the people who have tested the Constitution through the years.
That was a pre-recorded, really, really interesting conversation.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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