CNN Identity Crisis, and How Boys Become Men, with Jesse Kelly, and New Nancy Guthrie Timeline Questions, with James Hamilton and Maureen O'Connell | Ep. 1283
Megyn Kelly and Jesse Kelly dissect escalating U.S.-Israel tensions over Iran, citing Vice President JD Vance's reported challenge to Netanyahu and polling showing Trump's approval plummeting to negative 58 among independents. They condemn Fox News for silencing dissent while CNN suffers an identity crisis, then pivot to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case. Guests James Hamilton and Maureen O'Connell analyze unconfirmed claims that a second ransom note indicated Nancy's death, debating whether law enforcement withheld payment to avoid scams or if the family is merely holding out hope amidst Sheriff Arpaio's controversial handling of the investigation. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
So great.
Are you getting nicer weather where you are?
It's getting nice here in the Northeast.
Like we had a 70-degree day yesterday, which is just incredible.
Such a gift.
And then the Lord takes it away.
Tomorrow it's going back to like 30.
But I enjoy, I enjoy just the breakthrough, right?
It's like the people who joke online about how they're like, I don't have seasonal depression.
And then, you know, skipping through the fields as soon as we hit 60.
That, yeah, I feel it too.
In any event, we've got breaking news this morning to bring to you on Iran, plus more attacks on conservatives.
I mean, the right wing is ripping itself apart, really not helpful towards midterms or beyond.
But first, new reports of tensions between Israel and the United States as this war continues with no end in sight.
Axios News today reporting that Vice President JD Vance is expected to be the top U.S. negotiator in potential peace talks between the Americans and the Iranians.
As we've been reporting, the Vice President has long been a skeptic of foreign interventions in general, and we believe the Iran war in particular.
The way Trump described it publicly was he was not as enthusiastic as other members of the cabinet.
He was enthusiastic, but not as enthusiastic.
That's how Trump put it.
But I think we all know that JD Vance has been more part of the isolationist wing, restrainer wing of the Republican Party.
And I think he's handled this whole thing very well.
It would be a massive error to contradict the president or counterman the president publicly.
He is there to be supportive of the president.
I felt that way about Kamala Harris when they made her the border czar.
Like her job at that time was not to come out and say, geez, Joe Biden has really screwed this up.
But then when she ran for president and got asked by the view of all places, is there anything you would have done differently?
That was the time to say, you know, the border wasn't great.
That isn't exactly how I would have handled it, but I understood why my boss did it that way.
Whatever.
You defend the boss, but then you carve your own lane.
I think that's where it's going right now for JD, because what we're hearing now is, first of all, JD Vance was chosen to do this negotiation because he's one of the only ones they say would have credibility with the Iranians who will know what we know, which is he's more of the restrainer when it comes to this war and wasn't in favor of it.
Secondly, they don't trust Witkoff and Kushner, who were stringing them along as we were about to bomb them to smithereens.
So the word of our lead negotiators is no longer good.
And then thirdly, there are reports today that Axios, from Axios, that Israel is already objecting to Vance.
Shocking.
I'm shocked, shocked.
Because he's not pro-war enough.
They're reporting that Vice President Vance and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly had a tense phone call on Monday.
Axios is reporting this.
And all I can think of is Vance in the White House in the Oval with Zelensky and sort of how he put Zelensky in his place.
It sounds like he just did that to Bibi Netanyahu.
The vice president allegedly pressed Netanyahu on his many rosy predictions to our president about how this war would play out.
Specifically, Vance calling Netanyahu out on the fact that there seems to be no chance that a popular uprising will topple the regime as the Prime Minister of Israel promised our president.
So Netanyahu looking at him saying, what happened to your rosy predictions about how the people were going to rise up in the street and see this regime change thing through to the end?
It didn't happen.
Axios quoting an unnamed U.S. source, quote, before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was.
And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements.
Well, good for him.
It's delightful to think about someone holding him to account for the lies he told that got us into this war.
Stop with that President Trump's decision.
I'm aware, but someone talked him into it.
And those people should be held to account.
As this thing goes south, we need to know exactly who talked him into it and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea.
Who?
Who specifically?
The names we know are Bibi Netanyahu first and foremost, Lindsey Graham, equally to blame.
We know from the Wall Street Journal report that Mark Thiessen of Fox News and General Jack Keene were major advocates of the war.
Okay.
Like those guys, but they appear to have been very wrong that this was a good idea.
And we could keep going.
Mark Levin, chief among them.
He says now, oh, I wasn't me.
Every night, every night on Fox News out there, urging the president to do this.
And then he had a meeting with him in June where we know he denies it now.
We know he pushed him for this.
Ben Shapiro was out on his show every day pushing this war.
Like there were very prominent activists on the right who were practically frothing at the mouth for this thing.
And now that it's not only going poorly, but the president's poll numbers are in a precipitous free fall.
We'd love to see some accountability.
Who?
Who promised him what?
And this is a great start, having the vice president speak directly to Bibi Netanyahu and say, you promised regime change was going to be easy.
You promised the Iranians were going to rise up in the streets and see it through.
That hasn't happened.
And the United States is suffering as a result.
And the report is that the response by the Israelis to our vice president doing that was to have a hit piece planted on JD Vance in an Israeli newspaper that is owned by American, but Israel first, mega donor, Miriam Adelson.
So the response is to start drip, drip, drip, planting negative hit pieces on JD Vance.
Good luck.
Good luck with that.
Okay.
Good luck.
We'll see how that works out for you.
Now, related to that, we have to tell you about a story that has not gotten much attention, but has massive implications about war and peace and what exactly we are fighting for in the Middle East.
All right, no one's talking about this.
We're going to walk you through it.
Last Thursday, March 19th, Prime Minister Netanyahu held a press conference.
NBC's Richard Engel, the network's longtime chief foreign correspondent, he knows his stuff, got to ask a question.
Now, this is the official Israeli government press office's feed of that press conference.
Listen to what went down.
You're going to think something happened with your audio feed from the Megan Kelly show.
That's not what's happened at all.
This is straight from the source and how it aired through this Israeli government press office feed.
Watch.
Next question from Richard Engel from NBC News.
Good to see you again.
Just hold on.
He's clearly asking him a question, but there's no sound.
Netanyahu, who's listening?
Engel.
Well, I think we have concrete goals how to do it.
How to end it.
We wanted, as I said, decimate the ballistic missile.
What happened?
Why do we get part of the answer and no question?
It's really not that helpful when you can't hear the question the reporter asked.
Well, they muted Richard Engel.
They muted a member of the American press at a press conference in the middle of the war.
That's what the Israelis did.
Now the story did not get any attention at the time, but on Wednesday, we heard from Richard Engel himself on the Sky News podcast called The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim, and we got to see and hear the question.
Many Americans do believe that Israel dragged the United States in this war and is now pulling the rest of the world along with it.
How do you see this ending?
Well, I think we have concrete goals how to do it.
How to end it.
We wanted, as I said, decimate the ballistic missile program, which we're doing, decimate the nuclear program, which we're doing.
This canard that we dragged the United States into it is not just a canard.
It's ridiculous.
How about that?
So he brought up the widespread belief.
It's not a belief.
It is a fact.
It's a fact that Netanyahu talked Trump into joining this war and now is trying to recruit even more countries into the conflict.
And to make matters worse, Richard Engel had a follow-up question.
And that did not make Netanyahu's handlers too happy either.
Here's Engel explaining what happened next.
After I asked my question, the handlers, they took the microphone away from me, and I was happy.
I'm not done yet.
I didn't exactly ask, however, why the Israel...
No, no, I think I only figured out...
No, no, I think it's only fair enough.
This is a serious subject.
This is a serious.
My question.
Question for outlet.
Go ahead.
You don't have enough time.
Why don't this is a world war and peace here?
Of course, but you have oil fields around the world that are burning.
Gas prices are going up.
The war is popular here in Israel.
It is not popular with many Americans.
So my question was, how do you see this ending?
Not why, not even when.
What do you imagine the day after will look like?
Well, we have achievable goals in order to have the flow of oil.
Just have oil pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula, right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports.
And you've just done away with the choke points forever.
That is definitely possible.
This is unbelievable, but totally believable.
I mean, this is obvious media manipulation by the Israelis, and you should not trust what they say.
You should not trust what they're putting out.
Obviously, they are lying and manipulating the American press.
Imagine what they do to their own press in order to make sure Netanyahu looks good.
And the attempts by the American reporters to hold him to account aren't seen by a wider audience.
Do you really find it so hard to believe that they dropped a hit piece on JD Vance after he confronted Netanyahu directly about his rosy promises that are not coming true as American soldiers die?
This is like this is prov to esque type shit.
Jesse Kelly is here today.
He is the host of the Jesse Kelly Show on the Megan Kelly Channel series XM111.
Listen to it every weekday at 6 p.m. Eastern.
He's also got a book out called Jesse Kelly's Little Red Book.
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All right, Jesse, great to see you.
So I'm sorry, but like, this is bullshit.
Building A Domestic Coalition00:15:33
Like an Israeli prime minister who interferes in our foreign policy to get us to join him in this war.
And then when an American reporter asks him about it, says many Americans do believe Israel dragged the U.S. into the war and is now putting the rest of the world along, pulling the rest of the world along with it.
How do you see this ending?
It disappears.
It magically disappears thanks to the Israeli government press office muting him.
Your thoughts on it.
Well, sorry to filibuster as I often do when you have me on, Megan, and thank you for having me back.
But my thoughts on it are this.
I think a lot of people are ignoring or not just acknowledging a very practical reality of both this war and so many wars throughout human history.
And that practical reality is allies are often allies during a war because they share a common enemy.
And oftentimes, all the time, allies do not share the same end goal in said war because they are allied up to a point.
And then after that point, they see different endings in it.
You could go through any war.
I mean, ancient times, any war throughout history where you have these allegiances.
And that's what happens here.
The United States of America hates Iran.
Iran hates America.
Israel hates Iran.
Iran hates Israel.
We are allied with Israel and the fact that we do not like Iran.
We wanted the mullahs out, all these other things.
We are allied in them up to that point.
The Trump administration has to consider this.
66% of Americans believe he is not focused enough domestically.
The Trump administration is the Trump administration because we want people who are not MAGA hardcores, the Maha people, young men who are disaffected by the economy.
Donald Trump won the popular vote because of those people, not because I voted for him.
I was always voting for him anyway.
Donald Trump is currently 66-0, 60 points underwater with the people who put him in the White House.
Those are people angry about the economy.
60.
If those numbers were the same, it would be President Kamala Harris.
They don't think he's focused enough domestically.
Therefore, no matter what, we're in this now.
Donald Trump needs an off-ramp.
He has to get out and come home.
All right.
We killed the Ayatollah.
We blew up a bunch of Iranians.
Sounds good.
Screw those scumbags anyway.
The political reality is he must stop this and come home.
And he knows it.
He's not some moron.
He can read all the poll numbers.
All these people do all day is read poll numbers.
He has to end it and come home.
On the flip side, Israel views this, and they're probably very correct about this, as their last and best shot at getting rid of Iran, which has plagued them permanently.
They don't view this as an option to end it.
They don't want to end it because they don't think they're ever going to get another shot.
And they're probably right about that for a variety of reasons, which we can get into.
They're probably never going to get another shot like this with American big brother dropping tomahawks on Iran every single day.
So we are allied up to a point.
But if, you know, if I'm, if, if you're my neighbor, Megan, you live right next door and the neighbor across the street keeps letting his dog poop in our yard and we join together and we say what we're going to do is we're going to get our dogs to go poop in his yard.
Yeah, we'll be allies.
And then you say, well, yeah, then we'll burn his house down with his family in it.
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we were allies to a point.
Now you're taking it too far.
The different end goals is what we're dealing with here.
Yes.
Well, well put.
This is so I'm against this war, as the audience knows, but I'm against it for many reasons.
Practically speaking, the political fallout from the war is front and center in terms of long-term problems for America, because we cannot have, as you call them, the communists, return to power.
And that's exactly what's about to happen.
The polling for the president on the Iran war is horrific.
It is horrific by any measure.
He keeps looking at the limited polling that people who call themselves MAGA overwhelmingly approve of the war.
That is no more than 30% of the population.
It's no more than 30% of the population.
So he may have 92% of those people, but it's no more than 30% of the population.
We have 70 plus percent outside who are not MAGA, who are very against this war.
And they vote that you cannot win an election with just the people who describe themselves as MAGA, especially when Trump is not going to be on the ballot in 2028.
He's not going to be on the ballot in the midterms.
So the MAGA faithful, what motivates them?
Donald Trump.
He's not going to be in either of these ballots.
And we've seen before that he doesn't necessarily have the coattails for other people who say they're like in his mold to get them over the line.
You need Republican Party support and independents to win elections.
And that is still a golden rule.
So listen to Harry Enton describing President Trump and the approval on the Iran war sought for.
When there was this slew of initial polls that came out, the Fox News poll was the one initial poll that did not show that the war was unpopular.
That has changed.
Trump has lost his one good poll when it comes to the Iran war because just take a look here.
Net approval rating of U.S. military action in Iran.
In early March, it broke even, right?
Zero points.
What that essentially means is 50% approved, 50% disapproved.
But down it goes.
Look at this now.
The net approval rating for the U.S. military action in Iran, negative 16 points.
Just 42% of the American public approve of it.
58% disapprove.
So now we're looking at basically every single poll in which the clear plurality or majority of Americans disapprove with the U.S. military action in Iran.
Trump can no longer point to a poll that actually shows that among the general public at large, that the American public actually approve of this military action.
But look at Trump's handling of it.
It's even worse.
Oh my.
Okay.
Trump's net approval rating of Iran.
Look at this overall, 28 points underwater.
Very, very unpopular Donald Trump's actions are when it comes to Iran.
And look at those in the center of the electorate.
Look at independence.
Negative 58 points, 58 points underwater.
I mean, all right.
So there's a couple ugly addendums I'll add to this.
And I'm sorry.
It's just, it is ugly.
It is what it is.
First of all, we have to understand.
Anybody with two eyes and two ears can see just from what Harry just laid out for us.
This never goes up.
Those numbers don't change direction.
Every single day now, they get worse.
There is nothing in the world that could happen that will reverse those numbers.
So every day, tomorrow we will wake up.
They'll be worse than they are today.
That's the trajectory of it.
That's one thing that's really, really ugly.
Another part of it that's really ugly, and this may be the ugliest part, as I have explained on my show over and over and over again, whatever you feel about this war.
It has always been, has always been easy to start a war.
If I decide I want to have an argument with my wife, she says hi, by the way, Megan, she loves you.
If I decide I want to go home tonight after work and have an argument with my wife, I can most definitely do that.
I've been married 19 years.
That's quite easy.
I can fire off an argument, but can I stop that argument and get all lovey-dubby with her whenever I want?
No, that's not how that works.
Because now we've got two parties.
Now we're at war.
She's offended.
It's easy to go over there with our military, our incredible military and our might and bomb the Iranians back to the stone age.
That is easy.
Now companies are scared to send oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
Now there are mines.
Now there are things outside of our control now that it has been started.
Donald Trump is on the highway.
He needs an off-ramp.
He has to pee.
But as someone who has driven in Montana many, many times before, I will tell you there is not always an off-ramp available to you when you have to have one.
Now there is a chance we are stuck.
He called for a ceasefire now until April 6th.
I'm going to back off these power plants.
Everyone's going to back off.
We're trying to work out a deal.
He's got JD Vance burning up the phone lines over there.
Let's work out a deal.
What if Iran decides they don't want a deal?
Iran's military cannot defeat Donald Trump in the United States military.
The one weapon Iran has, the most powerful weapon they have, is the one we cannot bomb.
And that is the state of the United States economy.
Iran knows it.
They can read poll numbers the exact same way Donald Trump knows it.
Iran knows the longer Trump is here, the less popular he is, the less popular he is.
The worse we get wiped out at the midterms.
The worse we get wiped out at the midterms, the more neutered Donald Trump and his administration are for the final two years.
Iran's greatest weapon is the United States economy, and they have deployed said weapon.
That's a fact.
And they're making money in Iran right now.
Before the war, Iran was exporting 1.1 million barrels of oil at $47 a barrel.
Right now, they're exporting 1.5 million barrels of oil at $120 a barrel.
Like Iran is actually making money because they've taken over the Strait of Hormuz.
They control it.
The Saudi and the other countries in the Gulf are not exporting their oil, but Iran is.
Iran's letting its own ships go through and they're getting their oil out.
And now we seem to have a new goal in ending this war, which is we need to open the Strait of Hormuz.
You mean the strait that was open before we began the bombing campaign?
I mean, it was open.
There was no problem with Strait of Hormuz.
Like it was fine.
The reason it's closed is because we decided to start a war.
And this is the only thing these guys can control and they know it and they're doing it rather effectively.
And you can hear Trump's frustration as he's like, NATO should get over there and help us.
And NATO, the NATO countries are like, we agreed to help defensively.
If you get attacked by another country, you didn't.
We don't want part of this quagmire.
We're out.
And Trump's trying to guilt them into it.
And it's not working.
And then he says, you know, he's picking on.
random adversaries or random random allies of ours being like, how about you?
You owe us.
You can see him.
He's getting frustrated.
But this is not something you can just double and triple and quadruple down on and have the problem get better.
Because Trump, as his frustration grows and he tries to guilt our adversary, our allies into helping us and they're not, seems to be saying, all right, fine, we'll do it, you effers.
And he's sending five to 7,000 troops are already there, Jesse.
It's 5,000 to 7,000 who arrived today.
And now the Wall Street Journal reporting last night that we've, he's considering sending more than, more than, a minimum of 10,000 more.
So now we're talking about 17,000 American ground troops minimum that we may have over there.
And let me give you another statistic from the polling.
Reuters did a poll eight days ago.
You know what percentage of the American people support a, quote, major ground invasion?
By any standard, five to 17,000 American troops is a major ground invasion.
Seven, seven percent of Americans would support a major ground invasion.
We cannot send five to 17,000 troops into Iran and ever win a Republican election again for the next 10 to 20 years.
He cannot do that.
Everything he built, the entire coalition we were all part of, will be ruined.
Well, I mean, you laid it out.
Let's just put it in very simple terms.
Megan, the American right, Donald Trump, the Trump administration, they have to decide whether this war in Iran is worth the communists conquering every single branch of government again in the United States of America, because that is the stakes of the game.
Yes.
I think it would be, I think it would be worthy to remember what it was like four years under Joe Biden, 20 million foreign barbarians brought in.
They created an app on your phone so foreigners could invade the United States of America.
The White House lit up in rainbow colors, on and on and on down the list.
We go, federal government packed full of transsexuals, all the nightmare that was there.
We have to decide.
Look, the poll numbers don't lie.
We are going to have to decide whether the war in Iran is worth that again, because that very likely is the stakes of the game.
I will again remind everybody that presidencies are won with coalitions, not with the hardcores.
As much as we hardcore Trump voters, I'm a three-time Trump voter myself, as much as we love to believe that we are everything, Trump has 94% approval with the MAGA.
That's always the case.
Donald Trump could go out and kick a puppy in Central Park and he would still have 94% approval with MAGA.
That is always the case.
He is not the president because of me.
He is president because he very smartly brought in guys like RFK Jr., who doesn't even align with him on things.
My wife is not a hardcore political person, certainly not a hardcore Donald Trump person.
She is a hardcore health freak with the things and the foods and the health and all that.
The second Donald Trump brought in RFK Jr., my wife was ready to strap on a MAGA hat.
That's called building a coalition.
Why did Donald Trump go on these podcasts like Rogan and Theo Vaughan and all these other young men podcasts?
Why?
Because non-political young men do listen to those podcasts in droves.
Trump is a great interview.
He sits down.
He's real.
He talks about his family.
He cracks a couple of funny jokes.
Young men who are not hardcore MA voters came out in droves for Donald Trump.
That's called adding to a coalition.
That's how you win the popular vote, certainly as a Republican in the United States of America these days.
And those people, every single poll shows, are leaving us and they're leaving us because they are unhappy with the United States economy and they do not feel like Donald Trump is focused enough domestically.
People can get as mad at me as they want about that.
You can take your offense and wipe your rear end with it.
I don't care.
I'm giving you a dose of reality.
We have to wake up and smell the roses.
People cannot find a job.
Their son, their daughter just graduated college.
They moved in back home.
Manufacturing has not come back.
Prices have not come down.
Not that I'm blaming all this on Donald Trump, by the way, but when these are the conditions in the United States of America, you cannot be seen to be focusing everywhere else.
If the neighbor's yard has weeds all through it, I may care a lot if things are fine in my house.
But if my air conditioner just went on the fritz, I have a leak in the ceiling.
My fence fell down from a storm last night.
I don't give a crap about how many weeds the neighbor has.
I got my own problems.
The degree to which any society cares about foreign lands is directly correlated to how happy they are at home.
When Americans are happy at home and satisfied at home, they are fine with some level of foreign adventuring.
When they are buried in credit card debt, work in the second shift, can't make ends meet.
The Political Side Of War00:06:19
They don't want to hear about Iran, the MULA, nuclear weapons, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, even Venice.
They don't care about anything.
They want a job, period.
Yeah, it's so true.
I want to correct something I said earlier.
MAGA's not 30% of the country.
MAGA's MAGA, the Republicans are 30% of the electorate, Republicans, and MAGA's half of that.
So you've got 15% of the country who are MAGA, who are completely in Donald Trump's corner.
It's like 92% favor the war in Iran because Donald Trump told them to.
That's great.
That's great for Donald Trump.
He can make himself feel terrific knowing that MAGA is still with him.
But that does not win you an election.
And he is losing support amongst the wider Republican base by the second.
As you point out, these numbers, the approval numbers on the war don't tend to go up.
And there's not going to be some big moment like at the end of World War II where the Japanese surrendered.
And we had some moment where the troops came home and the girls kissed them in the middle of Times Square.
That's not how this one's going to go.
The Iranians do have a meaningful hand to play and they're playing it.
They have their own demands that they want now, including reparations.
Of course, they want us out of their country.
They may give us some things on like not enriching uranium.
They were reportedly already going to give those to us when we bombed them.
You know, the Middle East observers of the negotiations that Kushner and Witkoff were doing with the Iranian emissaries said that we were actually making progress, that the Iranians were giving and taking in the way that a negotiation goes when we dropped our bombs on them.
And so now we found somebody eighth in line to power who says, okay, we'll still have that discussion, but we're pissed now and we're not going to give you everything.
So we're not in a better position.
We're not in a better position than we were.
And now we have 13 U.S. service personnel dead and we're going to have more.
If we send five to 17,000 ground troops into Iran this weekend in the coming weeks, we are going to have more dead service personnel.
And for what?
For what?
That does not make those numbers go up.
People do not like to see it.
They don't like to see it even when we've been attacked, like post 9-11, but they'll stomach it when we've been attacked.
But we haven't been attacked and they know that.
And I'm sorry, like it's not just Ben Shapiro's fault, but I am going to show you something that Ben Shapiro is out there saying because it's insane.
He, the way he's talking about our troops, and he's not the only one, Mark Levin, too.
He talks about like the gas prices.
Like, so what?
Fucking, you're going to have to pay another 50 cents a gallon.
By the way, it's more than that.
It's already up a dollar a gallon in order to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
You do it.
Oh, easy for you to say.
You're a multi-millionaire.
And by the way, no one believes that we were about to get bombed by a nuke by Iran.
But here's Ben Shapiro talking about our troops.
You, you served.
You understand the sacrifice that our troops make and the risk they take when they sign up.
I would submit to the jury, it is not to die in a war for Israel.
But here's Ben Shapiro talking about it.
And also, Americans are not dumb.
We don't believe that if you're involved in military activity, you're not going to lose anybody.
Because again, if necessary military activity can only be pursued at zero cost, there's no use in having a military.
Literally, the point of a military is to do hard and dangerous things.
That's why our military members are heroes.
During Vietnam, the Viet Cong counted on the idea that Americans would get tired, that Americans would get bored.
And after a while, they were right.
Americans did get tired.
After a while, they were right.
Americans did want out.
We should know that there were 50,000 American dead by that point.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, too.
Reality is that there is no way to extricate ourselves from this situation right now.
There is no way to extricate ourselves from this situation by simply running away.
That does not leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which means $100 to $150 barrels of oil from here to forever.
And here's the thing.
Once we get to the end of this, if the Iranian regime falls, energy will become cheap again because the Strait of Hormuz will be free again.
I'm sorry, but that's disdainful.
Megan, people always point out Vietnam and the Viet Cong and things like that.
And Americans got tired.
But here's the reality of it.
And I've read this in a million books.
I've been told this personally by veterans.
It is a fact and it is a fact that nobody likes.
Certainly dudes don't like this.
There is a political aspect to every war, not just a military aspect.
I'll give you a little example.
Rhodesia was once this heavenly, heavenly country in the middle of Africa, most prosperous country in Africa, really settled by England and run by these well-to-do great families.
This is paradise right in the middle of Africa.
And they eventually got assaulted by communist savages on all sides.
Of course, backed by Jimmy Carter and other scumbags.
We won't go into the whole details of it.
But the Rhodesians were excellent fighters, incredible fighters, and they pulled off this amazing mission where they went undercover across the border into an enemy base.
They drove basically enemy trucks into the enemy base, drove up all the enemy soldiers, surrounded them on the parade ground, and then they opened up with heavy machine guns and just butchered all of them, turned around and took off and didn't lose a man.
It's one of the most amazing, daring, brilliant military actions I have ever heard of or read about in my entire life.
And to this day, you can talk to men who fought in the Rhodesian War who will tell you that helped them lose the entire war because the images of dead enemy soldiers slaughtered on the parade ground caused such an international incident that Rhodesia's last ally in that war, the last ally they had left, that was South Africa, decided to cut ties with Rhodesia, which cut the country off completely, which ended up having it fall to the communists.
And now it's Zimbabwe, one of the poorest, biggest dumps on the face of the planet.
There is a political and a military aspect to every single war in Iwo Jima.
I mentioned we talk about Vietnam, FDR.
These people, the presidential administration at the time were mortified that we had over 6,000 Marines die.
This is at a time when Americans were uniquely invested in this war because Americans were tired of it.
Poll Numbers Show Division00:14:43
This isn't an American thing.
This is every country ever has a limited amount, a very finite amount of caring for any war, and then they want it to stop.
The truth is, Americans, as you pointed out, do not feel emotionally invested in this.
They simply do not.
I know the Trump administration tried.
I know many different people are trying, but nukes.
Okay, that may be true.
I have no reason to call Donald Trump or Rubio or anyone else a liar.
They may have been 15 minutes away from a nuke that did not sell with the American people.
The poll numbers bear that out.
Politically, this is absolute suicide.
So again, we can argue all day long.
The choice is very, very simple.
Is the Iran war worth handing the United States of America's government back over to the gay race communists?
Because that is the choice we are currently making.
And it's happening.
I mean, there have been, I think, 15 special elections for these state house races that have been happening over the past year.
And the Republicans have not won any of them.
They've all gone blue in jurisdictions that were heavily red, that had gone for Donald Trump by some, what, 19 points in the latest one down in Florida or between 11 and 19.
I can't remember the specific number in Florida, but I saw the list and there were many that had gone 19 Republican that have now swung blue.
This is a terrible harbinger for things to come in these midterms.
There are serious political pundits now predicting the Republicans genuinely may lose the Senate in addition to the House.
Yeah.
And now, and what does that do in terms of the Republican positioning on the Senate in 28 when they have more seats that are, we weren't supposed to lose the Senate, Republicans, in this midterm election.
That was not supposed to happen at all, but now they're seriously talking about it like it might.
And but then the next election in 28, where there's a presidential race on the line as well, the Republicans are more exposed.
So, I mean, now you're, now we're on route to a, what, a 60, a 60 seat Democrat majority?
Do you know what that is?
That's a fucking nightmare because the Democrats could actually win the White House too with these approval numbers.
President Trump's approval numbers are in the basement.
They're the lowest that they have been.
And it is the economy first and foremost that's dragging him down.
And now the Iran war.
And by the way, he's lost Hispanics too.
The entire coalition that put him over the top is falling apart as, as you point out, that Joe Rogan's come out against the war.
Dave Smith is hardcore against Trump right now and has been for a while, a comic who's brilliant.
Theo Vaughan came out against it.
He lost comedian Andrew Schultz on whose podcast he made a lot of friends a while ago.
Sean Ryan has same against it now very strongly.
This is a coalition that the young men of America very much listen to.
And young people are completely against this war.
Even in the Republican Party, the latest poll that just came out from Pew showed the net approval among Republicans.
18 to 29 year old Republicans are against the war by a margin of minus two.
So net net, they're against.
It's not by a huge margin, but they are against as young Republicans.
The next setup, 30 to 49 year olds, they're for it, but only by a 20-point margin.
And then when you get to the older people, 50 and up, it goes up.
So it's older Republicans who support this war.
And it's only older Republicans who support the war.
Only.
The Independents are overwhelmingly against it, as you heard Harry Enton talk about.
Democrats are united against it for their own reasons.
And look at the numbers for Hispanics.
Let me just show you, because that's another part of the Trump coalition, right?
You had the young people.
You had a greater number of black voters.
You had men.
Harry Enton did a thing the other day showing men are against this, young men in particular, completely against this war.
And look at Hispanics.
Fox News just did a poll.
The Trump net approval rating dropped 40 points among Hispanics in the new Fox poll.
In just December, in just December, the Hispanic approval of Trump was, it was 48% approved, 52% disapprove.
All right, so he was four points underwater.
Now, March 20th to 23rd, approval has gone from 48% to 28%.
Disapproval, 72%.
Instead of a net negative of four, he's now at a net negative of 44 with Hispanics.
This is a Fox News poll broadening out to overall, not just Hispanics, the entire electorate.
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump's handling Iran?
Approved 36%.
Disapprove, 64%.
How concerned are you about gas prices?
Not concerned, 20.
Concerned, 80%.
And then there's Mark Levin.
Here's a poll question no media outlet asks.
Would you prefer that the Iranian regime launches nuclear missiles at our country or paying 50 cents more a gallon for gasoline?
Jesse, if they go with that Mark Levin approach between now and November and thereafter, then they deserve the giant effing they're going to get.
You know, Megan, I go back and forth on this because you laid out all the numbers and the numbers, they are what they are.
I have these moments where I say to myself, you know what?
If we get wiped out in November because of this, we've friggin' earned it.
You know, when Donald Trump gets impeached every other week, he signed up for it.
But then I remember that there's a lot more at stake than me and my anger and petty grievances and things like that.
My children, I have two teenage boys.
I don't want them to live in a communist-run country.
Lord Billy, they will get married one day and have children.
We have huge things at stake here at home.
And fighting our domestic enemy has to be everything.
And we need to continue to stress that it's not just the economy.
It's not just Iran.
These issues are linked for people.
They are linked for people.
Part of the reason people are so unhappy economically, just so everyone completely understands this, is pre-COVID, people were richer that we hadn't had this rampant inflation.
Pre-COVID, people remembered what it was like.
People remember today what it was like to be able to afford to take your family out to Applebee's on a Friday night.
They remembered what it was like to be able to go to the beach once a year on vacation, fancy or not.
They remembered what it was like when life was better because it was so recent.
Americans are poorer and they remember when they were richer.
And when you were richer five years ago, before we shut down an economy for a bad chest cold and printed $7 trillion, when you remember what it was like to be richer and now you're poorer, you don't want to hear about Iran and nuclear weapons.
You don't give a crap.
You don't care about Russia, Ukraine.
This is why it fell so flat when Joe Biden tried to sell it all the time with his buddy Mitch McConnell.
The most important thing in the world is Ukraine right now.
You know why that never landed?
They kept selling it every single press conference and leading up to the election of Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump.
Ukraine was somewhere below genital warts on the popularity of things.
Why was that the case?
Why was it the case?
Because you don't care about anything.
It's not the righteousness of the cause.
It's not that it's good or bad.
When things are bad at home and you remember Applebee's and you haven't been there in three months because you're on your second shift and your wife had to go back to work, you don't want to hear about foreign affairs.
And I'll tell you what, if the GOP plan is to run ads in the midterms telling people, well, two weeks away from a nuclear weapon, oh my gosh, we are going to be annihilated.
But you know what'll be comforting?
After we lose 60 seats in the House of Representatives, the next morning we can all wake up and say, but 94% of Malcolm was with us.
That'll take us far.
Yeah.
And also, you know, 50% more in gas.
I mean, really, who am I to complain?
I sacrificed for my country.
Honestly, like the nerve of this guy.
Mark Levin has been making millions of dollars off of his radio show and his Fox News gig for years now.
This is a true let them eat cake type moment.
By the way, it's not 50 cents.
It's not.
It's a dollar more per gas and it's more than that for diesel.
And it's only going in one direction.
You know, we reported this morning on our morning update show that the Trump administration is reportedly game planning what happens in the U.S. economy if the price per barrel of oil goes above $200.
200.
The administration denies that, okay, but it's a reliable report.
$200, like if it goes, and you're already having very smart oil and gas analysts say there's only one direction that this is going.
And we haven't felt the full effect, full effect of what's happening in the oil market and the energy market yet.
We're only feeling the initial tremors that the full pain will come just in time for summer vacations and the trip you are going to take with your family cross country in the station wagon to the Grand Canyon.
Gas prices, trust me, as a newswoman, every year, I've been doing this 24 years now.
Gas prices in the summer are always, always a news item.
They always seem to go up.
People always feel the pain then.
They start looking at the gas prices more than ever.
They're driving more than ever.
And if this thing is actually going to hit most over the course of the summer, this energy crisis that we've created, two months before they actually vote for the midterms, Jesse, I don't know where this could go.
So Trump, he is brilliant.
Trump is a political genius.
That hasn't changed.
He's been dazzled, I think, by some smooth talkers into believing this thing could have been quick and just like Venezuela and he could sort of feel like Captain America.
And that's not what's happening.
So now he's offloading the get us out of this thing to JD Vance.
That's yay.
That's good.
Thumbs up on that.
And I think what needs to happen right now while JD does his job is no one should be able to talk Trump into fucking 17,000 ground troops.
Like that can't happen.
5,000 can't happen.
We should not shed another drop of American blood on the oil fields of Iran because all these numbers get worse as soon as we do.
And by the way, he's already, you know, as we point out, he's losing men.
He already lost women.
He has very few women who are voting for him.
But I guarantee you, as more American men and women die over there in Iran, the few women he has are going to start to dwindle too because women do not like American casualties at all.
I mean, that's another thing I know from my 20 years at Fox.
In any event, it's such a shit show.
And here's part of the problem is the media, right?
Because if you are a Republican who still watches television news, all you watch is Fox, Jesse.
That's all you watch.
And you will not find a dissenting voice on Fox News.
Can we get the Will Kane side over here?
I love Will Kane.
You know, the one we never ran with, General Keene.
I love Will Kane, and he's an honest broker.
But he's the only one who's like tried to like ask a couple skeptical questions, like, this isn't great.
Everybody else is cheerleading the war.
So Republican voters who are older voters, but they are the ones who actually go to the polls, all think it's going swimmingly.
That's what they believe, because that's what they're being told every night by Sean Hannity.
I mean, his show is full propaganda with Lindsey Graham every night, Tom Cotton, you know, all these big cheerleaders for the war.
And then you've got like, let me know when we have it.
Like the one time one guy tried to ask a dissenting question, he got his hands slapped by General Jack Keene, who I also really, I love General Keene, but he's, you know, show the hammer, the nail.
What is it?
To a hammer, everything's a nail.
Of course, he's in favor of this action.
And to me, it's just evidence of the media problem we're having when you look at the Republican numbers.
We have this out.
Here it is.
Watch what happened.
You know, I think the objectives are pretty clear.
Hegseth just, Secretary just laid it out.
The president has laid it out and the Secretary of State has laid it out.
The objective is to prevent this regime from having the capability to continue to attack us.
And we don't retaliate.
This president is not going to let this happen again.
So that is the mission here.
It's pretty clear.
Well, it's not 100% clear to me, General.
And that's not to suggest that I don't support 100% what is happening, nor that I 100% offer my support.
I just think I want to ask a couple of critical questions.
And I hope you know how much respect I have for your service.
And I think it goes without saying to anybody watching how much respect I have for the men making these decisions.
You don't have to patronize me.
Just ask the question.
Go ahead.
Come on, ask it.
To be clear, General, I'm not patronizing you.
I'm trying to have a very serious conversation in front of the American people.
The men making these decisions have my utmost respect.
And this is less about you than everybody making these decisions.
And this is about the American people understanding the investment that lies before them.
I just want to say two things.
I like both of those guys a lot.
General Jack Keene is fucking badass.
He's like, he is a grizzled, you know, general.
Like he's, I love him.
I've talked to him 10,000 times on my shows on Fox, and I respect him.
And I love Will Kane.
I think he's actually one of the greatest things Fox has right now.
But the fact that he felt so uncomfortable challenging General Keene on that question tells you everything you need to know about the dynamic inside Fox because Will is not a coward.
Will is actually quite strong, but he knew he was on thin ice going there because the bosses would not like this.
And by the way, my information is that they didn't.
They didn't like it.
And Jack Keene, it was kind of fun because he's like, spit it out, son.
You know, this grizzled general doesn't like somebody, right?
I appreciate the dynamic there.
But to me, this is all hashtag part of the problem for that record.
This happened the first day of the war that Monday after the bombing.
Your thoughts?
My thoughts are that it's a little bit concerning that the American people have such a difficult time now finding just actual news sources that can deliver them all sides of everything because you're 100% right about how the coverage has been.
If all that person is hearing every single show, every single day, all day long about how everything's perfect, everything's perfect, everything's perfect.
Well, okay.
Relief Actor Offers Amusement00:03:13
What happens if April 6th comes?
And God forbid, I'm going to bank on Trump's dealmaking ability.
What happens if April 6th comes and Iran, Iran doesn't make a deal?
Because let's talk about something, Megan, something we touched on a little earlier, but there's another part to this.
We talked about how two allies, or at least I did, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Two allies can share a common enemy, but not necessarily the same end goal.
Okay, we got that.
Israel wants complete annihilation of Iran.
Understandably, that's not good for us.
Got that.
What if Iran doesn't want us to leave now either?
They've already lost the Ayatollah.
They've already lost all their leadership.
They're wounding deeply the man they had tried to kill, by the way.
They did try to assassinate Donald Trump.
Now they're wounding him politically, which they couldn't do physically.
They've already lost the Ayatollah.
What if Iran doesn't want to make a deal?
So now this is United States, Israel, and Iran, and two-thirds of the coalition doesn't want to make a deal.
What are those people watching Fox every night hearing how great things are going to go?
What's going to happen if April 6th comes and we're stuck there?
As I mentioned earlier, off-ramps can be hard to find.
All right, Jesse stays with us.
We will be right back and we've got plenty of other news to discuss, including the implosion of CBS News.
That's next.
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Hilsen oss i spar.
Jesse Kelly is back with me.
Go get his new book for free at jessekelly.com.
All right, JK.
As much as we've seen inter, you know, podcast wars and wars on the right, whatever, the mainstream media is really where the problems are.
CNN Loses Audience Share00:15:22
I mean, as usual.
They are desperately trying to hold on to their relevance and their very, very dwindling audiences.
And what they're doing in order to do that is very amusing.
And we need a little amusement.
It's damn Friday.
We had a fiery first hour that was kind of depressing, but real.
And we're having it while there's still time to save the Republican Party.
But we need some levity, which brings me to CNN.
Now, CNN's ratings are in the toilet.
I mean, truly, they're terrible.
Their overall numbers are like half a million.
That's the overall, not the key demo, which is going to be lower but more relevant for advertising purposes.
Their key demo numbers are like 100,000, but the overall numbers are like in the 400,000s.
It's terrible.
So they're doing a lot of desperate things.
We reported earlier this week that they tried to make Anderson Cooper look like Edward R. Murrow/slash a podcaster radio host by telling him to roll up his sleeves and to undo the top button, Jesse, to undo the top button while still wearing the tie.
It's a look.
And to sit in front of like a big podcasting or radio type microphone.
Okay.
Then they had Jake Tapper move his program to inside his office, where you of all people, I'd love to get your take on this, but he's peppered his walls with only pictures of losers, losing candidates in political races.
No winner makes the wall.
That's his inspo to surround himself with losers all day, every day.
Okay, so far, I haven't seen any ratings boost over at CNN.
And now, so they're trying to go low-tech.
We showed the audience earlier this week how on Anderson Cooper's show, they took a map of Iran.
They just put it out on his desk and then took an overhead shot of like the physical map as opposed to using the big giant CNN technology that they have for, you know, election night.
They've got all sorts of LED screens that they could, they didn't do that.
They went low-tech.
We're low-tech like the podcasters now.
We're authentic.
We're scrappy.
Now they're going high-tech again by trying to pipe in the voice of the guy directing the show, the tech director, in telling the anchors and the hosts where to go for the next shot and what camera shots we're going to be taking.
Listen to the latest attempt.
This happened on Aaron Burnett's show between the A block to the B. All right, let's set to the B block.
Gets her clear.
Let's move the colonel and Aaron to the magic wall.
Breaks one and four.
Set by Break Monster in three, two, effect.
Where your break, please.
All right.
Let me tell you a couple of things.
First of all, they don't know who they are.
They're having an identity crisis.
We're low-tech, we're high-tech.
You know, we're CNN.
We've got all these resources around the world.
That's what they front when they promote themselves like the global anchors from every single country.
Oh, no, we're very, we're just like you.
We roll up our sleeves and we undo our button because it's uncomfortable if we don't.
And it reminded me, we did this during the Kamala Harris campaign, of the infamous Sally Roll, Sally Fields' role of Sybil.
This is who CNN really is.
No, you keep them away from me.
I will.
I will.
I will do it.
I will do it.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care.
I just love you today.
Mushletta Peck hugged around the neck.
Just tickle, And tickle, Paper is valuable.
Paper is valuable.
Here's it is.
Here's it is.
It's valuable.
It's valuable.
You can see now.
Welcome to CNN.
They have no idea who they are or what they want to be, Jesse Kelly.
Well, they're having a crisis that many, many different American companies have had to go through.
That many people, American companies, companies throughout history have had to go through this.
That for a time, you basically have your customers held captive because you're one of the only ones selling what the customer wants to consume.
So for so many years, the mainstream media outlets in this country, look, we don't even have to go to ancient history.
1990.
If I'm a regular Joe and I get home from work and I want to catch up on the news, I can read the newspaper that they dropped off in my driveway.
They used to do that.
I know I'm aging myself here.
Or I can sit down and I have like four channels I can tune into and watch for 15 minutes.
And then I will be given the news, given the news.
And so all these people, all these organizations, they got so used to being able to simply talk down to people because you didn't have anywhere else to go.
If you wanted to know what was going on in the world, there was no, there's no smartphone, right?
There's no internet.
There's no nothing.
There's no social media.
There's no podcast world.
You don't have to sit and watch me.
And so years and years and years of getting used to just talking down to people.
And now we are in the age where everybody has options.
Everyone has options.
I mean, so grateful for everybody listening, watching the Megan Kelly show right now.
Why?
Because everybody, you can be listening to jazz music.
You got 8 million options sitting here on your phone.
You could be anywhere you want to be.
You choose to be here.
And it's all on demand now.
So to make that adjustment from talking down to people instead of actually talking to people like a normal human being, that is a very, very, very difficult thing.
It's difficult to go from being king to one of the countryside peasants.
And so you mentioned identity crisis.
I find it to be hilarious that Jay Tapper is now surrounded by losers.
He's been surrounded by losers.
He works at CNN.
That's his entire life has been surrounded by losers.
You have to be authentic now.
People are trying to be kings still where there's three news outlets and you're Walter Cronkart and 10 million Americans watch you, but those days are gone.
There will never be another one because there are too many options.
The only thing you can do now is be you in whatever field you're in, CNN, this show, the podcast, doesn't matter what it is.
You just have to be you.
And the people who like that will listen and watch.
And the ones who don't, they have too many options.
They're going to leave you.
If you're trying to be something, you're not, Anderson Cooper with his unbuttoned shirt.
If you're trying to be something, you're not, that's going to lose you way more people than you would have gained otherwise.
Authenticity is the only thing you have to sell now if you want to do what we do for a living.
And unfortunately, for a lot of those characters over there, the authentic them is even worse than the fake them.
So that it's actually not going to work for them.
But here's the funny thing to me.
So yeah, they're having the identity crisis, the multiple personalities like Sybil.
But I mean, I have a note for CNN.
I have some free, a pro tip, if you will.
The problem in getting ratings for you, CNN, is not that your technical director cannot be heard over the airwaves telling this guest to move in front of that screen during the A to B block.
The problem is not that the anchors are literally too buttoned up or broadcasting from the sets that you've built them instead of from their offices.
The problem is the content.
Clips like this one.
Last week on this show, a guest shocked the table by arguing in part that slavery in America can't just be blamed on one race and that museums put too much focus on the role of white people who participated in that terrible institution.
And now tonight, that same argument is being pushed by the president of the United States.
Donald Trump says that one of the reasons for his crackdown on Smithsonian museums is, quote, everything discussed is how bad slavery was.
It's important to say objectively, slavery was indeed bad.
It was evil.
And it is impossible to understand the true history.
You get the gist.
And she keeps lecturing us in her little pantsuit.
That's the problem, Jesse.
Oh, well, you nailed it.
It goes back to what I was just saying.
They're used to you having to sit there.
Megan, you don't have anywhere else to go.
You sit there and you let me lecture.
You let me scold you about how bad your country sucks and you suck.
And no, no, no, you can't go anywhere.
You don't have any options.
You sit there and take it.
And then they watch the ratings go down because you don't have to sit there and take it anymore.
And this stuff is such a turnoff for so many people.
They're tired of being scolded.
They're tired of being lectured, told about how bad the country sucks.
And so they're changing the channel.
But then these organizations, as you mentioned, their authentic selves are terrible.
What is that?
Abby Phillip, I think her name is.
That's who she is.
She's an awful human being.
She's an America-hating, awful human being.
She believes that the United States of America sucks, that white people suck, that all this is evil.
And she believes that she should be able to scold you without end about those things.
And if you ask her, hey, Abby, could you tone that down a little bit?
Abby, the numbers aren't there.
People were changing the channel.
Can you tone that down?
Well, now she's lying because that's who she actually is.
That's her being authentic.
Authentically, she's horrible.
So you can't have that.
And you can't have her lying because then people will sniff that out.
So that's a disaster.
You're better off just being a jerk like I am.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly endorse the Jesse Kelly approach to broadcasting.
It's not going any better over at CBS where, oh my God, we told the audience about this earlier.
So they're under new ownership.
And the new ownership, I guess, thought that they were going to somehow magically save this sinking ship that is corporate media.
It's failing.
They brought in Barry Weiss.
This is nothing personal against Barry, but she never had any shot.
Not only could no one do it, but Barry really can't do it because she doesn't know shit about broadcast news.
She literally has never done it before.
And I'm sure that the Ellisons thought, oh, how complicated can it be?
We'll figure it out.
No, there actually is something to the broadcast piece of broadcast journalism.
And by the way, not for nothing, but it's what Roger Ailes understood and no one else did, which is why Fox News became number one within a couple of years after launching, because he understood it's a visual medium and how to make the screen dazzling and how to make it so that people couldn't turn away and how to get in and up, up and down on a story and use the television to communicate.
And there are all sorts of nuances to it, which, you know, if I had a longer time, I could watch the audience all through.
But some of it you just experience here on this program, because I understand how to make the screen relate to what the anchor's saying without even knowing that the host is doing it.
It's just sort of, we call it like cool water.
You're just kind of enjoying the broadcast.
You don't know why.
And Barry Weiss doesn't know how to do it.
She doesn't know how to do it.
She's never been in broadcasting before.
It's not her fault, but her bosses should have thought it through before putting this problem in her lap.
And here's what's happened.
The CBS Evening News, which was job number one when the new ownership took over and Barry was sent in, they overhauled it.
They fired the two anchors who were there, Maurice Dubois and the other guy who's John Dickerson, because they were very terrified that they were sometimes dipping below 4 million.
This is the flagship property of CBS News.
And they were like, you got to go.
Well, not only now is this Tony Docapool regularly falling below 4 million, but Oliver Darcy, he's a media reporter.
His Substack reports that CBS Evening News' Evening News with Tony Docapool is on track for its lowest rated first quarter in the 21st century, in the last century, in total viewers and the advertiser coveted 25 to 54 year old demographic.
So we're talking in 26 years, this will be the worst first quarter that show has ever seen.
Okay, how's the morning show doing?
Because you can still pay the bills if that thing's a juggernaut.
CBS Mornings is pacing toward the lowest rated quarter on record.
The lowest rated quarter ever in total audience and the key demo.
Both are on track for epically record bad quarters.
And on top of that, there is no faith.
He goes on to report in Barry Weiss.
She's fractured the trust amongst herself and the executive or the producing executives, the talent and so on.
And you tell me whether this is a ship that can or should be raised from the bottom of the ocean.
You know, Megan, and I'm not changing the subject.
I swear I'm going somewhere with this, but I actually had a conversation because we were just talking about CNN.
I had a conversation with a friend one time inside of CNN and he was talking about their identity crisis and similar to what we were just saying.
And I, of course, told him, well, you can't filter every show and everything through the lens of, you know, the communist propaganda and America sucks and things like that.
You can't do that.
You have to give some sort of an alternate perspective.
Otherwise, you're going to narrow yourself down to only so many people.
And he didn't argue with me.
But what he said to me, Megan, was, yes, Jesse, I agree.
But anytime we've attempted to do that, what happens is the second we stray an inch away from the communist revolution propaganda that we do all the time, then we lose the viewers we had.
Then you've lost the viewers you had because the audience has been baked in.
If you are a regular CNN viewer, you expect to see the communist revolution all day, every day.
And if there's ever any deviance from that, you will change the channel.
You'll email in, you'll complain, you'll go find a different communist revolution channel.
Now you're watching it happen at CBS where the rumors were, I don't know her, that Barry, Barry, whatever her name is, that she was trying to make it at least somewhat more middle of the road.
Well, CBS had been spewing commie propaganda for so long, they had tempered their audience down to being communist revolution types.
And they don't want to see middle of the road.
They don't want to see any kind of an alternate perspective.
If you're straying an inch from that, the viewers you used to have, they're going to leave and they'll go find different commie propaganda.
It really, look, they made all these channels made their own bed and I don't feel an ounce of sympathy for any of them.
Screw them all.
I hate them.
But they made the bed and now they're sleeping in it.
If your anchor of choice, your news of choice is Scott Pelley, Gail King, Margaret Brennan, and the CBS Evening News, whoever was in there, Nora O'Donnell, et cetera, you do not want fair and balanced news.
Accountability Shrinks Balls00:12:26
And by the way, Barry doesn't like Trump.
I mean, she's not a Trump supporter.
She's not a Republican.
She's just not woke.
She's not a woke person.
So she's trying, I think, on the order of the Ellisons to be slightly more fair to Trump, although it's not working.
That's not working either.
Trust me, I've seen enough on CBS to know that bias is not erasable.
So their audience doesn't want that.
Like none of those people wants to watch more fair and balanced news.
And if you are a Republican, as I started this discussion with, you are not going to go watch CBS because here and there at the edges, they've been marginally more fair to Republicans.
You're just going to stay with Fox.
If you like TV news, you're just going to stay with the one that actually understands you and doesn't hate Trump, by the way.
So, which is Fox.
So it's not going to work.
It was doomed to fail from the start.
I had said when Barry took over that they were going to eat her alive from the inside.
And that's what's happening.
She doesn't have the support of the troops inside.
She's not going to.
This is not an experiment that's going to work out.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
And that's not to say anything of Topra Docapool, who's still crying in the anchor chair every other day, trying to get us to watch him because he's got a softer side, unlike my friend Jesse Kelly.
Did I ever ask you about the crying?
Did you and I ever talk about that?
No, no.
I didn't even show you this clip.
He tweeted this out.
He tweeted this out, Jesse, to try to show us who he is as he took over the CBS Evening News.
Watch.
He said this is your favorite place in the world.
Why?
Why South Florida and Miami?
What?
It makes me emotional.
It's so funny.
I didn't mean anything going to catch you.
No, because you only have one childhood, right?
So.
Let me get a second.
I can relate.
This is home.
To help people understand why I have such a reaction.
Thank God.
Can't stop wiping his eyes.
Florida's where I grew up.
We didn't get a lot of sleep.
Yeah, my grandmother's here.
My father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins.
And it's where I would have spent all of my childhood, but we left.
Because of my father, he got in some trouble with business.
It's like, we laugh about it now, but he was a drug dealer.
But the reason it's so emotional for me is because I feel like I was robbed at the full Miami experience.
So when I come back, I'm always like, Jesse.
Well, first of all, Megan, his father was a drug dealer, I believe, he said.
So I believe that is, in fact, the full Miami experience.
That is one.
Two, maybe I just had a different father.
And it's not that men should never cry, but it should be reserved for, you know, watching old yellow and things like that.
The fact that this has become currency with men, that's a woman thing.
That's what women do.
And that's fine.
I understand that.
But men are so anxious to become women now in this country instead of just embracing being a freaking man that now they'll stand in front of you.
And I don't even know if those tears were real.
He didn't even look like he was crying.
I don't know what would be worse if those were real or that if he thought that he had to fake tears in order to create some sort of emotional response in people.
Oh, I'm so sad.
I didn't have the pupuses that my grandma used to make.
And whatever he was whining about in that freaking video, I find it to be incredibly embarrassing.
These men who try to be women in order to appeal to, I mean, I don't know what they think that appeals to.
There's no woman worth the crap who finds that appealing.
Any man who's worth his salt finds that completely revolting.
I think my T-levels dropped about 300 points just watching that clip.
It's just the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life.
And this, this feminized male population in this country now absolutely floors me.
And it's killing us.
It's guys like that that are killing us.
And there's no audience for it.
Speaking of no audience, like I said, the only people who want to see that crap are mentally ill single women on Xanax.
Those are the only people in the United States of America who find that particular type of man appealing whatsoever.
I'll never understand it.
Yes.
Totally agree with you.
I feel like it's revolting as a woman.
And I feel like if I were a man, you could probably feel your balls shrinking as you watch that.
Like you say, like the testosterone is actually leaving your body.
And yet, like they tweeted it out.
CBS tweeted it out.
He clearly blessed it.
He wanted us to see it.
He wanted us.
That's why I call him Topra instead of Tony.
He's like, let me show you my pain.
And I said to the audience when this first broke, I was like, he's telling a story and he's like crying, crying, crying uncontrollably.
I'm like, how is this story going to end?
Like, what the hell happened to the family in Miami?
I'm like, I thought for sure it was going to end in they all died in a house fire.
It was horrific, but I learned to fight again.
It was, they moved.
They moved.
I would love to, I miss my dad, Megan.
I lost him about a year and a half ago and he was one of these rough, tough construction guys.
And I miss him to death.
And sometimes, I mean, I miss him for a variety of reasons, but sometimes whenever we would hang out and do something, I would take a video like that and I'd say, hey, dad, hey, dad, I want you to look at this.
I should have filmed it.
I wish I had recorded it just to get his reaction on that kind of thing.
And the complete disgust and disdain.
Like, he didn't even understand it.
And he didn't understand this world that we have now.
And I'll tell you what, I'm grateful for him.
Yes, I know what you mean.
Yeah.
Like, they didn't even understand it.
Like, what?
Like my, like Archie Bunker used to say, huh?
I don't get it.
Okay, maybe a 180 from Topra Docapool.
And you're going to have to walk me through this guy, Dan Hurley, because I didn't know him by name prior to today.
He's apparently the UConn head basketball coach.
But the reason I'm teeing up sports for you, and you know, I don't really talk about sports unless I have to, is he gave an interview.
Apparently he's very known for being tough on his guys, like tough love.
He's not actually a jerk, but he's kind of a jerk, I guess, with them, because that's what he thinks works.
And he's got a reputation along those lines.
And he was explaining, okay, first, which is the one we need to start with.
I'm trying to read here.
Okay, here, 17.
This is why first he sits down at a pregame press conference on Thursday and explains why he is the way he is with his guys.
What do you think it says about the culture that people see, you know, yelling or hard coaching and somehow think that's a problem?
Yeah, I just think that's, you know, society.
We've gotten soft in a lot of ways.
I think with, you know, with trying to develop young people, I think young people, the teachers and coaches that impact their lives the most are not the teachers and coaches that like gave them a grade they didn't deserve.
I mean, you remember the teachers and coaches that pushed you to your maximum, you know, that pushed you beyond your comfort level, that got the most out of you.
I feel like I got a responsibility.
You know, I coach 18, 19, 20-year-old men.
There's a lot that I got to instill in them.
There's a lot of discipline.
There's a lot of accountability.
There's a lot of commitment that I've got to instill in them to prepare them for the real world.
The real world is tough.
It's cruel.
You got to be equipped.
Isn't that amazing?
And if you don't have a guy like Dan Hurley, whether it's a father, a father figure, or a coach in your child's life, you wind up Topra Docapool putting out videos of yourself crying so that people will take you seriously as an authority figure in the CBS Evening News Chair.
Yeah, that's how young men learn with pain and suffering.
And people don't like to talk about that because it does make people uncomfortable.
But that's how young men have always learned with pain and suffering.
If you walk into Marine Corps boot camp, you will see a lot of pain and suffering.
Pain and suffering is how young men grow up.
It's how you learn from mistakes.
When I told my son, I think he was 15 years old, that it was cold out and he better go grab a sweatshirt.
And in his 15-year-old ways, he knew it all.
And he said, no, dad, I'll be fine in my t-shirt and shorts.
And I sat there for two hours while we were outside as he shivered and his teeth chattered and he was suffering.
And I could have given him my sweatshirt.
I certainly could have.
But instead, the entire time I told him how warm I was.
Man, it's nice to be in this sweatshirt.
And you know what, Megan?
Not one time since then has he forgotten to check the weather and dress appropriately because pain and suffering are how young men learn.
And that makes people uncomfortable.
Of course, I understand it makes people uncomfortable because you don't, because you love them, right?
You don't want it.
You don't want to see people hurt, but that's how young men have always and will always learn.
I cannot speak for young women.
I'm not raising young women.
I don't have a lot of interaction with young women, but I know young men who I do know quite well learn through pain and suffering and yelling and push-ups and running stairs and being cold for a couple hours.
That's how you wake up and that's how you grow up and turn into a man who doesn't cry on television because daddy was a drug dealer and moved you out of Miami.
Yeah.
Young women would not leave the coat at home.
That's pretty much a daughter.
Well, she takes the coat.
So like you have different problems with girls, but they're not in that lane.
I can totally relate to what you said.
When we went to Scandinavia, I got raincoats for all five of us.
This is a couple Junes ago, because they say in one day in Sweden or Norway or Denmark, that's where we went.
just in one day you'll experience all four seasons.
You'll freeze your ass off.
You'll sweat.
You'll be snowed on potentially.
You'll be rained on.
So I'm like, okay, everybody needs a raincoat.
And so I went and I got everybody a raincoat.
Now, I put the raincoat in my young son's duffel bag that we were traveling with, who is then 10, nine or 10, 10, I think.
And the older two, I just gave it to them and they packed it up.
We get to Scandinavia.
We got to Sweden.
Sure enough, it's raining.
It's pouring rain.
I'm like, we're ready.
You know, I'm feeling proud of myself as a parent.
I'm like, everybody's got their raincoats.
Let's go.
And Thatcher, my youngest, looks at me with like big eyes.
Like, I'm like, what do you mean?
I know you have your raincoat.
I bought it for you.
I put it in your duffel.
He goes, I took it out.
Why?
Of course, him packing.
He has like four things.
He had plenty of room for it.
Like, why would he remove something I put in there?
And he's like, I didn't think I'd need it.
I'm like, what do you mean?
You don't know anything about this, the weather in Sweden.
What do you, he's like, I'm fine.
I don't need a raincoat.
Sure enough, I look at him.
I was like, and now you will suffer.
He looks at me going, I use that word with the big silver dollar eyes like, oh my gosh.
I'm like, let's go.
And sure enough, he got, he got a little wet that day.
But yes, to your point, and to, and also to your point about just being the parent of a boy.
I was like, what?
They are, and it's always been this way.
You know, it's not just like these are American boys.
It works the exact same way at any period of time, at any location on the planet.
Young men, as they develop, they have to go through.
By the way, it doesn't have to be military, right?
It doesn't have to be a hard basketball coach or football coach.
There are many different ways to go through this.
But young men have to go through hard things in order to grow and develop into the kind of men that can actually lead, lead their homes, lead a country, lead a company, lead anything.
You must go through hard things.
I've had women multiple times, mothers, email my show and ask, hey, hey, Jesse, your confidence level when it comes to really anything.
How do I give that to my son?
How do I give it to my son?
Especially yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
How do I give that to my son?
You know, and it's a genuine question.
I have, I'm raising, I'm a mom, I'm raising a boy.
How do I give him confidence?
And I've had to explain several times before, look, you can and should tell him a million times that you love them and that you're proud of them and that this and that.
Suffering Builds Confidence00:08:23
But none of those things, none of those things can give a young man confidence.
The only thing, there is only one thing that gives a young man confidence, and that is going through hard things.
And the harder things you go through, the more confident you will be.
You ever meet a Navy SEAL?
I know several Navy SEALs.
They're the cockiest SOBs who walk the face of the planet.
Why are they so cocky?
Because they've been through something more difficult than most other people will ever go through.
You want confidence.
There is only one way to get it.
You can't love your way into it or tell them you're proud your way into it.
You can't read your way into it.
Suffering of some kind in some way.
And like I said, it doesn't just have to be physical.
It could be God knows what you go through educationally or whatnot.
You must suffer and come out the other end and then you will be confident.
Yes, I love everything you just said.
There was a great clip circulating on X the other day of the British actor who is in Hannah and her sisters, Michael Kane?
Michael Kane.
Yes.
That's his name.
Pretty sure.
Anyway, he was talking about how when he was young, he was going on to the set.
I think it was a Broadway play.
And he was supposed to open the door, walk on stage and like confront this man and woman who were arguing on set.
And he opened the door at a rehearsal and walked in and they had somebody had shoved a table in front of the door.
So the door opened into a table.
And now it's like the table's blocking his entrance.
It all got screwed up.
And he was angry.
And he was like, you move the table.
And somebody else said to him, how can it be useful?
How can you make it useful?
He's like, what do you mean?
They're like, if, you know, improv, if it's a comedy, bump into it, fall over the table and fall down and give the audience that experience.
If it's a drama, get angry.
Start screaming about the table that blocked your way.
But he said this became like his life motto in raising his own kids and thinking about the challenges that came his way.
How can it be useful?
How can I make this challenge, which otherwise would make me go crying in my soup and feeling sorry for myself into something that's useful so I can get to the other side where I have more confidence, as you said, where I believe in myself a little bit more, where like I know I can handle adversity.
Yeah, I love Michael Cain, by the way.
And he's always been one of those real type actors where so many of them seem fake.
But it's why I, as a parent, I've tried to figure out how do I give that to my sons while also protecting my sons, right?
Because it's a weird thing.
I don't want to go drop them off in the fifth ward.
That's the gangbanger part of Houston at midnight and say, well, good luck, son.
You got to suffer a little to grow up.
I don't want that, right?
But that's why, look, I'm not here to teach people life lessons or parent lessons.
I can only tell you what we have done.
That's why we're adamant about sports.
And neither of my kids are incredible athletes, nor do I care, nor do I need them to be.
I'm not living vicariously through them.
I don't need them to get a full ride or something like that.
Although that'd be cheaper, but no, go suffer.
You know, my, my youngest decided to do track this year.
He can't run for crap.
He runs like I do.
I can't jump over a piece of paper.
I run a 40, a 40-yard dash in about 15 minutes.
And he's the exact same way, but he's doing it just to do it, just to suffer.
And he's out there and he's sweating and he's in pain and his misery.
And it makes me so freaking proud to watch it because he's better.
You can already see him.
He's standing up a little straighter because he's out there.
He's in pain and he's suffering.
So there are ways you can give that to your kids.
We just have to avoid here in America.
We're so blessed that we can avoid a lot of pain.
You can avoid a lot of things.
And that's good, right?
You can avoid a lot of danger, but you can get to the point where you really can helicopter parent your kids and keep them in a bubble.
And then finally, you kick them out of the house at 18 and they're just soft and gooey and getting ready to get eaten alive by what that coach said.
What is his name, Dan Hurley, by a very cruel world.
I mean, when my kids get a bad teacher, who's mean to them?
And they'll come home and, dad, she gave me a detention.
You think you're never going to have a bad boss?
You think all the bosses are going to be lovely?
You think that they're all going to treat you fairly?
No, you're going to have crappy bosses and it's going to suck.
Consider this a great time to learn about it.
My oldest this summer, he's got two jobs lined up.
He has to go put in irrigation lines and he has to work at a local Mexican fast food joint.
And both those jobs are going to suck, Megan.
They're going to be brutally crappy jobs for crappy pay.
And it's going to be outstanding for him because one day he's going to have a job at 25, 26 that may not be ideal.
And you know what he's going to say?
Hey, it's better than taco time.
It's better than that job.
Now, wait, there is a twist to this story about this coach, Dan Hurley.
Speaking of tough love, he not only gives it, he certainly seems to receive it from his wife.
Look at this.
We did a little deep dive into Dan Hurley because we got interested in that clip.
Here he sat down with Graham Bensinger in September of 24 and described what his wife Andrea does when he loses games or starts to maybe get down on himself.
Listen here to SOT 17.
On the rare occasion you've lost, what will the wife yell at you to get you out of bed?
I mean, she has strange like motivational tactics.
So the game at Creighton this year where we lose by a lot and I'm fighting with fans and going like crazy Dan on the way out of the arena.
You would think that that next morning she'd like tell me it's going to be okay.
She's telling me, you're a lousy coach and you acted like a baby last night and why don't you take out the garbage because you're no good at coaching.
You're a glorified gym teacher.
You go in, you coach games.
You don't perform surgery.
You don't save lives.
I mean, part of me is like really pissed off.
You don't know, you know what you're looking at.
And I'm just like, okay.
Well, I'm just telling you, get back on your horse.
It's not that big of a deal.
You know, it's like, it's a game.
Stupid game.
So is this what Aubrey says to you when you have a bad show?
Like, Jesse, how does it work in a Kelly household?
You know, it's not that, but I'll tell you, when I have, you know, Megan, I'm more of an introverted type.
It's the reason you don't see me at all these conferences, giving speeches and things like that.
It's just not something I enjoy doing.
I'm an introvert.
I don't want to hang around a bunch of people.
I don't want to give speeches.
I don't need applause.
I want to go home and read a book and watch a documentary and hang out and be with my family when I'm not doing my show.
But I also understand that occasionally traveling for work is beneficial, but I'll always say no until Aub finds out about it.
And then she'll just climb in my butt about the entire thing and tell me, this is what you have to do.
You cannot come home and live in your cave at all times.
You have to go out there and do things you don't like to do.
You can't only do what you want to do.
That's exactly right.
You can't only do what you want to do for the rest of your life.
You got to get out there and do it.
You got to do this.
You got to write something.
I hate writing.
I despise writing.
I don't mind talking, of course, but I hate writing.
You got to go write something.
Write something down.
She does that same type of thing.
And it's, I've needed her.
I'll tell you that much.
I need that every now and then.
Otherwise, I'd never leave my house.
Ah, well, I think their dynamic is very interesting in the Hurley family.
There was a follow-up sound bite by him being like, she's clueless.
She doesn't know anything about what I do.
It took a turn from like this kind of charming to like the, oh, well, I'm not, I don't know how I feel.
But it's an interesting study of relationship and messaging.
Jesse, I love having you on.
Have a great weekend.
Love to Aub and let's do it again soon.
Appreciate you, Megan.
Ah, what a great guy, right?
Okay, coming up, we were actually, we're not going to do anything on Nancy Guthrie today.
And then, do you guys know I've mentioned nerdy addict on this show from whom we've gotten a few good tips on this investigation?
And nerdy addict just dropped a bit of a bombshell in the Guthrie investigation.
We'll discuss it next.
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Scammers Prey On Grief00:11:05
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We showed you yesterday clips of Savannah Guthrie's first interview on NBC since her mother Nancy went missing nearly two months ago now.
My gosh, that's crazy.
Today is March 27th.
Nancy was taken on January 31st.
Well, overnight on the wee hours of February 1st.
That is so crazy.
Unfortunately, we have more questions than answers two months later.
Like, why didn't the Guthrie family ever pay a ransom?
if they believed, as Savannah told us yesterday, that two of those ransom notes they received were authentic.
Why wouldn't they have paid the money?
And why did Savannah's military veteran brother immediately think that Nancy was kidnapped for ransom?
Immediately, that's where his mind went.
Was there something in the second note, this is another question, that made them believe it was fruitless to pay money to the kidnapper?
Because they made video statements after each of these notes.
And that last question, what was in the second note?
And did it suggest something about Nancy that was dark and would have suggested the ransom was fruitless?
And that's the question taking new significance this morning, because one of the ex-counts that has followed this case the closest and that we have been following and that has steered us right more than once in its commentary and leads on the case is a user who goes by the name nerdy addict.
And nerdy, you may recall that because I've cited nerdy addict in talking with you guys before.
Nerdy addict writes today, quote, I now have two sources confirming that one of the letters sent to the media in the Nancy Guthrie case allegedly states that the sender apologized, claiming that they did not realize how serious Nancy's heart condition was and that she has, quote, gone to be with God.
Right.
So this is nerdy claiming that nerdy's been told by two sources that the second ransom note, you know, this person was demanding Bitcoin and wrote to Harvey plus two local stations that the second note apologized saying they didn't realize how serious Nancy's heart condition was and that she has quote gone to be with God.
Nerdy goes on to write, quote, according to these sources, investigators believe the message came from the same individuals who previously demanded Bitcoin, though this latest letter reportedly made no demands and was framed solely as an apology.
While this has been validated to nerdy by two independent sources, it has not been publicly released or confirmed by the media.
So nerdy is telling us, and we are telling you, to take it with a grain of salt and put a big ol asterisk at the end of it.
With all due respect to nerdy, we don't know nerdy's agenda.
We don't know nerdy's background.
We don't know anything about nerdy other than the reporting that we've taken from this account with citation so far in this case has all proven to be very sound.
So that's why we decided to bring it to you.
Here to analyze this is James Hamilton.
He's a former FBI supervisory special agent who created the FBI's Close Protection School, which is a specialized training program designed for agents to protect high-level individuals.
And Maureen O'Connell, a 25-year veteran of the FBI and co-host of the Best Cased, Worst Case podcast.
Thank you guys so much for being back on.
I want to say, I want to go through a little bit of the timeline here just to refresh us all and the audience about that second ransom note, right?
Nancy was taken on that Sunday, February 1st in the We Hours.
That whole week, we had ransom notes and we had family responses.
And now it seems like ancient history because we're two months in.
But the ransom note, my team has done the timeline for me.
Okay, the first we heard of a ransom note was Tuesday, February 3rd.
The first ransom note sent to TMZ and two local Tucson stations at 1.12 p.m.
The letter demanded $4 million in Bitcoin by Thursday, February 5th, and then $6 million if the payment didn't come before Monday, February 9th.
And then, you know, what was in that note?
Well, we don't know.
All we know is that they made a demand for ransom and they had revealed something about Nancy's clothing or something inside the house, allegedly about her watch and maybe a floodlight on the outside that convinced investigators that they should take this note seriously.
And the family certainly took it seriously because that was the note in response to which we first saw the family come out.
The three adult children holding hands, Savannah with the no makeup, very, very dark.
You know, talk to her and you'll see saying the things about Nancy.
You should get to know her.
And in this day of video manipulation, we need to know that you do have her and, you know, that she's alive.
So that was after the first one.
Then on Thursday, February 5th, authorities confirm those two ransom deadlines.
And later that day, KOLD TV Tucson received a second ransom letter at 5.30 p.m.
They said there's no deadline in it.
The new note, quote, contains something the senders seem to think will prove to investigators that they're the same people who sent the first note.
And then in response to that second note, the family came out the following day on Saturday, February 7th.
And they said, we received your message.
We understand.
We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her.
This is the only way we will have peace.
This is very valuable to us and we will pay.
And many of us sat and said, that sounds like they believe Nancy's no longer alive.
Return our mother to us so we can celebrate with her, celebrating, you know, possibly a term of art, you know, a celebration of life.
Well, they're looking for peace now, very valuable to us and we will pay.
And that would dovetail with nerdies reporting that the second ransom note was more of an apology, but they had Nancy's body and said she's gone to be with God.
This is all speculation, but it could dovetail.
And it also dovetails, Maureen, with the fact that the family didn't actually pay.
Like if that second note suggested Nancy was no longer with us, I don't know that even Savannah Guthrie, who probably does have well over $6 million in the bank, would pay $6 million at that point in the investigation.
But I don't know.
I'm not sure what to make of this.
What do you make of it?
Well, I think that the FBI was probably telling her without proof of life, do not pay these people.
It will never end.
Just, you know, let's wait for proof of life and then we'll move forward from there.
And if they can't provide proof of life, then we're probably dealing, we could very well be dealing with the wrong people.
You know, it's just, it's simple.
It seems cold, but it's how these things work, basically.
As far as the apology to you.
I mean, oh, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, I'm interested in the apology because some have speculated online who would apologize.
What kind of a kidnapper apologizes for stealing an 84-year-old?
And does that tell us anything about who may have done it?
Well, people that apologize, over 90% of them are female, which is interesting.
And then also...
Oh, that's so true in life.
It is.
It's so true.
I hear these young women, you know, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.
But also, go with God.
That's something obviously men and women can say, but it's a comforting, it's designed to comfort the family.
Why would hardened criminals that are professionals want to comfort the family?
They would probably just be mad that they didn't get their money.
But they feel that.
First of all, just for the record, it's amazing to me.
My husband and I have been married 18 years, together 20.
He never apologizes.
Like, maybe I've heard him apologize like three times.
It's not that he never takes responsibility.
You know, he'll take responsibility, but like the words, I'm sorry, are so rare.
Meanwhile, women are constantly like, oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
James, we blame you.
That's really where we're going with this.
It's completely fine.
But I bet you're not an apologizer.
Yeah, completely fine to blame me and us.
And good to see you again.
I would say there's a lack of personalization here that I would like to see.
And what I mean by that is if Maureen and I are working this up on the big board, you will have all of the specificity that could have been gleaned from all the public information, press conferences and what have you, drone footage, media, crops.
And all I've heard so far is watch, outdoor light, pacemaker or heart condition.
All of this is public knowledge.
So if we're going to apologize, and I'm going to take it seriously, I would have liked to seen something like, you know, hey, in the note, we apologize or I apologize for knocking over the picture in the room or more specificity.
I knocked over the photo of your father.
Okay.
That would be, okay, we need to take this seriously.
Something that's not released to the public.
Then, yeah, there might be something to this.
But all I'm hearing, Megan, is what scam artists do.
They prey upon grief.
They prey upon your vulnerability.
They're saying anything they can to get paid.
Fake Notes And Bitcoin Demands00:07:50
It really doesn't move the needle a lot for me.
And yet we know from Savannah yesterday that she believes whoever wrote those notes is the kidnapper.
So we're going to talk about that.
And we put together all we know about what was in the ransom notes from Harvey Levin's multiple evolving statements on it.
We're going to go there next, plus what Savannah said today.
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There are a lot of different notes, I think, that came.
And I think most of them, it's my understanding, are not real.
And I didn't see them, but you know, a person that would send a fake ransom note really has to look deeply at themselves.
Yeah.
To a family in pain.
But I believe the two notes that we received that we responded to, I tend to believe those are real.
All right, so there she is back now with James Hamilton and Maureen O'Connell.
She believes that those ransom notes are real.
So what do we know about those notes?
We put together a montage of everything we could find Harvey Levin saying about them since he's seen them.
And here that is.
So we got something in our email that looks like a ransom note.
It's written like a ransom note for Savannah Guthrie's mother.
Specifically, there are certain amounts of money, very specific.
And also, they say at the bottom there are certain things they're saying about what she was wearing and damage to the house.
They're clearly saying to verify that it's us.
We know what you're talking about.
They do mention an Apple Watch, as the FBI said, and they do mention the floodlight, the damaged floodlight.
There is something else, and it is the placement of the Apple Watch, which has not come out.
And if that placement is accurate, I'm sure that is something that puts this letter on the FBI's radar.
There are deadlines, I say plural deadlines in this letter, and one is looming.
The letter says that she will be returned within 12 hours back in the Tucson area.
And then if you look at 12 hours, that's a radius of about 70 years.
Yeah, the map.
I know.
And when I say I know, I am positive that authorities, including the FBI, are vitally interested in that ransom note.
I know this to be true.
And I can't say the specifics because I promised I wouldn't, but I can tell you they are absolutely still vitally interested in this ransom note.
Okay, so he, to clarify, received the first ransom note, not the second one, which nerdy addict thinks they have a scoop on today.
We know precious little about the second one from authorities or from the media that has received it.
KOLD TV Tucson is the one that received the second one.
And again, as I said to you, they reported the new note contains something the sender seemed to think will prove to investigators they're the same people who sent the first note.
And the response to it by the Guthrie family was, we received your message.
We understand.
We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her.
This is the only way we will have peace.
This is very valuable to us and we will pay.
So what do you make of that collection of information there, James?
Certain, they say, they say something about what Nancy's wearing in the first note.
They mention the Apple Watch and the placement of it.
They mention the floodlights.
They mention deadlines and something about being within 12 hours of the Tucson area so that they could get Nancy back to the Guthries within that amount of time.
Does that tell you anything?
Do you have any new insights on it?
There is some specificity.
Again, I would need to know, are there any publicly released photos of Miss Guthrie with the Apple Watch on?
If not, if we was on the Today Show with Savannah wearing it.
Well, then it's not as crucial to me.
Again, something very specific, like instead of saying nightgown, like if they gave a very specific, and again, I don't know because I haven't read the note, but if it was a very specific type of nightgown with maybe a tear or a stain, something that we would not know, but Savannah and the family would know, then that would lead me to believe, okay, we need to take this seriously and we need to, you know, respond.
We need to have correspondence with this individual.
And the very first thing I'd be asking for is, you know, I'd let them know what we want to pay, but I need to know she's alive, period.
And then I don't know, you know, did that happen?
And if it did happen, what was the next response, right?
Did something go wrong with the negotiation and we're just not being told?
But you said it.
We're just not being told.
There's a lot of information we don't have.
What do you make, James, of the, if this is true, the report by nerdy, of the report that the kidnapper apologized in the second note?
Lying About Gone With God00:03:01
I'm sorry.
And she's gone to be with God?
Yeah.
Again, I've seen notes like that with regards to a scam.
I've seen anything they can say to, you know, curry favor to feel as though, you know, because she's clearly grieving Savannah and the family.
So he's playing upon that, right?
And I know she says something like, you know, how could someone do that?
And I'm sorry to say this, but there's truly evil people walking this planet and they do do this.
And this is how they act.
And they will make you believe a lot of things.
That's why they're scam artists.
That's why they're successful.
And they play, they prey upon that grief, the vulnerability, the sadness.
Again, they will say whatever it takes to get that money and to apologize or say they went with God.
It's like one of the tells, Maureen, I'm sure, can say this as well, Maureen, but as an investigator, whenever when someone says, you know, I swear to God, whenever they put that on you, they're letting you, they're literally lying and they're trying to make you think they're telling the truth.
They always say things like that.
That is so true.
Phil Houston, who's a lifelong CIA guy who literally wrote the book called Spy the Lie, he's a human lie detector, says that one of the things he looks at to figure out whether somebody's lying is has to happen within the first five seconds of asking the question.
So you need a cluster.
You need two of his deception indicators to happen within the first five seconds of asking the question.
So in other words, sometimes people will look away.
That's not, that's not a tell unless it's part of a cluster.
It has to be at least two things.
So if you look away and hands go above the midline, because you do that when you're lying, you can do it normally too, if you're like I am, like Italian.
But it can be you're lying, you have adrenaline pumping through your body, and it's amazing.
He has all these videos of people lying.
It has to shoot out of you.
The electricity that runs through your body when you are lying, it does shoot out of you someplace.
That's why your hands go above the midline.
Touching your face is a big one, like your ear, your hair, your nose, your mouth.
Or if you see somebody sitting, like with the legs crossed, you'll see them start to like do this with the leg.
It starts to like kick.
It's amazing how you cannot keep the adrenaline from lying in your body.
And again.
But anyway, yeah, you're right.
One of his is referencing God, James.
Yeah.
And for me, I think now it's become an absolute pet peeve of mine.
But if I ask you a question and you were to respond to me and you say, well, honestly, James, or to tell you the truth, James, well, all I hear is you're a liar.
You lie all the time.
And right now, you just want me to believe you because you're prefacing the answer.
Honest people like you and me, I just give you the answer.
And that is what it is.
I don't need to preface it.
But also, I did just want to say, I looked at the February 3rd press conference with the sheriff and that information is out there, right?
So to say she's gone with God, that clearly is already out there and preys upon, oh, they care about God as well.
Sister Calls During Crisis00:14:58
I've seen it.
These scammers, they'll do anything and say anything.
And we know publicly that Miss Guthrie was supposed to be at a church meeting that morning.
Oh, I see.
So at the press conference, he revealed that she was supposed to be at church.
And so you're saying that these scammers, if that's what they were, knew that a reference to God might play with the Guthrie family.
Or it may have just been, if in fact the nerdy report is true, them lying and covering it up with a reference to she's gone with God.
We don't know.
You know, there's a lot.
There have been a lot of good questions asked about Savannah's interview yesterday, many by just armchair detectives or regular civilians, Maureen, who have been covering this case.
I saw one woman on my ex-feed today asking a really good question about this soundbite.
Let me play it and then we'll talk about it.
This is Savannah talking about the moments she found out from Annie that Nancy was missing.
And my sister called me and I said, is everything okay?
And she said, no.
She said, mom's missing.
And I said, what?
What are you talking about?
She said, she's gone.
And she was in a panic.
I was in a panic.
I'm like, call 911.
She's like, I did.
We've called them.
They're here.
And we thought that she must have had like some kind of medical episode in the night and that somehow, you know, the paramedics had come because the back doors were propped open, you know, and that didn't make any sense.
We thought maybe they came and there was a stretcher and they took her out the back.
But her phone was there and her purse was there and all her things.
And it just didn't make any sense.
So, you know, Annie and Tommy had already called all the hospitals, but then I'm like, I'm going to call the hospital.
So then I started calling the hospitals and the police were there and talking to her at the same time.
And it was just chaos and disbelief.
Okay.
In the longer version of the clip, Savannah sets up that story by saying her husband had been away on a guy's weekend that weekend and he had just come home and that she had been at Carson Daly's house with her kids all day and she had just gotten home and that they were getting ready.
It was the evening and then the sister called.
Well, we know from the authorities that 911 was called just after noon that morning, right?
Nancy, they revised the timeline, but they said at 1157, they realized Nancy wasn't there.
They called 911 and that 911 got there.
The authorities got there just after noon.
So that would have been just after 3 p.m. East Coast time.
So hours, hours went by from the sound of it before Annie Guthrie called Savannah.
And I would give this woman online credit, but I didn't actually see her name.
But she was saying, who, you only have one other sister.
She's got, Annie Guthrie has a brother, Cameron, and she's got a sister, Savannah.
And the sister happens to have major resources.
But the point is, you know your mother's potentially missing.
You've now been to the house.
There's blood.
There's blood throughout the house.
The door's propped open.
Nancy's missing.
The ring camera's been, it's gone.
The nest camera's gone.
You wait hours, two or three hours to call your sister to say, like, have you heard from mom?
And by the way, you do all the hospital calls too before you loop in the sister?
Like I could see if your sister's missing, you do all that legwork yourself before you loop in your mom, whom you don't want to panic.
But your sister is your sister in arms.
Like your siblings, they're in it with you as a sibling.
You're like, this is our mom.
Like it's all hands on deck.
And also, wouldn't you have just called her to say, have you heard from her?
Like, it is very strange, the more I think about it, that Annie Guthrie did not call Savannah Guthrie for hours, apparently, after she knew that something had gone very, very wrong with the mother.
She was probably just, you know, I mean, she's going to say, Annie's going to say that she was trying to figure it out and that she and Tommaso were.
But to your point, you know, I would absolutely, one of my first phone calls would be like to one of my sisters, hey, get on the phone and call these three hospitals.
I'll have Eileen call the other three hospitals and, you know, or divvy up these hospital, nearby hospitals between the two of you.
I'm here.
I'm doing a ground search.
I'm trying to find mom in the house.
I have no idea why the door is propped open.
There's blood in the front entryway.
But I could see how the only thing that really stands out to me is that door being propped open.
Not the only thing.
But the thing that really blows my mind is that door being propped open because she apparently left through the front door.
And I mean, was the initial plan to pull the car around back and then they had to abort mission and the driver came up on the circle driveway instead and then they went out the front door?
I don't know.
But with them removing the camera, that makes me believe that part of the plan was to remove Nancy via the front door.
And perhaps if it was a kidnapping to begin with, that was the plan, they wouldn't want the family to see what condition she was in when they pulled her out of that house.
Well, we speculated yesterday, James was here, about whether maybe they did take her out of the house.
Maybe they threw her over the shoulder and walked out of the front of the house.
That's what I think.
And one of the questions I have is, does Savannah know that her mother was wearing the pajamas?
She said that yesterday without her shoes in her pajamas because she's seen maybe additional images from the nest camera that the rest of us haven't seen?
Or is it more likely that she's going off of what was in that first ransom note that she's taking so seriously, James, which you heard Harvey Levin say describes what Nancy was wearing.
And maybe she's just going by that, that she, maybe the note says we took her in her pajamas without her shoes.
Yeah, and it's interesting.
I didn't catch, but what she led with was that when she talked, when Savannah, what she led with was when she talked to her sister, that her sister says something's odd, mom's missing, and noticed she said the door was propped open.
Well, what about the blood?
If you and I were brother and sister, Megan, and I called you and I said, hey, there's blood all over mom's porch, I'd lead with that.
I wouldn't lead with door propped open, right?
I'd lead with blood.
I'd lead with camera knocked off the front.
That was not said.
And I try not to ever really get involved in family dynamics and why a call was made or not made.
We just don't know.
I don't know enough about that family dynamic.
But if they're taking care of, meaning if Savannah's sister and her brother-in-law are taking care of the mother and they're there frequently, there might be a lot of things going on that they don't ever call Savannah about.
Again, I don't know the family well enough.
I do know families and sometimes that does happen.
So I don't find the three hours terribly strange.
But I do have a problem with the not knowing about, so did she not know about the blood?
Why not lead with that?
It makes me feel like they didn't know.
It's possible she's, it's possible she's been told, you know, not to discuss evidence like at the crime scene.
You know, maybe she thinks the blood is not to be discussed, even though we've all seen it.
You know, I mean, it's not, it's not a secret thanks to the investigators.
I feel like they didn't know.
I feel like, you know, the law enforcement say, remember yesterday we talked about law enforcement trying to talk.
It sounds like they're trying to tell the family it's not a big deal.
People go missing all the time.
And the family keeps saying, no, no, you don't understand.
She can't just walk away.
She has this heart thing.
No mention.
I think maybe they started searching later and then, you know, found this blood and then called crime scene unit and all those things.
I think that took a while because if they had known that in the beginning, then certainly the prop door is a concern, but blood's more concerning.
And I think I lead with that one.
I would too.
Meanwhile, she.
Yeah, go ahead.
With regard to what she was wearing, it could be a simple case, Megan, of one of the granddaughters bought her a Hello Kitty sleep shirt or something, and she always wore either that or this other thing, and they all know it and, you know, or something very anecdotal like that.
And they noticed that one of them was missing.
The sleep shirt she always wears is missing.
Something distinctive.
You know, that's what I thought of when I heard that.
I mean, I'll tell you something.
I know exactly what my mom sleeps in.
I know exactly what it is.
And if somebody ever took her while wearing it, they'd be able to convince me in a heartbeat that they had her.
You know, it's like distinctive.
I know every option she has and what she does.
So if that's the case here, then maybe there was something that really convinced them this person in the first note is the person.
But I have my doubts because we have seen the Apple Watch on Nancy on previous Today Show segments.
We've seen Nancy's cane on previous segments.
I don't know if they mentioned the cane, but they might have known that she was not that mobile from that information.
We've seen, as we discuss now, the inside of Nancy's bedroom in that videotape that we found from 2013.
I don't know whether this person ever saw that, but if you're going to do it, if you were doing a planned kidnapping on Nancy, you might take a deep dive into whatever segments you could find where they showed the inside of Nancy's home, which they did on the Today Show.
So it's very possible this person could write a convincing note that they had Nancy, even if they didn't.
As we've discussed before, I don't understand a kidnapper who's like, check the floodlight as proof that I have Nancy.
Like, Maureen, that just doesn't like the floodlight.
That's something anyone can see from the outside of the house.
Well, yeah, the floodlight.
But the Apple Watch, I'm convinced because for the FBI to take this seriously, and James can agree with me because they were talking about it.
They got together.
Everyone discussed it.
It had to be something specific.
Like, I ripped her Apple Watch off.
I broke the buckle to the where she hooked it on.
I threw it.
He said it was the location.
I threw it.
Harvey said the location.
I threw it under her nightstand or under the dresser or I threw it into the bathroom, something like that.
So it's got a couple of elements that just no one else knew about unless they were there.
That's exactly right.
Go ahead, James.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And yeah, I just, again, she's very emotional and she's hanging on to any thread at all.
And so for her to believe that, you know, the note was for real, I completely understand how that could happen due to the emotional nature of it.
And not to say that her brother's not emotional, but I'd love to hear from him.
Did he think or did this sister, the other sister believe that, you know, this was real?
I'd like to hear from them.
And again, I could see her believing that because of the, you know, they are there.
These victims are hanging on to any shred of hope that it's going to be a good outcome.
I mean, I do think it's interesting that the brother, this fighter pilot, his mind immediately went to, she was kidnapped for ransom.
Like Savannah told us that yesterday without even, and he didn't get there until a couple of days in, James.
So that was him just being, just having the crime scene described to him by phone.
He immediately went to someone stole her to extort money from us because knowing Savannah had means.
Exactly.
You know, and that's kind of what, again, what I was talking about yesterday.
You know, he was intuitively, he was putting it together.
And, you know, if you've ever been through a traumatic situation, you know, that's exactly what happens.
I was actually stalked one time and the cops were asking me, you know, who do you think it is?
And I immediately put it together.
And, you know, I had no training.
This was, I was very young.
I didn't have any training in FBI stuff or stalking or any of that, but I just, you know, put it together intuitively that it's so-and-so.
And sure enough, that's exactly who was stalking me.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that that's what happened.
Again, intuition is a very powerful thing and it operates at a subconscious level faster than a computer.
And he put it together very quickly and not surprised by it at all.
And Megan, fighter pilots, they go through all kinds of training being taken into custody by state actors and others and tortured.
And so they go through a whole series of training where when something goes bad, it usually goes bad pretty quickly.
And, you know, with that front door pro or that back door propped open, her not being there, she obviously didn't walk away.
Blood on the front doorstep.
I wonder how long it was before they called him.
I just think that timeframe, if that timeframe is correct, that is really odd to me.
Me too.
I had my producers transcribe exactly what she said about when she found out.
Well, she said, we just, Mike, that's her husband's name, I'd given Mike for Christmas a boys trip to go play tennis.
And so he had been gone for the weekend.
So I took my kids actually to Carson's.
So we had a beautiful, fun night together.
And then he came home, meaning Mike.
And really, I just got home at the same time that Mike came home.
We were just saying hi, putting down our stuff, and the kids were running around.
And my sister called me and I said, is everything okay?
And she said, no.
She said, mom's missing.
She uses the term, the word night, that she and her kids and Carsten's family had a beautiful, fun night together.
So now, and she clearly found out Sunday evening.
She didn't, she's not talking about the next day.
So it hadn't happened on Saturday night.
So it maybe.
No, it couldn't have been the night before.
Oh.
Had to be Sunday night.
And it was definitely Sunday night because she's saying, you heard the rest of the soundbite that I played for you where she's saying, you know, have you called the hospital?
She's like, I already did that.
Polygraph Everyone Immediately00:15:45
Like, it's all unfolding still.
And she's like, call 911.
We did that.
They're here.
She says.
So it's like, this is Sunday night.
She got the call.
It's very strange.
I don't know how many hours elapsed between Annie Guthrie calling the cops.
911's at the house.
You're calling all the hospitals.
Your mother's blood is there.
She's missing.
Her purse is there.
Her phone is there.
And you don't think to call the other sister to say, have you heard from mom?
Like, that is very strange.
I don't know what it means, you guys, but it's strange.
It is.
Unless she tried to call her and she didn't answer.
And that's why Savannah said, is everything okay?
Because I like looking at it like, oh, I missed two calls from my sister, Annie.
I don't know, but it is strange.
I don't know.
I mean, can I ask you frankly, like, do we still suspect Annie slash Tomas, who she calls Tommy?
The evidence that we shouldn't is Chad Aeros reporting on our air that he has a source boots on the ground in Arizona who says they've taken polygraphs and passed, quote, with flying colors.
The sheriff who said they've been cleared, but then he backed that off a little by saying they're not suspects at this time.
No one's been arrested.
And Chad's other information was, quote, there are no suspects right now.
Savannah saying if you knew how much like they take care of my mom, like those two are so loving and like completely took care of Nancy sounds like in a very loving way in Savannah's judgment.
So is it time to completely move on from Annie and Tomas?
Maureen, what do you think?
No, but I'm not blaming them, but I'm not stepping away from them.
I'm objective.
I'm going to go wherever the evidence leads me.
However, I do think it's got to be someone that knew Nancy.
I don't think it was a complete stranger.
I think it was someone that interacted with her, knew how vulnerable she was, and the fact that she was vulnerable and she also had access to a great deal of money, if in fact it was a kidnapping from the beginning.
We just don't have enough information on this end of the deal right now.
And if this were my case or James, we would probably love it if everyone was saying, hey, no one's, we don't have any suspects whatsoever.
Just let people go and do what they do and we'll just put our head down and try to solve this case.
Interesting.
So that could, we're hoping that was a head fake thrown out to possibly throw off the suspects, if any, that they do have.
Let's pray.
Let's pray, God, that that's actually what is happening here, that Chad has been used by somebody trying to throw everybody or the suspects that they do have off the scent.
Well, look at the Corey Richards case.
She was out free and clear and her family was just, or his family was just like, what is going on?
It's obvious she did it.
Well, it took him a year to build the case.
Sometimes, oftentimes, it takes a long time to build a case.
These people were pretty careful, wouldn't you say, James?
With, you know, no comms or little comms.
Still think they had walkie-talkies, not jammers and stuff.
I'm always going for the simpler, no traceable comms.
Yeah, I mean, that first day I was with you, I said that they're not that stupid.
They haven't been caught yet.
So, you know, and I think we were laughing about the gun placement and all that, but here we are, 53 days later, as Megan said, and we got nothing.
So, I think they're laughing more than anybody.
They're not that stupid.
And, you know, again, with regards to, you know, they passed or quote-unquote passed with quote-unquote flying colors.
I mean, it's NDI, you know, no deception indicated would be what the polygrapher said.
And again, they don't pass with flying colors.
There's just no such thing as that.
They do the test.
And if there's no detection indicated, then okay, they passed.
But again, I don't know, Megan, I don't know the polygrapher.
I don't know if he or she has a tremendous amount of experience.
They might.
I don't know.
I'd like to know that.
I'd like to know what the control questions were.
I'd like to know specifically what the questions were.
So I'll give you a good example.
If the question was, did you do this?
And they say, and they didn't, by the way, have anything to actually do with it physically and they were just like paying someone to do it, they would pass on that question.
If they said, no, I didn't have any, I did not do this.
That would be the answer.
But if they paid someone to do it, then they would pass.
They would not show deception.
So I'd like to know what the questions were specifically and who did it.
How good is this polygrapher?
To let me feel a little bit better about the results.
But again, without the body, without solving the case, I can't say that really anyone is quote unquote cleared because I have nothing, right?
I still don't have the case solved and I still don't have the body.
So I'm not saying anyone's ruled out.
You know, that you might have an alibi, but it doesn't mean you didn't benefit in some way, shape, or form.
And I'm just not going to say that.
Again, why do that?
You don't need to do that.
Why would we?
By virtue of the fact that the polygraphs took place at the sheriff's station, my guess is it's a law enforcement polygrapher, which are.
I don't think they did.
Yeah.
I don't think we know that.
No, I think we believe that they took place probably at the family's homes because Ashley Banfield was suggesting she like people had the cop station staked out and the family had not been there.
Brian Enton reported that he thought it was at the sheriff's station.
And so my only point is, no matter where it was, if the family hired a polygrapher and as a crisis manager, I would say, let's just polygraph everyone, get it over with, and we can put that out so you guys are off the hook, at least, you know.
So if it's a polygrapher hired by the family to conduct these interviews, that goes into one bucket, the wishy-washy one.
If it's an FBI profiler or a sheriff's department profiler that's conducting this according to law enforcement protocols, that gets a lot more weight from me.
She's exactly she's 100% right, Megan.
If this was a family thing, that's a totally different thing than a law enforcement custodial type polygraph at the police station.
That is a totally different thing.
And I'm just trying now to remember.
We can go back and check this, but if my memory serves, Brian Enton was the first to report that people were being polygraphed and that it was happening at the sheriff's station because then we added to the reporting that they rarely do that at this sheriff's department, that they're not big.
One of the other detectives came on the record saying it's rare for them to polygraph anybody.
And then there was a second report later that the family had been polygraphed.
And I don't know.
Did Brian specifically report that the family went to, that the family went to the sheriff's to be polygraphed?
He did not, but he saw, he heard that polygraphs were happening at the sheriff's department.
And then the sheriff's department mentioned to someone that they have new hires that they were polygraphing or polygraphing.
So, you know, so young sheriff's deputies were being polygraphed.
Oh, not potential suspects in this case.
Right.
But then after that.
Okay, so we don't know.
I'll tell you right now, I don't believe the family went down to the sheriff's office for a polygraph.
I'm telling you, in Savannah's position, you would say, fuck off.
No, if you want to polygraph me, I'll do it.
I'm going to do it right here.
Otherwise, it can become a media spectacle.
And I'm not giving anybody videotape of me or my sister and my brother-in-law, who I already think are being unfairly smeared, walking into the police station because it's just going to add to more speculation.
And that's the last thing we need.
And this sheriff is obviously trying to please Savannah.
That's why he came out and said, everyone's cleared, which is not a term he could use, right?
Since no one's under arrest to the point.
It's the DA that makes that decision anyways.
It's the prosecutors that make the decision.
Who's heard two words from the DA?
I don't even know who the DA is.
We've been covering this case how many times together?
I have no idea.
We never heard from the DA.
There seems to be a lot of dissonance amongst the leadership in Pima County because normally in these press conferences or anything like this, you'd have everyone up there together showing unity.
We're working together.
We're all on the same page, you know, fighting the good fight for the family, for the victims.
I wouldn't know who the DA was if I tripped over her.
Or him.
No, that's what Matt Murphy's been saying, James, all along, you know, lifetime prosecutor.
Now he's doing some defense work for cops.
But he's like, where's the DA?
In every case I ever handled, the DA was the face of the case.
The DA would be driving the direction and the DA would be the one saying whether somebody had been cleared or not.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
It's disparate, as we've kind of talked about before.
Very little task force feeling, very little combination of resources.
It's a lot of the Sheriff Nano show, it feels like.
And I'm with you all.
I don't know who the district attorney is.
I don't know even if the FBI is still involved.
Last thing I heard was they were pulling resources back to Phoenix.
They called it a tactical reallocation.
Well, that sounds to me as they're not heavily involved here either.
And that's not good because you need those resources for all of the various things we're talking about, the evidence that leads other states, other countries.
You're going to need the FBI.
You cannot do that alone as a Pima County sheriff.
And lastly, you see a lot of bad optics here.
I've been seeing a lot of videos of him and his Corvette going to the gym every day.
It's just a bad optic.
I'm not saying the guy can't have a life, but certainly she's not at the gym.
Ms. Guthrie's not there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, we're supposed to believe that an 84-year-old woman has been kidnapped and might still be out there in need of finding, in need of our help.
Like it isn't a good look.
If Nancy got, I mean, there is, it's remote, but there is a possibility that she's still alive and suffering.
So go to work.
Work out in your basement.
Stop parading around in your Corvette.
And we saw to the basketball game early on.
It's so insensitive.
This is why no one likes him.
It's a real bad idea.
I wanted to play this one soundbite.
Today's piece of the Savannah interview was all emotional.
It was like, you know, it's like the typical today show, pull on the heartstrings.
There wasn't news.
But I did want to play one piece of it in light of the nerdy report, which again is unconfirmed, but nerdy's reporting that the second ransom note suggested she's with God.
I didn't realize how bad her heart condition was and she's with God.
Listen to what Savannah says here and I'll explain why I'm tying them together.
SAT 25.
How can someone vanish without a trace?
How?
Someone knows something.
Even if that something is someone's been acting strange for the last seven, eight weeks, even if it's just that.
Somebody knows.
And maybe somebody's afraid.
I understand that.
But our hearts are in agony.
We can't breathe.
We can't live.
We can't go on.
We can't be at peace.
We can't go forward.
We have to know what happened to her.
It's hard to watch.
It's awful, and you can completely relate to it.
I think of these poor parents who lose kids, you know, who have missing children.
Like, I don't know how you'd wake up, how you'd get, how you'd do anything knowing your child was out there.
And I'm sure the pain is in that neighborhood when it's your 84-year-old mom who is also a dependent in many ways.
You know, it's like I have an 84-year-old mom.
It's a tough time of life.
You know, it's a tough time.
And you know what?
My mom is a lot like Savannah's mom.
My mom also lost her husband when my mom was 44.
Her mom was 49.
It was a sudden heart attack for her dad and mine.
My dad died at 45.
Her dad died at 49.
It was like, it's really crazy some of the parallels of our lives.
Same here.
My dad.
I'm guided to some of this stuff.
45.
Really?
Yeah.
And it left my mom with six kids.
Oh, my God.
Right.
So like, you can relate to what she's feeling about her poor mom who's been through a lot and got her through a lot and now needs her, needs her to help her, needed her before she got kidnapped, I'm sure, to help her live and maintain her independence and now needs her to find her.
But to me, I couldn't tell if Savannah was trying to telegraph there at the end, like, we think she's still alive or just we need to know one way or the other.
But she didn't sound to me like somebody who totally knew the mom was dead.
And like, that would undermine the reporting from nerdy.
No offense to nerdy, but the reporting might be incorrect.
That they, that they've been, the family hasn't sounded to me like they definitively know Nancy's dead.
They sound, they've sounded to me since like that since the first, after, excuse the first video they did where they were like, we need to know you have her and that she's alive.
Then they started to sound a little bit more like they suspected she was dead.
Like we need to celebrate with her.
And they, you know, they seemed less less hopeful, but I haven't heard anything from them, James, suggesting they know Nancy's dead.
Yeah, she's holding out hope.
And I think, unfortunately, as you work these cases and, you know, Maureen and I have, it's just tragic.
And she's going to continue to always hold out hope.
And, you know, again, if this prolongs, which I think it will, and a year from now, we still don't have the body.
I think, you know, she's obviously going to feel more inclined to believe that her mom is gone, but not 100%.
She'll always hold out hope that she's going to come back, that she's still alive.
That's a very common, you know, feeling of a family member.
But I'm with you.
I think she's not believing that her mom's gone and that she is holding out hope that he's still there.
And again, I think going back to her question, how does someone just vanish?
That's where I am.
And we, everyone collectively needs to put pressure on this sheriff or whoever's running this case, because again, I don't really know, but what is going on?
Give us an update.
You know, like hold them, like you were saying yesterday, the value of the media in this case is to continue to ask questions.
Where is a district attorney?
Someone should be down there with a microphone going, what are you doing?
What is going on?
Have we just resigned ourselves to say this case is over?
That is unacceptable, right?
Like that, that's the purpose of this.
Continue to put pressure on them so that it's not acceptable that nothing has happened and there are no leads and we can't find this lady.
Because that's going to set a precedent.
That's just how we act around here.
And that is not what we want to be doing.
It is weird.
Like, Maureen, if I were Sheriff Nanos, I'd call a presser.
Yeah.
Like, there's no better way to get the media re-interested in this case than call a presser.
Give us the latest update.
You know, whatever you have.
I'm sure he's got a couple of nuggets that he could feed to the media to get people re-interested in this, but why, why don't they?
FBI Warns Against Paying00:08:30
I have no idea why, but it could be as simple as, hey, we got 12,000 tips overall and we did a triage and all the strong tips went to the top of the list.
We were working our way down.
We're down to, we have another 600 to go.
We're still, you know, but I think, honestly, I think part of the reason why the FBI pulled the resources back to Phoenix is they're going to be in their own space.
They're going to have, you know, they're going to have all the FBI resources, but it also creates distance between them and Nanos so they can just do what they want to do.
And it also gives breathing room to the detectives in Pima County that are assigned to that task force so they can just work with the FBI and stay a little bit away from the drama.
If she was taken by kidnappers because Savannah is well known and has money and the first ransom demand came in and they believe it, Savannah to this moment believes it was from the people who took her mom.
Why didn't they pay?
Truly, I know they didn't give proof of life, but she's telling us she believed she was communicating with the people who had Nancy.
Like, would the FBI have been saying, even though you believe it, we suspect we got a hunch this is them, don't pay without proof of life.
Well, we don't know how many ransom notes they got because she mentioned in this, in that last clip that of all the ransom notes, well, we only know of three.
My guess is the other ones went to either the Pima County Sheriff or the FBI, in which case we don't know about those.
So maybe the FBI is like, listen, we have one here, one at Pima County, and this other one, and let's give the money to whoever comes up with the proof of life.
I don't know.
There's got to be a method to that.
Well, that's exactly right.
And were the FBI even.
They would have taken Nancy back dead or alive.
Oh, yeah.
You know, so it's like, is proof of life even what they're actually looking for?
It's like proof that you did it is really, right?
Like that's, we should play, we should play the message where they said, yeah.
Okay, this is Saturday night.
They've received both ransom notes from the Bitcoin guy saying, this is the person that Harvey says, said this is what she was wearing.
She had the Apple Watch and exactly the placement of it.
Take a look at this floodlight and had deadlines in it and had 4 million and then 6 million and then talked about 12 hours of the Tucson area.
Like that's, they've received a very detailed ransom note and then a follow-up that may or may not have said, we didn't know how sick she was and she's with God.
We don't have, that's unconfirmed.
But here's what the family said, having had all that and knowing this is Saturday night that the last deadline, they've missed the first deadline, which was Thursday for 4 million.
The last deadline is coming of Monday for 6 million.
Here's SOP 44.
We received your message and we understand.
We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her.
This is the only way we will have peace.
This is very valuable to us and we will pay.
But still they didn't, James.
They still didn't pay.
Even if you believe in that message, they now believe she's dead.
Maybe nerdy's right.
Maybe the second note did say the terrible things.
But she's saying there, we will pay.
And she actually didn't even ask for proof of anything there.
It's just to me, it's very confusing unless the FBI was telling her, don't pay one dime until we get a hair or a picture or something to prove this is not a scammer.
Yeah, I certainly believe there were FBI and law enforcement off, you know, off camera who were assisting with that video.
And certainly they're not going to throw good money away if there's no chance that this is legitimate.
But here again, a great question.
Sheriff Nanos, FBI, district attorney, what happened?
Why didn't they pay?
Did they want to pay?
Please tell us what is going on.
Again, nothing.
Why didn't Hoda ask that?
Well, you nailed all that yesterday with regards to what that was, whether it was a journalistic deep dive interview or it was two friends on a couch, right?
Or something that they're trying to paint as two friends on a couch.
I mean, I thought it was very telling that Carson Daly admitted in the roundtable afterward that none of them had been in touch with Savannah throughout this entire ordeal.
Wow.
And yet Hoda is there like crying, fake crying.
I'm sorry, but she was fake crying.
She kept wiping away tears that weren't there.
Look at it.
I watched it on my computer where my big screen is like 12 inches from me.
There were no tears in her eyes.
There were no tears coming down her face.
Savannah was crying.
They were real tears.
And she kept wiping away tears that weren't there.
Hoda kept sniffling.
She was like, she kept interjecting with her.
Yes, yes.
It's like, just stop.
I know it's a joke.
Some journalists.
That's what you're here for.
Yeah.
Like her constant, yes, yes, in the background, it was distracting.
It was off-putting.
It was distracting.
And she didn't do her job, which is the very basic.
Why did you believe that that actually was from the kidnapper?
Why did you believe that?
And then the obvious follow-up.
If you believed it was real, why didn't you pay?
She could say, I'm not going to answer that.
That's fine.
We get that all the time.
I've had a nickel for every time I've had to ask an uncomfortable question of somebody, including people I know and like, but I have to do it because it's my journalistic duty.
I've had many people come on the show saying, I'll come on, but I'm not going to be able to answer the following things.
And I'll say, you do whatever you're going to have to do.
I'm going to have to do what I'm going to have to do.
And it's your duty.
Truly, this is not a small deal.
You know, it's your duty as a journalist.
This was the biggest interview in the country this week.
And she completely fell down on the job.
Why didn't you pay then?
And to your point earlier, Maureen, what do you mean the door was propped open?
The back door was propped open?
With what?
With what?
Yeah.
Very simple.
Would that have been so, if you're going to tell us it was propped open, why wouldn't you say with what?
Unless they wanted her to keep that secret.
But I agree with you.
I just, the other thing with the payment situation, when they said, you can go to any post office, let us know which one, and we'll have the cash there ready for you.
And, you know, the interviews after that, with me, I think it was with you where Fitz and I were both like, yeah, that's a great idea.
But we're both thinking exactly what the perpetrators are thinking.
Like, that's unsurvivable.
There's no way I'm going to walk into a United States post office, get a giant duffel bag of millions of dollars, and then walk out and not get caught.
So I think they're just at the point where they need to, these perpetrators need to cut their losses because Nancy's gone.
And I actually think that I actually believe that Savannah knows her mom's gone.
I don't see any hope left for her to be alive, but I do think they have hope that they'll be able to bring her home and have a celebration of life.
So I just think the bad guys are just like, we're never going to.
I think they're getting more comfortable right now, by the way, because when Savannah said, if they've been acting strange for the last eight weeks, sure, but they got away with it for eight weeks now.
And to Jim's point of, you know, how many days it's been so far, they're starting to get comfortable again.
Whoever this person or these people are, they're starting to get comfortable again because they're still walking around.
I mean, there's still a million-dollar reward out there for information leading to the identification of the perpetrator or the finding of Nancy.
It's still possible someone could say, I want that million dollars.
It's possible the family could raise the reward still.
And I mean, I guess it's possible that somebody who hasn't seen that guy's picture will now.
We talked about how the billboards were insufficient that they're putting up all around the Southwest because they only showed Nancy.
They don't show the picture of that guy.
Reward Still Out There00:02:24
Well, guess what?
After our discussion, they actually changed the billboards.
It was amazing.
Jennifer Coffender noted that on her ex-feed.
So they did change the billboards and now his picture's on them.
So it's possible you know this guy, you're married to this guy, you employ this guy, and you don't know.
You know, a lot of people don't even follow the news.
You know, they just live their lives.
Those are the happy people.
And they don't, they haven't seen this picture a million times like we all have.
And they see this picture.
Like there's still some hope.
I do want to show one thing Savannah said.
We have 90 seconds left.
Do I have time?
Let's play 23 quickly.
But faith is how I will stay connected to my mom.
God is how I'm holding hands with my mom.
And I won't let sadness win for her.
She taught me.
I saw her grieve.
I saw her world shudder.
I saw it.
And I saw her get up.
And I saw her belief.
And I saw her love.
And I saw her hope.
And I saw her smile.
And I saw her laugh.
I saw her joy.
I saw her love of the world and adventure.
I saw her belief.
I saw her faith.
She taught me.
She caught all of us.
How to handle this.
A final gift from mother to daughter.
It's awful.
That's why we stay on this.
That's why you guys come on and we'll continue to until we have answers.