May 15, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
09:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey, my friend, are you in New York City? | |
| I'm in New Jersey. | |
| Beautiful, bucolic, central Jersey. | |
| You're good. | |
| You know, because it was just redundant. | |
| As soon as anyone hears central Jersey, they think beautiful, bucolic. | |
| You know, I grew up in the Bronx. | |
| Oh, so then you're right. | |
| Then that is beautiful. | |
| It's like one big botanical garden. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But if anyone ever told me I'd end up in New Jersey, I would have looked at them like they had three heads. | |
| But this is actually, it's been wonderful living here. | |
| It's been a gorgeous part of the country. | |
| Well, that's great. | |
| So let's get to the General Flynn issue. | |
| So I... I want to give my listeners just a drop of background and then into what the current judge is doing. | |
| So if you can, in a nutshell, bring us up to this moment in the soap opera. | |
| General Flynn was identified as one of the strands of the Obama administration's Trump-Russia probe, which the FBI called Crossfire Hurricane. | |
| They opened an investigation of him in July of 2016 on the preposterous notion that he was a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. | |
| They were evidently ready to shut that down at the end of December because it was, surprise, surprise, no evidence of that. | |
| But then he ends up having these conversations, one in particular on December 29th of 2016 after Obama imposes the sanctions on Russia. | |
| He has a conversation with the ambassador, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. | |
| They use that as a rationale for keeping the investigation open, even though Flynn didn't do anything wrong. | |
| And in a nutshell, Dennis, they stage a perjury trap interview of Flynn to try to get him to say something different from what they know is on the conversation, because they have... | |
| The conversation with Kislyak, because they know they have a recording of it. | |
| I believe the reason they did this is because they wanted to continue the Russia investigation with Trump in office, targeting him to try to make a case on him. | |
| And it would have been very difficult to do that if you had had an engaged, sophisticated intelligence actor who was loyal to the president as national security advisor, which... | |
| You know, Flynn checks all those boxes. | |
| So I think they weren't really looking to make a case on him at the time more than they were really trying to get him out of that position or at least marginalize him. | |
| Right, and we're talking about two weeks before the end of the Obama administration. | |
| That's right. | |
| So I just don't want people to have a time frame here. | |
| You kept using the word they. | |
| What does they mean? | |
| I think the investigation was begun by the Obama administration, and mainly the point of the sphere of the investigation is the FBI, but it's not all of it. | |
| I think the CIA is involved in other elements of the intelligence community as well. | |
| I believe at the beginning, nobody really thought Trump would win the election, so they weren't taking that possibility all that seriously, but they did exploit this investigation somewhat in conjunction with the Clinton campaign to try to get a Russian narrative going in terms of the 2016 election. | |
| Once Trump won, this became much more serious business. | |
| For a variety of reasons, not least that it meant that in 10 weeks after November 8th, when he won the election, he was going to be taking over the government. | |
| He would have access to all the intelligence files, and he would obviously know that the Obama administration had investigated his campaign and was continuing an investigation into his administration. | |
| At least he'd have the wherewithal to know that. | |
| And I think a lot of the frenetic activity that you see after Election Day, including the intelligence leaks, were done for the purpose of trying to project something that wasn't true, namely that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. | |
| Do you think the average American, who is not as engaged as you or I, obviously, but the average American, what sense do they have Do they have the sense that the whole Russian collusion thing really was invented and is essentially a lie, or they're just in a haze? | |
| I think many more people understand that now in the last year than understood it heretofore. | |
| I think one of the real depressing things about this whole escapade is that notwithstanding the scant amount of evidence that ever existed for this debacle, that if you took a poll, and people did take polls, before the Mueller report came out, I think a majority of before the Mueller report came out, I think a majority of Americans believe that the president had some kind of inappropriate relationship with the Russian | |
| And I think that's sheerly a result of the constant media suggestion that that was true. | |
| even though I think we now can see that it was more gaslighting than anything else. | |
| Okay, so I have one more question before we get to the present moment. | |
| If the FBI came to interview you, do you think that they would have a very high batting average for people like you or me to get us to lie? | |
| I think I'm a bad example. | |
| Dennis, because I was a prosecutor for 20 years. | |
| I worked with the FBI. I know how they operate. | |
| And I would not only not engage in a conversation like that, I would advise anyone not to engage in it. | |
| One of the ways the FBI gets to have those conversations is by making people think if you refuse to talk to them, then that confirms that you're a suspect. | |
| And what I always tell people is that the government has lots of lawyers, and you need to have a lawyer, too, just to be on a... | |
| An even playing field because they don't play fair. | |
| And I think we're seeing that because I actually don't think that Flynn wanted to lie to the FBI. Flynn was a very sophisticated intelligence actor who would have known that the Bureau had a copy, a recording of the conversation he had with Kislyak, the ambassador. | |
| So why on earth would you lie about something you know that they can listen to? | |
| Right, so that's my question. | |
| Why did it happen? | |
| Because he talked to them. | |
| No, no, of course. | |
| Why did he lie? | |
| I don't think he did lie. | |
| Okay, so that's what... | |
| Look, if I'm asking this question, clearly a lot of Americans are. | |
| So, is it... | |
| The whole thing was a lie, that there was Russian collusion, let alone that this man who's given his life to America was colluding against America for an election on behalf of the Russians. | |
| So that's clear. | |
| But is this another lie that he lied? | |
| Dennis, the easiest way to explain this is... | |
| People have routine failures of recollection. | |
| And if you really want to find out for information purposes what happened in a conversation and you had a recording of it, in good faith what you would do is play the recording for the person who was in the conversation and say, what did this mean? | |
| What did that mean? | |
| But if you or I were asked a month from now about the conversation that we're having right now, we would not remember it like we'd remember it two minutes from now. | |
| So we would render it probably with some inaccuracies if somebody asked us about the exact words that were used a month from now. | |
| And I think that's what happened to Flynn. | |
| It's not that he was trying to lie to them. | |
| That's exactly what I... So then, why did such a sophisticated man talk to them without a lawyer? | |
| And then, of course, I want to get to the present, but everybody needs to have a recollection of the past. | |
| Otherwise, we won't understand the state we're in right now. |
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