Lee Smith joins The Stone Zone to expose a "shadow network" of partisan operatives—like CIA Director William Radcliffe’s whitewashed report on John Brennan, the "admitted communist" who allegedly signed visas for 9/11 hijackers and weaponized the discredited Steele dossier to justify Crossfire Hurricane surveillance. Smith calls Brennan’s omissions in Radcliffe’s report a cover-up, linking it to House Intelligence Committee’s RussiaGate probe under Rick Crawford, while dismissing Adam Schiff as a "congenital liar" with no collusion evidence. He warns Brennan may face perjury charges but doubts prosecution due to statute limits and partisan bias, citing CIA’s pre-JFK surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald as proof of institutional rot. The episode ends with Smith urging legal accountability from Kash Patel and the DOJ while framing Brennan, Comey, and their allies as architects of a rigged system. [Automatically generated summary]
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And we're back in the Stone Zone.
Joining me now is Lee Smith.
He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Plot Against the President, that was subsequently made into one of the most powerful documentaries I have ever seen.
He has a new book out, which is even more shocking, actually, called Disappearing the President.
It is a shocking tale of how a shadow network of powerful partisan activists have waged a years-long scorched earth war to eradicate and destroy President Donald Trump, resorting to unprecedented campaign of domestic spying, election rigging, brute force censorship, and political violence, and sabotage countless other vital institutions in their relentless effort to destroy Donald Trump.
There is literally no person in the country more knowledgeable about the Russian collusion hoax than Lee Smith, and we are honored to have him with us today.
Lee, welcome back into the Stone Zone.
Roger, thank you so much for the really super kind introduction.
And like you, I'm excited to see movement on certain things, though.
I'm hopeful, but not certain we're going to get anything right now.
Yeah, I'm in the same position.
I think things are looking better.
I think the public focus on it is vitally important.
I'm sure that you had kind of the same reaction that I did when I saw this report by CIA Director Radcliffe that said that John Brennan, the disgraced CIA director, the admitted communist, he admitted that in a lie detector test.
The same John Brennan who got caught spying on a Senate committee that was investigating his illegal use of torture as CIA director.
The same John Brennan who signed the visas for four of the hijackers who attacked America on 9-11.
The same John Brennan who FBI counterintelligence agent John Guandolo swears converted to radical Islam when he was the station chief in Riyadh, pushed to include the largely discredited Steele dossier in the president's intelligence community briefing.
You reported this long, long ago.
This was not news to you.
You had reported this.
We're well aware of it.
Now we have the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford, who's a very good man, saying that he thinks that Radcliffe's move was really designed to preempt the report that he's been working on for eight months that includes a great deal more declassified documents, a much, much deeper dive about the rot and the corruption in our intelligence agencies.
So Lee Smith, what say you?
Well, I mean, What Chairman Crawford is referring to is he's referring to the House Intelligence Committee Russia report that those guys are working on since I mean, since Devin Nunes ran that committee in 2017 is when they started that report.
And that report is extensive, and that does talk about Brennan.
I mean, I haven't seen it.
I'm just saying what they've told me that still classified that report.
I'm telling, I'm relaying the parts of that report that they've told me about that can be talked about.
And, you know, we've seen it because we've seen that reported now that there are parts in the House Intelligence Committee document that talk about Brennan, that talk about the intelligence community assessment and RussiaGate.
I don't think that.
I think that Director John Radcliffe is a good guy.
I think he loves Donald Trump.
He supports Donald Trump.
So he's not trying to do anything underhanded.
But I agree with you, Roger.
I think that this report is, as other people have said, it's a whitewash.
I mean, it's insane.
We've known most of this stuff for a long time, and it doesn't really get to the, it doesn't really advance anything new.
And there are different parts which absolutely cover up for the bad things that Brennan and that group did.
I mean, there are just some astonishing things.
I really have to hope that your great audience, your listeners, are welcome to look it up and check it out.
But, you know, we all have more important things to do with our lives.
So I'll just say the sort of ridiculous things it's saying, stuff like, oh, yeah, it's still a robust document using proper sourcing.
I'm like, this is just insane the way that these bureaucrats talk about each other.
But, you know, I mean, we all know that that's the kind of work they were going to get.
If you tell the people at Langley here, write a report on what people at Langley did.
That's absolutely the product they're going to turn around.
So again, I don't think that Director John Radcliffe is a bad guy.
I think he's a good guy, probably a great guy.
As Donald Trump's director of national intelligence at the end of Donald Trump's first term, Radcliffe declassified a whole bunch of really important documents.
So he's a good guy, and we know a lot about RussiaGate thanks to the efforts of John Radcliffe during Trump's first term.
So I don't think he's trying to obfuscate anything here.
But yeah, we want that report that Devin Nunes started.
The report that Chairman Rick Crawford is talking about.
So those things are all really important for our understanding.
I'll just say that the craziest thing, the craziest thing about that document, the craziest thing about the reporting afterwards is, well, yeah, of course Brennan and Comey wanted the dossier put into that intelligence community assessment report because that's all they had.
There was never any evidence that Donald Trump was colluding, conspiring, contacting Russia.
Never.
All they had was the dossier.
It had to go in the ICA.
And that's why Devin Nunes, Devin Nunes, in my first book on Russia Gate, the plot against the president, that's why Devin Nunes called that intelligence community assessment Obama's dossier.
And that's the title of one of my chapters in that book, Obama's dossier.
So we've known this for a long time, that they had to put that in there.
They had to put all that steel reporting in there because that's all they ever had.
This whole fake story paid for by the Clinton campaign.
I completely agree with your assessment of John Radcliffe.
He's a good man, and I think this has been an important contribution to getting public focus back on the epic corruption, what I continue to call the greatest political dirty trick in American history, and certainly the greatest single abuse of power.
I'm sorry, but Watergate pales in comparison to this.
Watergate was an operation.
A bunch of misguided private citizens broke into the Watergate.
I have my own theories about what they were looking for.
You can read it in the two books I've written about it.
I don't want to get sidetracked on it.
Oswald, Charge, and Investigation00:11:50
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Corruption, I guess I have to call it, and the games played by the CIA.
For six decades, the Central Intelligence Agency insisted that they had no knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald.
They weren't tracking him.
He wasn't on their radar.
That turns out to be an egregious lie, that they had him under surveillance.
They were monitoring all of his communications.
And those reports were not being handled by low-level bureaucrats.
They were going to the CIA director, John McCone, and to the then Deputy Director, Richard Helms.
So they were not only, in essence, monitoring Oswald, they were actually handling Oswald.
And they set up the famous altercation on the street in New Orleans, in which Oswald was handing out pro-Castro leaflets in an effort to establish the narrative that he was a communist.
By the way, none of this, in my opinion, means that Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John F. Kennedy, because he didn't.
It's a story for another day.
But it does demonstrate the fact that even now, with the president ordering the National Archives and all branches of government to release all data regarding the murder of John F. Kennedy, that the government held the so-called George Joe Annites documents back.
Joe Annites was the FBI official, probably the CIA official in charge of overseeing the monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald.
And he's also the CIA operative who was in charge to stonewall the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations re-examination of the Kennedy assassination, with the CIA flatly refused to cooperate in.
They turned over no documents, they provided no witnesses, and they answered no questions.
It just speaks to the epic corruption of the CIA.
There is no greater patriot than Devin Nunes, who I think did an amazing job as the chairman of the committee.
Just having to put up with Adam Schiff every day should get a medal for that.
I mean, this guy is the most incredible congenitor liar in the history of American politics.
I'm sure you recall when he said that he had seen more than circumstantial evidence of Russian collusion.
Well, Congressman, produce it.
Where is it?
You never produced anything.
The fact that he continues to get away with these lies, he actually got a promotion to the U.S. Senate is hard to stomach, to be quite honest with you.
I was happy to see Kash Patel announce that there's now open investigation into Comey and Brennan because there's no question they need to be held accountable.
There are some statue of limitations questions.
What's interesting here is that both Brennan and Comey not only used the steel dossier, wedging it into the intelligence community assessment that was presented to Obama, but as you pointed out, Obama knew it was coming and he used it essentially as the rationale to authorize Crossfire Hurricane, the CIA,
FBI effort to surveil and bring down Donald Trump, also later used as the rationale for the appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel.
This, by the way, is why I think they came back and pressured me.
As I say, after spending $30 million and conducting an exhaustive investigation, they couldn't find the Russian collusion because it didn't exist.
And therefore, they decided that perhaps they could flip me and get me to testify falsely against the president, which I refused to do.
There was no Russian collusion.
There was no WikiLeaks collaboration.
I passed not one, but two different polygraph tests on that very subject.
So I'm really very hopeful that they will be held to account here and that there will be indictments.
The problem here is one of statute of limitations, or maybe not.
I would make an argument that both Brennan and Comey engaged in treason, and there is no statue of limitations on treason.
But while Brennan and Comey both lied before Congress about pushing to include the so-called steel dossier in the intelligence committee's assessment, later on, as late as 2020, in Brennan's interview with special counsel John Durham, he yet again lied about that.
There may be some legal vulnerability there.
For reasons I don't understand, then Attorney General Bill Barr cleared Brennan of wrongdoing, claiming falsely that the CIA had stayed in its lane.
I think there is also the possibility that Comey lied at a later date before Congress as well.
I still have the same concern, which you and I have discussed, which is that any indictment brought in the District of Columbia is going to get a hostile partisan judge, going to get an all-democrat jury.
And of course, you have the coverage by the fake news media, which will seek to discredit any accounting by these people.
I saw John Brennan yesterday on MSNBC.
This guy's arrogance just continues to blow my mind.
I mean, he's there yet repeating the same lie.
He basically said yesterday, oh, no, I didn't do anything wrong.
I didn't push to include the steel dossier when we know the exact opposite is true.
Well, that's going to be the problem.
I mean, you know, I mean, we're all reading the same reports about the and I don't know.
It's just not clear to me yet if the FBI has announced an investigation because they're not really supposed to do that.
My sense is that what's been announced is that John Radcliffe made a criminal referral, which went over to DOJ.
So I think that's what we know for sure.
I've seen reports that there's an FBI investigation now, but that might be racing a little bit ahead.
But definitely Radcliffe made a referral for an investigation over at DOJ, FBI.
Yes, if it is a perjury charge, that's going to be a big problem because as I've been explaining in these different books, I mean, look, no one called it the steel dossier until January 2017 when they were passing this thing around before they were not calling it the steel dossier.
So just the idea, you know, I mean, Brennan has been weaseling out of this one for half a decade now.
For instance, Roger, there's an article.
I mean, I know all the press reports inside out.
I have all the dates.
It's June 23rd, 2017, Washington Post.
What the story is about, it's about how John Brennan put the steel dossier on Barack Obama's desk, that they sent it over.
I mean, did it really happen?
I don't know.
But John Brennan is the source for the story.
It was published in the Washington Post, but it's never referred to as the steel dossier in there.
So the idea that Brennan, you know, that Brennan somehow is going to get in trouble because he said he didn't put the steel dossier in there, it doesn't make sense to me.
They never called it that, right?
The way that they thought of it in an entirely different way, and they were very careful.
John Brennan, and I try to remind people of this, John Brennan is not a good guy.
He's a bad guy, but he's not a dumb guy.
And this is something that Congressman Nunes and Chairman Nunes repeated again and again.
He said, look, Brennan is a very slippery guy.
These guys are not dummies.
They get to the head of these agencies and these institutions by being more clever as bureaucrats, right?
Not by being more patriotic or not by necessarily being the best at their jobs, but by being more skillful bureaucrats who know how to use paperwork.
So the idea that they're going to catch Brennan on this on a perjury charge, I don't see it.
I think there probably are different things.
And you mentioned before when Durham went to Langley to interview Brennan in August 2020, I think that there are different things that may have happened while Brennan was preparing for that interview, perhaps even in the aftermath.
I'm hoping that DOJ and the FBI looks at that period.
But I think the 2017 period, again, I can't speak to the statute of limitations, what it is exactly for every charge and how it might be extended.
It just seems to me that there are different places that if they're looking to hold John Brennan accountable for what he did, it seems to me that maybe the preparation for that intelligence community assessment is not going to provide a lot of leads.
But that August 2020 meeting or interview with John Durham may be fruitful.
All right, we have to wrap it there.
I want to thank our guest, Lee Smith, the great Lee Smith.
Urge you to check out his book, Disappearing the President, the New York Times bestseller.
Whatever you do, don't touch that dial because we'll be right back.
Done zone on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Rural Hospitals Lifelines00:00:56
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our nation has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.