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Jan. 4, 2017 - Sean Hannity Show
01:31:42
Buckle Up, This Won't Be Easy - 1.3
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Let not your heart be troubled.
You are listening to the Sean Hannity Radio Show Podcast.
All right, happy 2017.
Glad you're with us.
Here's my advice for you as we kick off this new year.
And I know it's very similar to the advice I gave you at the start of last year.
You better put your seatbelt on and buckle up.
None of what Donald Trump is going to do is going to be easy.
He is still going to have the same enemies that he had all throughout 2016.
It's going to probably even be tougher because as he tries to implement his agenda, which is about as aggressive an agenda, and by the way, America needs most of it desperately, uh, of any president in our lifetime.
I would even argue in ways if if on paper, more aggressive than what Ronald Reagan proposed.
Because he's fundamentally talking about shifting, changing, altering government at its core.
If he if he tries to do this, the very same media establishment that worked against him and colluded with the Hillary campaign, they they will still be there fighting every day and accusing him of everything from hating women and poor children and wanting dirty air and water and it's all coming.
The campaign is not going to stop.
The narrative against him is not going to stop.
So if you if you think you can vote for a candidate, walk away and think your job is done, then you've got another thing coming because then you're going to get the government you deserve.
It's not going to be something that he can do on his own.
This is going to be placed in the laps of you, the American people that went out and voted for him.
Because when important moments come up, and there should be many of them, a lot in the first hundred days, then you better be ready to help call your congressman and your senator and and let them know how you feel, or else the changes we've wanted that you fought for all last year will be for nothing.
And in that sense, it won't be his fault.
It'll be your fault.
It'll be your representative's fault.
He's got a weak Republican establishment.
They they're embarrassed by him.
They you've got to understand this.
Very few of these Washington Republicans went out and fought for their own candidate.
Paul Ryan is now the speaker again.
It's going to start immediately with the people that he's choosing for his cabinet.
It'll start with his first Supreme Court appointment.
I'll get to the idea.
I know a lot of you are worried.
What if Obama tries the recess appointment between the hundred and fourteenth and hundred and fifteenth Congress?
Will there be a minute where he might be able to recess a point Merrick Garland?
We'll get to that in a second.
So much that's going to come up here.
Look at Trump, by the way, was pretty funny.
Say about Gitmoge, lock the door and throw away the key.
Well, that's if Obama in his waning days, if you've been watching, this has been the single biggest post-election power grab almost since Teddy Roosevelt that we have seen in American history.
And that is Obama trying to put every single obstacle in Trump's way that he possibly can.
But if Trump follows through and he and he tries to lower the corporate tax rates, oh, that's going to be labeled tax cuts for the rich.
You know, there's a story out there about Ford Motor Company, which I think is a pretty good story and one that should make us feel pretty good that they decided that the $700 million they were going to spend on a plant in Mexico, they're now going to build that plant in Michigan, which desperately needs jobs.
I know because I've been to Michigan.
I've been in the Detroit area, and I've seen the devastation.
They want to literally bulldoze entire neighborhoods that are empty.
Home after home after home, street after street after street, block after block after block.
They want to bulldoze all these empty homes, consolidate services, because they can't afford to light up the entire city where there's only one or two people living on certain blocks and garbage services and the likes.
I mean, to rebuild one of America's great cities is not going to be done overnight.
But if Trump tries to eliminate, here's what's possible.
Maybe I'll put it in a positive way so that if you buckle up and you're ready for this fight, you're going to be enthusiastic about what it is, that what it is, what you're fighting for.
You know, in the first hours that Donald Trump is president, he's going to be rescinding as many executive orders that Barack Obama has used to govern because he doesn't respect the Constitution and he decided to bypass Congress and separation of powers and co-equal branches of government.
The good news about ruling by executive orders is they can be undone.
And the first order of business, Donald Trump can probably wipe out in the first few hours 70 to 75% of the damage that Obama has inflicted on the economy and on this country.
Just with the stroke of a pen.
And then if they move immediately to repeal Obamacare, well, that takes away another 10%.
Now we're up to 85%.
And the remaining 15%, it will almost be as if Obama was never there for eight years.
It could be that deep and that profound.
Now the question is, well, what are you going to replace all of this with?
The only thing we're definitely left with is the $10 trillion in Obama debt, the bad state of the economy, a foreign policy disaster all around the globe, you know, but for the killing of bin Laden, I can't think of think of a single foreign policy success.
But if he wants to lower the corporate tax rate, I can guarantee you the narrative isn't going to be that jobs are going to be created for the 95 million Americans out of the labor force.
The narrative's going to be is Donald Trump is for big business.
If he removes the burdensome regulation for automakers and steel mills and uh whatever other industry, carrier air conditioners, because it's costing them money, compliance money, it's costing them in terms of the products they have to they're able to create.
It's costing them in terms of research and development because of these ridiculous environmental standards.
And if the environmentalists tell you he's poisoning the air and poisoning the water, well, that's going to be an obstacle.
And then you have these weak need spineless Republicans that don't have any courage or vision, if you don't call their offices with a steady stream and flood of support, then you know, he might have difficulty making these changes.
You know, changing the tax code from seven brackets to three, lowering the corporate tax rate, allowing multinational corporations, the repatriation one time tax, 10%.
Well, that's all money that can be spent on manufacturing centers and factories and creating jobs for Americans.
The next big component of this is if he eliminates Obamacare, you know, the Democrats' line is you break it, you own it.
No, you already broke it.
It's shattered, it's in tattered all over the place.
And now we have to clean up your mess.
That's what the narrative ought to be.
But the narrative the Democrats will put out is Republicans want your grandmother to die.
That's what that's what you will hear.
This is all very predictable.
When he allows drilling and fracking and an expansion of coal mining and nuclear facilities, and he changes America's energy policies towards energy independence, which is good for national security.
We're not dependent on countries that hate our guts anymore.
And it'll create millions of high-paying, career-paying jobs.
Well, then it's going to be the environmentalists screaming, we're going to poison the air, water, and kill the environment.
Well when Trump goes forward, and already there's a story out today how he's already planning to build the wall.
When he starts building the wall, then it's going to be that Donald Trump's racist, doesn't want Mexicans in the country.
Well, he did say the wall will have a door in it somewhere.
So people can come over, but we'll know who they are.
And it'll keep Americans safe.
We'll have less competition.
Those Americans that are out of work, the eight, nine, ten million illegal immigrants that have jobs may end up having to go home.
That means more opportunities for Americans that are on food stamps in poverty and out of work.
So every single one of these policies is going to require a fight on your part.
You can't just vote and walk away.
You can't.
If you do, then you're going to get the same failed government that you've always had.
And that's not going to work.
But I can guarantee you, starting now, not even January 20th, starting now, the battle is beginning.
And the Democrats are going to be flailing and they're going to be screaming and they're going to be hemming and hawing and yelling and ranting and raving.
And they're going to act as though, you know, the sky is falling.
And they're going to go to their predictable fear tactics that they use in every election cycle.
And if we fall prey to those tactics, then items in the agenda are not going to get done.
But if the same people that were enthusiastic that showed up at Trump rallies before the election and went out and voted in record numbers if they want jobs, if they want corporate investment, if they want energy independence, if they want health savings accounts, well, you know, wait till he wait till Donald Trump sends education back to the states.
The NEA is going to go ballistic.
And they'll spend millions and millions of dollars in rank and file money to protect their turf.
Because we're talking about a fundamental rooting out of the corruption which is America's educational system.
All right, you keep the system the way it is, you're going to get the same miserable results.
We'll spend more per capita than any other country in the world with the worst results.
You probably have heard it's got more play, more press than than I imagine.
I was in London yesterday.
Let me tell you my schedule.
So I ended my vacation a little bit early.
I was in Florida, but I drove two hours to Miami, got there at 7 o'clock for 9 o'clock direct to Heathrow in London.
And we had been working some time on a sit-down interview with Julian Assange.
And we finally got he had agreed to the interview, frankly, two weeks ago, and we just had it again had to get permission.
This guy has not had sunlight on his face outside in four and a half years.
The first thing I saw when I got there is I was shocked at the very tiny living space this man has and how little access he has to the outside world.
We get into the issues of why he's there.
He made a very passionate strong defense, and there's a lot of questions that I have about the legitimacy of these things, but I'll let you decide when you watch the interview.
We're going to run the full hour of it tonight.
We literally had about an hour and 20 minutes worth of taping, so it's frustrating that I can't just let the whole thing run.
I wish I had two hours tonight.
Um, but it's to me a fascinating interview.
Now, a lot has happened since I've been gone, as it relates to this narrative by the White House and by the Hillary campaign and by every Democrat that the Russians tried to influence the elections.
But yet nobody has presented any evidence that anything new has been discovered or is proven to be tied to the Russians influencing this election in any way.
And what was actually somewhat funny and humorous is the Washington Post, they actually made the claim that the Russians hacked the U.S. electric grid, and they had to correct a story that originally said Russian hackers penetrated a U.S. electric grid by breaching a utility company in Vermont.
Well, then they had to put out a retraction claiming that Russia in fact hacked the grid.
Why did they run with the story so fast?
Probably because they wanted to create legitimacy to the story that the Russians hacked and influenced the elections.
Now I asked Julian Assange, and we'll place some of the interview later in the program today.
I asked him directly, did he ever meet Vladimir Putin?
No.
Did he ever talk to him?
No.
Did he ever talk to an associate, a friend, a surrogate of Vladimir Putin?
No.
Did he ever talk to Donald Trump?
No.
Did he ever talk to a Trump surrogate?
No.
I think I had read a report that Roger Stone had spoken to him.
I had, did you ever speak to Roger Stone?
No.
So he said no to all of these questions.
And then I said, okay, did Russia can you tell the American people that in fact the Russians had nothing to do with the information that you got from WikiLeaks as it relates to the DNC and John Podesta's emails?
And his answer was unequivocal.
No, no, no.
And yet, you know, what's very fascinating about all of this is Congress has been wanting an investigation here into all of this.
You know, we've got one top security cybersecurity expert, John McAfee.
Well, he was in quoted as saying, according to Zero Hedge, he's the uh creator of America's first commercial anti-hacking software.
He said flatly, I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.
Other cyber experts we have had on the program have said the same thing.
Now, the administration continues to stonewall Congress long before Christmas, Congress was saying, Well, give us the give us the proof.
Give us the evidence.
And the president, the administration, has been stonewalling Congress and their demands for evidence showing that this claim is true.
And then they put out a 13-page memo that basically said nothing.
And no proof was offered.
So it's very, very dubious in every way, and it's, you know, there's no evidence that I have seen at all that would debunk what Julian Assange is telling me.
And if you're asking me if I believe him, having sat and spoken with him and spent all the time with him, I'd say I believe him.
But you can watch tonight yourself and make your own decision.
All right, Clad You Weather's 25 now till the top of the hour.
Happy New Year to everybody.
I I come back um from vacation.
Vacation does a wonderful thing for me.
It gives me perspective.
It um I didn't realize, Linda, you were telling me, of course, you're not paying attention to my show because I know you're talking of Buck Sexton and we love Buck.
He's a great guy, but I mean he just I just asked him to leave.
Well, I just saw him like to pay attention to you.
I saw he was filling in for Rush.
I guess you just want to talk to him.
Uh yeah, I mean I'm glad he filled in for Rush today.
Thank you.
How are you doing?
Good to talk to you.
I haven't heard this kind of talk in a long, long time.
But you had been telling me before the end of the year that I look like crap.
I look tired, that I was uh overworked.
It's so funny because I remember that in the reverse.
Uh no, I you well, you look tired too.
I mean, we we had a busy year last year.
Someone needs some chamony stat.
All right, no, uh well, you notice I got a lot of color because I was out in the sun a lot.
You do notice the color, right?
You look fantastic.
I look fantastic.
You're just lying.
All right.
Putting that aside, but I didn't realize till I actually got on vacation how tired I was.
I didn't I had no idea.
And then all of a sudden I am sleeping eight hours a night, which for me is a miracle.
And straight through.
Now there was a little wine or beer involved in the sleeping, but that's that's neither here nor there.
As I'd go, I ate too much on vacation, like everybody does.
I'm back on my chicken soup diet today.
And uh, and then I would take a nap in the afternoon.
I mean, what have I ever taken a nap in my life?
Now I love naps, naps are great, but then after about a week I started to feel normal.
But what happens to me when I get on vacation, and I take only one big vacation every year, it's two weeks around Christmas and New Year's, I do the same thing every year.
And number one, I get very introspective.
I think about my life, I think about my age.
I always have a birthday over the holiday and I hate it.
Um, and I I just I appreciated this year and this audience and this country, and I'm not gonna say what Michelle said, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud.
That's that's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is the engagement of all of you against all odds, having a Republican establishment actively undermining their own presidential candidate, to have a democratic establishment actively undermining their own candidate, to have a media establishment.
I saw this quote of Chuck Todd.
I don't understand.
You know, I thought we all did a great job this year.
And I'm like, that's the problem.
He believes that.
Chuck, that is your problem.
You believe that crap.
Watch your own network.
You know, you're on MSNBC every day.
You know, you do MBC News every day.
By the way, did you hear that Megan Kelly is leaving Fox?
That just broke on the Drudge Report, apparently is going to MBC.
Breaking news now.
Um, well, well we'll address that at the right time.
The but I I think about how great.
No, think about this.
This was the year that I would argue the rest of the country, not this audience, but the rest of the country, WikiLeaks exposed how corrupt our system is, the collusion between the Democratic Party,
the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, the media establishment, even Republicans, Democrats, and the media established, all three of those establishments are all in collusion so they could maintain power, and this seems to be 2016 was the year the American people caught up with my proclamation back in 2008 that journalism is dead.
You know, all these people writing me today about the Julian Assange interview, all these people, even CNN is writing me.
They're wanting comments from me about my Julian Assange interview.
They don't want an honest comment from me.
You know, what about what you said in 2010 about Julian Assange that he's waging war against the United States?
Okay, how many times, Linda, on this program, did I bring up my own comments about Julian Assange to Julian Assange?
I mean, it was at least three times.
The three times he's been on the air.
And I brought I brought it up in the interview yesterday.
I don't know if it's going to make the cut.
I honestly, we we taped an hour and nearly 20 minutes straight through.
I mean, and this guy a couple of observations.
His life sucks.
He is doing it if you believe him, and I I really believed him because he wants to expose corruption.
I was very clear and asking very pointed questions.
Well, if this was about Donald Trump, would you have done it about Donald Trump?
Yes.
Have you had any contact with Trump as a surrogates, his associates?
No.
Putin, his associates, if anybody, no.
Okay, you you all why are you eliminating one source here?
He's saying, because everybody's getting it wrong.
And then this guy lives in a shoebox at this Ecuadorian embassy for four and a half years.
And he gets to see his kids on occasion.
You know, how what kind of life can that be?
Six years not seeing sunlight.
So it's a fascinating story.
Now, you've got to ask yourself this question why are the Democrats, Including the White House and the President of the United States advancing this narrative so hard that the Russians hacked.
Well, then you have to start, we got to look at a little history.
Because in 2015, we know for a fact that the Chinese, that would be the Chinese government, stole millions, millions, 23 million personal documents, classified information on individuals who are seeing and working for the United States government.
Now, what do you think Obama did to the Chinese?
Did they expel 35 Chinese diplomats?
No.
Did they ever make a single public comment about it?
No.
So it raises questions.
Why is he politicizing this Russia case without any definitive evidence that he's that he's providing and ignore what we know the Chinese did?
Well, it reeks of politics in my mind.
Now, he's got his compliant news media, I mean the sycophants in the news media, the colluding news media, and we know that you know the evidence that Vladimir Putin ordered a cyber attack to torpedo Hillary's campaign is so weak that the alt-left radical media in this country is now resorting to spreading patently bogus reports to bolster their case.
And that's what the Washington Post did.
You have David Keene writing in the Washington Times from the American Conservative Union, and he said in this drive to further demonize Mr. Putin's Russia, the media have become the nation's number one spreader of hated fake news.
What's the case in point?
When Obama tossed a number of Russians out of the country, what, 35 of them, to retaliate against the Russian hacking?
Now, let me remind you the government knew about whatever hacking WikiLeaks had that they supposedly got from Putin way before the election.
There's nothing new that has come out that they any new information or any new evidence of hacking post-election.
This narrative began weeks after the election when their original narratives and their recounts didn't work.
So now, in an effort to delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency, this is what they've now resorted to.
Now we know that the Washington Post, the New York Times, political, NBC, ABC, CBS, and of course CNN and MSNBC and CNBC, all of these networks colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
So now they're advancing a false narrative to convince you that the Russians are hacking all the time.
So when Obama tosses out a number of Russians, he's trying to create a false impression.
The same guy that did nothing about 23 million documents being hacked by China.
Anyways, then it becomes out that the Russians hacked into the U.S. power grid in Vermont.
And that could wreak real havoc on our n on the national grid.
Well, that story turned out to be false.
The Washington Post had to retract that claim.
And on top of it, if the president really had the evidence that in fact Vladimir Putin and the Russians did this and handed it off to Julian Assange, then the question is, well, why wouldn't they hand over that information, hand over that evidence to Congress?
What just the opposite is happening.
The president and his administration are still stonewalling congressional demands for whatever evidence they have that would show that this claim is actually true.
And over the holidays, you had Washington Democrats pounding away Vladimir Putin, the Russians, they all hacked the DNC emails.
They all did it to help Donald Trump win the election.
And they talk as if it's proof they've proven their case beyond any reasonable doubt.
And anybody who raises questions is nothing but a Putin Patsy.
Why do you think CNN wants to interview me?
CNN wants to, again, collude for the Democrats and Obama and Hillary, and they want to say, well, you were once critical of Assange, and now you're interviewing.
Now you're his best buddy.
I just thought it was so someone would watch.
You thought it was what?
So someone would watch.
Watch them.
Watch CNN.
Sean Hannity's going to be on him.
No, what they want to do is they want to discredit me.
Well, in 2010 you said this.
Well, I've asked him in I have quoted my own quotes to him.
But I guess.
I look forward to them asking Obama about the shovel ready jobs and tax credits that you've got to do.
Yeah, that too.
Yeah.
Now there is a top security expert, John McAfee.
I guarantee you it wasn't the Russians.
I've talked to other experts as well.
Roger Simon had a really, really good column out.
He's a good writer.
Do our intelligence agencies suffer from Trump derangement syndrome?
And he goes on to write, it'd be a little, it'll be more than a little disturbing if we found out our intelligence agencies suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, especially with the inauguration of Donald Trump as our president, only slightly more than two weeks away.
Nevertheless, we've been told that 17, 17 of our intelligence agencies are sure that the computers of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee were hacked by Russians under the direct orders from Vladimir Putin himself.
As we all know, Putin and Trump are bosom buddies and cahoots.
Well, we're not sure about that part, but they must be up to something.
In other words, this is all a lie, too.
The media lies.
The government of Obama lies.
Keep your doctor, keep your plan, save money.
I mean, the president's out there actually trying to make a legacy case for himself that the economy is in great shape.
If I had time today, I'll do it sometime this week.
I've got more statistics about how bad he's leaving this economy.
I'll put it up on the website.
It'll shock your conscience, but I don't have time today.
Now there was the FBI Department of Homeland Security report, and I do ask Julian Assange about this.
It was a 13-page joint statement accusing Russian civilian and military intelligence services of compromising networks and infrastructure associated with the 2016 campaign.
Aaron Klein wrote a pretty good column about this.
And he points out much of the news media and their coverage of this joint report.
They don't mention that the 13-page document, which is extremely short on specifics, and Assange read it in full, starts off with a glaring disclaimer that the Department of Homeland Security doesn't provide any warranties about the information contained inside the report.
They actually have a disclaimer.
This is the definitive statement of the FBI and DHS.
Quote, this report is provided as is for informational purposes only.
The Department of Homeland Security does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.
That's like saying everything in here may be false, is probably false, but we're we're doing it for little for political purposes.
So there's no proof Russian hacking influenced the election.
And they're also subtly trying to make you think, well, they must have got in and gotten into the voting machines.
No, they're talking about the pedesta emails, the DNC emails that showed they were racist and anti-Semitic and misogynistic.
They're talking about the pedestal emails.
They're talking about the questions about Hillary's health, they're talking about everything that we exposed.
Oh, and of course, their friends in the media that they collude with every day.
That was another big part of it.
By the way, more than 1,500, you don't think we ought to be vetting refugees?
More than 1,500 of Obama's refugees have been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
TB, one of the top ten causes of death worldwide.
2015, 10.4 million people fell ill with TB.
Two million of those died from the disease.
You think we could at least check that out?
Um by the way, I love the Trump tweet today to uh Rom Deadfish Emmanuel that if he can't fix his city, 763 murdered, over 40, what, 4700 shot this year?
And maybe the feds need to come in and help him out to save lives.
Maybe that could be a job for Rudy Giuliani.
He knew how to do it in New York City.
A guy who served as Chicago's top cop until 2015 said over the weekend, Black Lives Matter is responsible for the rising national crime wave that has resulted in a 10% jump in the homicide rate in a single year.
Said what's happening is ironic, it's a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken because 80% of our victims in Chicago are male blacks.
Well, if they cared about black lives, maybe they would help out black communities And police them properly.
And save the lives and the talent of those people that live in the neighborhood that deserve our support.
By the way, Trump on Gitmo.
He said, Lock the door, throw away the key.
And maybe we can dig up the soccer field that Obama built them.
They really need a soccer field at Gitmo.
And maybe it's time to take away the Quran that they're using to justify their radical Islamic views to kill infidels and wage jihad and holy war.
Just a few suggestions for the year.
All right, we're going to get Newt Gingrich's take on all of this.
By the way, I gotta give Ford a lot of credit today.
The 700 million dollar investment that they were going to have in Mexico for their small cars is now going to Flat Rock, Michigan.
And lots of jobs are going to be saved.
Thank God.
Those people in Michigan need those jobs.
And maybe having a president that's promising to change the regulation and confiscatory corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world to one of the lowest, I bet you that's influencing a lot of companies to say, you know what, let's stay in America.
We love this country.
We just need a better economic environment so that we can actually make a profit.
Can you say to the American people unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta's emails?
Can you tell the American people a thousand percent you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
We we can say we have said uh repeatedly uh over the last few months uh that our source uh is not the Russian government, uh and it is not state party.
If the U.S. government is accusing WikiLeaks of having received these materials from Russia, and you say it's false, it did not come from Russia, and the President of the United States is advancing the narrative.
Is the President of the United States lying to the American people?
Well, he he's acting like a lawyer.
Uh if you look at most of his statements, uh he doesn't say that.
He doesn't say uh WikiLeaks obtained its information from Russia, worked with Russia, saying Russia's trying to influence the US elections.
Yes.
So he he and you also note that he doesn't say uh I uh from statements that I've read, he doesn't say that Russia was trying to influence the election for Donald Trump.
Our publications uh uh had wide uptake by the American people.
They're all true.
Um, but that's not the allegation that is being presented uh uh by the Obama White House.
So why such a uh a dramatic response?
Well, the reason is obvious.
Uh they're trying to delegitimize uh Trump administration as it goes into the White House.
They're going to try they are trying to say uh that uh uh President elect Trump uh is not a legitimate uh that was my interview with Julian Assange yesterday at the Ecuadorian Embassy, hour two of the Sean Hannity show.
Happy New Year, by the way, to all of you irredeemable deplorable people in this audience, God bless you all in the year 2017.
This will be one of the toughest political years on record.
That I can guarantee you.
Joining us now, he's been a great friend all throughout this year, and of course into next year is former Speaker of the House, uh Nuke Gingrich.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing great, and uh congratulations, what a coup.
You know, uh thank you very much.
What what did I look if you ask me you I'll let you interview me in this as part of the interview.
If you ask me if I believe him, the answer is unequivocally yes.
Wait, wait, if I'm getting interviewed, I want to start at the beginning.
When did you know you could you could get in, go to the Ecuadorian Embassy and have this kind of an in-depth conversation with him?
We'd been working on it all throughout my vacation.
I needed a hundred percent confirmation, and that meant confirmation from the Ecuadorian embassy that they would let me in.
Uh Julian Assange had agreed to the interview two weeks prior, and then we had to work out the final details.
So I left Miami on what night was it?
I guess on Saturday night at midnight.
No, Saturday night at nine p.m. arrived no Sunday night at nine p.m. arrived 10 30 a.m. local time in London yesterday, really 11 a.m.
It was about a half hour late getting in, did the interview at one after taking a quick shower, then went back to the airport and flew home and got home about nine o'clock last night.
So that is a quick turnaround.
It was sixteen hours in the air and six hours on the ground in London.
So if you're gonna do an interview of that that is this important and that covers this much ground, uh how how do you organize I mean you must have had, even as smart as you are, you must have had a set of organized questions that you knew you wanted to walk through as far as how long did you work on that?
Um well, pretty much the entire eight hours going over.
I didn't sleep.
That's that's amazing.
And then when I got then here's the best part.
He was very generous with his time.
I think we had filming time of an hour and twenty minutes.
The problem for me on TV tonight is condensing it down to an hour, and then we'll run some more tomorrow night and and ask you for commentary on it.
Well, that's just I mean I when I first saw the initial clips, I thought this is a really terrific coup on your part to have the opportunity to to get into the embassy, uh, to interview this this guy who's world famous, uh, and to do it on a topic that is could hardly be timely.
I mean somehow, you know, nobody's really gotten to the to the the heart of the whole WikiLeaks system, uh, and yet it's it's vivid proof that we don't have signer cybersecurity, we have cyber vulnerability.
Well, I think the two things if we would learn the lesson from Julian Assange, that's one of the lessons I picked up.
We have no cybersecurity.
Countries are waging cyber warfare against us.
That's number one.
Number two, I think he exposed a level of corruption that none of us could have imagined with the John Podesta emails, but the corruption at the DNC, the collusion to stop Bernie Sanders, the collusion with the news media and the Hillary campaign.
And I asked him numerous times, would he have also done the same thing if it was information on Donald Trump?
And his answer was yes, I'll even tell you more.
He said he's never spoken to Vladimir Putin or any of his surrogates.
He's never spoken to Donald Trump or any of his surrogates, and that this information came to him.
He would he would uh uh as a usual on a usual basis, he has a policy they don't reveal sources.
They've never been wrong in ten years in the in terms of what it is that they print.
And he said if people think this influenced the American election, it's only because people didn't like what they were reading about Hillary.
That's right.
Interestingly, nobody has uh challenged the accuracy of what they have released.
Because it's accurate.
Those were the emails.
I mean, look, even pretty much the Democrats have acknowledged it's the emails.
And it exp look, you've been around government for a long time.
Is don't you think this is somewhat breathtaking and unprecedented the collusion between the Democrats and the media in this country?
Oh, sure.
There are so many pieces to this year.
Um that it you you you it's it's hard to imagine, even as somebody who writes novels, it's hard to imagine how you'd weave it all together and and make it believable.
I mean, how how do you get the level of corruption that was inherent in the entire Clinton Foundation operation?
How do you get a guy as smart as John Podesta writing some of the stuff he wrote?
How do you how do you get somebody as smart as Hillary Clinton thinking she can get away with deleting 33,000 emails?
And then of course, as as you have pointed out, and as tonight people will get to see firsthand on your show, you have you have this guy who's who's basically you know isolated in the Ecuadorian embassy, can't leave, or he's gonna be deported to Sweden and uh uh and then charged with a criminal offense of rape.
He made he made a very powerful defense of that charge.
I I mean I I believe it, but he ain't gone home to do it in the court.
No.
My only point is I mean, how can you have a guy think about just this the if somebody came in to a movie theater uh company and said, I got this great plot.
We're gonna have this guy who uh is an internationally known cyber specialist locked up in a Latin American embassy in London, and he is gonna wreck the front runner for the Democratic nomination and probable next president, and it's all gonna be done online.
It is if you ever see you could never sell that as a movie plot.
We have uh our good friend Bill Gertz, he has a brand new book out called I War.
If we don't start paying attention to cybersecurity, we do so to our own peril.
That's exactly right.
Let me let me ask you this question.
While I was away on vacation, I did print out an article that quoted you.
I think it was this past Sunday on on this week, and it had you quoted as saying your biggest fear about the Trump administration is they may lose their nerve.
Right.
Tell me what you mean.
And and no, I don't mean Trump himself necessarily.
When you try to tackle, and this happened with Reagan a number of times.
You know, he he ended up he wanted to say m Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall when he was in Berlin.
The entire State Department opposed him.
He had to he had to put it back in the speech three times when he finally insisted on it.
At the breakfast, the morning of his speech in Berlin, every senior staff person begged him to take it out.
They said it's gonna the wall's gonna be there for thirty or forty more years.
The CIA thinks this makes no sense.
The State Department thinks you're gonna offend Gorbachev for no avail, and he just stubbornly stuck to his guns.
Now, I think President like Donald Trump has the same nerve that Raven Reagan did.
But here's the difference.
The scale of change that Trump wants is dramatically bigger than the scale of domestic change Reagan wanted.
I mean, Re Reagan went in and he did certain very specific things, but he wasn't trying to reshape making America great again.
He wasn't trying to reshape all of our different regulatory systems.
He wasn't trying to get school choice for every poor child in the country.
I mean, you look at uh Trump's goals, they're much bigger than Reagan's, and that means that an entire team, uh one one of my uh thoughts is that he has to take this this cabinet of winners which he's assembling and turn it into um a team so that they uh they're they are totally committed to working with each other.
Uh because they're gonna come under so much pressure.
The first day they walk into their cabinet offices, virtually every um civil servant who reports to them will have voted for Obama and voted for Hillary.
And that's what they're surrounded by.
So when they say, What are my options in phase one, they're gonna get junk.
Uh they're gonna get people who don't believe in what they're doing.
They're gonna be undermined by by the professional politicians, and if you're paying very close attention, and I'd love to get your comment ter commentary on this, you know, Obama seems to be putting up one roadblock after another.
He's he's uh issuing one executive order after another.
You know, it's uh seemingly to block uh or turn hostile towards Donald Trump and and whatever smooth transition that he had promised is out the window.
Well, sure, look, we need to understand the left is engaged in a permanent war against us.
Uh you know, you you had this this professor today who said that we need white genocide.
Just you just go through item after item after item.
Uh, and every time you turn around, you you're gonna you're gonna be hammered like this.
And no one should forget this is the capital city of the other team.
It is their news media, it is their lobbyists, it is their bureaucrats.
And so when you arrive here as a good government business person, and you think, oh, this is all gonna be, you know, we won, now they're gonna obey us.
No, no, no, no.
They're gonna find every possible method to slow you down, to distract you, to convince you it's not possible.
Uh and that's why you have to be so relentless uh and so tough.
And because, and I think this is a good thing, because President elect Trump's goals are so lofty, because he really does want to make America great again, because he really does want to turn the economy around.
I mean, he's gonna have all of the Greens mad at him over EPA.
He's gonna have the teachers' union enraged over uh school choice and the great job that I think uh that Betsy uh DeVos will do.
Uh he is gonna have all sorts of left wingers upset uh and at uh at the Department of Labor, he's gonna have the ninety percent of the career foreign service upset at the State Department.
I mean, all of these things are gonna be surrounding him, and he's gonna have a news media which just cleaned uh doesn't understand what he's doing and and is opposed to the parts they do understand.
You know, the funny thing is, you know, Chuck Todd was making some comments this weekend.
He talked about what he calls the sort of concierge media friends.
I'm not gonna name names, but we all know who they are.
And then he tried to make the case, the journalism of the mainstream media, quote, I thought was outstanding this year.
And I'm thinking they missed everything about Donald Trump.
They missed his winning.
They never they never covered WikiLeaks.
They covered for Hillary Clinton.
His own network was exposed as colluding with the Clinton campaign.
And he thinks they did a terrific job, an outstanding job this year.
Well, okay.
With all due respect to Chuck Todd, he is them.
That's true.
Uh yeah, yeah, and uh yes have to start with that.
These are people who are delusional.
Uh they they are and and uh and and Charlie Murray's book, which you and I've talked about it before, uh coming apart, uh, the opening sections of that book describe exactly who they are.
They're people who live in an isolated world.
Uh they honestly sincerely believe that eliminating thirty-three thousand emails wasn't a big deal.
They don't understand why that why we made such a big fuss about her having a private server.
Uh they think that our picking on the Clinton Foundation is a sign that we're meanies, uh, and and it doesn't occur to them that raising money in seventy five different meetings with Clinton donors uh in the State Department might be inappropriate.
I mean, just got on the last that Chuck Todd is at the core of this.
And remember, it's people like Chuck, and I'm not trying to pick a fight with him, although I I thought part of what he said suddenly was appalling.
Uh but it but it's people who are at the center of the system who then hire their successors.
So if you go to a place like NBC or CBS and you want to rise, you better not walk in with a make America great again hat on your head.
Uh that ain't gonna you know you aren't gonna last two long weeks.
Yeah.
Well, look at what's happening.
Little things have happened and big things have happened.
We know the carrier deal.
We know the deal about fifty billion dollars being invested and and and what, thirty million jobs created that Trump has made.
Other companies have pledged they're gonna keep their companies here in America.
Ford just canceled the seven hundred million dollar investment in Mexico for their small small car applications and now they're gonna and by the way, on that one, I tweeted uh a few minutes later, and we are sitting to see if any of the Michigan Democrats will vote for the Trump program.
Because remember, Ford announces they're gonna keep the jobs in the U.S. because they believe in the tax and regulatory reforms that Trump is talking about.
Now, will any of the Michigan Democrats who claim their pro-jobs, any of them vote for the Trump program?
How could you possibly vote against it when a state like Michigan needs those jobs desperately?
And how do I know the last time I went to Michigan, it looked like the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, where block after block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood had been abandoned, and they're talking about literally bulldozing entire neighborhoods for consolidation of services that's gotten so bad.
Yeah, I mean, that's why, you know, this is a great crisis of where we are.
And I I think, and I'm writing my newsletter today about this whole notion of whose table are we negotiating at.
I think that Trump has to have his table of his ideas, and then invite any Democrat who's willing to work on these to join him in a bipartisan effort.
All right.
Um former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, we will be uh with you tonight uh on Hannity, our Julian Assange interviewers as well.
Hope you'll join us uh soon again here on the on the program.
First hundred days are going to be fascinating.
Thank you, sir.
800, 941 Sean, Tollfree telephone number.
Is America ready for the ratcheted up cyber war, or are we in real trouble and really far behind?
That's next with Bill Gertz.
Regrettably, some seem to believe that the U.S. friendship means the U.S. must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles, even after urging again and again that the policy must change.
Friends need to tell each other the hard truths.
And friendships require mutual respect.
Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations, who does not support a two-state solution, said after the vote last week, quote, it was to be expected that Israel's greatest ally would act in accordance with the values that we share and vetoed this resolution.
I am compelled to respond today that the United States did in fact vote in accordance with our values.
Just as previous U.S. administrations have done at the Security Council before us.
They fail to recognize that this friend, the United States of America, that has done more to support Israel than any other country.
This friend that has blocked countless efforts to delegitimize Israel cannot be true to our own values or even the stated democratic values of Israel.
And we cannot properly defend and protect Israel if we allow a viable two-state solution to be destroyed before our own eyes.
But now I must express my deep disappointment with the speech today of John Kerry.
A speech that was almost as unbalanced as the anti-Israel resolution passed at the UN last week.
In a speech ostensibly about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary Kerry paid lip service to the unremitting campaign of terrorism that has been waged by the Palestinians against the Jewish state for nearly a century.
What he did was to spend most of his speech blaming Israel for the lack of peace by passionately condemning a policy of enabling Jews to live in their historic homeland and in their eternal capital Jerusalem.
Hundreds of suicide bombings.
Thousands, tens of thousands of rockets.
Millions of Israelis in bomb shelters are not throwaway lines in a speech.
They are the realities that the people of Israel had to endure because of mistaken policies.
Policies that at the time won the thunderous applause of the world.
I don't seek applause.
I seek the security and peace and prosperity and the future of the Jewish state.
The Jewish people have sought their place under the sun for three thousand years.
And we're not about to be swayed by mistaken policies that have caused great, great damage.
All right, 25 now till the top of the hour.
This, of course, the refusal of the Obama administration to block a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements with U.S. ambassador power voting to abstain and allow the measure to pass, there's also been some evidence that in fact uh the administration was involved in this effort.
You know, I I guess having been on the ground in Israel, as I was during the last conflict, I learned a lot.
I was on the Gaza border by Sarot, where I actually went to the police station in town, and there was many of the 10,000 rockets that had been fired in a seven to eight year period at that one little town because of its proximity to Gaza.
Uh I saw one of the many sophisticated tunnels that used Israeli provided cement and Israeli provided electricity, some fifty feet below the ground, so that these tunnels were dug right into Israel and where kidnappings and murders were taking place on a regular basis.
I was out with the IDF.
I talked to them, I saw what they had to deal with every single day.
Uh I was at a location where the night before, uh multiple scud missiles had had been fired at this particular town, and I saw the carnage and I saw the the aftermath of of that having all taken place.
So does the country like Israel, only democracy in the region deserve better than Obama lecturing them in two thousand and nine that America doesn't accept the legitimacy of Israel's settlements on Israel land, or that the Prime Minister, when when the President actually left him sitting in the White House, and the Prime Minister then had to leave through a side door after a chilly White House meeting with Obama.
That was twenty ten.
Or the demands that Israel negotiate with the Palestinian Authority that is governed by Hamas, which our own State Department recognizes as a terrorist organization in Fatah, and with the subject being pre-1967 borderlines, something Ed Koch at the time called throwing Israel under the bus by Obama,
or Chuck Hagel, who is a pretty strong critic of Israel as defense secretary being appointed, or the Pentagon leaking information that Israel attacked uh Damascus in Syria to stop a shipment of weapons to terrorist organizations.
Obama officials then refused to apologize for the leak because it endangered American lives.
And it goes on from there.
And I can give you many more instances over the last eight years of the deteriorating relationship with the only democracy in the region that has also been a good friend to the United States.
Now, Pat Buchanan has a pretty controversial con column out about it.
Israel first or America first.
And he said Donald Trump has a new best friend, President Elect Trump.
Thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel.
Gush Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.
Mr. Buchanan, how are you?
Doing fine, Sean.
Happy New Year, my friend.
Well, happy new year, and I think you'll agree with me.
This is going to be a very, very tough battle this year to get America back on track.
Well, I agree with you, and it's it's very uh it is a news filled year already.
Something seems to be happening every day.
I can't recall a transition.
It was quite this arresting and exciting, Sean.
A lot of things happen every day.
Funny, I mean, look at Ford.
Ford now has made a decision.
They're going to re lake relocate jobs to Michigan.
They canceled a Mexico plant, and you know, one announcement after another that with the business incentives and corporate incentives and new tax policies and the end of a lot of burdensome regulation, companies now seem incentivized to want to stay here.
Well, I think they do, and the anecdotal evidence, Carrier and Ford and these other, where Trump has sort of intervened personally and been successful, I think are excellent, but in the longer run, and I think the President Leck realizes this.
Sean, in order to get rid of a five hundred billion dollar trade deficit, you're gonna have to raise the price of imports coming into the country and reduce the price of goods made and produced in the United States here.
And I think he's going to have a program, he's got a couple of folks in there that understand this.
And I think if he works for the Hill, he's going to have some resistance with the free traders up there.
But I think it can be done.
But this is a process really of years, Sean, and not just anecdot anecdotes, although these anecdotes are certainly welcome.
Well, listen, I I uh I've got to tell you I don't even think a trade war is ever going to happen.
One thing I've learned about interviewing Donald Trump over the many years, everything he says and does is far more calculated than I think people give him credit for.
And I think everything is a negotiation.
And the fact that a president of the United States is calling particular companies, I'll I'll use carrier as one example, Ford is another example, and saying th this is what the business climate is going to be like.
I ha you'll have an open door to me if there are burdensome regulations that are hurting your business and job creation.
I mean, I I just think that goes a long way to incentivizing companies to stay here.
And as it relates to other countries, if they want to put up trade obstacles to the United States, like a forty percent excise tax or forty percent tax on American goods, well, I think those deals are going to be renegotiated fairly quickly, or these countries will realize they're gonna be hurt themselves because of their own actions.
Well, let me disagree here a bit.
I think a trade war has been waged against the United States and we have not fought it, and that's the reason why we lost fifty-five thousand factories in the first decade of this century, and six million manufacturing jobs.
That's why we've run a twelve trillion dollars in trade deficits in the last twenty-five years, four trillion of that with communist China.
It's why places like Detroit and Baltimore and inner cities in America look like what they do, whereas we've seen China a backward place when I was there with Nixon in seventy-two, suddenly become the greatest manufacturing power on earth from a totally backward state.
We've had our clocks cleaned for decades because of the free trade ideology, which is had the both parties in its grip and presidents of both parties have pursued.
And I do think Donald Trump recognizes this, but what I'm saying is if we're gonna undo the consequences of the trade wars conducted against us where we played neutrals and were run over, it's gonna take policies besides the uh Trump getting folks on the phone.
Well, I think I totally agree with you, but I also think that the threat is real.
I mean, if you read the art of the deal, which I suggest if you want to get into the mind of Donald Trump negotiating.
His attitude is you walk away from any deal up to the last second before you sign it.
And I think he's not going to negotiate a trade deal that is one-sided with I don't care if it's renegotiating NAFTA, which the Mexican president said he's open and willing to do, or if it's a trade deal with Japan or a trade deal with China.
I think it's gonna be m beneficials to both sides.
Free and fair trade seems to be what he's saying and communicating, and then it becomes uh an issue for these other countries if they're willing to work in an environment where things are fair for everybody.
Everybody here's my view.
I'm a Hamiltonian.
He believed that uh trade was a means to an end, it's not an end in itself.
And he said a U.S. trade policy should concern itself for mi with making America sovereign and independent in its defense and its weaponry and its habitation and its feet to feed and clothe itself.
In other words, to make America the totally independent country we were, Sean at the beginning of World War One and the beginning of World War II, where the United States could say, look, we might not want to get in this war at all, and we've got no problem staying out completely because we're not dependent on anyone for anything.
That's what you want.
Economic independence to support your your political independence, and the idea that, you know, this is like we're we're tr we're we're trading down at the mall, I think loses the concept of what international trade is all about as opposed to trade with me going down to, you know, McLean hardware store.
I'm not talking about that.
What I'm saying is trade can be beneficial to many people.
In other words, American companies can have access to other global markets uh if in fact it's free and fair.
If it's not gonna be free if it's if it's not gonna be free and fair, I think Donald Trump has been Pretty clear what that would mean for those individual countries.
My guess is that these countries are highly dependent on having access to our markets and the adjustments will be made to make it fair.
Well they've got to have access to our market.
It's a what is it, 17, 18 trillion dollar market, the greatest market on earth.
If your auto companies don't have access to the American market, they almost cannot be world-class auto companies.
But there is a difference here.
Exports of produced goods manufactured in the United States add to the gross national product of the United States, and imports of produced goods detract, diminish, subtract from the gross national product of the United States.
If you buy a Lexus car straight, say all its parts and coming off the boat in uh in you know San Diego or wherever, that is enormous gain for Japan.
But if you put a tariff, say of twenty percent, and the Japanese decide, hey, look, that'll make force the price of our Lexus beyond the Cadillac and we'll lose sales.
If they then move their factory to the United States of America, amen, brother, I'm all with you.
I'm all with you too.
I mean, I thought this was pretty interesting.
The the seven hundred million dollar investment that the Ford Motor Company was gonna make with Mexico and and build their plant down there, well now they're building it here in America.
Well they are, but let me tell you why they make that decision.
A lot of these guys, it's not that they're anti-patriotic.
It's you're sitting up there and you're an executive and you say, Look, Ford or the Cadillac Company or General Motors is making its cars down in Mexico, it's paying the guys six bucks an hour down there, it doesn't have the pension problems, doesn't have the social security.
They can make them cheaper down there, and if we want to compete, we're gonna have to build them down there more cheaply, and then bring them into the United States free of charge and sell them here.
It makes economic sense to move your production to Asia and Mexico, just like it did to move it out of New York and Connecticut down to the Sunbelt when those folks weren't making as much money down there uh per capita as they're making in the North.
So you've got to adjust the incentives for production so that the people who make decisions will say we gotta produce inside the United States.
I think most Americans are now understanding that globalism has hurt our economy.
The economic statistics, and I have a whole page of them, uh uh additional ones, more than I have I have used in the last year or so, they all speak for themselves, and that includes the trade deficit, that includes the deficit in general, the debt that we have accumulated, all of which is has not been good for American workers.
Ninety-five million Americans out of the labor force.
So if Donald Trump can incentivize these companies by offering a lower corporate tax rate, incentivize multinational corporations to repatriate trillions and invest here, and also incentivize companies by getting rid of the bureaucratic red tape and regulations.
That's just good for the American worker, right?
Well, if they put in there you've got three or four of the of the five key items right there, Sean.
The one thing you're gonna need is you're gonna need a border tax of some kind.
You can call it a tariff or a VAT or whatever.
But what it says, in effect, is sure, you're free to leave the United States and produce down in Mexico.
But when those Fords come down and those big trailer trucks, you're gonna pay a tax to get them back into the United States that is not paid by Ford cars that are built in the United States.
All right, I got a run.
Patrick J. Buchanan, happy twenty seventeen.
I'm sure we'll have you on often.
This is gonna be a very, very tough year politically.
There's gonna be a lot of fighting from day one.
This is the fighting season ahead.
This is the hey, this is the season where we can save the country.
That's what I'm hoping for.
Well, I I agree.
I'm very hopeful for time in a long time.
So am I. All right, Pap Buchanan.
Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta's emails, can you tell the American people a thousand percent you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
We we can say, um, we have said uh repeatedly uh over the last two months, uh that our source uh is not the Russian government, uh, and it is not state party.
If the U.S. government is accusing WikiLeaks of having received these materials from Russia, and you say it's false, it did not come from Russia, and the President of the United States is advancing the narrative.
Is the President of the United States lying to the American people?
Well, he he's acting like a lawyer.
If you look at most of his statements, he doesn't say that.
He doesn't say uh WikiLeaks obtained its information from Russia, worked with Russia.
Say Russia is trying to influence the U.S. elections.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Yes.
So he he and you also note that he doesn't say from statements that I've read, he doesn't say that Russia was trying to influence the election for Donald Trump.
Our publications had wide uptake by the American people.
They're all true.
But that's not the allegation that is being presented by the Obama White House.
So why such a uh dramatic response?
Well, the reason is obvious.
Uh they're trying to delegitimize uh Trump administration as it goes into the White House.
They're going to try they are trying to say uh that uh uh President elect Trump uh is not a legitimate uh president.
All right.
That was part of my interview that took place in London yesterday with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy where I was at, and uh all of that interview, a full hour will air tonight, 10 Eastern on the Fox News Channel.
Uh we have many, many foreign policy challenges that Donald Trump will face.
We have we do have cybersecurity issues that clearly have not been dealt with in the last eight years.
And that has that's got to be at the top of the list.
We have strained relations with Israel.
They've never been this bad, culminating in that U.N. vote that took place where the United States should have vetoed it and did not.
That's all part of a series over the last eight years where Obama has stabbed Israel, our closest ally in the back in the back.
Then of course, the aftermath with the emergence of ISIS because the president pulled out of Iraq too early, and ISIS now has gone worldwide, and ISIS has access to all the oil in Iraq to fund their terror activities.
We haven't even begun to talk about what's going to happen with the relationship with Russia.
You know, for political purposes, now the the President is throwing out 35 diplomats.
Donald Trump will have to clean up that mess.
Relations with China seem almost nonexistent.
North Korea is seemingly non existent.
And of course, North Africa, Libya, and the rest of the globe, the Middle East in general.
Things frankly couldn't really be any worse.
Anyway, he's been an expert in foreign policy and uh for a long, long time.
And one of the uh one of my favorite writers and authors, he wrote the brand new book.
Uh it's called I War, and it's War and Peace in the Information Age.
His name is Bill Gertz, and he's a New York Times bestselling author.
Who are you writing for now?
I you know, I never know where you're writing.
I'm very busy.
I write for the Washington Free Beacon and the Washington Times.
And you always send me your directly, so I don't know where I'm getting it from.
I'm just getting it from Bill Gertz, who I've known for many, many years and have great respect for.
Uh let's start with Julian Assange.
Let's start with he is adamant he did not get this from Russia.
But that narrative keeps getting advanced.
Well, I think we're going to have to wait to see what the administration's investigation of the Russian influence operation is.
Uh any I've been covering intelligence for decades.
Any good intelligence service worth its salt is not going to leave any fingerprints when it does an operation like was done uh with the uh hacking up activities.
So you but so when you read the FBI and the DHS 19 page report that or the 13-page report, and I asked Julian Assange about this, they don't directly tie it to Russia.
It but the President makes the comments so that everybody will conclude it was Russia.
Yeah, and they didn't identify the names of the intelligence services like they did on background for reporters, which was the military GRU and the Federal Security Service FSB.
That said, uh I can tell you behind the scenes is the National Security Agency, and they are really, really good.
And they're not going to reveal how they know what they know.
Uh but they would that mean that James Clapper, who is one of the few that cast doubt on the whole Russian hacking theory, he has access to all of this information as the director of national intelligence, correct?
He does.
But uh Clapper is uh, you know, kind of a uh intelligence czar.
He's not really into the day to day thing.
You know, I mean, he's the guy that came out and said the uh the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular organization.
I mean he's that that's insane.
Yeah, he's you know, I mean, he's he's on the on the way up.
But I can tell you that NSA is very good.
How good are they?
Uh in IWAR, I talk about this.
They're so good that they can break into foreign intelligence services and steal the information that they're getting from their spies.
That's how good they are.
Julian Assange on this radio program, and he he I think he regretted saying it, but he acknowledged to me in an interview that I had here that when he was sixteen, he broke into and hacked into NASA.
He hacked into our Defense Department, and I forget one other agency, I don't remember which one, but if you're sixteen years old, I don't care how smart you are, how computer literate you are versus me not being able to download an app, um it means that it's very vulnerable if a sixteen-year-old kid can break into our systems.
America is extremely vulnerable.
And I think that's the bottom line of this book I war, that we are getting killed in the information space.
And I define information warfare in two ways.
One, cyber and technical, and two, influence and content.
It's both aspects.
So in other words, it's not just breaking into computers, it's doing operations to try to influence policy.
Uh in the case of China, it's taking over the South China Sea without firing a shot.
In the case of North Korea, it's attacking a movie company uh to to make them pay a penalty for a movie they didn't like about North Korea.
North Korea in particular, you devoted your second chapter to North Korea, and you say they are far more advanced in this hacking than we give credit for.
For example, if I was going to mention countries that were likely to have hacked into our system, I'd probably mention some allies like Germany and Israel.
Um I might mention Iran.
I might mention Russia.
I might mention the Chinese, but I kind of overlook North Korea.
Why?
Uh in terms of capabilities, the North Koreans are considered a second-tier cyber threat.
Uh the big dogs are Russia and China.
After that, it's North Korea and Iran, and they're both coming on strong.
For this book, I interviewed a North Korean defector who is in charge of training the the very people who conducted the Sony hack.
And he issued a dire warning.
He said, Look, we've got to do something to counteract North Korean information warfare operations, or this country is going to be facing a more serious threat.
Here's what you say.
United States 80 percent of success is showing up.
You you make the point that the U.S. lost the information warfare capabilities.
Then you go further, you quote uh a former CIA operative, uh Brad Johnson.
If the CIA were directed to conduct information warfare today, it would be unable to do so because it no longer has an effective and capable uh director of operations.
Yes.
I was absolutely shocked by that.
I I asked you I'm shocked by it too.
That's why I'm asking you.
I asked him, I said, okay, if you were in charge of the CIA and he was in the the the dark side, the operation side, how would you do information warfare?
And he said the agency has been so politicized uh over the years, and especially under John Brennan, that it has lost the capability.
CIA has shifted its focus to conducting drone strikes instead of conducting clandestine and secret operations, and they really need some dire reform.
We're hoping that uh the incoming director, Mike Pompeo, who's a really good guy, can turn things around over there.
All right.
Let's go to uh more of my Assange interview and and play a couple of things where he says Russia not the source, and who knows if the leaked emails change the course of the election.
I want to get your thoughts on this in particular, because you make a statement early in the book where you talk about Donald Trump's use of Twitter uh against his opponents and how it will now set the tone for political campaigns in the future, which I I've made that point as well, but I'm not sure anybody's gonna be as effective as he's been.
Let's hit up.
Did it change the outcome?
Uh who knows?
It's absolutely impossible to tell.
But but if it did, if it did, the accusation is that the true statements of Hillary Clinton and to the campaign manager, John Podesta.
Uh and the DNC uh head Debbie Walsh.
Their true statements is what changed the election.
Did Russia give you this information or anybody associated with Russia?
Uh our source is not a state party.
So uh the answer for our interactions is no.
Uh but if we look at um uh we look at the most recent statement by the U.S. government, which is on the twenty ninth of December.
Okay.
We had uh five different uh branches of government Treasury, DHS, FBI, White House uh presenting uh their accusations uh to underpin uh Obama's uh throwing out thirty-five Russian diplomats what was missing from all of those statements uh the word WikiLeaks that's very strange.
What do you make of number one of Julian Assange's statement?
Do you believe him?
One.
Two, is the Cold War now beginning anew?
Three, how do you view and how should the U.S. view Vladimir Putin?
Okay.
Uh first on Assange, I think it's clear that until he reveals where he obtained the information that he leaked, then I think the onus is going to be on telling him where did you get it?
And if he doesn't reveal that I think that's a problem.
But he's never been fairness to WikiLeaks in ten years they've never been wrong.
He's never revealed a source, but he has eliminated sources in the past and he's clearly eliminating Russia or any surrogates.
I've I I I went at this five different ways with him.
You don't believe him?
No, I think, like I say, I believe that our technical intelligence agencies have the real story.
They've identified WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and Guccifer 2.0 as conduits for this operation.
Does that mean that they're directly tied to Russia?
I think it's going to be really hard to make that connection.
What about the Daily Mail report that had a friend of Assange claiming that they were all hand-delivered at American University in a wooded area?
and that it was from a disgruntled Democrat who felt Bernie Sanders got screwed in this campaign and there was a conspiracy against him and he felt the corruption at the Clinton Foundation was bad for the country.
This is going to be one of the huge debate questions that's going to be percolating for the next few months until the actual source comes forward and says okay I did the hacking I got the emails I gave them to this until we have that we're gonna be arguing over but Hillary was wrong in saying seventeen agencies confirmed.
Oh yeah she was that was totally yes totally mis but what about Russia Putin are is there a new Cold War in the we are definitely entering a new Cold War.
In in IWA I outlined the ideology behind Putinism.
He is basically trying to re-establish the Soviet Union without communism he wants to create a uh pan-Eurasian uh sphere of influence stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and he wants to control all the areas in between let me ask would that mean the annexation of Crimea Ukraine is a quid pro quo with China and their territorial ambitions?
Well the Chinese are f are are looking at uh the South China Sea South China Sea they want to take over there.
More importantly they want to drive the United States outside of the two island chains.
They basically uh a Chinese admiral several years ago went to the PACOM commander and said hey we'll give you everything up to Hawaii but that's going to be ours after that what can the United States what can Donald Trump do now that the ransom was paid to Iran and the Iranian deal.
Oh I think we've got to use an information warfare campaign against Iran.
There was a golden opportunity in 2009 during the Green Revolution Obama dropped the football because he wanted to do this nuclear deal which is a disaster it's going to lead to a nuclear armed Iran in ten years.
I advocate in iWar an information warfare campaign to bring about the democratic, peaceful transition in Europe.
You are talking about a new type of warfare using social media cyber warfare as a means of influencing the minds and hearts of populations towards freedom liberty democracy.
Yes and I think we can learn from our enemies we can apply truthful means use truthful means and uh conduct aggressive information operations.
And do we have the means and intelligence not right now we're way behind.
I I present uh my main proposal in the in IWA is to do something called information America and this would be a digital age USIA type organization and I present several alternatives it can be government it can be private sector, it can be a combination of both.
But we need some new institution that's going to be able to help the United States fend off uh this information warfare assault that we're under under facing right now.
You are one of the premier writers on national security and defense in the country.
I've I've followed you now for my entire career on Fox, 21 years.
Uh, always love the things you write, your columns.
This book is phenomenal.
It's called I War.
War and Peace in the Information Age, uh, how the United States can beat China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Islamic terrorists on the digital battlefield.
If we don't learn from this, we're gonna make a big mistake, because I think you're dead on.
Uh, thanks for being with us, appreciate it.
When we come back, wide open telephones, 800-941 Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program.
Dear members of Congress.
Dear members of Congress, dear members of Congress.
Dear members of Congress.
I'm mad.
Flabbergasted.
Furious.
Concerned for my children.
I'm worried for everyone.
The majority of Americans, regardless of who they voted for.
Did not vote for racism, for sexism, or for xenophobia.
And yet Donald Trump won.
And since he won, hate crimes arising.
Women have been attacked in his name.
People of color attacked in his name.
You represent us in Congress.
You are our last line of defense.
So here's what we ask of our elected officials.
No, here's what we demand.
To the extent that Trump pursues racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-worker, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-environmental policies.
We demand that you vigorously oppose him.
We demand that you block nominees who threaten the rights of women, the LGBT community, people of color, immigrants, and the poor.
And we want you to know that we are with you.
As long as you do that stuff, we won't remain silent.
We won't remain silent.
We won't remain silent.
We'll work harder to mobilize our votes and our communities.
But we need you.
And we expect you to have our backs to protect our civil liberties and to use your congressional powers to obstruct.
To obstruct.
Obstruct.
Obstruct.
Defeat.
Anything.
Anything that violates our core values as diverse Americans.
Signed.
The majority.
The majority of the American people.
Republican members of the Electoral College.
This message is for you.
As you know, our founding fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is to an imminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
An eminent degree.
Someone who is highly qualified for the job.
The Electoral College was created specifically to prevent an unfit candidate from becoming president.
There are 538 members of the Electoral College.
You and just 36 other conscientious Republican electors can make a difference.
By voting your conscience on December 19th.
and thereby shaping the future of our nation.
I'm not asking you to vote for Hillary Clinton.
As you know, the Constitution gives electors the right to vote for any eligible person.
Any eligible person, no matter which party they belong to.
But it should certainly be someone you consider especially competent, especially competent to serve as president of the United States of America.
By voting your conscience, you and other brave Republican electors can give the House of Representatives the option to select a qualified candidate for the presidency.
I stand with you.
I stand with you in support and solidarity with conservatives, independents, and liberals.
and all citizens of the United States.
The American people trust that your voice speaks for us all.
And that you will make yourself heard through the constitutional responsibility granted to you by Alexander Hamilton himself.
What is evident is that Donald Trump lacks more than the qualifications to be president.
He lacks the necessary stability.
And clearly the respect for the constitution of our great nation.
You have the position.
The authority.
And the opportunity to go down in the books as an American hero.
Who changed the course of history.
And you have my respect.
You have my respect.
You have my respect.
For your patriotism and service to the American people.
Unite for America.
First show back, 2017.
My admonition for you is you better buckle up for this year.
This is not going to be an easy political year.
The Democrats are plotting, they're planning, they're scheming, they're trying to figure out the best way to destroy, and I mean politically, Donald Trump, to prevent the agenda that he ran on from ever becoming the law of the land.
It's going to require your engagement.
It's going to require your assistance and your help on a daily and sustained basis.
I know people's attention spans are rather short these days and and everything is in 30 second sound bites, but if you're trying to lower the corporate tax rate to 15%, that's going to be hard.
To eliminate Obamacare with the mantra, you broke it, you own it.
Well, actually, they broke it.
We're trying to fix the mess that they created.
You know, when you try and and and remove energy regulations, and you get a bunch of environmental snowflakes out there that are going insane and and staging protest after protest and fear mongering about dirty air and dirty water, that's not going to be easy to do.
When you try to put a strict originalist constructionist on the on the Supreme Court, that's not an easy lift.
When you begin building the border wall, that's not going to be an easy lift either.
When you when you push education back to the states and allow choice in education for families, that's not going to be an easy lift.
And then when you start cleaning up the mess of Obama on foreign policy and Libya, the Middle East, repairing the damage with Israel, working, you know, to improve the abysmal human rights record in countries like Yemen and the UAE and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
That's going to be difficult.
You know, then you have to deal with problems that Egypt is having and problems that Jordan is having.
Then you have a Syrian refugee problem, and what do you do with victims of a civil war there?
And how do you stop the expansion of ISIS and how do we choke them off, especially their financial resources, especially if you don't want to engage on the ground in another foreign conflict, especially because America doesn't seem to have the stomach to actually begin a war with the goal of winning it before you leave.
How are we going to deal with other issues?
All right, but I could keep going on forever here.
All right, let's get to our busy phones, our first calls here.
Well, we took one earlier, uh, for 20 uh 17.
Let's say hi to Biancas in Palm Beach Gardens in Florida.
Bianca, happy new year to you.
Glad you called, glad you're with us.
Happy New Year to you too.
And I just want to say I'm so glad you're doing the program tonight on Julian Assange because I am so sick of President Obama and the Democrats blaming the loss of Hillary on the Russians hacking our election.
I would like to ask you a favor.
What can I do for you?
I would I would like you to ask Julian Assange.
I know you've pressed him on it before.
However, I'd like you to ask him was the murdered DNC stopper, Seth Ritz, one of his sources.
Because he did put up a $20,000 reward, and that was shortly after mur his murder.
And it was also shortly after Gabby Watzerman Sult was forced to step down.
All right, I didn't.
Well, first of all, I did I I did the interview already, so I did it yesterday.
Uh so it's not like I can go back and fly to London just to get you're talking about Seth Rich, who I believe you're talking about who was murdered in in DC and the motive, and his mother told the local MBC station that there were bruises on his face, his knees, his hands, you know, apparently trying to fend off attackers.
Uh I look, I've read all about here's what I will tell you.
The Daily Mail did have a story about a friend of Julian Assange.
And this friend claimed in to the Daily Mail that in fact he went and met this guy, the friend of Julian's.
It was a DNC staffer guy that was upset with how the DNC was acting, and that he in fact went and met him and handed off all of these emails in person.
Now the guy's name is Craig Murray.
He was the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, an associate and a friend of Julian.
I asked him about that tonight, and it seems to be one question that irritates him because one of the things that you get out of the interview is that in the 10 years that WikiLeaks has been up and running is that he's very proud of the fact that they've never been proven wrong.
So nor that nor do they reveal sources.
Now, if you're going to do the type of work WikiLeaks is doing, you you really can't reveal sources or you won't have any sources.
That's true.
Can I also mention I and I know it may be here say, but Steve Peznyak or Piznyak, I'm not sure what his name is.
He sent several videos, and he said that many of our own intelligence officials in the CIA and FBI were actually staging a coup against Hillary as to not have her win the election because she they thought she was a danger to our country.
Look, you know, there's all sorts of theories out there, and you know, here's the interesting thing that I would ask the federal government.
Uh and I'd ask Obama.
If they're going to claim the Russians did this, and there's not seventeen agencies as Hillary claimed, and there's a 13-page memo that does not give any information that confirms this.
Why don't they give us the evidence that proves it?
And then that would, quote, prove Julian Assange a liar.
Now, the only reason, now we have a top cybersecurity expert, John McAfee, who says, quote, I can guarantee you it wasn't the Russians.
The Washington Post had a retract their claim that Russia had hacked the U.S. electric grid.
You know, which is pretty humorous.
I mean, the media is spreading fake news and a bid to bolster the Russian hack claims.
And in that particular case, they got caught.
You know, so why for example, the Obama administration has been asked by Congress for a long period of time, a number of weeks now, to hand over proof that they have that the Russians hacked themselves, that they gave it to WikiLeaks.
Well, as Byron York pointed out in his column, they continue to pound away on these allegations that Vladimir Putin is the one responsible.
Julian Assange says no, but uh in fact, members of the Intelligence Committee have a lot of questions about it, and they like the information they were asking for it before Christmas, and the White House refused to brief the House Intelligence Committee, telling lawmakers they can wait until Intel officials finish the investigation that was ordered by Obama.
Well, by that point, you know, you know, we've been told seventeen of our intelligence agencies are sure that the computers of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee were hacked by Russians under the direct orders of Putin himself.
The only problem is that you don't have 17 intelligence agencies.
So now we've got fake news stories to bolster the claim of the president and the Democrats losing the election.
Now it raises another question, and I think this is an important one.
If in fact, you know, the president reacts by expelling these these 35 people.
Well, I have a question for the president.
Why didn't the president do anything in 2015 when there were 23 million hacks by the Chinese?
He never even mentioned it.
In 2015, the Chinese stole millions of millions of personal accounts, including classified information on individuals who are seeing or working for our government, twenty-three million, and the White House of Obama never even gave a single statement on it.
So why are they treating this any differently than what China did?
And that has been confirmed.
You know, why is he politicizing Russia and Putin and not China?
Because this advances the political narrative to delegitimize Donald Trump.
To me, it's that that's simple.
Robin Jonestown or Johnstown in Pennsylvania.
Robin, how are you?
And we're glad you called.
Thank you.
I'm doing quite well.
Um Happy New Year.
Tired of Happy New Year to you, too.
Did you hire a did you say you hired a therapist?
I no, I said I I'm well about ready to, but no, I mean I'm tired of uh switching my channels back through three different news broadcasts to get uh any story straight.
I haven't Googled more stuff since last year than I've ever in my life doing my own research.
Can't believe anyone anymore.
I mean my frustration has been kind of comparing this situation with that Russian hacking and them treating the American public like we're idiots.
Um saying that they couldn't have taken any action because it would have this.
You look at the time and how swiftly November twenty fourth, two thousand fourteen is when celebrities emails got hacked, and they put all that information out that made them look, I guess, like a bunch of crazy people.
So by December early, they had decided based on the coding, the different things that was North Korea.
January second, sanctions were put against the North Koreans, not necessarily the people they thought were completely responsible.
Let l let me just say this in what you're saying.
We are hacked all the time.
We hack others all the time.
The question is why are they focused on this narrative when no new information came in after the election?
It's all political.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
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And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
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