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All right, let's go to some weekend information.
And we're going to break this whole thing down.
We've got three big stories we're following today.
Number one, the president has signed a new executive order banning travel from six terror-tied countries.
Jay Seculo believes that it is an 8-0 Supreme Court decision and it is far more rock-solid legally and better legal footing than was the first one.
That is issue one.
At some point today, probably after the show, we are going to get an outline of what the Republicans are planning, just an outline, that is, as they move towards the reconciliation part of repeal and replacing Obamacare.
There are critics out there that are skeptical and that are claiming that the mandate will exist, albeit another form.
The mandate would be to insurance companies, not to the government, that the Cadillac tax would stay, that there might be a new entitlement.
But you know what?
All of this also will be subject to a lot of amendments, and it's not going to be the same bill, whatever outline they have today, by the time it actually gets out and voted on.
So we'll follow that.
But our top story today is very simple.
Did people in the Obama administration, were they seeking surveillance against Donald Trump, an opposition political opponent, in the middle of an election year?
Now, a fascinating side note to all of us, later in the program, we will have William Binney on the program.
He's one of the architects of the NSA surveillance program.
And he's actually saying that every American, every minute of every day, is being surveilled.
Everything from every text message, every phone call, and every email you send is being data mined.
Now, it all starts with this weekend, and it starts with President Trump, and it starts with his very simple, basic text that he couldn't believe that, in fact, that he believes that the former president was, in fact, surveilling Trump towers and wiretapping Trump towers.
Now, what does this mean?
Well, that would mean why.
What information do they have?
Nobody seems, except the New York Times, the Daily Mail, McClatchy, and all these other, quote, mainstream news sources, all of them confirmed.
Now, I've spent a lot of time on this program in the last number of weeks talking about the shadow government, the deep state.
I've been talking about how we have within our government, because we haven't had the time to actually get everybody that needs to be confirmed, confirmed.
So what do we have?
A bunch of Obama holdovers, a bunch of career bureaucrats.
We have all of these intelligent leaks, and nobody can seem to get to the bottom of it.
This is the swamp.
How many times have I told you that there is five separate sources of people that are now literally trying to destroy the president?
You got the alt-left propaganda, destroy Trump media.
That establishment obviously wants him out.
The Democratic establishment from day one, they couldn't accept that Donald Trump won the presidency.
Democrats have been talking about impeachment even before he got into office.
That's two.
Then you've got weak Republicans.
They make their living off of being called senator and congressman, and some of them, that's why they didn't do anything and keep their promises on health care or the president's unconstitutional executive order.
Then you've got the snowflakes out there.
I mean, a crazy bunch of people, some paid, some not paid, but it doesn't matter.
They're trying to create the impression that all hell is breaking loose in the country, and it's all designed to create a false image of Donald Trump.
You have the media questioning his sanity.
You have the media attacking him on, if he breathes, if it takes a breath in the morning when he wakes up, they're never going to be happy.
Their total aim is his destruction.
They're not his friends.
They never thought this day would happen.
I was watching the circus last night on Showtime.
No, I was.
That's that political show with whatever, Heilman and Halpern and whatever his name is.
And I actually think it's a good show.
It's just three liberals, for the most part, McKinnon.
But the bottom line is they covered Election Day, and they were shocked.
They couldn't believe it.
And the country for days and weeks and months is going to be stunned at this outcome that nobody saw coming, et cetera.
Well, they don't want the outcome.
They wanted a minimum to stop Trump from his agenda.
They wanted a maximum and they want as much collateral damage and him out of office as quickly as possible.
And they'll stop at nothing.
And all weekend long, all you hear, and then the other one is now we've got an intelligence community that is leaking like a sieve.
You know, think back to General Flynn for a second here.
General Flynn never, ever should have lost his position.
Why?
Because the phone call that our intelligence community, and I have no problem with them tapping the Russian ambassador, that's their job.
Intelligence, counterintelligence.
We need to know what our friends and enemies, so-called friends, are up to.
And so they spy on us and we spy on them.
That's part of the way that the world works.
It's an evil world and you got to protect the country.
And one of the ways you protect the country is you gather intelligence.
The way you gather intelligence, you have people on the ground, you have people that are listening, eavesdropping on phone calls, stealing text messages, stealing emails, whatever they do.
All right, so on the phone call, as a matter of law, when they're tapping the Russian ambassador and they identify an American is on the call, they have to minimize what they hear the Americans saying because they don't have a warrant to listen in and eavesdrop on any American.
And that is obviously a violation.
I think you can argue the fourth, first, fifth, and sixth amendments if you really want to get into the technicalities here.
They do not, they did not have a right to surveil and identify General Flynn.
And as a matter of basic course, the way those calls historically have been handled, this is why General Flynn was so unprecedented, is that once they identify an American's on the call, they're supposed to do what's minimization.
Minimization means they stop listening.
That means they're only allowed to listen a little bit.
And when they finally write up a report on the call, they don't identify who the American was.
As a usual practice, standard practice, they would write, oh, we surveilled the Russian ambassador, and this is what he said.
And then an American got on the call, and we heard a little of this and a little of that, but you don't identify the American.
They took down every word that Clint said.
And then they used that information illegally.
It's a felony.
And they leaked the whole damn thing.
So you've got this deep state, Obama holdovers, bureaucratic, lifelong bureaucrats that are sabotaging.
This is the shadow government I've been talking about.
This is what deep state means.
They are sabotaging the Trump presidency.
Now let's go to what we've been listening to and watching all weekend long.
You've got this hysteria that is built up and repeated and repeated.
Where's the evidence?
Where's the evidence after Donald Trump?
Why do you demand the evidence?
After sending out a single tweet Saturday morning accusing the Obama administration of wiretapping his offices at Trump Tower.
Now the president came out with a strong statement of denial, or was it strong?
Because the way they interpret it, well, the president strongly denied it.
Of course, I believe President Obama when he says that he had nothing to do with this.
Well, if you read the statement and pay attention to it, it says a lot less than you think.
Because what it says is, a cardinal rule of the Obama administration was no White House official ever interfered with an independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.
That's not a denial that it happened, meaning the FISA court requests.
And it says that as a matter of practice, neither the president nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.
Any suggestion other, they didn't order it.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
And that doesn't mean Obama didn't know that it happened.
Because it's happening if it's true, if the New York Times is right, and we'll go back there in a second.
If the New York Times and all these other publications are right, then in fact, they did wiretap Donald Trump and Trump Tower.
Because I read it in the newspaper.
The New York Times has to be accurate, right?
They're demanding that President Trump, after sending out the tweet, he's got to give incontrovertible proof of this.
Wasn't that grand?
Because for the last four months, the entire fake news media, along with the Democratic Party, has been completely obsessed with this idea.
It's been going on for months now that the Trump campaign, that General Flynn, Jeff Sessions, and anybody else they can think of, colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton based on not a shred of evidence.
And yet now they want proof, none whatsoever.
It's a figment of their imagination up to this point.
A wish list of allegations backed up by absolutely nothing.
Even the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC's email and gave it to WikiLeaks has no evidence whatsoever to support it.
None.
At least none that has ever been released to the public.
And everyone seems to have forgotten that way back in December, House investigators asked for a classified briefing on any evidence that would support the notion the Russians were behind the DNC hack.
The Obama administration refused to share that evidence, even in a behind-closed-door, classified setting, which means that the only evidence we have to back up the Russian hacking allegation is the word of Obama's CIA director, Obama's national intelligence director, and his FBI director, which, by the way, we'll get to as well because all three are hacks, in my opinion.
And I'm sorry, the statements of political hacks, one totally confused FBI director, who doesn't know what he's doing at this point, doesn't constitute evidence of anything.
You know, evidence is something that you can actually see, read, tangible, that leaves you with the inescapable conclusion that something happened.
Not because they say so.
That's not evidence of anything.
And add to that the fact that Obama's CIA guy, John Brennan, is a political hack, and he's been carping against Trump and the administration from the minute he left office.
Or James Clapper, he's already been caught lying to Congress about the NSA surveillance program.
And James Comey is so bewildered by all of this, he doesn't know what he's doing.
He can't figure out if he's coming or going.
He has no business in this job at this point.
He went into the tank for Hillary during the campaign when obvious felonies were committed.
Then he jumped back again days before the election.
You know, none of these people have even the remotest shred of credibility here.
But the question remains: listen to what the liberal New York Times reported eight days before the election.
Exhibit A, the New York Times, McClatchy.
Then we can go.
But by the way, Mark Levin did a great job on Fox and Friends this weekend.
And he's going to be on Hannity tonight.
He did a great job tying all of this together.
But the New York Times, in classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump.
They focused particular attention on what cyber experts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump organization and the Alpha Bank, which is one of Russia's biggest banks and whose owners have long-standing ties to Vladimir Putin.
FBI officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump organization server and Alpha Bank.
Computer logs obtained by the New York Times show that the two servers at the Alpha Bank spent more than 2,700 lookup messages, a first step for one system's computer to talk to another, to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring.
But the FBI ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation like a marketing email or spam for the computer contact.
So the FBI admitted, and the New York Times reported, that they had tapped into the computers at Trump Tower.
They're admitting it, and that the FBI decided it was a good idea to leak whatever they found of the New York Times.
Now, who?
That is illegal, what they did.
Just like what Hillary did with a secret server was illegal, just like all these other leaks are illegal.
And it appears that, in fact, there has been surveillance.
All evidence indicates that, in fact, the Obama administration and officials surrounding the president, what did the president know?
When did he know it?
What did Valerie Jarrett know?
What did Ben Rhodes know?
What did David Oxarod know?
What did Dan Pfeiffer know?
And when did they know it?
Because if they're denying that the president ordered it, that's different from them knowing it happened.
Extremely different.
This is beyond troubling here because I'm telling you, if they can tap into the president or the opposition candidate in the middle of a presidential election, nobody's information is safe.
Nobody, nobody, nobody.
Quick break, right back.
We'll continue.
Looking for fake news, you won't find it here.
You're with Sean Hennedy on the air now.
I think some people are missing something here.
The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.
That's going to be very, very powerful, and whoever...
In terms of the organizing for America that he's now shifting to become a 501c4.
That's right.
That's right.
And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it's never been done before.
And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket have to deal with that.
They're going to have to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it.
And he's been very smart.
I mean, it's very powerful what he's leaving in place.
Very powerful what he's leaving in place.
The database that Obama's put together will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before.
And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that.
Oh, that sounds like a shadow government.
Sounds like Kennedy's not the great conspiracy theorist that some people may think I am.
Well, let's go to the New York Times.
And when was this?
March 3rd of this year.
No, yeah, March 5th of this year.
The FBI Director James Comey asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject the president's assertion that Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump's phones.
Okay, we're back to the same argument that Obama made.
Nobody's saying that Obama really ordered it, but it happened on his watch, and that there's no way that such a FISA request could have taken place without him knowing.
Do you understand the word parsing that's going on here when Obama says no White House official ever interfered with an independent investigation led by the Department of Justice?
As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.
And Comey's demanding, but again, he doesn't get involved in investigations or comment on ongoing investigations, that the president, that President Trump, you know, take back his assertion that Obama ordered it.
Well, was it ordered?
And if so, by who?
And why?
Mr. Comey has argued that highly charged claim is false and must be corrected.
And the department has not released any such statement.
But Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Trump put the allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down that claim because it falsely insinuates the FBI broke the law.
Well, did they break the law?
Did they go to the FISA court?
And what would that have meant?
You know, I mean, what the president, what he's saying here is something, how long has President Obama, how low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process?
Well, that's kind of sick, isn't it?
Isn't that dangerous for a Democratic republic?
If we're going to have the FISA laws applied, I'll get to the distinction and the difference, but it's a very dangerous thing.
And the New York Times on multiple occasions had referred to wiretapping that had taken place.
Now, did the New York Times ever get it wrong?
You know, two people close to the president say they believe the president was referring to, you know, this whole issue that had been reported extensively by all of these different outlets that, in fact, show, including the New York Times, that the president had been wiretapped.
These are public comments by so-called credible news sources, the mainstream media.
And, you know, if in fact they saw the FISA, two Pfizer court requests, one in June and one in October, that would be pretty unprecedented.
And there would have to be real good cause.
And by the way, with all due respect to the FISA courts, they rarely disapprove of the request.
And they did do it back in June.
Then they had to narrow the scope of what they were requesting in October.
Anyways, what I'd like to know: Chris Coons of Delaware said he believed that there were transcripts that would help document the contacts when we're talking about the House and Senate intelligence committees moving their own investigation into Russians' efforts.
Well, where did the transcripts come from, Senator Coons?
Okay, why were the transcripts available?
How do you get transcripts if you're not surveilling somebody, spying on somebody?
Those transcripts that provide very helpful critical insights into whether or not Russian intelligence or senior aides, there hasn't been a bit of evidence ever presented on the Russia case.
I believe they exist, he said.
Okay, spokesman for Mr. Koons, the senator, said that he did not imply he's aware of transcripts indicating collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
So he had to backtrack it.
So he said on Friday that he believed there were transcripts that would help documents, that would help document the contacts.
Okay, where'd the transcripts come from?
Transcripts between who and who.
You know, why is it that the New York Times said that, in fact, there was wiretapping?
Their words, not mine.
You know, there's no confirmed evidence that the FBI obtained a court warrant.
Then we've got the word of, you know, let's play James Clapper over the weekend.
But keep this in mind.
A lot of people, you know, wanted Clapper out and brought up on perjury charges because he admitted, gave a false statement to Congress in March of 2013 when he responded, no, sir, not wittingly, to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting any type of data at all on millions of Americans.
He replied, and I quote here: the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.
The reason I'm asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don't really know what a dossier is in this context.
So, what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
No, sir.
It does not.
Not wittingly.
There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.
Well, according to Bill Binney, who's going to join us later in the program today, he was one of the architects of the NSA surveillance program.
Remember, he was a whistleblower.
He left the agency after, what, 32 years?
Because, why?
Because he feels Executive Order 12333 allows the government to surveil any American at all times.
And in fact, they do it.
And that would mean all your texts, all your emails, all your phone calls are being data mined, all of it.
And then they can go back and use it at any time.
Now, in fact, if that's happening, that means basically we live in a police state.
And under the wrong leadership, that means that that information could be used to compromise an awful lot of people and shut down criticism, wouldn't it?
They come out on compromising information on a critic of any administration.
They just say, well, we have this phone conversation that we recorded, and maybe your wife or a daughter or whatever doesn't want to hear it.
That would be called blackmail.
That would be the stuff you'd expect in the former Soviet Union.
He'll join us later.
But that same executive order was reopened, opened in the two weeks remaining in Obama's presidency to allow that data to be shared with other agencies, 16 other agencies.
Do you see what's going on here?
Why didn't Obama apply that standard to himself?
That allows then, if, for example, in the case of General Flynn, okay, they were supposed to minimize the conversation.
They didn't minimize it.
And not only that, they transcribed it and then they leaked it.
They weren't supposed to be.
There was no subpoena.
There was no FISA court surveillance subpoena warrant given out to anybody, any place, anytime.
Then they destroyed this man's career with information they never should have heard.
That's the danger when you have unlimited warranting like this.
You know, this is getting way out of control.
I don't think you realize how bad this is.
Andy McCarthy has a great column out today and one that he's also updated that I want to get into here in a second.
But Andy McCarthy says, remember the great debate over the wall, the separation wall after the 9-11 attacks, internal guidelines issued by the Clinton Justice Department in the mid-90s?
The wall made it legally difficult, practically impossible for agents in the FBI's foreign counterintelligence division, essentially our domestic security service, now known as the National Security Division, to share intelligence.
Remember that?
The wall of separation?
Anyway, the criminal investigative side of the FBI versus those who are critics of the wall.
And he pointed out, I was a strenuous one beginning in my days as a terrorism prosecutor.
You might remember he successfully prosecuted the blind shake in the First World Trade Center case.
He said, my favorite argument that I repeated countless times centered on how preposterous there were the underlying assumptions of this wall of separation.
This was far easier for prosecutors than journalists, academics, and the public to grasp because we dealt with the Justice Department's different chains of command for criminal and national security investigations.
It was insane.
And he says, after 20 years, I have to revise my thinking.
The theory that the Clinton Department of Justice brass in imposing the wall was the potential that a rogue criminal investigator lacking sufficient evidence could obtain a traditional wiretap, would manufacture a national security angle in order to get a wiretap under the 1978 FISA or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
You understand what he's saying here?
He's saying the standard for a traditional wiretap is far higher than getting one for a FISA wiretap.
Traditional wiretap requires, he goes into detail, evidence amounting to probable cause of the commission of a crime.
You want to wiretap somebody?
That's the standard you need.
A FISA wiretap requires no showing of any crime, just evidence amounting to, quote, probable cause, a much lower standard that the target of the wiretap is an agent of a foreign power.
Foreign power could be another country or a foreign terrorist organization.
And he points out the reason for the wall theory was absurd, was that a rogue agent, the reason the wall theory was absurd, was that a rogue agent would surely manufacture evidence of a crime before he'd manufacture a national security angle, which he's right.
What comes first?
The chicken of the egg.
And the process of getting a traditional wiretap is straightforward.
FBI, criminal division, agents, and a district attorney of the United States write a supporting affidavit.
It gets approved by the district attorney, attorney supervisors, then submitted to the Justice Department Electronic Surveillance Unit, and that unit's approval, the Attorney General's designee signs off.
And then at that point, the district attorney, U.S. attorney, and the FBI present the application to a district judge.
FISA wiretaps, by contrast, they go through a completely different, more difficult remote chain of command.
In it, you have, for example, you have the FBI criminal division agents, a district assistant U.S. attorney, okay, FBI criminal division agents, start the investigation, get cut out of the process, taken over by the Maine Justice Department's National Security Division and the FBI's national security agents.
In other words, if we assume an agent is inclined to be rogue, it would be far easier and less likely of detection to trump up an evidence of a crime in order to satisfy probable cause standard for a traditional wiretap than to manufacture a national security threat in order to get the FISA wiretap.
No rational rogue would do it.
And he says, all right, look at this case, the claim that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI sought FISA warrants against Trump insiders and potentially against Donald Trump himself during the last months and weeks of a presidential campaign.
And he says this is a particular interest.
This revelation, in light of the last media's fall media consternation over banana republic tactics used by political adversaries, triggered by Trump's vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the felonies of criminal Hillary Clinton.
I'm using the word felony here.
Do you understand what this means?
Agents do not ordinarily draw Pfizer requests around possible crimes.
Possible crimes prompt applications for regular criminal wiretaps because the objective is to prosecute any such crime in court.
And so, you know, the Pfizer request, he quotes the Heat Street report.
Sources say name Trump.
That was denied back in June.
And he reports that the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October in the lead up to this election after evidence was presented of a server possibly related to the Trump campaign and its alleged links to two banks, SVB Bank and Russia's Alpha Bank, which has ties to Vladimir Putin.
The Times story speaks of metadata.
Sources suggest that Pfizer warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern U.S. persons.
Well, that's a citizen, lawful permanent resident alien, and would not normally be subjected to searches or electronic eavesdropping apps and probable cause.
The exception is the FISA court.
That's why they went the FISA route.
We haven't seen the affidavit yet.
We don't know exactly what they're putting in here, but that then gives us the timeline.
They were denied in June because it was directed at Trump.
Then they went back with a more limited request in October in the lead up to the election.
And around October, when the Pfizer request went in, James Clackard had to tell the president to dump NSA Director Mike Rogers.
A week after the election, Rogers made a trip over to Trump Tower without telling Clapper, which now means, hmm, what did he tell Trump?
And according According to the executive order rule, the changes that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, signed off on December 15th, he signed off on this.
That would mean he lied yesterday or he parsed his words.
Notice he put a lot of caveats in that statement, and it was well planned out.
So, did they, I want to know, was there a FISA court request in June?
And if so, why?
If there was one in October, if so, why?
And I want to know what every Obama official knew and when they knew it.
And if they can tap eavesdrop on Donald Trump and people around him, and they can circumvent the normal process of getting eavesdropping permission, a wiretap, and use FISA as an excuse to get it, then I am telling you we're all done because that means that there's no privacy that exists for anybody in this country at all.
And if this happened, a sitting president surveilling an opposition party candidate in the weeks leading up to an election, if that doesn't, if that's not the story, then I don't know what ever will be the story.
Now, we're going to get into all the legal aspects.
We've only begun to touch the surface here.
We're going to get into all of the legal aspects of this.
We've got Jay Seculo, and we've got our friend Joe DeGenova, but they're going to be with us for the full hour.
This is too important not to examine every single solitary aspect of this.
I'm missing something here.
The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.
That's going to be very, very powerful.
And whoever...
In terms of the Organizing for America that he's now shifting to become a 501c4.
That's right.
That's right.
And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it's never been done before.
And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that.
They're going to have to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it.
And he's been very smart.
I mean, it's very powerful what he's leaving in place.
This is the difference between being correct and being right.
I think the president was not correct, certainly, in saying that President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower.
However, I think he's right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the Attorney of the Justice Department through the FISCO.
And what do you base that on?
I base that on news reports that you mentioned in the last spot.
I also base it on a kind of inadvertent blurting out by Adam Schiff that his committee wants to talk to the counterintelligence agents at the FBI who were involved in this.
Now, what that means is that this is part not of a criminal investigation, but of an intelligence gathering investigation.
The FBI has got two functions: they investigate crimes and they gather intelligence.
They started gathering intelligence in 08 based on guidelines that we put in place.
They tried to get, apparently, tried to get a wiretap based on their criminal investigation function in June.
That was turned down.
They then tried to get and got an order permitting them to conduct electronic surveillance in October.
This is October of 2016.
So that's when, apparently, that's when they're.
And again, you're basing this on news reports as well.
And on Adam Schiff.
And Adam Schiff.
If a wiretap did exist, it would have to have been approved by a FISA court based on real evidence.
So if there was a wiretap, does it mean there were suspicious things going on between the Trump administration and the Russians?
Means there was some basis to believe that somebody in Trump Tower may have been acting as an agent of the Russians for whatever purpose, not necessarily the election, but for some purpose.
And the FBI keeps track of people who act as agents of foreign governments.
They keep track of people who act as agents of the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, everybody.
All right, our three top stories, hour two of the Sean Hannity show, that was Mike Mucasey, who, of course, worked under President George W. Bush, and he's saying Trump was right.
There was surveillance in Trump Tower at the behest of Loretta Lynch.
And he was right saying that Obama ordered the tap.
That's our one top story.
Then we have the new executive order, Donald Trump signing an executive order banning travel from six terror-tied countries.
And we're expecting the outline of the reconciliation part of the repeal of Obamacare coming at any moment when that happens.
We'll bring that to you live on what is a busy news day.
Joining us now, Joe DeGenova, founding partner of DeGenova and Tunsing, Jay Seculo, chief counsel for the American Center of Law and Justice.
Guys, I guess this comes down to one very, very simple, basic, fundamental question.
The New York Times reported it, the Daily Mail reported it, McClatchy reported it.
All these news sources, liberal as they are, had talked about the fact that the Obama administration went to the FISA court, was denied in June or July, and then went back with a revised limited request in October and that it was received.
Can we confirm that, Joe DeGenova?
Do you know 100% sure that's true?
Well, I don't think there's any doubt based on the sourcing for those stories, which is either senior government officials, law enforcement officials, or intelligence community officials that the stories are true, and I consider it to be so.
And it means one thing.
It means that probably in June, they were conducting a criminal investigation and in all likelihood of Paul Manafort and people associated with him.
They were denied a warrant, either a criminal wiretap warrant under Title III or a FISA warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
What's fascinating about this is they continue to do whatever they're doing.
They come back a few couple of weeks before the election of a president and they get a warrant to electronically surveill something, maybe a computer, maybe phones, maybe emails, we don't know, something in the Trump campaign headquarters.
Now, Comey is in charge of this.
This is his baby.
Nobody in his right mind, given that we're not talking about terrorism or a threat to national security, none of this involved that.
Nobody in his right mind allows a wiretap or electronic surveillance that close to a national election on the headquarters of the opponent of the in-power administration.
I got to tell you what I think.
I think James Comey needs to see a psychiatrist.
I think the man is out of control.
I think it is clear that in collusion with people in the Justice Department like Sally Yates and others, he decided that he was going to spread his wings and investigate something, which we will find out later what it was.
But this smells and stinks, particularly because of all the leaks of classified information, all of which are felonies.
I assume, I hope, and I pray that Jeff Sessions' people, who are now running the place, Rod Rosenstein shortly, are impaneling grand juries to look at this.
This may be the takedown of the FBI.
This brings us back to Watergate.
This is L. Patrick Gray territory.
Wow.
What a powerful statement.
Jay Seculo, do you agree with all that?
No, I do.
And let me take it in the logical sequence.
You talked about the timing of this, which is bizarre to say the least.
But let's assume that they did eventually get this warrant from the FISA court to do some type of, even if it was limited surveillance.
What Joe said, and I think what needs to be underscored here for everybody that's listening, is that means that the FBI under James Comey's direction once again was intervening in a presidential election.
Now, I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, or Independent, three times during this election, he publicly made statements.
First, it was there's no evidence against Hillary Clinton, then there may be evidence against Hillary Clinton, and then she's cleared of charges relating to this evidence against Hillary Clinton.
He should have never done any of those.
He should have, as Joe just said, in paneled a grand jury to investigate this.
But that's not what they are doing.
So I think this is a head-to-head conflict between James Comey and the president.
And the fact that James Comey, the FBI director, challenged publicly the administration by saying that the FBI and Department of Justice should not do what the president asked, which is to investigate this.
I think that tells you the entire story.
So whether there was an investigation of Paul Manafort, whether it was somebody else, whether it was the Bank of Russia that's located in Trump Tower, you know what?
That's kind of irrelevant.
What we do know is so far, and Senator Coons was forced to say this by our friend Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, they have no evidence of a link between inclusion between the Trump administration and the Russian government, despite the fact that Senator Coons said the exact opposite on the Friday before.
But I think this underscores the real problem here, Sean, and that is an FBI is what Joe's saying, out of control.
Now, the president could declassify this information or, as he's decided to do, send it back to Congress.
And you're going to look at Russia, look at this too.
And I think, you know, at this point, the country's going to move forward on other issues.
But I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that I think you've got a meddling FBI here, and that's very dangerous.
We have a lot of ground to cover.
We're going to continue for the hour with Jay Seculo and Joe DeGenova.
We're not going to race through this.
One of our top stories today, we have a new executive order, by the way, by the president that he signed banning travel from six territory countries.
This is round two.
We are expecting later today the outline of what the Obamacare repeal and replace is going to look like.
So we'll get to that as well.
Still not sick of waiting.
Making America great again.
Sean Hannity's on the air.
All right, as we continue our three top stories today, we expect the health care outline to come down at any moment.
When it does, we'll bring that to you, or at least on Hannaday tonight, the new executive order by the president banning travel from six territide countries.
And, of course, this whole issue of wiretapping and FISA.
And we continue with Jay Seculo and Joe DeGenova.
Well, I want to play for you both.
And by the way, we're not going to rush through this in this hour because, number one, you guys are too smart.
Number two, there's too much at stake here.
And number three, I agree with both of you.
This is of monumental proportions here of what's going on.
Now, we all know and agree that crimes were committed by Hillary Clinton.
And yet he came out with that statement, I believe it was back in July.
He gives this 13, 14-minute press conference, meeting James Comey.
And I'm saying, oh, my gosh, he's laying out the case.
He's going to pull the lever.
He's going to do it.
And then all of a sudden at the end, he just, but never mind.
And meanwhile, we all know that what she did was illegal.
We know that she was circumventing congressional oversight.
We know that special access program intelligence and top secret intelligence was on that computer.
We've since discovered that at least five foreign intelligence agencies had been able to tap into that server in a mom-and-pop shop bathroom closet.
So you're right, Jay, in saying that that was politicized.
Now, let me go back to the issue of what the president tweeted out this weekend.
And James Clapper, the National Director of Intelligence, what he said.
Let me start with the President's tweets yesterday, this idea that maybe President Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his offices.
If something like that happened, would this be something you would be aware of?
I would certainly hope so.
I can say, obviously, I'm not, I can't speak officially anymore, but I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time as a candidate or against his campaign.
I can't speak for other Title III authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity.
Yeah, I was just going to say, if the FBI, for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not know?
Yes.
You would be told this.
I would know that.
If there was a FISA court order on something like this.
Something like this, absolutely.
And at this point, you can't confirm or deny whether that exists?
I can deny it.
There is no FISA court order.
Not to my knowledge.
Of anything at Trump Tower?
No.
Wow.
Now, the first thing he said would, I would hope so, that I would know.
And then it became he would have known if there was a FISA court order.
And if you pay very close attention to Barack Obama's statement, you know, they're very specific in saying a cardinal rule of the Obama administration was no White House official ever interfered with an independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.
That was as part of the practice.
Neither the president nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.
They didn't order it.
Any suggestions that they ordered it is not true.
Now, it was very interesting.
I've gotten a bunch of Twitter wars this weekend, and the former speechwriter for the president was out there on Twitter, and even he was couching that statement and trying to point out the obvious, at least from my vantage point, which is that, you know, John Faru, and he said, I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there's no wiretapping.
The statement just said that neither he nor the White House ordered it.
That seems to be an acknowledgement that it probably did happen.
What's your take, Joe?
Well, I think what's interesting is what Clapper didn't say.
He didn't say there was no electronic surveillance.
He said there was no wiretapping.
You can have a FISA for emails and all sorts of other things, telephone numbers, the connections and things like that.
But he also said something that's actually more important than all of this.
He said, which the press has ignored, that they found no evidence of collusion between Trump's people and the Russian government as a result of their investigations.
Now, how did he come to that conclusion if there were no wiretaps or no electronic surveillance?
The answer is there was electronic surveillance.
And Clapper knew it.
Remember, he's lied before.
Well, there was talk about that.
Yeah, he was.
He was.
There was questions about perjury charges at the time.
He lied about the megadata.
Here's one thing also we have to remember.
The timing of this request for wiretaps or electronic surveillance, both in June and October, was at a time when the Democrats thought they were going to win the presidency and they were going to take back the Senate.
They were preparing to hold hearings on Trump and everybody else after the election.
That's why this was all being done.
And any statements by the former president, President Obama, about what he did or didn't do are entitled to absolutely no belief whatsoever.
Is there any way that there was a FISA court approval without the president knowing?
And doesn't that mean that we have a, if in fact that happened, doesn't that mean the president knew as a sitting president that he was getting information about an opposition party and spying on an opposition party in the lead up to an election?
Well, this is exactly the problem.
So the president not ordering it, not ordering the surveillance, is not the standard.
The standard is...
He could have stopped it.
And would he be known about it?
Well, stop right there.
What do you mean he could have stopped it?
Well, if he found out about it, hey, let's say he didn't order it.
He finds out about it.
He says, what the hell are you doing this for?
Stop this right now.
We're in the middle of a presidential election.
He didn't do it.
Right.
So the fact that did or did not order it is irrelevant.
The question is, did he know about it?
And General Mike Hayden today said, former, of course, national security director said there were times when they targeted high intelligence targets that were politically sensitive, and they would, of course, let the administration know that that was going to happen because there'd be a political cost to doing that.
Again, whether he ordered it or not, Joe's right.
He could have stopped it.
All right.
I want you guys.
It's impossible for the president not to know.
When we get back on the other side of this break, I want to get into the legality, the laws that are broken, and who potentially could be in jeopardy here.
We'll continue with Joe DeGenova, Jay Seculo, and then we'll also be asking them about Donald Trump's new executive order banning travel from six terror-tight countries.
We're also awaiting the Republican outline on the reconciliation, repeal, replace attempt.
We'll get an outline of that tonight.
That's all coming up straight ahead.
Sean gets the answers no one else does.
America deserves to know the truth about Congress.
If a wiretap did exist, it would have to have been approved by a FISA court based on real evidence.
So if there was a wiretap, does it mean there were suspicious things going on between the Trump administration and the Russians?
It means there was some basis to believe that somebody in Trump Tower may have been acting as an agent of the Russians for whatever purpose, not necessarily the election, but for some purpose.
And the FBI keeps track of people who act as agents of foreign governments.
They keep track of people who act as agents of the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, everybody.
Let me start with the president's tweets yesterday, this idea that maybe President Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his offices.
If something like that happened, would this be something you would be aware of?
I would certainly hope so.
I can say, obviously, I'm not, I can't speak officially anymore, but I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time or as a candidate or against his campaign.
I can't speak for other Title III authorized entities in the government or a state or local entities.
I was just going to say, if the FBI, for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not now?
Yes.
You would be told this.
I would know that.
If there was a FISA court order on something like this.
Something like this, absolutely.
And at this point, you can't confirm or deny whether that exists.
I can deny it.
There is no FISA court order.
Not to my knowledge.
Of anything at Trump Tower.
No.
Not to my knowledge.
I would hope I would know.
And that question was specifically only about the FBI.
And do we have the full answers here?
Now, we're going to get to that and the president signing a new executive order banning travel from six territory countries today.
But our top story is clearly what did Obama administration officials know about an attempt to get a FISA warrant against Donald Trump or people close to Trump in October of this campaign?
And why did they attempt to do it in July?
And the FISA court does not have a strong track record in rejecting these requests, but they rejected that one in June or July.
Joe DeGenova, he is the founding partner of DeGenova and Tunsing, Jay Seculo, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.
You know, I hear a lot of word parsing there, and I go back to what Obama said in his statement.
And, you know, the corridor ruled, no White House official ever interfered with an independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.
And as part of that practice, neither the president nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.
Any suggestion would be otherwise false.
What laws are we talking about potentially being broken here, Jay?
And I'll start with you.
And any of the public disclosures of confidential communication, 18 USC Section 641 and others.
That's the Espionage Act, right?
Yeah, so that's, yeah, these are felonies.
So it is a violation of the Espionage Act.
And then you take it a step further.
It could be multiple counts of that.
So this is not just a one-count incident.
And that's where I'm hopeful, as we said earlier, and I hope that Joe is that the department's doing this because when I was with Treasury and when I was working with justice, and I know this is true for Joe, too, these were the kind of things that would be investigated aggressively if this kind of disclosures were going on.
I just know that it's been late to the game for the Trump administration to get their people in place, so I don't know the scope of where those investigations are, but you're talking about violations of the Espionage Act.
And by the way, this wouldn't be the first time.
And Jason Chaffetz, you know, who's going to join us later in the program today, I mean, he actually made a good point is that this would not be new for the Obama administration because, well, we know they use the IRS to target Americans based on their political beliefs.
We know the Department of Justice had surveillance on my colleague, Fox News reporter James Rosen.
And last year, dozens of Secret Service agents were disciplined for leaking information about Chaffetz as apparent retribution for his investigation of the agency.
And we've had a series of leaks.
Now, I want to specifically, Joe, ask you about this.
Let's take the case of General Flynn.
Now, we have all discussed all these intelligent leaks that have taken place.
And in the case of General Flynn, well, here's a guy that was picked up on a monitor of a Russian ambassador.
And as part of the law, as I understand it, once they recognize that an American citizen, that they don't have any right to surveil, is heard on that call, that they're supposed to minimize the conversation in terms of what it is that they actually listen to.
And I spoke to a very high-ranking intelligence official last Friday who told me not only that, but then at the heart of it, if they write up a report, it's supposed to say an American, not the name of the specific individual.
And in this case, they mentioned General Flynn and they saved the whole conversation.
And then they leaked the whole conversation.
And I was told by this intelligence official that in his lifetime, he'd never seen this before, and that this was also a felony and a violation.
Nobody seemed to care about poor General Flynn being surveilled without a legal warrant or a FISA warrant.
Well, I don't think there's any doubt that everything surrounding this entire affair from the New York Times story in January before the inauguration saying that there had been wiretaps of the Trump organization.
Remember, the New York Times story said there were wiretaps.
They used that word.
And following up on that, we now know as a result of criminal leaks to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere in the McClatchy papers, that there were other activities by the FBI in conjunction with the Justice Department and senior Justice Department officials to intrude themselves into the election by doing national security surveillance.
These issues are now so big, I'm not even sure that the Republicans who have oversight responsibility on this on the Hill understand what they are grappling with.
This is, on its face, a major series of criminal acts committed by government officials.
This is a real simple process, by the way.
You impanel a grand jury, you slap subpoenas on everybody in that process on that distribution lift of transcripts, phone call knowledge, and FISAs, and you put them in a grand jury.
And they can do whatever they want.
They can take the fifth.
But we are way beyond speculation about whether or not something needs to be done about this.
Crimes have been committed by senior government officials, and it needs to be investigated now, not tomorrow, not by Capitol Hill, but by a federal grand jury.
I think a grand jury does need to be impaneled.
Would they be able to bring in somebody from the outside to do this?
Sure.
Listen, there are dozens of good people that they could make special counsel.
You wait for Rod Rosenstein.
He's going to be confirmed.
They're not going to be able to hold him up.
I mean, you know, the guy's a superstar.
He's a wonderful human being.
Of course, that doesn't mean anything to Democrats anymore.
But we will have a deputy, and they're going to have to appoint somebody.
In fact, that's probably why they're waiting.
They need to have somebody.
I think that's right.
You know, unblemished.
Well, I mean, it seems to me, but Hillary got off the hook, didn't she, Joe?
Hillary committed Loretta Lynch.
And because of Loretta Lynch and that goofy meeting on the plane with Bill Clinton, which, by the way, was not accidental.
That was planned three days in advance, according to people at the Phoenix airport.
So, in other words, it wasn't just, oh, I see my good friend Loretta's over there.
Let me go.
Not a casual meeting.
All right.
Why can't we get a definitive answer?
Even though the New York Times said it, McClatchy said it, the Daily Mail said it, everyone else said it, that there were wiretaps going on.
Why can't we get an affirmation?
Wouldn't the Trump administration be able to pull up the Pfizer request?
The president can wave.
And he could declassify it?
Yeah, the president can declassify.
I mean, by the way, you don't just wave your hand and declassify it.
There's a declassification process.
The president can do it.
He is the only one that could do it.
But it could raise a host of other issues.
So it may or may not be a situation where they want it declassified for intelligence gathering purposes.
But, Sean, you raised the issue, and Joe really hammered this.
We've got to have a lawyer in there investigating this because at the bottom of all of this is that these are leaks.
So yes, are there violations of 18 U.S.C. Section 793, the Espionage Act?
Yes.
But why are there leaks?
Who's doing this?
What shadow government's operating here, and why are they being allowed to do it?
This is a shadow government.
Yeah, it is a shadow government.
Once Jeff Sessions, and I'll tell you, I think this was a sea change today in how General Sessions will be perceived.
I think this nonsense from last week was exactly that.
It was nonsense.
You got Senator Coons again saying, well, there is no evidence of collusion that we've seen after he said there was.
So now the situation is who is engaging in those leaks?
And that's where a prosecutor comes in, investigates this with a grand jury, and you know what?
You get indictments, you get some convictions, and this stops.
But you've got to move quickly here.
Because I agree, because if you don't stop the leaks, it's going to go on forever.
I mean, there's been seven months and not a single shred of evidence about Russia.
What about Obama's 14 days before Obama left the White House?
He signs the Executive Order 12333, which allows these SAT communications that, for example, the NSA would be involved in to be shared with 16 other agencies.
Now, for whatever the reason, if he didn't want this applied to himself, why would he then leave it for his successor?
And why would they want to share it if not to maybe muddy the waters and maybe make it more difficult to find who the leakers are?
Sure, it was an absolute setup.
I mean, you got the president went eight years with the same rule that Ronald Reagan operated under, which is when the sing intel comes in, the NSA will review the raw data and then determine what agency should get it.
17 days to go into his presidency.
He has Loretta Lynch sign off on an order that changes it going forward to include, was it, 18 agencies that had or 16 agencies that had raw data access, which now the leak number increases exponentially.
So sure, this was, you know, look, the president, President Obama is operating, and he's, look, he's operating his own team still in place in large part.
Now, I think that's going to change over time.
Do you think there's any chance that the former president could be indicted in this?
No.
I'll let that to Joe decide that one.
No, no, no.
And that's not the object here.
History will take care of him.
The bottom line is there were senior Justice Department officials and people apparently inside the FBI who were willing to disclose classified information of the highest nature.
We're talking about signals intelligence.
And that to me is the worst type of criminal activity.
These government officials were entrusted with incredible power and intrusiveness into the private lives of people.
And to disclose the contents of these intercepted phone calls, not to mention the phone calls of the President of the United States, which were leaked involving foreign leaders.
I don't know how in the world the Justice Department can avoid this.
This is staggering stuff.
I'm sitting here repeating this to you guys, and I'm saying to myself, who in the world cannot investigate this?
This is unbelievable what has occurred.
We've got to take a quick break here.
When we come back, while I've got you both on the phone, we've got to get into the president's new executive order today.
We'll continue more with Jay Seculo.
Final hour roundup is next.
You do not want to miss it.
And stay tuned for the final hour free-for-all on the Sean Hannity Show.
All right, as we continue, Jay Sekulow and Joe DeGeneva are with us.
We haven't had a lot of time to get into this because of all the news on FISA and the back and forth that's been going on all weekend.
But the president today signed a new executive order blocking arrival of travelers from six conflict-prone countries for 90 days and freezing the inflow of refugees from any country for the next 120 days.
Will this meet constitutional muster?
If the left goes judge shopping again, Jay Seculo, will they be able to pull off what they did the last time?
Well, they may be able to pull it off in California in the Ninth Circuit.
And the ACLU, by the way, is already threatening to do that.
They've said that they're going to file a lawsuit and stop this.
But let me tell you something.
As a Supreme Court litigator, I want this case.
I want this case badly.
I think I could win this case unanimously because the order is bulletproof.
And any areas that were questionable, and I said the other order I was clearly willing to defend and would defend, but anything that challenges this one, this idea that this is a Muslim ban, really, 50 countries that are majority Muslim, this affects six, and only for a period of time.
So I think, Sean, what we've got here is the best situation.
We had suggested some changes.
Those changes have been incorporated.
It's bulletproof.
I think the president's order and the way they rolled it out today was perfect with the head of DHS, with the Secretary of State, with the Attorney General making the discussions, talking about this.
I think it's exactly the way this should be handled.
This is handled right, and the law here is on our side.
We will win this.
I don't know what happens in the Ninth Circuit because they make up the law as it goes on their own.
But I think at the end of the day, we win this.
What do you think, Joe?
I think, first of all, the original order by the President was in fact constitutional.
The District Judge and the Ninth Circuit were absolutely wrong.
Their opinions were a disgrace to Article III of the Constitution.
The new order, from what I've seen, will clearly pass muster.
And let me just say this.
I'm going to make a prediction.
If the same judge, district judge, rules that this one has to be enjoined and the Ninth Circuit agrees, there will be articles of impeachment against those judges in the House of Representatives.
Wow.
What a powerful commentary.
What a day as it relates to the law.
Are you both convinced people will be tried and convicted on the felonies that we believe have committed here?
I do think that Jeff Sessions will impanel a grand jury as he's entitled to as the Attorney General, that we will determine who made these leaks in violation of the Espionage Act and people will go to jail.
Joe, your final thought?
I concur with that, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
This is one of the most disgraceful moments for the Department of Justice and the FBI in history.
And Comey is responsible for this from start to finish.
He is an embarrassment to law enforcement.
Wow.
Very powerful statements.
All right.
We're going to have more on the other side.
Thank you both for being with us.
Joe DeGenova and Jay Seculo.
We'll have more.
We'll get into this with Jason Chaffetz.
He's in studio today.
And also, we'll check in with Bill Benny, who is the former technical director of the NSA World Geopolitical and Military Analysis and Reporting Group.
Dan Bongino will also join us as well and much more.
800-941-Sean on this busy news day.
We're also awaiting a possible outline on the health care bill.
that happens we'll bring that to you as well let me start with the president's tweets uh yesterday uh this idea that maybe president obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his offices If something like that happened, would this be something you would be aware of?
I would certainly hope so.
I can say, obviously, I'm not, I can't speak officially anymore, but I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time or as a candidate or against his campaign.
I can't speak for other Title III authorized entities in the government or a state or local entities.
I was just going to say, if the FBI, for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not know?
Yes.
You would be told this.
If there was a FISA court order on something like this.
Something like this, absolutely.
And at this point, you can't confirm or deny whether that exists.
I can deny it.
There is no FISA court order.
Not to my knowledge.
Of anything at Trump Tower.
No.
This is the difference between being correct and being right.
I think the President was not correct, certainly, in saying that President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower.
However, I think he's right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the Attorney of the Justice Department through the FISA court.
And what do you base that on?
I base that on news reports that you mentioned in the last spot.
I also base it on kind of inadvertent blurting out by Adam Schiff that his committee wants to talk to the counterintelligence agents at the FBI who were involved in this.
Now, what that means is that this is part not of a criminal investigation, but of an intelligence gathering investigation.
The FBI has got two functions.
They investigate crimes and they gather intelligence.
They started gathering intelligence in 08 based on guidelines that we put in place.
They tried to get, apparently, tried to get a wiretap based on their criminal investigation function in June.
That was turned down.
They then tried to get and got an order permitting them to conduct electronic surveillance in October.
This is October of 2016.
So that's when, apparently, that's when they're going to be able to get away from it.
And again, you're basing this on news reports as well.
And on Adam Schiff.
And Adam Schiff.
All right, so the question remains, did people in the Obama administration go to a FISA court, not once but twice, to get surveillance permission from that court to monitor an opposition party candidate in the middle of an election?
That's the question.
Now, Obama's statement is very clear that the White House, neither the President nor the White House or any White House official ordered surveillance.
Well, that doesn't mean a thing, nor does it mean a thing what you just heard as well from James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.
Well, I would hope that I would know.
I'd hope so.
I can't speak for the other agencies that have the ability to do it.
The part that I saw, there was no wiretap.
That doesn't answer the question.
And everybody in the meeting.
C. James Clapper said.
C. Obama said.
Obama said he didn't do it.
Okay, did he have knowledge of it?
What did he know?
When did he know it?
And why doesn't he tell us?
And why won't they confirm it?
And why did the New York Times report on what?
They mentioned it five times, wiretapping the exact words.
Seriously?
Anyway, joining us now to discuss all the ins and outs of all of this, we welcome back to the program.
Bill Benny is with us.
And also, we have, he's a former technical director of the NSA Geopolitical and Military Analysis and Reporting Group.
Dan Bongino, risk management consultant, former Secret Service agent, NYPD, and contributing editor of Conservative Review.
Bill Benny, you were the architect, if I'm not mistaken, of the NSA surveillance program, and you became a whistleblower when you resigned in 2001 after spending, what, 30 years with the agency?
Yeah, a little over 32, yeah, as a civilian, yeah.
Yeah.
And what can you tell us about whether or not these FISA requests were true, whether the first was denied, and whether or not in the middle of a campaign that somebody in the Obama administration, in fact, got permission for surveillance of Donald Trump's Trump Tower and members of his campaign?
Well, you see, I think that they're missing the point here.
Under Executive Order 1233, they do surveillance of everybody in the United States without warrants.
And that's done through various upstream programs, Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney, and also cooperation with other countries in terms of collection worldwide.
So it's all done without warrants.
And that was testified to Adrian Kinney by Adrian Kinney and David Murphy Falk, who were transcribing at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
They were transcribing conversations between U.S. citizens with no warrant at all.
So, for example, General Flynn, there was no warrant in his case.
And General Flynn, when they recognize if they're doing monitoring of an ambassador from another country, let's say Russia, and General Flynn is on the phone, once they recognize he's an American citizen and they don't have permission to surveil him, aren't they supposed to minimize what they listen to and what they record?
Yes, they are.
Yeah, unless they find probable cause at which time they require to get a warrant.
That's right.
Okay, and they didn't do that, and then they also leaked all the information.
Is that not true?
Yeah, that's right.
And I look at it this way, is the I.C. is becoming more like the Praetorian Guard, you know, where they're trying to determine who the emperor is and also influence what the emperor does.
So, you know, I just think that this is getting out of hand.
And I think, you know, President Trump is absolutely right.
The intelligence community needs to be revamped.
Are you saying that every American can be wiretapped against their will without any warrant at any point?
No, I'm saying they are.
You're saying every I have been wiretapped.
That's right.
Repeatedly.
Yes.
And by wiretapping, that means what?
Recording my phone conversations, taking my emails, my text.
That's right, that's correct.
And also storing it for mining.
It's all done under Executive Order 12333, Section 23C.
Well, 1233 is the one that Obama put in place just two weeks before he left.
Well, he opened it up to all the other agencies in the intelligence community.
Originally, it was just restricted.
The only ones who had access were NSA, CIA, and FBI.
You're saying that every American listening to this program and every American in this country is being surveilled by our government without any type of warrant.
Isn't that against unreasonable search and seizure, sir?
Yeah, it's a violation.
This is why I left NSA in 2001.
They're violating the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments of the Constitution, as well as any number of laws.
That's why I left.
I couldn't stick around and be a party to that.
And you were one of the big architects of the surveillance program.
Yeah, that's right.
Unfortunately, yeah.
Well, what do you mean, unfortunately?
Don't we need surveillance?
Yes, but you don't need it to be abused, and that's what they're doing now.
So was Donald Trump being surveilled even without the FISA court?
That's correct.
And actually, what it is, is he's being targeted now.
They're going into the database looking for data on him.
So in other words, all the mining that they've done, now they're just searching it all out.
So in other words, my private conversations with Donald Trump could be made public one day.
That's right.
And who would release that?
It'd have to be somebody in the intelligence community.
Well, now any one of the 16 agencies now have access, I guess.
And by the way, isn't that a felony to release that information?
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
And how come nobody's been charged up to this point, and do you think people will be?
Well, I mean, when Nixon was doing this with the same three agencies, basically at the core, NSA, CIA, and FBI, I mean, he got impeached for that.
Dan Bongino, what's your take on all this?
This is rather shocking.
What wouldn't you say?
Holy Moses.
I mean, how do you follow that up, Sean?
Rarely am I a guest on a show where I'm listening like, no, no, let him go.
I mean, that is, if that is in fact true, and I have no reason to question it at all, the legitimacy of that, that is just a stunning revelation.
And it separates out the warrant issue from the wiretapped.
In other words, if that is in fact true, then Trump's statement is correct.
His tweet about being wiretapped is absolutely true.
Whether there's a FISA warrant or not, as reported by the New York Times and other places like that, that then becomes kind of a mood point because then it becomes a point of who released the information, not in fact, was he tapped.
And then you have a ⁇ I mean, we have a conspiracy right now that's devastating to the former Obama administration.
But once we find out who releases that information, I'm sure Mr. Binney could tell you at least.
Well, if they're data mining all of this, Mr. Binney, then is that in and of itself you're saying, and I'm agreeing with you, that that would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and you're probably right the first, fifth, and sixth.
So all of this is happening.
Why don't the American people know that every conversation they have is likely being data mined?
Yeah, unfortunately, they don't seem to care.
You know, they throw out the statement, well, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to hide.
Well, you know, I have three things to say about that.
The first thing is that's a great quote from Joseph Goebbels, former Hitler propaganda minister.
Secondly, what they think, what the people think in this country is totally irrelevant.
It doesn't matter what they think.
The only thing that matters is whether or not the administration thinks you're doing the wrong thing.
And thirdly, I take a quote from Goethe that said, and this I think is our current state.
No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe they are free.
But if there's no, let me ask you this.
If there's no warrant, let's say that they are data mining.
Let's say everything you're saying here is true and I have no reason to doubt you.
Let's say every American is being monitored and they're recording every phone conversation.
I want to ask this about Donald Trump.
Would that mean now that they can go back without a warrant and pull this out and leak it against Donald Trump, every private conversation he may or may not have had?
Yes.
And probably they can go back at least five to ten years.
Every conversation.
Does that include every email, every tweet?
Absolutely.
I mean, every text, rather?
That's right.
Good grief.
So nobody's safe and secure.
If you want to see the way they're collecting it, look at just Google NSA Space Fairview and NSA Space Stormbrew, and you can see all the tapping points inside the United States.
I've got to be honest, there's very few times in my life that I get stunned, and you've just stunned me.
We'll take a quick break.
We'll come back.
And Jason Chavitz is waiting outside.
He'll join us live at the bottom of this half hour.
A lot more to talk about, including the health care bill, the executive order now, the new executive order the president signed banning travel from six territory countries and more obviously on this surveillance issue of the Trump campaign and who knew what, when, and where.
Hannity Headline.
A bite-sized version of the show that you can take with you anywhere you go.
To sign up today for Hannity Headlines, go to Hannity.com.
All right, as we continue Sean Hannity's show, we continue with Bill Binney and also Dan Bongino.
I want to ask you, Mr. Binney, is one of the architects of the NSA surveillance program.
Were you the chief architect?
I was the designer of how to manage large volumes of data, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you referred in an interview, I guess, with Aaron Klein referencing two NSA whistleblowers who said that they worked at the agency in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and they were asked not only to monitor phone calls of U.S. citizens, but transcribe them.
This is all being done without a warrant?
That's right.
And what about James Clapper's claim in March of 2013 during an open Senate session of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA was not wittingly collecting data on Americans?
Did he lie?
Yes.
Do you think he lied yesterday in an interview that he gave about not knowing about this?
Well, I mean, he would know about the FISA warrant, but he wouldn't, I mean, FBI and CIA have direct access into the NSA data with no oversight or attempted oversight at all.
So they could have people going in targeting President Trump or President-elect Trump or candidate Trump at any time, even before that.
They could go back years, and he would never know that.
So he's not necessarily lying.
He just doesn't know.
Isn't Dan Bongino what Mr. Binney is describing here, isn't that the foundation of a police state?
And if you have a corrupt government, that they can use this information to silence opposition, blackmail people, compromise people.
I mean, no offense, but I don't think I'd want every email I've ever sent looked at by my government.
I just wouldn't.
And I'm not sending any.
Is there any other way to look at this, Sean?
I mean, think about what happens in North Korea.
They say a lot of curse words on some private calls sometimes, you know.
Yo, you?
Me too.
Well, you know Linda.
I mean, I'm almost as bad as her.
Almost, not quite.
But think about it.
I mean, a real police state like North Korea or Cuba, you know, there's no private and public self, right?
You know, when you're behind closed doors, nothing's really private.
They're listening to your phone.
They're looking at your internet traffic.
There are literally neighbors paid to spy on people in places like North Korea and things like that.
So there's no distinction between the public and private self.
Why are we replicating that model here in the United States where the private self, your email behavior, your private telephone conversations, are now no longer private, but they're in the public domain for what?
Government bureaucrats and officials to access anytime they have a gripe against you?
I mean, Sean, you and I both have a lot of enemies out there.
You know, I mean, this isn't the kind of thing you want out there.
That's the actual distinction.
Is that why the IRS is going after me now?
Is that why?
Even though I pay a fortune in taxes?
I mean, the sad thing is, you don't know.
Like, that you have to ask the question is bad enough.
The answer, frankly, is irrelevant.
That you're asking the question says we're all in trouble.
And if what Mr. Binney says is even half accurate, again, I have no reason to think otherwise.
Should we worry about the judge in the FISA court, Mr. Binney, was picked by Bill Clinton, appointed by Bill Clinton?
Well, I mean, that certainly would be some concern, but I think the Pfizer court's basically totally irrelevant.
They're not even concerned, or are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 1223 collection?
That's all done outside of the courts and outside of the Congress.
So all that, when I talk about the president opening up the sharing of 1233, Executive Order 12333, that I'm you're saying that they now allow the sharing, but it always allowed the monitoring of every American citizen, and they do it with regularity, and everything is being recorded.
Yeah, that's right.
Jeez, good grief.
What the hell is going on in this country?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I looked at it this way.
When some of this first started coming out from Edward Snowden back in 2013, there was a quote by Wolfgang Schmidt, who was a former lieutenant colonel in the East German Stasi.
And if you remember, the East Germans had folders on everybody in their country, and they kept records of them all.
And this colonel said when he looked at the NSA collection system and its acquisition of data, he said, for us, for us, meaning the Stasi, this would have been a dream come true.
Very frightening, very chilling, and we really appreciate it.
We'll have a lot more on this tonight on Hannity 10 Eastern on the Fox News channel and all the other news of the day, the executive order, the new order put out by the president today, and the outline of the health care information that we've been talking about, and much more.
Here is not a liberal Democrat, a Republican senator who says he's trying to get the details.
Wait, let me guess.
You're going to quote Rand Paul for Senator.
Hold on.
What we think is being hidden from conservatives is that there's a lot of Obamacare light in their bill.
There's a new entitlement program that will increase at about 5% a year forever.
There is also a Cadillac tax or something similar to the Cadillac tax that was in Obamacare.
And there's also an individual mandate, believe it or not.
Instead of paying the mandate to the government, they're going to tell you you have to pay the mandate by law to an insurance company.
So a lot of conservatives will be upset to know that we're keeping those things from Obamacare, and there needs to be an open debate about it.
Is that all true?
No, it's not.
And I think he's just kind of, you know, I like Rand, but I think he's looking for a publicity stunt here.
What's happening is the committees of jurisdiction are drafting legislation and getting feedback from their members.
That's exactly how legislation is supposed to be written.
The things he described are just not accurate.
And like I said, when the committees write their bills and put their bills out there to mark up, everybody will see what they've done.
President Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the Congressional Intelligence Committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.
Is that a fair ask of this administration?
Well, look, President Obama has flatly denied that he has done this.
And either way, Chuck, the president's in trouble if he falsely spread this kind of misinformation.
That is so wrong.
It's beneath the dignity of the presidency.
It is something that really hurts people's view of government.
It's civilization warping, as Ben Sass, a conservative Republican, called it.
And I don't know if any president, Democrat or Republican in the past, has done this.
It shows this president doesn't know how to conduct himself.
On the other hand, if it's true, it's even worse for the president because that means that a federal judge independently elected has found probable cause that the president or people on his staff have had probable cause to have broken the law or to have interacted with a foreign agent.
Now, that's serious stuff.
So either way, if the president makes it worse with these tweets, now is he trying to divert things here?
Yeah, the president denied this.
I don't have any doubt to doubt.
I don't have any doubt that President Obama has been telling the truth.
Regardless of whether or not President Obama ordered such a wiretap, do you know if there was any such wiretap by the FBI or the Department of Justice?
Well, we wouldn't know that, but in fact, the very idea that President Trump is saying he wants his Justice Department to look into that, you don't look into something like that.
In other words, A, President Obama flat out has said we have nothing to do with this.
What the Justice Department is doing is another subject.
I have no knowledge of anything of that kind.
Well, notice the parsing of words we've got going on here.
That was with Chucky Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
The statement of President Obama this weekend was very, very, very specific.
In other words, neither the president nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.
They didn't deny that there were Pfizer court requests from either the FBI or the Justice Department or any other department, nor did they acknowledge that it happened.
Now, the question is, we now have great suspicion that, in fact, there were two attempts to get Pfizer warrants against Donald Trump or associates, and one was denied in June or July, and the second one in October, more narrow in scope, was approved.
And if that happened, then it's very likely that, in fact, Trump Tower was wiretapped, at least in some capacity.
Anyway, 24 now till the top of the hour.
Joining us a rare in-studio appearance is Jason Chabitz, the congressman from the great state, where are you from, Utah, and is the chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.
Boy, you've been making the rounds today.
You were on Fox and Friends early this morning.
Yeah.
It was good to be in town.
Glad to be with you.
How are you?
Doing?
Doing great.
Doing great.
You actually made a statement about it this morning.
You said it wouldn't be the first time that Obama illegally wiretapped his opponents.
What did you mean by that?
Well, what I was saying, I didn't say wiretapped.
What I said is he doesn't, you know, they've been notorious over here.
Remember what happened with James Rosen?
Remember what happened with the targeting of innocent Americans just based on their political beliefs and what they did with the IRS?
Aren't all those things crimes?
Aren't all those things illegal?
Yes.
I mean, look what the Secret Service did to me.
I was investigating the Secret Service.
More than 40 agents illegally, against the law, according to the Inspector General, tapped into my private files all in an effort to damage done.
Isn't it the same case with General Flynn?
What they did to General Flynn, and tell me what part of this is wrong, because I speak to members that are high in the intelligence community.
And for example, if the NSA or any other agency is, in fact, intercepting the signals of either a friend, ally, opponent, which is their job.
I'm glad they're doing it.
In the case of the Russian ambassador, once they identify that an American is on the line, is it or is it not true that they're supposed to minimize the amount of listening, number one, that they do to the American, unless he's saying something outrageous, because they haven't gotten a warrant to listen, and they don't have a FISA court opportunity.
They haven't gone to the FISA court to get permission to listen.
And isn't it general practice that when they finally write up a report on whoever it was that they were surveilling, that they wouldn't identify the American?
Yeah, that's exactly.
We had a hearing about this in judiciary literally just last week.
As we're looking at what's called the so-called 702s, and that's how the FISA court works.
That's what's supposed to happen.
So there was a felony committed in the case of General Flynn by, number one, releasing this classified information.
There was no reasonable search or seizure here.
There was no government granting of a tapping of his phone, right?
No, and mishandling of classified information, putting that out into the public.
I mean, as I talked to Devin Nunes, who's the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he said the one crime we know about is the actual leaking of classified information.
That is against the law.
And so General Flynn lost his job because he was illegally tapped by our own government, and then the information was leaked, both of which are felonies.
So we've asked the Inspector General to go in and look at that information.
I've talked to Devin Nunes a few times about the information that they're going to look at.
We're going to go into this eyes wide open.
I don't know where the facts will take us, but we're going to take this very seriously, and we're going to look and see what the reality is.
Do we or do we not have confirmation that, in fact, there were two attempts to get the FISA court to sign off on surveillance against Donald Trump and members of his campaign?
I have read and seen that in the media.
I mean, the New York Times.
The New York Times, McClatchy, the Daily Mail.
Any other places you read it?
Well, it's out there, but I have not independently confirmed that.
I can't say that it happened or didn't happen yet.
So do you know personally, but could you tell us if you knew?
I'm just flat out telling you, I don't know.
I mean, this happened over the weekend.
It's starting the process to try to untangle this very deep web, and it's going to take some time.
Do you agree with me that the White House statement that neither the President nor any White House official ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen is meaningless?
And isn't it likely that, in fact, the president, if it did happen, would have known?
I don't know, but you go into these eyes wide open.
You don't presuppose the conclusion of this, but we're going to find out.
What would it mean if, in fact, the sitting administration in the heat of a presidential campaign is tapping or surveilling the opposition party candidate?
I mean, if it is.
That sounds like a police state to me.
No, look, if it is true, I think some have said, hey, this is one of the biggest political scandals of all time.
And you're probably right.
Why it matters is because if our government can do surveillance on Donald Trump, if they could do it on General Flynn and they can leak that information, then what's to stop them from doing it against me or you in the case you've already had it done against you?
No, I know.
I mean, it's already well documented through the Inspector General.
It was done in more than 40 people.
And it was like a day and a half maybe in the news.
Nobody paid any attention.
The administration just kind of brushed it off and gave people literally paid time off.
Sounds like a vacation to me.
That was not exactly a reprimand.
I was a little mad at you last week because of comments that I read you had said about Jeff Sessions.
I don't think Jeff Sessions should have recused himself.
I think that it was a rush to judgment.
I understand he wants to avoid any appearance of impropriety.
But if Loretta Lynch can meet on a tarmac days before she's making a decision on Hillary Clinton, where I know she committed felonies, is there any doubt in your mind she committed felonies?
Look, she should have stepped way back.
She stepped way out of bounds.
The Democrats were absolutely nowhere in the world.
Isn't it illegal to mishandle classified information?
Absolutely.
So is the definition of mishandling, if you have it in a mom-and-pop shop server, bathroom closet, is that the mishandling of classified information?
I mean, that's look, we helped spearhead the whole Hillary Clinton email investigation and that whole.
Are you convinced she committed felonies?
That Loretta Lynch?
Oh, that Hillary Clinton did?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you can't come to Congress and lie.
Then why don't we ever prosecute or follow up on people that commit crimes?
Why hasn't that happened?
Well, we have a new administration, a new attorney.
Sheriff in town.
But why do I know that, boy, if I burped the wrong way and broke a law, I mean, that they would have me in handcuffs, perp walked, and mugshotted.
Look, I just sent a letter in the last, I think, two weeks.
Mr. Pagliano, who we issued.
Yeah, we issued a subpoena for him to appear in Congress.
He just said no.
He didn't show up.
Well, they should prosecute him for that.
You know, it's not optional to show up and testify.
But the thing is, we never follow through.
Now, I'll give you another example.
We have all this video of people that were rioting and looting in Ferguson, Missouri, or rioting and looting in Baltimore, Maryland.
We got their faces on video, and we never follow up.
But look, the legislative branch, you know, myself, Trey Gowdy, others, we can't prosecute anybody.
We can highlight it.
We can point at it.
What about the jump of Congress?
Well, and when we do that, again, the administration has to be the one to actually prosecute somebody.
They don't give me handcuffs, Sean.
If they give me handcuffs, there's lots of people that come before a committee that should be in handcuffs.
That's a good point.
How do you feel about the president's new executive order banning travel from six terror tied countries?
I'm excited.
I mean, good.
You saw three cabinet secretaries.
By the way, don't worry, the media is going to lie and say it's a Muslim ban, even though it doesn't impact 90% of the world's Muslims.
And they're going to say it's a religious litmus test, none of which is true.
This is about countries that have specific ties to terror, and it's a temporary ban, but it'll be mischaracterized.
Look, the number one goal of the president is to protect the United States of America.
It's totally within his rights.
And he absolutely should do this.
And I think he's rolling it out the right way.
It starts 10 days from now, and I wholeheartedly support it.
I'm a little bit worried about, I mean, we played Rand Paul and his criticism.
I've had numerous conversations with the speaker, and I've talked to Congressman McCarthy, and I've talked to Freedom Caucus members, and I've talked to Rand Paul.
And there seems to be this schism in this divide about what, you know, we're getting the points now out as we speak.
In other words, the main points of how the reconciliation bill is going to work.
Do you interpret this in any way that it has a new mandate except to the insurance companies, that the Cadillac tax still exists, and that there's a new entitlement?
Are any of those things true in your mind?
Well, we've got to see it all fully rolled out.
And Paul Ryan is right in that when it goes to the committee, members can offer amendments.
And we're going to have some votes on these things.
And they may or may not go the direction I want to go.
I really like Rand Paul's approach to this.
I like his bill.
He's got a lot of caucus.
I have this guy, Dr. Josh Umber.
I actually gave his name to Reince Privus the other day.
And Dr. Umber is a guy in Wichita, Kansas.
And what's really cool about him is he's created this co-op: $10 a month for kids, $50 a month for adults, all the care you can want.
He buys in bulk all of the main pharmaceuticals that you'd ever need.
If you need stitches, you break a bone, you know, all your basic medical care, stress tests, all of this stuff is covered.
The only thing that's not covered is cancer, heart attacks, or if you have a bad accident.
Yeah, I mean, if you have something catastrophic.
Well, then you need a catastrophic.
Everybody would hope that people would go buy, but I don't want to force them to go buy it.
It's a numerica.
They've got to be able to make their choices.
Well, they'd make their choices, but I mean, could you imagine if all of, let's say, the bricklayers of America or the nurses of America could actually create such a cooperative like that?
And that's absolutely.
I really do believe it.
I think you'll see a lot on health savings accounts, which aligns the financial incentives.
And people should be able to congregate the way they want to, whether it's an organization or however they want, to try to pull together and get the best deal they can.
Well, people don't know about you.
And I saw your wife the other night at the joint session of Congress speech.
She looks like Kate Beckinsdale.
I take that as a huge compliment.
Yes.
And I keep thinking every time I see her, what the hell was she thinking when she married you?
I don't understand why.
Hey, I'm keeping that deal.
26 years we've been married.
Your face is not out.
Why is your face red when I say that?
Because I just got visions of her.
I still get the tingle down the back of my Isn't it great being a talk show host?
I can be so free and I don't give a flying rip what anybody thinks.
And you guys in Congress have to be so careful and nice about everything.
I got my tie all tied up.
You're wearing a golf shirt.
You're going to be golfing before we're.
Yeah, I have a lot of time to golf in my life.
Let me fit that in in my morning workout routine.
I barely have an hour from my ninja workout, which wore me out this morning.
Congressman, we appreciate it.
I really think if we don't get rid of the swamp, if we don't get rid of the Obama holdovers, and we don't get rid of the lifelong bureaucrats, and we don't get rid of Republicans don't get a spine, this is like the only chance we've got.
You guys got to do your job.
You guys got to get this done.
And everybody that listens to this program wants you Republicans to step up in the House and Senate.
Hey, we're on the clock, and we do.
We've got to get it done.
That means repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something that we can all live with.
And then we got to do tax reform.
Those are the two big ones right up.
And we're going to hold people accountable.
For my point, we're going to hold people accountable.
That's my job.
And if you don't, I will be screaming and yelling and giving out your phone number.
I could be an awful human being.
I believe you.
All right.
Good to see you, Congressman.
All right.
We appreciate you being with us.
Thank you, Conrad.
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