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March 10, 2017 - Sean Hannity Show
01:41:50
ObamaCare Battle Continues - 3.9
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All right, so I have insomnia, but I've never slept better.
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If you want to join us, I guess I need to address this publicly because even Jamie Dupree, who is our correspondent in Washington and a good friend of the program.
Now I know that people keep asking about Jamie.
I I don't know why I have to keep explaining it, because where's Jamie?
Where's Jam?
Jamie's still here.
Jamie writes us, updates us on all the comings and goings in Washington every single day, and reports on the program.
We just don't have them on.
It's not because we don't love them.
We do love them, and Jamie has had vocal cord issues that are getting better, and and we hope he gets better soon, and he's a part of our family and we love him.
And one of the top items that he wrote in his report today is and you gotta put your mic on because you're you nobody will believe me, is what did I do on I was trying to get on to the WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was having a press conference.
First it was supposed to be 9 30.
Then it was supposed to be 9 45.
And uh then it it was coming later.
And I finally because I'm a dope.
I'm a I'm an idiot.
I don't even download my own apps.
And I know by the way, I just assume everything I do is being monitored, especially after talking to the other day uh what's his name, Bill Bill Benny.
And so it's not that.
I just what so I went to Periscope.
What do I know about Periscope?
That's new to me.
Apparently that's a Twitter sub-app.
Is that a fair way to characterize that?
Yeah, sure.
Talk about it like that.
Okay, is that what it is, or does is it connected to Twitter?
It has to be.
It's a separate entity that allows people to host video that's right.
Okay, so WikiLeaks put a put a link to that, and I'm trying to get to that.
And the first thing that popped up on on my link was that I needed to change my settings of my Twitter account before I could get the live feed Of the press conference of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
So I I tried to switch it to what they said I was supposed to switch it to, and then it worked.
I think, wow, Hannity, finally, tech genius.
I finally made it.
And then all of a sudden my phone starts blowing up.
Reporters from all over the place.
And people in DC.
Where's Hannity's Twitter?
He's gone down at the exact same time as the WikiLeaks presser.
There must be a conspiracy here.
Breaking news now.
All right, so why don't you tell everybody what I did?
Because I don't even know what I did, to be honest.
I messed it up.
I don't actually know how you did it, but you went into protect mode.
So you basically put all of your tweets behind a wall so that when anyone went to your profile, all they saw was your picture, who you were, and that's it.
I'm glad people are following me.
So deep, I mean all these tweets are protected.
Well, we hit the three million mark on Facebook and 2.2 million on Twitter, and by the way, we love that everyone follows.
We try and keep people abreast.
I start a lot of good fights into entertaining Twitter fights.
I'm really good at it, and I'm laughing my ass off the entire time I do it, and I could be far more aggressive on Twitter than I am on the air because I say whatever I please.
And I say it to people just to mess with their heads.
You know, egos are very predictable.
When you're dealing with very egotistical people, let's say in the television business, I won't mention any names, Joe, um, or people like that.
But, you know, when you're dealing with egomaniacs, they can't handle it.
They just crumble and bubble and fizz like alka salts are in water.
It is amazing to me that people in our business are so sensitive.
They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
And there's so many of them.
And what they don't like about me is, and maybe I just I don't know, maybe I've built a defense mechanism.
I have an ability to compartmentalize.
I don't really know exactly what it is, but I'm not taking their crap, and it doesn't bother me what anybody says about me.
As a matter of fact, I often retweet it and say that's very kind of you, or something to that effect.
Or are you a jackass only on Twitter or in real life as well?
Because a lot of people you know are these weirdos in their underwear that, you know, are Twitter warriors, and you know, they're all confident on Twitter and they'll be mean on Twitter, but they wouldn't dare say any such thing to your face.
I'll everything I say on Twitter, I'll say it to anybody's face.
I will say it to anybody, and Linda can attest to that.
You know I'm brutally honest.
Uh all right, we've got a lot coming up today.
I want to.
What I am about to do is complicated.
What I'm about to explain is difficult.
And you're saying, Hannity, that's your job.
You're supposed to break these things down.
Because there's just way too many things that are that are going on that are really, really troubling to me.
By the way, Paul Ryan will be on the program today.
Rand Paul will be on the program both sides of this healthcare debate, and we will have them both coming up in the next hour.
So I want you to stay tuned for that.
There's just so much happening in terms of what I've been calling the shadow government of Obama, the deep state of Obama, that you really need to understand fully and completely what the hell is going on here, but it does get complicated in ways that I wish it wasn't so complicated.
You know, when you look at WikiLeaks revelations, now here's the most frightening part of what WikiLeaks did yesterday and what they I actually saw the part.
It was hard to my phone kept buffering, which was frustrating the hell out of me when this press conference was going on because I want to discover, I want to learn.
And there are people that are way smarter than me when it comes to computers and hacking.
And, you know, if you watch the series Homeland, which I'm so addicted to, and I finally started season five.
I think I've watched Homeland in record time because I watch like three hours a night when I get a chance.
Deep into the night, I eat my one meal a day.
I have my vodka sitting next to me, and I watch Homeland, and you cannot drag me away from that television set.
I just love the series.
It's amazing.
And I've always been fascinated by espionage, fascinated by technology.
It's not my gift in life.
You know, take the case of Julian Assange at 16, 16 years old.
He hacked into the Department of Defense computer system.
He hacked in at 16 to NASA's computer system.
I mean, he thinks on a technical level, I guess maybe the way I think about politics, and I'm not making any comparison.
I think those people that are capable of doing this type of spy stuff are so fascinating, so smart, so intelligent, so savvy, so cunning, I'm just fascinated by it all.
More importantly, then I when I tie it and take this knowledge and filter it through the prism of my political thought process, I'm beginning to get really nervous.
Now, yesterday we had Sarah Carter and John Solomon on the program, and they broke this incredible story, and what did they find?
That in fact there was surveillance of Trump Tower in the servers at Trump Tower during the camp in the lead up to this election.
And Sarah Carter broke on my show last night that they found another warrant was issued.
We don't know the extent of it yet.
Hopefully, by the time we're on a 10 Eastern tonight, we'll know the answer to this.
And we learned that this entire Russia narrative that the media has been pushing has been looked into by our government, by our intelligence agencies, by our investigative agencies, and they have found nothing.
They've been looking now for seven months.
There's not a shred of evidence.
And now they have it confirmed.
If anybody in the media cared about real reporting, John Solomon and Sarah Carter are doing it.
Then when you put that piece of the puzzle together, what I've been warning about, I've been putting, again, I'm putting this all through the prism, the technological advancements, the wiki leaks discoveries and reveals, and the Carter and Solomon piece.
And I'm filtering all of this through my political mind and everything that I have been trying to say to you in this audience about a shadow Obama presidency, a shadow government about deep state sabotage every single day is now making more and more sense to me.
Let me put the pieces of the puzzle together for you.
Because it's interesting, isn't it?
These types of intelligence leaks were not happening during Obama's presidency.
Then we get to executive order 1233.
And again, Obama, just as he's leaving the door, puts an amendment in, and this takes SATNET communications, like in the case of General Flynn, which I think is the most understandable, which is why I keep using it.
In other words, our intelligence agencies, they're doing their job, they're surveilling.
And by the way, I have great respect for the intelligence community.
But there are some people that are sabotaging within the intelligence community.
They are openly in full complete sabotage mode of Donald Trump.
And I believe its tentacles do reach into the pres former President Obama's decision to modify executive order 1233 that allows communication intercepts, like in the case of General Flynn, to also be shared with 16 other intelligence agencies, because that means if leaks happen like they've been happening in the case of General Flynn, I'll just use one example.
Stay with me here, then it gets that much more difficult to find the people that are leaking, which is a felony in violation of the espionage act, and because they're not supposed to reveal in any way because they don't have a warrant to surveil on General Flynn.
It doesn't matter that he has top secret clearance, and if they do surveil against General Flynn, they certainly are not allowed to use that information and leak it.
Then you go to WikiLeaks.
What is WikiLeaks?
What is the what are we learning from the WikiLeaks discoveries here?
Okay, we're learning that, wow, the CIA at a level that nobody ever thought or knew has the capacity in so many different ways to spy on anybody at any place, any time.
Now, what does that mean for us?
I mean, because I think there's a lot of serious questions here.
Here's a question.
Did the CIA did Barack Obama have knowledge that the CIA had Had a cyber arsenal.
I didn't know that that was in the CIA's mission, really, up until this point, that they had a cyber arsenal that probably was more powerful than the NSA and the FBI?
Did anybody know the extent of the spying and techniques that were available?
Did they know that they purposely were making encrypted materials or products that we thought were encrypted, like the iPhone or the Android, that they were making it impossible not to be, they were making it possible so it could never be encrypted, which means that every text, every email, like Bill Benny said, and every phone call is being monitored and meta stored by your government.
You know, and if Obama did know about the capability of the CIA or some people in the CIA, how long did they know it?
And why did they not then in you know create an emergency brief so that the people of this country could be protected, that people like General Flynn wouldn't be the victim of a felony and then end up losing his career over the whole matter?
You know, my hypothesis here is you know, one of the most in incredible discoveries is you know, you think your TV's off, but your TV may in fact be working to spy on you.
Or the fact that we discovered the CIA has the potential to take malware, which basically helps hack into things, misdirect where it's coming from, obfuscate where it's really coming from, give false attributions like the CIA could be the ones that are surveilling, but they can say it's the Russians, or they could say it's the Chinese, or they can say it's the Iranians, and they'll have fingerprints on it.
In other words, they have the fingerprints of the malware that these other countries use to spy, and they use that, and it makes you think that the wrong other people did something they did.
Did that happen in the case of this whole phony Russian narrative that we've been hearing?
You know, it's um it gets very, very tricky here.
You know, why 14 days before Obama leaves office, 1233, uh the executive order is amended.
Did that ensure that Obama through his surrogates could sabotage the incoming president?
No intelligence leaks during his term, repeated leaks as soon as Donald Trump becomes president.
Very nefarious, all deep state, all shadow government things that I've been trying to tell you.
Hannity, you become a conspiracy theorist.
No, I've become a realist.
And it's all beginning to be pieced together.
People, in my opinion, will be going to jail over what we're talking about today.
That's my prediction.
Many people.
This will be gotten to the bottom of, I can assure you.
The forgotten man is forgotten no more.
this is the sean hannity show All right, as we roll along, Sean Hannity Show, 800-941 Sean, our toll-free telephone number, you want to be a part of this extravaganza.
Let me tell you what I think this president needs to do.
Now that we know there was surveillance of Trump Tower, now that we know that there were two warrants, one Pfizer, one other given, now that we know the media has lied, now that we know Obama set up deep state sabotage of intelligence links when he revised 1233 1233, the executive order when he was getting out the door.
The president at this point has no choice if he wants to govern and govern effectively because every one of these leaks is going to be taken by the alt-left propaganda, destroy Trump media and used as a distraction so he could never implement his full agenda.
I would not doubt one of the things that has happened to the president with his health care bill is he's so busy and distracted.
I mean, he once said that 75% of his staff's time is now been being spent on nonsense that is thrown.
The Russia thing never happened.
There was a full investigation, full surveillance, full almost espionage on Trump Tower.
And they found nothing.
And I don't see anybody in the news media reporting it.
Now I know we're we are I wrote this for my monologue on TV that we're at a time we need Abe Lincoln.
And I know people think, oh, team of rivals, Abe Lincoln.
Let me tell you the truth about Abe Lincoln.
Once he was in office in 1861, Lincoln purged the entire executive branch and anything that hinted at disloyalty.
Get this number.
Of the 1,520 executive branch positions immediately under Lincoln's oversight when he became president, he fired 1,0195 of the 1,520 people that were holdovers.
Bill Clinton got rid of, I think a hundred prosecutors around the country.
My advice to the president every Obama holdover, give them their marching papers tomorrow.
And any single person that leaked intelligence needs to be handcuffed, arrested, prosecuted, because they all broke the law.
All right, as we roll along Sean Hannity show, 800-941 Sean, toll-free telephone number, you want to be a part of the program.
I want to go back to what I was just saying.
And because I think it's really deep and profound.
Not me, but I mean what Lincoln did.
I think there's a lesson to be learned here.
And I know that if you think of Lincoln, you think team arrivals, he brought all his enemies in close, and he was found a way to govern.
But he was also smart enough to understand that he needed people around him that wouldn't sabotage him.
And so he gets in office 1861, and he purged the executive branch.
There were 1,520 executive branch positions at the time.
Boy, has government grown just a little bit.
And he fired 1,195 of the 1,520.
In other words, the most sweeping removal.
Who somebody wrote this?
I know Newt sent it to me.
Alan Guelzo, I guess, found this quote.
I want to always give attribution when I can.
Anyway, and um Lincoln fired them.
It amounted at the time to the most sweeping removal of federal officeholders in the country's history up till that time.
And Lincoln especially liked to provide for his friends who were often remembered.
Okay, that's what he said.
Bill Clinton came into office, and remember, there was a big deal made of George Bush getting rid of, I think it was eight U.S. attorneys, or somewhere around that number.
Huge, huge, you know, controversy.
Everybody forgot, you know, that when Bill Clinton became president, he fired all 93 U.S. attorneys on a single day.
Right after he got in on March of 1993, March 23rd.
Nearly, by the way, you know, about the perfect time for Trump to fire all of the deep state Obama holdovers.
He's got to get rid of them.
There's too much here.
He can't stop the media.
The media is not going to admit John Solomon, who wrote for the AP for 20 years and worked for the Washington Times and Sarah Carter, another investigative reporter who worked for the Washington Times and elsewhere.
He's not going, they're not going to admit what they found because if they admit that in fact surveillance happened and Donald Trump didn't lie, perhaps instead of the word wiretap, he should have used the word surveillance.
But I think we're parsing words here because if we know a FISA court granted in the middle of a campaign weeks before the presidential election.
A surveillance warrant of the servers at Trump Tower and those servers also held the information of the Trump entire Trump campaign apparatus.
And I know from personal experience because everyone had a Trump dot blah blah blah email address.
And I communicated with them often.
Guess that means I was surveilled in the process as well.
I send tons of emails.
So all I do is send emails.
Can't wait for those to get leaked.
Believe me, they all Got ripped up and thrown on the ground.
Nobody cares.
They all got shredded.
But the seriousness of this is really profound.
And then you go to Executive Order 1233.
And then you look at the amendment Obama makes 14 days before he leaves office.
And then you look at the WikiLeaks discoveries, which I think if it's less than 1%, God only knows what's coming out.
You know, you you gotta think about this.
Because I'm pretty certain, and important, you know, did the CIA conceal the fact that they had an entire cyber arsenal that nobody knew about, where they literally disabled the encryption capabilities of iPhones and Android phones where smart TVs can be turned into instant monitors of individuals?
Did they get warrants for every time they use these techniques?
Because if they didn't, that would mean they broke the law.
Nobody seemed, nobody at all seemed to care that the law was violated and felonies were committed in the case of General Flynn.
General Flynn, that never should have been leaked.
It's a violation of the espionage act.
So now I think the question of, well, what did Obama know?
Yeah, of course he didn't order it, nor did anybody else in the White House order, you know, a surveillance of the Trump campaign or Trump Towers, but it happened, according to Solomon and Carter.
They didn't find anything.
Is the media now gonna end their total phony Russian narrative?
Does anybody want to dig deep into the malware misdirection capabilities, the obfuscation capabilities, the false attribution capabilities in terms of the CIA spying that we didn't even know they had the capability to do?
Is anybody gonna ask what they did Obama eat?
Here's an important question.
Did Obama know what the CIA is capable of?
Did Obama know what the CIA was engaged in?
Apparently the CIA loved Obama because he gave them a hundred billion dollars according to these leaks to spend all this money on all this stuff.
And they were ecstatic, they were giddy over it.
So, and if he did know, when did he find out?
And if he did know, did he make any attempt to find out if all of this is legal?
Loretta Lynch would have had to sign off on a Pfizer warrant.
What did she know?
When did she know it?
What did Ben Rhodes know?
When did he know it?
What did Harry Reed know?
Why did he make his his comments before the election?
What was Hillary told?
She tweeted out this was happening before the election.
You understand the danger here?
That means a sitting president knew pretty damn well that the opposition candidate was being surveilled, in my opinion.
Certainly people around him knew at the highest level of government.
And, you know, do I trust that a sitting government of an opposition party is capable of surveilling an opposition party presidential candidate, honestly, truthfully, and not in any way, is there any malfeasance of any kind?
I mean, these are important questions.
Was there any nefarious acts being committed here?
I would have to guess the deep state, shadow government, those people leaking, all Obama holders, they need to be rounded up and thrown the hell out.
Or else I don't think this is ever going to stop.
And then when you look with the alt-left propaganda, destroy Donald Trump at all cost media, they'll take every leak and they'll run with everyone.
And then if it turns out, like in the case of the Russia story, that none of it's true.
If it turns out that in fact the Pfizer warrant was issued, you think they're going to run that with the same intensity and the hyperventilating and the hysteria they reported every Russia connection that apparently doesn't exist.
This is unbelievable to me.
So, you know, and I've said this about Julian Assange and taking heat before.
Julian Assange has done America a favor.
Why?
Because number one, he exposed that we don't have cybersecurity.
Now we're learning we really don't have cybersecurity.
If he can break into the DOD and NASA at 16, if the CIA, all of their strategies and techniques are now open to be revealed, and we've done nothing to fix it in the entire eight years of Obama.
That's a that's a that is a weakness that we cannot survive over time.
Everything we spend money on, everybody steals all our techniques where they steal.
It's being used against American citizens, apparently.
This is scary stuff.
This is police, this is potential police state stuff.
Somebody in the intelligence community, and I have great, great, great respect for those that gather intelligence.
Many of them risk their lives.
Covert operatives risk their lives for our safety and security to keep the homeland safe.
Somebody's leaking this.
Somebody within that community has access to it.
Obama allowed 16 other agencies to have, you know, signal access conversations now leaked as well.
Well, that ruined one citizen's life, General Flynn.
This is serious, serious stuff here.
And I want to I want answers.
This country better get answers.
And I'll tell you right now, if Donald Trump doesn't drain that swamp, and by the way, while he's at it, he might as well go right into the State Department because that's a swamp too.
And get rid of those people.
You know, Donald Trump is um I was communicating with this guy on Twitter today.
And the guy lives in New Zealand.
And he said his impression, he's a pretty smart guy.
He's into this tech stuff that I have really no know.
I mean, he they say tech things to me, and like it's my eyes glaze over because I'm so stupid.
My kids have to download apps for me.
I'm getting there, though.
I downloaded I did download the Periscope app today.
I got it all by myself.
No my daughter set it up that I only need my fingerprint.
Works so good.
She's 15.
I know it's embarrassing.
And this guy was very serious.
He says he senses in Trump a desire to really help common men and women in this country.
And I wrote back, I said, absolutely.
That's what he's trying to do.
What he's trying to do is simple.
Secure the homeland.
He's doing that through extreme vetting and building the wall.
And keep the homeland safe.
He wants to defeat ISIS without having a protracted war and boots on the ground.
I mean, we can't do what we did in Iraq ever again.
And I said, then he wants to fix the economy so every American has a shot at the American dream, a house, car, safe neighborhood, occasional restaurant, maybe a trip to Disney every three years when your kids are young.
I'm just right.
That's the American dream.
By the way, when you get to Disney, it's not anything it's cracked up to be.
Well, it's wonderful because I get a guide that makes me cut the lines, but I mean you have to pay for that.
Yeah, you can pay for a guide that will help you cut the lines.
Yeah, it's by the way, it's worth every penny.
Oh, yeah, it's so worth it.
And um, or they take you in the back way, nobody knows you're cutting the lines.
You didn't know that?
Yeah, but I, you know, I don't want to even go on these stupid rides, so it's not meaningless to me, but when you got a five, six, seven-year-old kid, they're racing up the ramp.
You don't call them riots?
I go on all of them because they make me.
But you don't want to go on them?
No, God, no.
That's really weird.
I would have never picked that.
I went on every roller coaster that ever existed.
My son is a roller coaster fiend.
Monster, what do you call that thing over at Six Flags, the I don't know, Ethan says King DeCa.
King to Ka loves it.
He stays on it all day.
Goes back online, gets off, goes back online.
Off, gets back online.
I've never been to Disney, so I'm I'm learning right now.
Oh, you'll be there soon.
How old's Liam?
He's a year?
Nineteen months.
You're gonna make a big mistake, take him at two, he won't appreciate it.
Then you'll take him back at five, and then you'll take him back at seven, nine, and then maybe once in their teens, and you're all done.
That's how it works.
I'm just telling you, then you will you'll spend one day at the one time at the Animal Kingdom.
The Grand Floridian is the one that you'll like the most because the bar stays open late there, and you can go fishing in the back, and uh you can sit on the beach and smoke a cigar.
Lenny can at least do that.
I'm just telling you, I know the whole Disney routine.
I like kids love it.
That's their dream.
And you're a parent, you suck it up, you spend a week there, you come home, and you're more tired than when you left.
Just reality.
You want to be a parent.
You bring life into this world.
That's the life.
That's the life you choose.
Anyway, this needs to be fixed.
This is not a game.
One other thing, and we have Paul Ryan and Paul, we have uh Rand Paul and Paul Ryan coming up in the next hour.
I said yesterday on this program that perhaps I'm naive, thinking that Washington can work smarter.
But apparently I'm wrong.
I knew every single criticism that would come the way of this bill, broadcast every single criticism before the bill was even released.
Everybody had to know it was coming.
And rather than put everybody in the same room, which makes no sense to me, and get this straightened out.
Now the Republicans are involved in a civil war.
On TV.
You got the conservative Freedom Caucus.
You've got Rand, who's going to join us at the top of the next hour, Paul Ryan at the bottom of next hour.
They're all fighting each other.
What for?
If it's ultimately going to be worked out, and I believe it will, in a way that everybody's going to be happy with.
Even if it meant waiting another month, considering they had eight years to prepare for this.
It is beyond any comprehension I have in terms of relatability in the way I roll in my life.
If I knew a if I knew November 9th, Donald Trump's the president, and he wants to repeal or replace Obamacare, I would have gotten every Republican in the House and Senate together and retreat for a month and get it worked out.
It's the opportunity of a lifetime.
And now we have to sit through and watch this unfolding cluster right in front right in front of our eyes.
And my question is, God, you guys are incompetent.
It's so pathetic to watch this.
So unnecessary, such an unforced error.
The information you need, the trunk you demand.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
you All right, a lot coming up today.
I know a lot of you want to talk about the health care bill.
I promise we're gonna get to it.
We have Rand Paul on one side and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan on the other side.
All right, we're gonna get into all this deep state shadow government, and I have a special message for the president that I'll lay out on TV tonight on Hannity on the Fox News Channel.
And we also have uh, well, we have House Majority Leader McCarthy's gonna talk about the health care bill.
We'll get into that.
We're also gonna talk about the alt-prop left media, destroy Trump at all costs media.
Lou Dobbs, you know what?
Immigration problems down dramatically.
And we have Sarah Carter and John Solomon back on tonight, and Laura Ingram and David Harwist all discussing who Trump needs to fire tonight at 10.
Speaker Ryan and Rand Paul next.
Speaker 1: The Republicans' American Health Care Act versus Obamacare.
Obamacare is full of job-destroying mandates.
The new plan eliminates them.
Obamacare puts bureaucrats in control.
The Republicans' plan puts patients and doctors in charge.
Obamacare stuck families with soaring premiums.
The new plan provides more choices and lower costs.
Repeal and replace Obamacare.
Tell Congressman Labrador to vote with President Trump.
The most important thing that this thing does is it takes power out of Washington, takes power out of the bureaucracy and puts it back to doctors and patients where it belongs.
The promise was very clear.
We're going to repeal Obamacare.
President Trump ran on.
We're going to repeal Obamacare.
And we all voted on a full repeal of Obamacare.
And all Republicans voted yes in the House and the Senate a year ago.
And so now the voters are just learning what's going on, and it turns out we're not going to repeal Obamacare.
I think we're moving a little bit too quickly on health care reform.
This is a big issue.
We're going to live with health care reform that we passed forever.
It says we're going to repeal Obamacare, but we're going to take the Medicaid expansion and extend it.
And it also says we're going to repeal Obamacare, but we're going to keep in place this mandate in a different form.
Lower costs, more competition, more choice.
And most importantly, get Washington out of the business of being a nanny state of micromanaging and running health care into the ground.
Get it back to patients, get it back to doctors, get it back to states.
That's what this does.
This is monumental, exciting conservative reform.
I've been working on this for twenty years.
This is exciting.
This is what we've been dreaming about doing, and we know it's going to make a positive difference in people's lives in this country.
I think amidst the um horse extra we can find a pony around here somewhere.
This is the Obamacare replacement plan that everyone has been asking for.
It's also a culmination of years of dedicated work and careful thought by Republicans to find a replacement that will best undo the damage that's been caused by Obamacare while ensuring that all Americans have peace of mind during this stable transition period.
These are the principles for which conservatives have been fighting for for years.
Our job is to do what we told the voters we're going to do.
In my judgment, looking at the document, reading the document, this does not do what we told the voters we were going to do and what they elected us to do, what they sent us here to do for goodness sake.
We had an election in 2010, 2014, 2016, where this was a central issue, and every one of those times we said we were going to repeal it.
You said you have no doubt that you will get the 218 votes necessary to pass this bill.
What gives you that certainty?
What are you seeing on the ground?
We'll pass this because we're going to keep our promises.
Every House Republican, every I think every Republican in Congress made a promise to the American people.
And the promise we made to the American people is we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Because we made that promise, I am confident we're going to make good on that promise.
There is not 218 votes today.
We had a meeting last night, and I can tell you, I don't know that there's two hundred and eighteen votes of consensus around any bill today.
The House plan is Obamacare-lite, keeps subsidies, keeps taxes, actually keeps an individual mandate, and bails out the insurance companies.
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.
All right, there you have the ongoing health care debate, Hour 2, Sean Hannity Show.
Write down our toll-free telephone number.
By the way, Speaker Ryan will be on at the bottom of this half hour, and we're going to talk about the rollout of this and why this intramural battle has now emerged, and was it something that could have been avoided?
Rand Paul has been a very outspoken critic against the rollout from earlier this week.
Did you get to go bowling at the Harry S. Truman bowling alley as a means of talking to the president yet?
No, I did not make the bowling list, but I did take a phone call and talked with him earlier in the week.
And you know, I think he's open to talking to conservatives, and I can tell you conservatives are unified that this is Obamacare Light, and we're not going to vote for it.
We were unified on repeal.
That's what we ran on was repeal, but we didn't run on Obamacare Light as the replacement.
Well, I guess to me, and what's frustrating from my vantage point, and I like, for example, I had this Dr. Umber guy on, and you have, for example, these cooperatives as part of the replacement plan in your bill, the Freedom Caucus bill, as well as health savings accounts.
And I guess the frustrating part to me is you were on this program.
Freedom Caucus members were on this program.
You hadn't seen the bill, but everything that you thought was in there certainly ended up being in there.
All your criticisms that you have and Ted Cruz has and Marco has and Lee has, and the Freedom Caucus and even members of the study group have.
And I guess the frustrating part for me is why it was all handled this way when I think a better answer would have been to take all of you in a room and and hammer out a bill, not one that everyone's gonna get with everything they want, but one that is gonna work and is gonna be significantly.
Here's the way it works in Washington, Sean.
Conservatives only have a voice if we have enough votes to stop them.
The establishment is in charge, and often the establishment of both parties are somewhat interchangeable in the sense that the status quo around here rules.
And if the conservatives ever want to get a seat at the table, we have to demonstrate that we have enough votes to stop them.
So right now, for the next week or two, it will be the House Freedom Caucus and Senate conservatives making sure they know they don't have the votes for Obamacare light, and then they'll talk to us.
But I promise you, they would just soon never talk to us if we didn't have the votes.
That's why they orchestrated and wrote this bill in secret, brought it forward because they knew we weren't going to like it.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess then the question is, then they were perfectly happy, I guess, to have this public fight.
Why do I think a far better answer would have been that everyone get in a room and resolve the issues as a team and give the president on his first big legislative piece of uh or item agenda a big success, and the president along with every Republican senator and every Republican House member coming out saying, here's our replacement, and this is why it's infinitely better.
It seemed that would have been a better way to handle it.
Yeah, I would have much preferred that we stood on the steps of the House and the Senate with all of us unified and said we ran on repeal, and that's what we're doing.
This is repeal.
But I've always been for replacement, but I've always thought it had to be a separate bill.
One, because we don't necessarily agree, but two, because the budget rules don't allow some of the good things to be in the repeal bill.
But that's why I've been saying these health care associations, these co-ops where you can join a group to get leverage.
I think that needs to be a separate bill.
We need to put it forward, and we put to put the Democrats on the spot.
Will they support it?
But we have all voted for repeal.
We voted for it several times.
Let's put a clean bill out there that's repeal, and then let's have a debate over what replacement would look like.
Well, I think the problem is number one, the president wanted the replacement bill right after.
So I think there would there would have been a way to do that.
You could have held back, you could have all worked out what the replacement is, then you could have done the repeal like you did in 2015, which is what you're talking about, and then immediately introduce and pass the new health care bill.
Well, that's why, you know, the the conservatives, the House Freedom Caucus, myself, other conservatives, we introduced the replacement bill, our version a month and a half ago.
We now have Obamacare Light, the big government Republicans version.
But I'm sure the Democrats would like to keep the ACA.
I'd put all three of them forward, and let's have a vote on them.
Let's see which one gets the most votes, see if any of them pass, and then let's go forward from there.
But we do not agree with Paul Ryan's Obamacare Light.
I promise you, conservatives across the country, the more they hear about it, the less they like it.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
And the problem is I don't understand what it specifically you came on this program and you talked about number one a new entitlement.
You talked about some of the taxes remaining under a different name.
Uh you had one other criticism that I forgot.
What was the other criticism?
Well, they they they keep the individual mandate, but instead of paying the penalty to the government, you have to pay the insurance company.
But they also have a hundred billion dollars worth of insurance company bailouts.
You know, I'm one of the conservatives that's not interested in having the taxpayer bail out big business.
And the reason they need the bailout is frankly this.
This will remain under Paul Ryan's Obamacare.
If when you get sick, you can still buy insurance after you get sick.
The problem with that model is the insurance companies continue to lose money.
That's why they built in a backdoor to give bailouts to the insurance companies, because the model does not work.
You can't make a profit if the young healthy people refuse to get insurance and only sick people buy it, that insurance model ultimately fails.
That's why Obamacare is failing.
That's why premiums are rising.
And the thing is is we will be judged a disaster if we repeal it, and yet insurance premiums still continue to go through the roof.
Yeah.
I think that there's a better way to do it.
Here's what what Sean Hannity would do.
I agree with you have a full repeal.
I agree that health savings accounts are a big part of this, especially for younger people because they can build that money up throughout their lifetime and most medical expenses come later in life.
It's just a fact.
Then these cooperatives, I know that the guy that I talked to, and I don't know if you heard or watched any of my interviews with him, uh, but this guy's name is uh Josh Umber, and he's from Wichita, Kansas.
Atlas MD is the name of his practice, and you know, he has six hundred patients, five other doctors each have six hundred patients.
You pay ten dollars a month if you're a child, fifty bucks a month if you're a kid, unlimited visits.
He negotiates directly with the pharmaceutical companies, gets ninety-five percent off what you would pay elsewhere, gives it directly to his patients, which is great, And if you break a leg, if you need stitches, if you need most care, even came chemotherapy medicines, they get it a greatly reduced price.
And then you add that with a catastrophic plan, which is very inexpensive.
That's a, oh God, what if I have a horrible car accident?
Oh gosh, what if I God forbid have I get cancer or have a heart attack?
You're covered.
Now, to me, that is the type of thing that is innovative, creative, cost effective, and he's saving the people in his cooperative, you know, sixty percent.
Right, but that's capitalism.
That's the free market and transaction.
What Paul Ryan's plan does is he gives fourteen thousand dollars and a new entitlement to every family.
That's a maximum, but fourteen thousand dollars to subsidize the the purchase of insurance.
Well, guess what?
Once you do that, insurance will never go below fourteen thousand dollars.
That becomes the floor.
So instead of that, what we ought to do is allow people to join associations, join these co-ops.
We ought to get rid of all of the mandates and allow the price to be determined by the marketplace with the with with the knowledge that if people join associations, they would have great leverage for getting lower prices.
But if you have a new entitlement program, the problem with Washington is we're 20 trillion dollars in debt because we can't afford the current entitlement programs.
I don't know where it ever became Republican mantra that we were going to be the ones to create a brand new entitlement program.
Well, I mean, is there a better way how and one of the things you're gonna have to answer is this question, because we can predict what the left does and says, and they've already started this narrative and Chuck Schumer and all the Democrats that caused this massive failure in the health care system.
Remember, none of the promises were kept, keeping your doctor keeping your plan saving money on average $2,500 a year.
Well, the average family's paying five thousand four hundred dollars a year more for health care coverage, and that does not include twenty seventeen, where states like Arizona saw a hundred and sixteen percent increase this year alone, and so I I I guess so they're not willing to help in any way.
How do you answer their charges?
Oh, Republicans want old people to die.
Oh, Republicans want children to die.
Because that's what they're gonna that's what they're saying now.
You know, I've spent uh most of my life as a physician taking care of all comers, those who pay, those who don't pay.
I've done a lot of charity work around the world.
I do care about my fellow man, I do care about taking care of people, and under my plan, the eleven million people who buy individual insurance would be eligible for group insurance, it would protect them against pre-existing conditions because they'd be part of a large group and would also help them with price.
But we wouldn't subsidize insurance.
If you were very, very poor and you don't have employment, Medicaid would cover you.
But we don't try to expand Medicaid.
What we do is try to expand the economy so more people have jobs with insurance.
Okay, but what do you do for the person that has no insurance, no money, and then that person needs help?
What do you do?
They're on Medicaid currently.
And so, in other words, would you block grant the money to the states?
Is that a better idea?
I'm asking I'm just asking a question rather than top down federal government.
Right.
But then what we would do is it has to be paid for honestly.
The Medicaid expansion is paid for through borrowed money, and Paul Ryan's plan continues it for several years.
The people are on it can stay on it as long as they want.
So if you're in the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare Light, Paul Ryan's plan, you can stay on it forever.
There's no limit.
So you could be on it ten years from now.
Hang on one second.
And we'll continue more with Rand Paul, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the bottom of the hour.
We'll get the other side of this debate.
Sean Hannity.
All right, we continue with Senator Rand Paul.
He is one of the outspoken critics of the health care bill that's been laid out.
What is it going to take for you?
The freedom caucus.
And by the way, there are a lot of smart outside groups, and and I'm I'm I tend to agree with your plan, and I like your plan better.
And I'll tell this to the speaker at the bottom of the hour.
And um but you've got the Club for Growth, you got Freedom Works, you got Americans for Prosperity, got Heritage Action.
They're all smart people.
There's these are people that give great information and do great amounts of research on these issues.
Cato's another one.
Well, you know, I think Sean, we're unified on repeal.
We've voted on it previously.
Should be easy enough just to put up what we voted on previously and vote on repeal.
We're not united on replacement.
I won't vote for the Obamacare Light proposal coming from House leadership.
How do we fix it?
How do we fix how do we unite because if we agree on repeal?
Okay.
Well, if you put everybody in a room, if you put everybody in a room, conservatives would have a seat at the table, you'd put out ten replacement items and see what we agree on.
Health savings accounts, check, uh health associations, co-ops, buying groups, check, um, freeing up so you can buy more insurance, you know, getting rid of mandates, check.
But then if you get to things like uh refundable tax credits, which are subsidies by another name, we do not have agreement on it.
If you say we're going to keep some of the Obamacare taxes, we don't agree to that.
If you say we're going to and keep a mandate, an individual mandate that you pay to the insurance companies, we don't agree to that.
If you say we're going to bail out the insurance companies by having a backstop for the insurance companies because they still can't make money, we don't agree to that.
But also, if you think premiums are going down and you still have a mandate in there on pre existing conditions, premiums will still rise, the system will be just as broken.
And what are people with pre existing conditions do then?
Well, we try to get them into group policies through associations.
All eleven million people, really every person in the country should be eligible for an association.
Once they're in a group, they get group insurance.
They will be protected by pre from pre existing conditions once they're in a group.
All right, and you're willing to sit at the table.
Last question.
We're working to try to get to the seat at the table, and we get a seat at the table.
this is what should have happened before they rolled out a plan they said everybody agrees to it the biggest mistake was telling president obama among the other i think they pulled the will over size it's no big right off I gotta run.
Thank you, Senator.
Paul Ryan's next.
Holding them accountable.
Sean gets the answers, no one else does.
America deserves to know the truth about Congress.
Twenty-five now till the top of the hour, eight hundred nine four one Sean.
You want to be a part of the program?
We just had Ram Paul, staunch, strong opponent of the health care bill that was unveiled earlier this week.
Uh we now welcome back to the program.
Uh Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan is with us from Wisconsin.
How are you, sir?
Hey, Sean, nice nice to be with you.
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate you being with us.
Look, I I'm sure you are aware there's a lot of anger out there.
And my first question for you is about process.
And here's what I mean by that.
In the lead up to the release this week, I had interviewed a lot of different people.
I interviewed Freedom Caucus members.
I interviewed Ram Paul, for example, and I I know you weren't happy with this criticism.
And they were using a series of arguments that they said they hadn't seen the bill, but they hear it's in the bill, and it turns out after the bill was released, all of the criticisms that they were mentioning before being mentioning now.
And my question is this.
Why wasn't everybody, you know, with eight you think back, this has been an eight-year issue for the Republican Party.
Why wasn't everybody brought into a room?
Why wasn't a consensus built, a bill agreed upon, and then you could have a big announcement, all House Republicans, all Senate Republicans, and the President say this is our replacement to Obamacare.
Why didn't that happen?
Actually, Sean, that is what happened.
Uh let me walk you through the process.
So last year we got together as all House Republicans and said we need to come up with a replacement plan for Obamacare.
We've all been saying we want to repeal and replace, but we need to show the country what we would replace it with if we win the election and have the ability to do it.
So we spent January to June of last year.
Any House Republican who wanted to participate in that working group that to do that did so.
That resulted in this plan.
It was largely modeled on the Tom Price bill, um, which is the the basic tax credit bill.
Twelve Freedom Caucus members were a co-sponsor of that bill as recently as December.
That was the plan that we ran on in our Better Way agenda all of last year.
And then after the election, the committees in charge of writing this legislation worked with our friends in the Senate and with the Trump administration to translate that into legislative text.
And so those committees, this is how all these bills work.
The committees have been working on and writing the bill, and the committees in the month of February had seven sessions with members of Congress whoever wanted to participate in those sessions to go through the bill, seven sessions to get member feedback, to walk members through the policy.
Here's how this works, here's how that works, what's your idea?
And anybody who wanted to participate could participate in those sessions throughout the month of February.
The weekend before the committees released the bill, we met with um over breakfast represent representation uh members of the Freedom Caucus, the the Tuesday group, and the RSC.
Those are sort of the three main caucuses here in Congress.
And the three of them asked for two specific changes to the bill as they had been briefed on it, um, to put a cap on the the credit so that it didn't go to millionaires, and to remove a provision that that capped the um employer exclusion.
Um those changes obviously were pretty big.
Um so the committees worked all weekend, which delayed the score of the bill, uh worked all weekend to accommodate those concerns brought forward by those members from those groups.
Um so what you have here is the result of just that a consensus driven process where more than any time I've ever seen in Congress, a bill was written by consensus, working groups, committees, seven sessions in in February alone, where the chairs of the committees and the members of the committees had it had literally had a room where they said, if you want to talk about this part of the bill, please come, give us your ideas, your feedback, we'll walk you through this.
That did occur.
And this legislation is the result of all of those conversations, and it is the legislative text of the plan that we ran on election for in twenty sixteen.
Well, let me forward here's what I think the the concern is, and here's where all the confusion lies.
Unfortunately in the House, we have to play by the Senate's rules, because if we pass a bill that is exactly like we like it, it can go over the Senate and they can filibuster it, and Chuck Schumer can kill it.
So we have to use this thing called reconciliation in the budget law.
And it's a Senate procedure.
And so there are things that we cannot put in this bill because they violate reconciliation.
They call it the bird rule.
And so there are a lot of things.
Look, interstate shopping across state lines, we love that policy.
We've passed it here through the House, but you can't put it in a reconciliation bill.
If you did, the bill would not be able to be voted on.
Chuck Schumer can literally filibuster it and that would never ever be voted on.
Association Health Plans, medical liability reform.
There are a lot of things that we want to have, which was part of our over our plan to repeal and replace, that the Senate can't have.
They can't vote on.
And so what's happening is people are seeing this one bill, the the American Health Choice Act, and la by the way, two-thirds of our members have never served with anybody other than Obama.
They've never been through a budget process before where Republicans are actually governing.
And so they're they don't see their favorite provision in the bill.
It's not because we don't like it, it's because the Senate rules don't allow us to put it in there.
Well, let me ask a specific question about that because I'll say two more sentences.
Yeah, go ahead.
And so that's why we have a three-pronged approach here.
One prong is Tom Price deregulates the marketplace.
The other prong is we pass those bills separately through the House, take them to the Senate, and then and then force the Senate to vote on them.
Fight for those, but we have to fight filibusters.
Donald Trump goes to these these Democrat states that he carried and goes and fights for these policies that we like.
That's the third prong approach that we're going to be moving at the same time.
I understand completely the the challenges that you face by dealing with Senate rules and reconciliation and being able the Democrats being able to filibuster and not getting a cloture.
I I get all of that, and that is a real hurdle that I understand Republicans have to go through, and it's a strong argument.
The on the other side of it, what what you're hearing and what they're telling me Is that the way the three pronged process is not a full repeal?
The hope is that you can get like you did in twenty fifteen a full repeal and get it on the president's desk like you did in twenty fifteen.
Right.
And from there work your way back.
But and by the way, you could do it simultaneously.
You can do repeal and the replacement bill through the reconciliation process to say that's what this is.
Right.
So it is a full repeal.
So this bill is the twenty fifteen bill plus replace.
And what President Trump asked us to do and what conservatives here in Congress asked us to do why are they all saying it's not a full repeal?
Rand Paul said look, the full repeal in 2015 wasn't a full repeal.
What you can do, and just to give you your listeners a quick tutorial, you can't you can only do fiscal policy, taxing and spending.
So we can defund the mandates, we can repeal the taxes, and we can cancel all the Obamacare subsidy spending.
That's what we did in 2015.
In twenty fifteen, we couldn't do any of the other stuff.
So 2015 wasn't a full repeal either.
It it did the things that we're doing now, end the Medicaid expansion, defund the subsidies, and kill the taxes and kill the tax uh mandates.
Those are the elements of repealing Obamacare that you can put through reconciliation, which basically guts the law.
That's exactly what we did in twenty fifteen and no more.
And this bill we added our replace policy.
That's the only difference here is we basically said because President Trump and House Republicans said we're gonna get one crack at this.
The last thing we're gonna do is just replace is repeal it and then have replace being filibustered.
We want to repeal it and put the replace in the repeal bill so that they can't filibuster it so we can get Republican conservative health care policy in place.
That's what this is.
You know, I'm somebody that follows the news closely, and and honestly, you're making a very compelling clay case.
Rand Paul just made a compelling case on the other side of this.
Well, uh, I love Randy's a good guy.
I think he's I think he's just Well, he has a bill with the freedom call because I don't want to get into personalities here, because I what I'm looking for really is a solution.
You know, one of the things that we were talking about, we know what works.
We know how savings accounts works, that's in the bill.
Right.
We know cooperatives work.
I don't know if you saw my interview the other night with Dr. Umber from Atlas Hill.
I've heard about it.
It's really worth listen, I use somebody I would highly advise you talk to.
I'm almost wondering, you know, if if the biggest uh concerns I hear besides it's not full repeal is well, why is there a new entitlement in this?
Why is there a backstop for the insurance?
There's not a new entitlement?
In other words, no.
There's no new entitlement.
Is not refundable tax credits, that's not an entitlement?
No, that's not an entitlement.
Giving letting people keep more of their own money and doing what they want with it is not an entitlement.
And why are they calling it that?
Uh I it's a darn good question.
I for the life of me, the o if you think letting people keep more of their own money and letting them do what they want with it is an entitlement, then you must believe that this is Washington's money.
Rand Paul's bill has a tax credit in it.
All of these this is the Tom Price bill that twelve Freedom Caucus members were the co-sponsor of that this is.
So I don't for the life of me understand why a person would say giving taxpayers tax credits um is an entitlement.
I mean, the president just said he wants tax credits for for school choice.
Is there is there a backstop in the bill for insurance companies if they're claiming they don't make enough money?
No, we have reinsurance, which we've all as Republicans believed in, which is we ha we have states set up risk and reinsurance pools.
We've always, as conservatives believe, the smarter policy for people with pre existing conditions is to set up risk pools in the states which directly subsidize and control the cost for really expensive people with pre existing conditions like people with cancer, because when you do that, you dramatically lower the cost of health insurance for everybody else.
Uh one percent of the people buying health care in America or under sixty-five drive twenty-three percent of the costs.
So Republicans have always believed we had this in Wisconsin, Scott Walker had a great risk pool setup, Obamacare abolished it.
They had a great one in Utah, Obamacare abolished it.
Washington State, Obamacare abolished it.
So we've always believed in having risk pools set up at the states, which this bill does to deal with the person with pre existing conditions.
Let me just say it this way.
You got a you got a business with forty employees, four of them get cancer, the rates go way up through the roof for those forty people.
If risk pools at your state kick in and cover those cancer costs for those four people, the rates dramatically stabilize.
You know.
And now going forward, the insurance in those states don't have to price in the fact that people might get cancer because the risk pools cover it.
That is this conservative Republican solution that's been out there for twenty years on how to solve this problem instead of a government mandate.
Does the GO plan, as is reported today, order insurers to charge people thirty percent more if they're uninsured for sixty-three days.
It's COBRA.
So that's how it works.
When people leave their employer's plan and go to another employer plan, they've got a certain window of time, I think it's thirty days, to go from one to the other without being discriminated against based on their health.
We're extending those COBA privileges over to the individual market.
If we did not do that, and you let people just go uninsured forever, and then they could buy the insurance whenever they want to, after they get sick, then you're gonna crank up insurance costs.
You will destroy the individual market, which is what's happening now.
Obama opened the enrollment period um for health care to for a whole year, meaning wait until you're sick, then buy the insurance.
It's like the equivalent of saying I'm gonna buy the homeowner's insurance when my house catches fire and not before.
So you have to have a limit on be when you switch plans, go from one plan to another, but you can't you don't want to discriminate against a person who is an unhealthy person from switching plans.
You understand my point?
Yep.
Let me let me ask this.
I I actually believe that you know, I I think you laid out a pretty strong case that there was an opportunity for some of these people to get their points across, et cetera.
And several.
And uh by the way, we're still doing it.
No, no, no, I and I understand the three phase aspect of it, which actually made me feel better because it's there's certain things in this that I was not particularly happy with.
I happen to believe that the answer is happens to lie in health care savings accounts.
You're definitely gonna have to be able to answer the democratic charge that you want old people and young people to die.
Right.
Uh you're definitely gonna have these cooperatives.
You know, in the case of this guy in Wichita, Kansas, it's pretty amazing.
I'll I'll put you in touch with him if you like it, but uh an adult pays fifty bucks a month, a kid pays ten bucks a month, unlimited care, he directly negotiates with the pharmaceutical companies at a ninety-five percent discounts, distributes it personally to his own patients, and the other part of it is it's usually coupled with catastrophic insurance with a you know five thousand dollar deductible, maybe more if if God forbid you have an accident, a heart attack or get cancer.
Here, let me ask a question.
Because I'm listening to you and I listened to the Freedom Caucus guys and their criticism and Rand's criticism.
You know, I just wonder if it would be helpful.
And I'm not saying this in any cynical way.
You know, if I came down to Washington and we could we could put you guys in a room and and and have this discussion because you're telling me one thing and they're telling me something directly the outside.
By the way, I appreciate the sentiment in the offer.
Um we're doing that.
You are doing well good then, don't you?
It's a little puzzling.
Yeah, the president just had some of those guys down for lunch today.
Yeah.
Um by the way, this is the president's plan.
We've been working with him hand in glove the whole year.
So I'm not sure.
It seems that they're at least for the bill passed without the Freedom Caucus.
You can't get it done without the the senators that I mentioned.
So if there's not some type of reconciliation on this and some type of agreement here, that means the president's first important legislative agenda item is a failure.
That can happen.
And so what's happening here, I think.
I mean, yeah, I would rather people speak and you know together instead of kind of go to the microphones and try to negotiate that way.
Um what's happening is people have never been through the reconciliation process and they don't like the answer that you get from the Senate, which I don't either, that how the rules work.
You said associational health plans, I love association health plans.
I think it's a huge market mover.
Let the farmer buy his insurance to the American Farm Bureau plan so he can buy his insurance through a buying bulk power of all farmers in America.
It's a great idea.
I love the idea of you guys.
The problem is you can't put you cannot put it in reconciliation.
So guess what?
We're bringing that bill to the floor the same week we're doing reconciliation.
That's the same thing.
So that's that's part of the three pieces.
Yeah, exactly.
So, well, can I ask this because if you when they're saying that there's a when they're saying that there's a new entitlement, when they're saying that some of the Obamacare mandates and taxes exist, when they say that there's a backstop for insurance companies, when they're saying there's new entitlements, when they're saying that they weren't allowed opportunities to collaborate,
when you know, w when I'm getting two different sides of a story here, I just am hopeful that maybe there would be a good idea if I come down and we could do s one of one session publicly so that you guys sit in a room very peacefully, very civilly, and that we have a discussion and let the American people on in on it so they can decide.
Because I could tell you right now there's more people that are so angry writing me every hour of every day.
And I'm sure if I'm getting it, you've got to be getting it.
Yeah, I mean, what's frustrating is this is the we've been having these meetings all year long, we're gonna keep having them.
Um you're talking to the co-author of Health Savings Accounts.
That was my amendment.
But do you understand don't wouldn't it be valuable if we're gonna have this discussion?
Let's make it public.
Let's uh uh you have my TV and radio show to do anything you want.
We just had two twenty-four-hour plus uh markups in commerce and ways of means.
I saw that were on TV.
You probably watched them.
But I'm offering you one that actually people will watch.
What do you mean nobody watches C-SPAN?
Nobody wants to C-SPAN still.
Would you consider it at least?
I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
I don't want to get into that.
I would rather just talk to my colleagues straight up face-to-face instead of doing it through some kind of a media vacuum or media information.
I'm not looking for a food fighter or Jerry Springer show.
All right.
Well, uh will you come back often and update us because people are dying they won't listen.
Not only when you repeal it or replace it, you guys own it.
It's gotta work.
All right, we appreciate it.
Mr. Speaker, thank you.
800-941-SHAWN, our toll-free number.
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So if the CIA, which is certainly is highly motivated to try and keep control of its cyber weapons arsenal, if it can't even control its entire cyber weapons arsenal, uh because information can uh flow without oversight, then what is the chance that it can control how that arsenal is used?
It it doesn't it can't.
There's there's absolutely nothing to stop uh a random CIA officer uh or contractor or liaison uh agent working for the British using that technology against whoever they like for whatever personal reasons they like.
Uh and we have quite a lot more material that talks about these um attempts to throw off uh attribution to discover who was really uh behind a particular cyber attack.
Already an antivirus expert has come forward to say that a s uh sophisticated malware that he had attributed to a state, either Iran, uh China uh or Russia, uh now he believes actually is from a central intelligence agency because the uh type of attack system it uses uh corresponds directly to a description that we published of that attack system,
and it's rare enough that it seems unlikely it would be independently discovered discovered.
Unless, of course, that China has already gotten hold of these parts of the CIA arsenal and that China uh is using them to pretend to be the CIA.
There were there are numerous press reports in the New York Times and Washington Post, some in Politico, that people close to Donald President uh Donald Trump had been monitored in a counterintelligence activity, possibly by some parts of the US government, possibly FBI, FUI had been mentioned, NSA had been mentioned.
On the other hand, it seems that many of the leaks to the media are coming from the Central Intelligence Agency based upon how they're described.
There are a number of collaborations that are evidenced by the material that we publish between the FBI and CIA National Security Agency and CIA.
So I think there's a real question whether that technology is being used or has been used in these types of investigations.
The CIA was so careless to produce this material, this enormous cyber weapons, Um arsenal and lose control of it at least once.
And then it has spread.
So does the cyber various cyber mafia already have it?
Do foreign intelligence agencies already have it?
Well, I think that's a serious question.
They weren't securing it very well.
So it's quite possible that numerous people could have it.
Also it has spread uh appears to have spread uh within the number of individuals within the U.S. intelligence community.
All right.
That, of course, was from WikiLeaks, that's Julian Assange from earlier today.
And I think probably the most frightening aspect of the leak from yesterday, and what we learned is less than one percent of the material that WikiLeaks has, and what we've learned is beyond disturbing.
And by the way, this is what Bill Binney was saying on this program this week, and that is that every email, every text message, every phone call is being intercepted and monitored of every American citizen.
Thirty-two years at the NSA.
That's why he got out.
That's why he resigned.
That's that's what he found because obviously for the constitutional violations that are involved in all of this, besides smart televisions that you think are off, possibly being used to monitor Americans in their own homes, and besides the fact that they have actually purposely rendered iPhone encryption, Android encryption irrelevant, basically.
And to me, probably the biggest revelation Julian Assange was just talking about there is how the CIA is capable of using st uh stolen malware and attribute cyber attacks to nations like Russia, Iran, China, and elsewhere.
In other words, it could actually be happening within the CIA, but it's actually happening elsewhere.
And then we get to the the blockbuster that we had with John Solomon and Sarah Carter, they'll both be back on Hannity tonight on the Fox News Channel, and in fact they confirm that yes, Trump Tower was in fact surveilled and their main server monitored by the government in the weeks leading up to an election.
And I know the entire political operation of Donald Trump's campaign.
Every single person, but I think one that I know of, maybe two.
They all had Trump email addresses, Trump organization email addresses.
That means that information may very well have been available and taken by a sitting president's administration of an opposition party.
These are the this is now the the tactic of a police state.
This is all very, very dangerous.
And what happens if the other ninety-nine plus percent of this information is leaked?
Joining us now to get back into this, Jeff Floyd, former associate political director in the Reagan administration.
He wrote the book, What America Needs, the Case for Trump, and uh so right he was very early that about the possibility of Donald Trump becoming the president.
Leslie Marshall was not as right.
He's the host of the Leslie Marshall Show and a Fox News contributor.
Did you read Sarah Carter and did you read John Solomon's column?
Yes, I have read the columns.
Okay, and they confirm that a Pfizer warrant was in fact issued to surveil the Trump organization and their server.
And then they also said last night, Sarah Carter did on my show, and they've subsequently updated it, that in fact another warrant was issued also before the election, although not Pfizer related.
And they discovered that there was a Sean.
No, we're not.
And PISA No, we're not.
Well, yes, we are.
Why do you President Trump dead on Saturday?
Was that President?
Linda, can you bring me in a shot of whiskey?
And that is there is no evidence of that.
Are there evidence is there evidence that there were uh Pfizer warrants were requested?
Okay, that's the PISA warrants.
You're saying that words are interchangeable, but let's get factual information on the table, and then we got to move from the facts.
A Pfizer warrant was was in fact granted in October in the lead up to a presidential election.
I want to know what did Obama said he didn't order it.
Well, did in fact Loretta Lynch, the attorney general at the time sign off on it?
What did the president know?
When did he know it?
Now I know it was more limited in scope than what we heard they sought in j in June.
But then the next question becomes okay, is it wiretapping if they have access to the server of the Trump administration?
It's kind of the same thing.
It's it's surveillance on a opposition candidate.
So why don't we deal with that issue?
No, because it's a very the accusation by President Trump was that a sitting president and no sitting president ever has ordered a visa warrant on an American citizen on an individual.
Nobody no nobody said he no look, wiretap surveillance, whatever you want to call it, it happened.
And John, you know, and that's the bottom line.
It doesn't really matter.
And I want to know uh just because Obama said he didn't order it, doesn't mean he didn't know about it.
Doesn't mean his attorney general didn't sign off on it, and doesn't mean they didn't glean information that they never should have gleaned, which would possibly make this bigger than Watergate by a thousand times, Jeff.
You know, Sean, uh this is semantics.
This is parsing a sentence.
The bottom line is did people in this administration, the Obama administration know what was going on in the internals of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Did they surveil the Trump campaign?
And clearly the answer is yes, they did.
And and one of the things that I think is is just amazing, the president himself, President Obama extended the number of people by vast numbers who who were entitled to see intelligence information, and then all these leaks.
I mean, uh, you know, one of the one of the dumbest things you can ever do in Washington is have more than one person know a secret, let alone spread it out to all these different intelligence agencies.
So for the president to then sit there in office and read as we all have to believe he did, the New York Times and the Washington Post and see these stories repeatedly, he had to say to himself, hey, what's going on here?
The fact that he apparently did not and knew this was happening, and knew this leaks these leaks were coming, and that the uh the Trump people were being surveilled, uh says volumes here.
Now you can't impeach him, he's gone.
But this is a big deal.
And in spite of the media's attempts to say, oh, there's nothing to see here, move along.
I'm sorry, we're well too down the path for that.
Yeah, but Jeff, there's a huge difference.
I mean you say semantics, but you know, when you go before a judge with a request for a FISA warrant, he or she is going to want extreme specifics and semantics do matter.
Because if you and I live in the same house and you are being surveyed and I am not, or your phones are being tapped in your office and mine are not.
Very different.
People who work within the Trump.
Leslie Leslie, the problem in what you're saying is only one in ten thousand Pfizer requests are denied.
That's the average.
So that's basically a rubber stamp.
That's number one.
Number two, we know in the case of General Flynn that while they were surveilling, which is their job, the Russian ambassador, there were no steps taken, which are absolutely very clear in terms of hiding the identity of any American, minimizing what it is that they're listening to, whether he had security or not, and number three, leaking it, that would be a felony.
Yes, but here's the thing.
And you don't seem to care about poor General Flynn.
The U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating connections between the presidential campaign of Trump, his associates in the Russian government.
But there is zero evidence that President Obama specifically tapped and requested the tap and that there were any.
Nobody's accusing him of that.
But the administration certainly his A.G. knew about it.
And I don't think there's a way in hell that you can c in intellectually be honest and come to any other conclusion that Barack Obama had no knowledge of this.
And the deeper issue the deeper.
There was a surveillance.
There was a surveillance of his entire server.
What are you talking about?
That's incr that's correct.
That's correct.
And Sean, let me just say something about the president i in this sense.
You know, when when I was working for Ronald Reagan and I was there during the ARON Contra mask, and it turned out that it was the National Security uh advisor, Admiral Foindexer and and our friend Ollie North who were involved, and the president didn't know.
I can only tell you they held in the day, his critics held President Reagan personally responsible for all of this.
And they did it for the simple reason that he was the sitting president of the United States.
It was his administration.
He was supposed to know what was going on, and eventually he later said, Yeah, I guess I should have, and I made a mistake.
This was Barack Obama's administration, period.
Not somebody else's his.
It's his job to know what was going on.
And this stuff was all over the newspapers, and if he didn't know, I mean, that's just not a that's just not gonna sell.
Are we are we to say that the New York Times or the Washington Post was not read by the President of the United States, this this president in particular, a liberal, and his staff?
I mean, did did no one on his staff and go in to say, Mr. President, this story is in the newspaper yet again?
That's why their statement will work.
Hang on.
That's why their statement that they didn't order it is meaningless.
It's a matter of who did know about it.
What did he know about it?
Who signed off on this?
Who who made the case?
It's unbelievable.
This is only going to get bigger.
I'm telling you.
You watch, wait and see.
We'll continue more with Jeff Lord and Leslie Marshall in a minute.
Are you ready to get out of the media spin room?
Well, you've come to the right place.
This is The Sean Hannity Show.
All right, as we continue, Jeff Lord and Leslie Marshall.
All right, so now we have an issue, Jeff, where we know that, in fact, surveillance took place on a presidential campaign.
We know that a Pfizer court warrant was in fact issued for the server within Trump Tower.
We know it was supposed to be narrow in scope.
Then we discover through WikiLeaks all of these different techniques that nobody ever thought were possible.
In other words, that even were able to transcend the the encryption built-in encryption safety measures of even the iPhone and the Android phones.
And so it raises so many security privacy issues.
I don't even know where to w to go with this, because then you have the CIA malware mis uh direction obfuscation, false attribution.
In other words, they can attack somebody and make it look like the Russians did it.
Do you think that could have happened in the case of uh what happened in this campaign?
Because if you'll remember, Sean, uh a few months ago, uh John Bolton, former UN ambassador and and uh of course contributor to Fox, wrote a piece, I believe, in which he he talked about he used the term false flag and said, was this a false flag operation?
Well, people were astonished at the thought.
But John, as usual, is is a very smart guy.
This is entirely possible.
We don't know.
And and I would be very hopeful that the intelligence committees can get to the bottom of the uh and find out was somebody planning this stuff to in essence tag Donald Trump was something that wasn't true at all.
And and do it under the guise of you know, using the government, using CIA equipment or what have you to do it, because they didn't like Donald Trump and they didn't like the fact that he'd been critical of the agencies and because there was friction between the then director, uh John Brennan and and uh James Clapper.
I mean, I don't know, but I sure would like to know the answer, and the fact that we now know that it's possible to do, that's a pretty frightening thought.
I would think that Leslie, there's got to be some civil libertarian in you that's scared to death of all this.
I'm not a civil libertarian.
I'm a realist, and I have to say that uh, you know, when Edward Snowden came out with his claims of the NSA, um, I'm sorry, but I eye rolled.
And the reason I did was it you know, we we've been watching crazy things even back to the days of Star Trek when we looked at demolecular composition when we could transport people from one place to another.
And you know, pla places are working on things like that.
If you think about it, Sean and Jeffrey, whenever we invent something with our great minds of technology, especially out of here in the United States, criminals are out there, you know, one or two steps behind.
So why wouldn't we think that the government would be one or two steps ahead, or organizations like Apple or Google?
But one thing that does perplex me is after the San Bernardino terrorist attack here in California, if you recall, the government was requesting that Apple assist them with the encryption of those phones.
So if in fact everything that WikiLeaks, Julian Assange with WikiLeaks has dumped and has accused the CIA of one of which having this miraculous de abil ability to decrypt.
Oh my god, Leslie talking to you're talking about it to decrypt anything, then why was that request?
I've got to go, but WikiLeaks hasn't been wrong in their entire existence.
Not one time.
I don't think there's any doubt about the veracity and authenticity of what they put out.
And unless you prove them wrong, I'm just assuming the ten year track record of being right continues.
We'll continue twenty five till the top of the hour.
Toll free, our telephone numbers eight hundred nine four one Sean, you want to be a part of the program.
All right, let's get to our busy phones here as we say hi to Katie is in Atlanta, Georgia, News Talk WSP.
What's up, Katie?
How are you?
What's going on?
Hi, Sean.
I am fine.
Thank you.
Will you do me a favor?
The next time you go to the varsity, okay?
Do you ever go there?
Absolutely.
Will you get like two extra hot dogs, onion rings, French fries, and a shake, and just eat it in my honor because I love the varsity.
You Is that fair?
Absolutely.
All right, don't forget, all right.
All right, so what's on your mind today?
So, Sean, um, I voted for President Trump, and um he put out something called the contract for the American voter, in which he pro he pledges to fully repeal Obamacare.
And so I'm very concerned with this bill that the GOP leadership has put out, VAH uh CA, because it doesn't even come close to repealing Obamacare and uh kicks the can down the road, um increases subsidization, it switches out the individual mandate for the 30 percent penalty on people who allow their policy to lapse.
And um I feel like we're we're we're trading an Obamacare for um a GOP version of an Obamacare, and I'm worried that it's gonna reflect very badly on President Trump with his voters once they find out that that's what this really is.
And I'm concerned that President Trump may not be getting um all of the advice that maybe he could be getting on what's really in the bill.
And I the solution I believe is to repeal first, which can be done because Congress did it last year.
Both the House and the Senate passed a repeal bill, put it on Obama's desk, and Jim Jordan of the Freedom Caucus has brought forth basically the same bill um for for the Congress to consider.
If they repeal first, that repeal would then have a period of transition in it, so nobody would lose their policies, and then the ha the Democrats and the Republicans can come to the table together to work out a replacement, and to me that makes sense.
And if President Trump goes down that path, I will continue to feel like he is the hero that he has been since he was inaugurated.
I'm confident of this.
Look, I I I it's inexplicable to me as as I discussed with the speaker of the House.
It's inexplicable that this is how the rollout came.
I I I it's very frustrating after eight long years that this is what this is the way they decided to do this.
I understand that there are legislative hurdles, reconciliation, all of these things.
Fifty-one votes versus sixty in the Senate.
I get all of that.
But I I what I would have rather have seen is yes, uh if possible, they all passed that repeal and they can do that very thing.
And I think that would be a smart move, but it's gotta have its immediate replacement.
But at the end of the day, you know, why they didn't they they knew all the criticisms that were out there?
Every one of them.
And they knew the people that were not going to support what they thought was in the bill that they didn't know was in the bill, but it ended up being in the bill.
Does that make sense?
And uh now you've got the freedom caucus, you got Club for Growth, and you got Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works and Heritage Action, and and every Freedom Caucus member, some study group members, and then you got Rand and Ted and Marco and and Lee, you know, against it.
And I'm like, why didn't we just fix this before we rolled it out?
Makes no sense.
My guess, Sean, you want to know my guess?
My guess is that it is the powerful lobbyists for the insurance companies, um, the draw the the drug companies who uh want to c cling on to what life makes life and business easier for them.
Um I think Washington is largely run by a cartel um that you could call the bigs.
And um I think that there are those in power who are in power because of the the donors um that are connected uh with these organizations, and they would stand to lose power and lose favor if they didn't do this.
And I'm gonna do it.
Katie, what do you do what do you do for a living?
Uh I'm uh I'm a housewife.
Well why would you why would you that that is the most important job anybody can do number one.
That is an important job.
I think you need to run for office.
How old are your kids how old are your kids?
Uh twenty two and twenty four.
Okay.
They're on their own now.
They have their own life.
Time for mom to go step out and step into the arena.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Yeah I don't know it's uh it's a Katie Katie for Congress.
That's what I'm voting for.
Thanks, John.
All right, appreciate it.
God bless you.
Uh 800 nine four one Sean if you want to be a part of the program.
Uh Anna is in uh Texas.
Anna, how are you?
Glad you called.
I'm great Sean.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today.
So I watched Paul Ryan's little infomercial this morning, and I was just flabbergasted that he was trying to polish it up and make it look slick so that we would buy this Obamacare light.
And he tried to bash the conservatives.
He's claimed himself as a conservative before, and he's about as conservative as I am a nun.
And he's bashing conservatives, threatening that, you know, they're going be the ones that stand in the way of this.
You mean you're not a nun I'm I appreciate you sharing that with us.
Go ahead.
I am definitely not a nun um by the way I'm I'm not a priest either trust me.
That is that is good to know.
So here's the thing I don't care what spin Ryan and his rhino cronies put on it.
I don't care how slick they make their power points look they can't change the facts and the facts are this plan that they're putting forward is just a re made version of the same crappy progressive policies that made Obamacare fail in the first place.
I just look there's certainly improvements to Obamacare but I gotta be honest it is so disappointing on so many levels that this was not this is not as hard as they're making it and the worst part of it politically for me is they have now opened up the door for an external civil war that is going to be fought in front of the entire country and it makes them all look stupid and incompetent.
And I'll be honest there was no need for this.
And if it meant if they've if it meant taking another month and and sitting down with all the opposition groups that I keep talking about and if it meant you know getting the bill right and then coming out united Senate the Senate Republicans, the House Republicans and the president and with solutions,
free market solutions that we've all wanted for all this time and maybe some creative cooperatives like Dr. Umber who I keep putting on the program and talks about I'll be honest this could have all been avoided and I warned people I and I warned big people.
I warned important people.
I went directly to these people and said you gotta get this right this way and you gotta understand what's coming if you don't I predicted with pinpoint accuracy to all of them what would happen and I was not wrong on any front.
Linda's shaking her head because she's heard the conversation she's seen the texts and emails I've sent and she's probably would use more expletives if I put her microphone on right now than you'd ever want to hear in your life.
So here's the thing nobody listened and that's the crazy thing.
You mentioned um with your previous caller Heritage Action.
I am a Heritage Action Sentinel um which is their activism arm um you know we're basically all volunteers and we all worked so hard last year to get this budget reconciliation language in place and the conservatives in Congress did the same and it is there and that is the vehicle that we needed to repeal Obamacare with a 51 vote threshold.
And there are no procedural hurdles they keep throwing that at us all they have to do is take the 2015 repeal bill add in language to repeal the individual mandates and they can put it all through reconciliation because it all has to do with budget.
Then They can come back and they can do piecemeal individual legislation to address the health care crisis.
Notice I didn't say health insurance crisis because that's not the point.
Insurance is not the point.
If we lower costs, then insurance becomes more affordable for everybody.
So all of this that they're telling us is a whole bunch of crap.
They've been promising us repeal for years and years and years.
We've elected them on that promise, and now they're trying to backtrack and say they can't do it.
And they're lying to the American people.
Wow.
You impressed me.
Everyone in this audience is so smart.
You are really, really smart.
Anna, you run for office too.
Uh we have gold stars going on to every caller so far today.
Lisa in Kansas, you got to keep up this uh momentum.
How are you?
Hi, Mr. Hannity.
Thank you for having me on.
I just want to say in a Can you call me Mr. Hannity, now old that makes me feel.
I'm still a young guy, you know.
Well, join join the club.
What's going on?
I wanted I in addition to your two previous callers, uh, not only are the congressional members needing to be called out on this, but President Trump is as well.
I'm looking at quotes uh he tweeted out hoping that Ron Paul will come along with the new and great health care program.
He's also wanting this bill pushed and approved quickly without significant changes.
This is not what the people who elected him to office are wanting.
They don't want the special interests that referred to by our previous callers, their interests being represented in this.
Constitutionally, there's no basis for there to be health care or health insurance reform by our government.
We the people who put Trump into office wanted all those special interests to stop be re stop being represented.
We want our interests, the people's interest to be represented, because at the end of the day, uh Paul Ryan can say all the things he wants to say about being conservative and that this is what everybody's been promising.
This is not what we want.
And he can keep putting out those talking points, but we are becoming more and more educated.
We're understanding procedurally how things are working when they talk about procedurally or oh, you don't understand, or my favorite quote of his that I saw today was that um people don't understand the new Republicans who've never held office before under a unified GOP control that they're having growing pains trying to figure out how to act in Washington DC.
When he says those things, it's just absolutely insulting.
The people who need to be meeting with President Trump are not the insurance company representatives.
It's the people, those of us everyday people who are living with the effects and the fallout, just like we have been for the last eight years with the fallout.
Lisa, I am I'm doing my level best, and I will tell you this.
You know, the president has a lot on his plate right now, and I can guarantee you that he was briefed on what's in the bill.
Now, whether or not the briefings were accurate or not, you know, I don't know.
I have my suspicions, and I'm going to get to the bottom of it.
But more importantly, at this point, they didn't nobody followed my advice, and had they followed my advice, it would have been rolled out ceremoniously with the president, all House Republicans, all Republican Senate members, and they would have united and they would have said this is the bill, it would have addressed every area of concern that you have.
It would have talked about health savings accounts, cooperatives, free market solutions, block granting to states.
It would have taken care of people that didn't don't have insurance, will never be able to afford insurance, you know.
But again, the states would be in charge rather than a top-down federal government issue.
We would have saved money and and stuff like Dr. Umber has.
I I mean, I you know, look, I'm not the brain surgeon, but I have a lot of friends that are doctors.
I don't know how this worked out in my life.
I have two friends that are brain surgeons.
I got, you know, multiple other doctor friends in my life, and I've spent a lot of time picking their brains.
And I'll tell you that, you know, what what Dr. Umber is doing in terms of regular day-to-day care that the average person needs at fifty bucks a month in a cooperative, negotiating directly with pharmaceuticals and getting ninety-five percent discounts, even what you pay at Walmart.
You buy it from him, it's cheaper.
For all the major medicines that are needed, even chemotherapy medicines.
So you couple the $50 a month per adult, $10 a month per child, you get a catastrophic family plan with maybe a $5,000, $10,000 deductible.
I know it's a lot of money, but God forbid you have that accident that costs $400,000, or a heart attack that cost you $300,000, or you get cancer, and the cancer drugs that are so astronomically expensive, you're covered.
And it works.
And if you need stitches, you get your stitches.
If if you need, you know, a broken bone fix, you get your broken bone fixed.
If you need a specialist, that's covered in the catastrophic plan.
There are so many ways to do this and do this right, and it's frustrating to me.
I'm uh I'm feeling what you're feeling.
And after eight years, it's frankly inexcusable to me that they this is what they've given us.
I I'm a little flabbergasted, and it's beyond shocking to me.
And it makes them look bad.
It really does.
Now, I think they'll probably get it right, but wow.
You didn't have to, this is such a big unforced error.
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Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
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