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Jan. 4, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show
01:35:17
Who's Button Is Bigger, That's Not The Question -1.4

Sean is joined by Colonel Oliver North to discuss the growing conflict between the United States and North Korea. First off, Colonel North corrected, there is no "button" on President Trump's desk...but is there one in North Korea? The United States has a structure in place that honors the full power of nuclear weapons but the fear is North Korea might not. Turning to Iran, the corruption of the Supreme Leader has finally been noticed by the youth within the country. Colonel North has the latest. The Sean Hannity Show is live weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, Clint, I didn't, of course I didn't watch the view with Joyless Behar and company.
You know, the last time I was on that show, Rosie O'Donnell was on that show.
And the show's crashing and burning anyway.
Nobody even watches that.
Daytime TV is dead.
It's never, not like it used to be.
You know, I didn't say thank you.
We came in number one in all the cable last year, total audience, and demo.
You have to add the demo.
And all of you made that possible.
And I know that I don't have this microphone every day.
I know I'm not sitting in front of that camera every night if it wasn't for all of you.
And I humbly appreciate it.
And I take the responsibility.
You know, I want to be the best host I can be for you.
I want to do the best show I can do every day.
And we talk about news and issues and what's going on in the world and how to make the world a little bit of a better place.
And we talk about lying and corruption, not the least of which is the media in this country.
They're so freaking corrupt, you can't even believe it.
They don't want to talk about anything of substance anymore.
And it's like the analogy I used yesterday.
We'll get to that too.
I'm just reading this, not sure why this came out today.
It's interesting because apparently, according to the New York Post, and again, this is back in April of 2017, but it's on that line today.
You know, one errant North Korean missile went so rogue last year that it crashed into a city not far from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, according to a report.
That was an intermediate-range ballistic missile, and it turned itself into a short-range rocket when it failed during a test flight on April 28th of 2017, slammed into a local city.
According to the Diplomat magazine, the missile flew only 24 miles before taking a nosedive and striking a complex of industrial and agricultural buildings, according to the report.
And according to U.S. government sources, with knowledge of the weapons program in North Korea, the missile's first stage engines failed about a minute after the flight took off.
And the location of the missile's impact was revealed exclusively to this one particular magazine, which said it corroborated the flub using commercially available satellite imagery.
And they were able to see the damage that it all caused.
And the images show that the explosion caused heavy damage in a very heavy populated area.
But, you know, they're so shut off, North Korea, nobody can really know, I guess, at the end of the day.
We'll get to that.
Now, you know, one of the things I was saying both on radio yesterday and on TV, I was telling you about what I think about the media.
And I was telling you, I think the media, not only are they lazy and they're overpaid and they're a bunch of sheep and they all echo each other.
I love the fact, too, that they all pretty much universally hate me.
I love that.
I don't want to be liked by them.
I have no desire.
Whatever switch might exist in the human brain to want to be liked, that switch is gone in my life.
Maybe it's 30 years of radio.
Maybe it's 23 years on Fox.
But I just, I don't know when, but there was a switch where I cared in the beginning a lot, then a little, then hardly at all, and now not at all.
I love that switch is gone.
You know, I remember who was it?
Jennifer Anniston said about Brad Pitt.
He's got a missing chip.
I have a missing chip because I don't care.
And people are telling me, a few people writing me today, and I guess it was on Twitter.
And Linda said it, and Jason said, oh, we've got the audio of Joy Beher attacking you.
And I'm saying, oh, really?
Can I have Campbell's soup for lunch today?
Because we have a whole big stock of Campbell's soup.
I know people think, oh, you guys on radio must eat great.
No, that's pretty much either that or a salad for crying out loud with mayonnaise on it, and they make fun of that.
I don't care.
You know, we know they're all the same.
Just think about it.
You know, look at the North Korean situation and look at their reaction to Donald Trump's tweet.
It's all the same.
And they try to outdo each other.
And they have this media bubble that they all live in.
And they're all addicted to the high that they're getting for, you know, wanting to prove to each other that they hate Trump more than you hate Trump.
And if you work at CNN, no, we hate Trump more than MSNBC hates Trump.
No, we hate Trump more.
And we'll call him demented and a liar.
And no, that's not enough.
He's a demented, demented, demented, liar, liar, liar.
And that makes it stronger and more powerful.
And then they retweet each other and they talk to each other constantly, you know, on social media.
I mean, to watch it, it is like I've never seen, it's like they march, they're like brain dead.
It's like they're hypnotized zombies.
It's like watching a horror movie of some kind.
And there's no creative thought, no real true investigative reporting.
There's so much out there that they could be doing to get to truth if they cared about their audiences even a little bit.
And a part of me is kind of happy about it.
I'm being honest, because there's such a wide open void that it's all mine.
And I keep doing it.
And it's all coming true.
Just like they laughed at the idea Trump could be president.
I didn't.
They thought there's no chance in hell he was going to win.
I knew he had a chance to win.
And I knew that the environment was good for him to win.
And then they're never going to talk about, you know, they worshipped at the altar of Obama.
They never talked about his failures.
I mentioned it every day in 2016, every single day on purpose on radio and on TV.
I'll never forget one conversation I had with somebody in the Trump campaign.
I need that list thing that you do every day.
You know, the list, the list thing.
I said, okay, I think I know what you mean.
I'll give you my list thing.
I said, they're called facts.
They're called, and I'm explaining to them.
And then I'm looking at, you know, they're never going to tell you Trump had a good year last year.
They're never going to go over.
You know, I'm looking at the numbers today.
I was looking at the Drudge Report.
And if you can get past, you know, the obsession everybody has with this Michael Wolf book.
That was another thing.
Media says, oh, Sean Hannity desperately trying not to talk.
No, not desperate.
I decided not to.
I gave my thoughts on it.
One thing I always hate is this circular firing squad among conservatives.
Like, for example, there are people in radio and on TV that probably agree with 85% of what I say, but hate my guts.
And my attitude is: okay, look, if we agree on 85%, we probably agree that the country needs to be saved, and we agree on conservative principles.
You can hate my guts all you want, but I can acknowledge that they're doing good work for the country by standing up for the principles that will make the country strong.
It's not a matter of who's right.
It's a matter of what's right.
You know, what are the answers?
What are the solutions to everyday problems?
That reminds me of that parable from the Bible about the boat.
Isn't there something in the Bible?
No, I was telling you this, yeah, because the apostles saw others casting out demons in Jesus' name, but they weren't the official apostles and performing miracles in Jesus' name.
And they're like, and Jesus said, the apostles were pissed.
And Jesus said, I don't know if he exactly said pissed in the Bible.
What page is that on?
All right.
I'm not saying it the best way.
I am not a biblical scholar.
I'm trying to be the best Christian I can be, okay?
And but Jesus then said, no, they're not against us.
They're with us.
And the same thing here.
Anybody that's advocating the principles of conservatism and eliminating Obamacare and cutting taxes and getting rid of regulations, energy independence, the president today, this is a huge, big deal.
Nobody will ever talk about this today.
That the president has opened all U.S. waters to drilling.
That's on top of Anwar.
That's on top of saving the coal industry.
I'm telling you, there's going to be an energy explosion.
Every single American is going to benefit.
There are going to be millions of Americans now that will have high-paying career jobs because of what the president has done on one issue alone, and that's energy.
And he did it all on his own.
He didn't need any help from Congress, although Anwar was in the tax bill that the House and Senate passed.
And I give him credit for that.
I've been very critical of Republicans.
I hope they can continue the little bit of momentum they got at the end of the year.
Senate also deserves credit for the judges they're appointing.
I think that's all good.
And Hannity, why aren't you talking about Palace Intrigue and Bannon and the president and their exchange?
Because my attitude, look, I have very strong feelings about it.
And I've said it many times in the past.
If you get to work in that building, I don't care who you're working for in that building, meaning the White House.
I think your job is to serve the American people and the agenda of the president.
And I think with that comes confidentiality.
I think it just is a part of a loyalty thing that I just believe.
And do I hope it all, you know, eventually it's going to go away, just like everything else goes away.
And meanwhile, what's happening?
Well, we see the president's weekly job approval, you know, is up, and he ended the year at the same approval rating as the first year President Obama.
That shocks people.
You know, I'm looking at the ADP report in Bloomberg News today.
Payrolls at U.S. companies increased in December by the most in nine months.
Well, who do I talk about every day on this program?
Oh, the forgotten men and women.
I showed the painting by John McNaughton yesterday.
Another 250,000 jobs, exceeding all other estimates.
Well, that brings us to 2 million jobs created since Donald Trump's been president.
Latest census figures show that, what, Americans are leaving and fleeing blue states in droves.
Michael Barone writes a great piece.
And I see that, what's his name, Cuomo in New York?
He's trying to be really clever.
He's so angry.
He gives a 90-minute, boring state of the state address yesterday and then goes on to excoriate the tax bill.
And so then he says, well, I've got a way around this tax bill because there's limits on deductions for state and local taxes to $10,000.
But Cuomo suggested reducing personal income tax rates and then funding state services more via payroll taxes.
He's not going to cut taxes.
He's still addicted to them.
Well, that's not going to stop the exit, the exodus from states like New York and California and other states.
There's so much good news out there.
250,000 more people with jobs.
I'm pretty happy about that.
And then you've got the Dow now, 25,000.
Well, we've had 60, 70 records set at the Dow, which is not my biggest barometer.
I'm going to be honest.
It wasn't because a lot of people don't invest in it, but those people that do, even if it's in a 401k or whatever, it's all good.
And then we've got, let's see, other news that we have today: job cut announcements in 2017, the lowest level since 1990.
Food stamp rolls declined by more than 2 million fewer Americans on food stamps last year.
That was one of the big items I'd mentioned all through 2016.
You got more companies offering workers bonuses now after the passage of the tax bill.
Why?
Because they have lower corporate income taxes.
And what have I always told you?
A simple thing.
Corporations don't pay income taxes.
You know who pays income taxes?
Or corporate taxes, you do.
They pass those prices on to the consumer.
Now they can give some of the money back to their employees because now the competition in the job market is getting a little bit harder because now we've gotten rid of regulations.
We've created a better business environment.
We're going to get to all this today.
Now, also, there's so much as it relates to what the media won't tell you about corruption and what is happening in terms of Uranium One, what is happening with the dossier, what is happening with the Clinton email server, who was in legal jeopardy about a fixed and rigged, not only a primary election.
I never understood why Bernie's supporters never got infuriated by what Hillary did.
But also, we see the fix was in by Comey and Peter Strzok as it relates to the email server scandal.
That means, well, a new investigation has to open.
All right, as we roll along, Sean Hannity show, here's some news from the Daily Beast that I've been expecting something on this now for a while.
Been hearing rumors about this for a while.
Justice Department officials are now taking a fresh look at Hillary Clinton's use of the private email server.
Oh, she served as Secretary of State.
How can they not if they believe in equal justice under the law?
The question is: what's taken the Justice Department so long?
Takes a long time.
I guess the wheels of justice grind ever so slowly, unless, of course, you're James Comey and you just write the exoneration first.
I mean, that's a better way to handle it, right?
I'll exonerate you and then we'll go through the motions.
That's all.
That's fine.
And we have the evidence that he wrote it.
It's not like we're making it up.
Anyway, Justice Department officials are now taking a fresh look at this use of a private email server.
Now, I told you last year all of this was going to be happening.
Uranium One is also happening.
The dossier issue is bigger than you think.
I'm calling this the year of the boomerang.
Trump-Russia collusion is officially pretty much dead.
Now, nobody in the media is going to tell you these things.
And we've now, it's amazing, amazing what we've learned about Robert Mueller and his special counsel team that he handpicked.
It's amazing what we've learned about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Bruce Orr and his wife Nellie.
It's amazing what Mueller knew about Vladimir Putin's criminal network inside the United States ahead of Uranium One, bribery, extortion, kickbacks, money laundering, and racketeering.
So now, all of these things, if you put the fix in, you rig an investigation and the rigging comes out.
To me, that's obstruction of justice.
And I know the talking point of the liberal meeting.
Oh, you're attacking the FBI.
I'm not attacking the FBI.
I love the FBI.
Thank God for the FBI.
Thank God for the CIA.
Thank God for the good people, not for the people that abuse the powerful tools or intelligence, which has happened.
I want to find out who those deep state leakers are that are trampling over the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, your right against unreasonable search and seizure.
I want to know who in the FBI was involved in surveillance and not minimizing and unmasking and leaking raw intelligence.
I want to find out why they didn't warn CFIS, the nine agencies, about what Putin was doing trying to get a foothold in the uranium market.
And now we have to look into Hillary Clinton, and apparently an ally of Attorney General Sessions is familiar with the thinking of the Justice Department.
They're saying they're now gathering information on the email server and the scandal and how things were handled.
Well, we know felonies were committed there.
The big question is going to be: do we have equal justice under the law?
I'll explain that when we get back.
All right, 25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941-Sean.
This is only the beginning, I can tell you, of what I have known now for a little bit, that that is the Justice Department is now taking major steps to now reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton's illegal email server.
Just like we know the Uranium One deal, Jeff Sessions has not recused himself, and there's an ongoing investigation there.
Now, how long it's going to take is probably going to be frustrating, but it's happening.
We know late last night that the Justice Department handed over to Congress these long-sought Trump dossier documents.
That, too, is now beginning to come to fruition.
After the House Intelligence Committee, the chairman, Devin Nunes, threatened to hold the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in contempt of Congress.
The Justice Department, late last night, promised to turn over all the documents they've been withholding on the Trump dossier.
Now, the House and Justice Department apparently reached a deal late Wednesday.
There was a private meeting with Rosenstein and the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.
And from what I'm told from sources, is that Ryan stood up for Devin Nunes and said, hand over the documents.
Otherwise, there's going to be trouble because they have the right to subpoena them.
Of course, you got Rosenstein.
Why didn't Rosenstein want to hand them over?
Why wouldn't he want to hand them over?
Well, that raises question.
Then you got this nexus between Mueller and Comey and Rosenstein, and it stinks to high heaven.
Anyway, so that came after that meeting with the Speaker.
And after meeting, after speaking to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, I believe the House Intelligence Committee has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that's going to provide the committee with access to all the documents and witnesses we have requested, according to Devin Nunes in a statement.
He said the committee looks forward to receiving access to documents over the coming days.
That's going to be interesting to watch unfold.
Now, we know the panel led by Nunes also sought to know the extent the dossier might have been used to justify the Pfizer warrant and whether or not that was, in fact, brought on as evidence.
Now, think of how profound that might be.
That Hillary Clinton and the Hillary Clinton-run DNC both paid the same law firm to funnel money to Fusion GPS.
Fusion GPS then hires this dirt digger, former MI6 guy, Christopher Steele.
Christopher Steele, we're told, according to some reports, although Fusion GPS denies it, I don't know how they would deny it because a lot of what they said in their op-ed just isn't true.
There's a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about how untrue a lot of that is.
I'm not going to go through it now, but anyway, and then Christopher Steele gets all the salacious information.
It turns out to be salacious lies about Donald Trump, hookers, prostitutes, and the Rich Carlton in Moscow.
And the prostitutes were urinating on the bed.
Didn't happen.
Okay, now, if that dossier bought and paid for by Hillary and Hillary's run DNC, we know $12, $15 million is the estimate.
Okay.
And then that's used to get a FISA warrant to surveil a then-candidate of an opposition party.
That is massive abuse.
That would mean any information that was obtained that way would be inadmissible in any court, period.
End of sentence.
And it also raises the possibility of other crimes that need to now be investigated.
Let's see.
Oh, we do have Keith Ellison yesterday.
Any doubt the Democratic Party has gone over the left-wing cliff.
We got Ellison endorsing Antifa, tweeting out a picture of himself smiling with the Antifa handbook.
What's the Antifa handbook?
Have you ever read it?
What?
I think the more interesting part is the fact that why are you eating crackers and spitting as we speak?
Saltines.
Salters.
Having a saltine.
I wasn't anticipating to talk at this moment.
You weren't going to talk at this moment, first of all.
All right, why don't you take a drink of your ginger ale?
I'll fill the time, and then you can then talk without having saltine.
Why, if you laugh, now you're wasting time.
All right, take the drink of ginger ale.
Is there a reason?
Do you have an upset stomach?
That's the only time anyone drinks ginger ale if you have an upset stomach.
And I don't know why anybody thinks that works anyway, because it's carbonated, and then you have to.
I happen to really like ginger ale.
All right, I don't care.
Go back to the point.
So that was rude.
Oh, enough out of you over there.
2018 is such a loving year already.
Yeah, exactly.
So what's the Antifa handbook?
Antifa was declared a domestic terrorist organization by the Department of Homeland Security.
So a sitting congressman took a picture with some handbook written by a domestic terrorist organization and thought it would be a good idea to take a selfie with it.
How did I miss that they were designated that?
When did that happen?
In 2016.
Yeah, the end of 2016, like September.
Huh.
All right.
So anyway, you got a top DNC official, Keith Ellison, with a picture with Antifa, the anti-fascist handbook, asserted the book would strike fear in the heart of President Trump.
Really?
I don't think so.
I don't think Donald Trump cares.
You know, this is how interesting this is all getting.
The sheer volume.
Go back to John Solomon's report from two nights ago on Hannity.
The sheer volume of classified information from Clinton's server was seen as criminal.
Now the Daily Caller is saying, yeah, this is now, we're beginning to know a lot about this.
And we know the fix was in two.
And why did they have that special category just for Clinton?
Because remember, FBI field officers would usually be responsible for the investigation.
That's why I don't, I love FBI agents.
I love, you know, those that follow the rule of law, thank God they're in the front lines protecting us.
Same in the intelligence community.
But you can't abuse the powerful weaponry of intelligence gathering against the American people.
We got Judicial Watch there, bombshell.
It has Uma Abedee and Cheryl Mills and five others under oath on the same espionage questions.
This is going to get interesting.
Judicial Watch is doing some great work.
That Wall Street Journal op-ed that I mentioned.
So we have the Clinton campaign hiring Fusion GPS and funneling this money through the lawyer, the opposition research firm, to investigate the Trump campaign.
Now, they tried to say, well, a Republican hired us first to look into Trump.
Okay, but that was pre-Christopher Steele.
And then when Hillary and the DNC hire Fusion GPS, a dirt-digging company, they hired, then they got the former British spy, Christopher Steele, and he produced a dossier that was full of lies and rumors and salacious material.
And the question now is, was it used as the basis for a FISA warrant, either on a president-elect or a candidate of an opposition party?
And as the Wall Street Journal points out, they're now claiming that they're a victim in this somehow.
But they say it doesn't really, you know, we don't believe they're a victim in any way.
You know, and this is a story they say spun by Glenn Simpson and the other founders of Fusion GPS.
And because if you look, you know, their talent is doing this dirt-digging thing, including for Russians to smear human rights activist Bill Browder, they pointed out.
And the problem is the veracity of their work.
The co-founders don't name a single example in their op-ed of something that proves the dossier's claim of collusion between Trump and Russia.
18 months after the dossier hit Washington, the special counsel have offered no public validation of any of the collusion allegations.
That's true.
That's why the media now is desperately trying to get in.
That's the only reason they're loving Bannon for like a minute.
And they'll turn on Bannon in 20 seconds.
They only like him because he trashed, you know, and I still, for the life of me, don't know why.
Because he has said he knows this Russian thing is a bunch of nonsense.
He's known it from the beginning.
Anyway, but let's look at who Fusion GPS is.
You know, let's see.
As Mr. Browder notes on Twitter, the Fusion op-ed conveniently admits that it worked for the Russian government interest trying to repeal the McGinsky Act.
They didn't mention that in their op-ed.
That's interesting.
At the same time, they were working on the dossier.
Oh, sounds like a conflict.
And that Mr. Simpson met with his Russian client, a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
This is the woman that met with Don Jr. before and after she sat down with Don Jr. and Trump Tower.
Yeah, that would seem like I would call that a setup.
And they pat themselves on the back for having handed over all the relevant bank records.
Well, they stonewall Congress for almost the entire year 2017.
And they wouldn't divulge the name of their clients for a year, which turned out to be the Clinton campaign.
And as Donna Brazil said, the DNC run by Clinton, even suing to prevent their access to bank records.
And that doesn't tell the whole story in any way.
And they claim to know nothing about her Trump meeting and that she knew nothing of the steel dossier work.
And they write, you'll have to take his word for the coincidence.
Yeah, that doesn't seem like a coincidence to me.
And they're concerned about the attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.
But meanwhile, the firm's concern about Russia and human rights abuses for which the McGinske sanctions were imposed would seem to stop at their bank account.
This is a pretty brutal takedown by the Wall Street Journal, particularly hard-hitting one.
And I think right on the money.
Another issue that's happening is Paul Manafort is now civilly suing the Department of Justice Robert Mueller over the investigation, saying that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his merry band of Hillary lovers and Trump haters over there, you know, he probably hired the only guy that got overturned 9-0 in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let's hire him.
That's a good choice.
He did a great job losing tens of thousands of jobs over at Anderson Accounting for nothing.
Did a great job putting people in jail for a year for nothing.
I mean, is this the guy with that track record?
That's who you're going to hire?
You only hire people that donate to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Great.
This seems like a very fair, very fair special counsel to me.
Anyway, Manafort is alleging Mueller went outside the scope of the Russian investigation, which he totally did.
And that's always the problems with special counsels, investigating Manafort for $13 million in work that he did for the Ukrainian political party.
It's lobbying work, which, by the way, from what I understand, John Podesta's group has done similar work.
When are we going to look at Podesta's records?
Anyway, so we'll watch all of this unfold here.
But I think it was a pretty smart act on their part because they can't sue them any other way, so they sued him civilly.
In other news we have today, Charles Grassley says Comey appears to have leaked the classified memo to his friend.
Well, we kind of knew that already.
And anyway, he wrote a letter to the Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein yesterday demanding answers about the handling of memos that Comey wrote following his conversations with President Trump.
And again, four of the documents contain information classified as confidential or secret.
And he hands it to his Columbia professor friend.
Well, that doesn't seem particularly good.
We have the House Intel Committee getting those documents that I told you about.
We've got Donald Trump now is going after both legally Steve Bannon.
Apparently, there was a confidentiality agreement when he worked on the campaign and apparently now is going up against the book, a cease and desist letter, has gone out on that book action as well.
But don't worry, the media, that's all they'll talk about.
A lot of good economic news.
All right, Jessica, Chicago.
What's up, Jessica?
How are you?
Oh, very good.
How are you?
I love your show.
I'm good.
What's up with you?
Well, I wanted to talk about the inconsistencies with the whole Bannon report.
He said that Donald Trump Jr. acted in a treasonous manner when he talked to the Russians.
And at the same time, he said that, you know, Trump didn't want to win.
Well, you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Why would you commit treason if you didn't want to win?
Look, I read the beginning of Michael Wolfe's piece, and it talks about, I'll give you one example.
And another example is, you know, he reports in the book that Trump didn't know who John Boehner is.
And then they went back on Trump's Twitter account, and in at least five prior occasions on what they were talking about, Trump mentioned Boehner.
That ought to raise a red flag right there.
You know, in the instance where he mentions me in this book, he never called me to fact-check it.
The New York Times, when they did their magazine piece, called me 17 times about fact-checking information.
And that's called reporting.
So some anonymous source can say Sean Hannity did this and he writes it.
It's ridiculous.
Now, the other thing is, so I don't know.
Apparently, Steve was on his radio show last night on SiriusXM and apparently was praising the president.
I don't know what else he said about, you know, but I know for a fact that Steve Bannon knows this Russian probe is a bunch of crap.
President United States is a great man.
You know, I support him day in and day out, whether going through the country given the Trump miracle speech or on the show or on the website.
So I don't think you have to worry about that.
But I appreciate the kind words.
Look, I'm not sure what he said, if he said it, why he said it.
I don't know.
And to me, it's all one big distraction anyway, because there is no, it's 18 months of Russian collusion and we've got nothing.
Nothing.
And, you know, at some point, you know, even the liberal media has to give it up.
The only thing, criticism, if you will, if it's abandoned, I just think when you work in the White House and you have that honor, it's solely to serve the American people, the agenda of the person you work for.
And it's not, and I think it's a, I think it should be an unwritten code about confidentiality.
Now, I know in recent years that's not been the case.
And we all love gossip, and we all love, and this book is full of it.
And some people are interested.
I'm just not.
800-941 Sean is our toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
But I sleep better at night, not giving a rip.
I care about the country.
I care about the agenda.
You know, these economic statistics.
I'm waiting for an explosion.
I want to get more things accomplished.
Well, we got the opportunity.
Why is Sean Spicer suggesting he screwed up as press secretary?
I guess he putting that in his new book.
It's like a big headline.
I don't think he's screwed up at all.
I think it's the hardest job in the world.
It sounds like he's being too—let's get Sean Spicer on the program tomorrow.
I'm going to straighten that out.
He didn't screw up at all.
He did fine.
Everyone's microman.
Oh, you didn't say.
You were hiding in the bushes.
Who cares?
All right, looks like we may have some breaking news.
Can you confirm this, Linda?
I see on Twitter, Breaking 911.
Colorado State Capitol is on a lockdown after a shooting had taken place there.
Now, there's a lot of state-of-the-art addresses, I guess, going on at this particular time.
I don't know if that's happening out in Colorado.
Anyway, what they're saying is Colorado Capitol on lockdown.
Reports of shots fired this afternoon.
The Denver Police Department officers are responding to the Capitol.
There's a large police presence in the area, if you're around the area, around the Colfax Avenue area.
Doesn't mean a lot to me, but if you're in Colorado, I hope it means a lot to you.
Hope and pray nothing happening there.
And we'll monitor it and we'll let you know anything that is going on.
You know, one of the things that I think was probably the most amazing is the reaction.
And I went into great detail about this in terms of the show yesterday.
So Donald Trump makes a statement about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the fact that Kim Jong-un is saying the nuclear button is on his desk at all times.
Well, will someone from his depleted and food-starved regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button and it's much bigger and more powerful than any of his and my button works.
Now, the media's reaction to this was utter insanity.
Let me play it for you.
We tweeted, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just stated that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times.
Will someone from his depleted and food-starved regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his.
And my button works.
That's right.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Nuclear warheads brag about who has the bigger button.
He is not merely being cavalier with a threat about nuclear war.
He's being cavalier in a way that makes him seem demented and deranged and makes no serious of our serious allies or adversaries around the world think that he's a serious person talking in this way about the most serious threat that the world ever faces.
Do any thought that President Trump might be less provocative or even scale back his Twitter habit in 2018?
Well, you can safely throw that out the window.
The president unloading in his first day back here at the White House, 16 tweets, mainly a mixture of taunts and threats, including raising the prospect of nuclear war, a shot at North Korea's unpredictable leader in language that many people noted seemed better suited for the playground than the presidency.
Tweeter in cheat.
Mark North Korea's Kim Jong-un yesterday.
They're saying that the nuclear button on his desk is much bigger and more powerful and his works.
Is this kind of a crazy game we're playing?
You know, he needs to be medicated and hospitalized at this point, or he's going to just kill all of us.
This is language that would have been rejected from the script of Dr. Strangelife.
This is President of the United States doing a measuring contest about nuclear weapons.
We can't begin to normalize this.
This is dangerous.
This is childish.
This is unprecedented.
It's not befitting the leader of the free world.
I think we could apply a test to his 16 tweets today.
The test would be: if this were the leader of Germany, China, or Brazil, what would we say?
How would we cover these tweets?
We would say these are the messages from a person who is not well, from a leader who is not fit for office.
I've asked Twitter spokesman, does this violate Twitter's terms of service, making this kind of threat toward North Korea?
So far, no immediate comment from the company, still waiting to hear.
I think they're trying to decide if this kind of tweet, referring to a nuclear button that he knows how to use and it works, whether that actually is a violation of the terms of service because it may threaten violence.
Doom and gloom.
You know, this is not the first time that we have seen the only thing the media likes is appeasement.
They're not going to be happy with President Trump for saying, we're not going to take your threats idly and we're not going to stand by and let you threaten the United States of America.
No, they prefer something.
When Reagan said the evil empire, oh, that caused, oh, he's going to start World War III, everybody predicted at the time.
Well, he ended the Cold War, and we didn't fire a shot.
And he brought the former Soviet Union to its knees because they couldn't keep up and build guns and butter at the same time.
And so it worked.
The same thing, you know, oh, we begin bombing in 10 minutes.
Oh, that's scary.
And he said it before a weekly radio address, and people panic.
Oh, my.
See, he really has this sick mentality.
He's going to start a war.
George W. Bush talked about the access of evil.
And Donald Trump sends out, you know, calls a dictator, a murdering dictator, thug, you know, little rocket man.
And the media can't handle it.
Now we've got that going on.
You know, unless he back, I think if he got down on both knees and begged and tried to bribe Kim Jong-un the way that Clinton bribed Kim Jong-il, maybe that would make the media happy, although I don't think there's anything he could do.
You know, if he personally flew a plane into Tehran with another $150 billion to bribe the mullahs that have been pledging to destroy the United States and Israel and burning our flags and chanting death to America and death to Israel,
short of driving, flying $150 billion in like Obama, I don't think there's anything he can do that's ever going to satisfy the appeasers that are in the media or in the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is the whole Democratic Party today.
Anyway, joining us, these are very complicated issues.
You're dealing with, you know, the bribery attempt that failed in North Korea, and now we're facing the consequences of not many good options and will face the same difficulties with Iran if, in fact, they don't overthrow that regime before they get the nuclear weapons.
That could be a modern-day Holocaust.
Radical Islamic terrorists with nuclear weapons.
Colonel Oliver North is back with me.
How are you, my friend?
I haven't talked to you in forever.
You doing well?
Happy New Year, buddy.
Yeah.
I miss you.
Where have you been?
How was your holiday?
It was great.
All 17 grandkids.
Oh, my gosh.
End of a week plus, I think we went through about five, no, 15 gallons of milk with the 10 boys.
Yes.
The seven girls have granddad wrapped around their little finger.
Oh, of course.
And it was a wonderful time.
When they finally all went home two days ago, we were exhausted.
No, listen.
The good thing about being a grandparent, and I don't know, but I'm guessing.
You will.
You will.
Well, I guess it was when you hand them back.
I mean, you can take the kids fishing, you can take them to Disney, you can have all the fun you want with them, and then say goodnight.
Have fun.
I'll see you later.
No, no.
We're now teaching them how to drive.
We're now teaching them how to go out and shoot birds with me and teaching them how to sail a boat and things like that.
See, there you go.
Shooting those guns and trying to kill the little birdies.
Yeah, and holding a Bible study.
No, we cling to our guns and Bibles.
Yeah, we're irredeemable, deplorables, clinging to our God, faith, God, Bibles, and religion.
Well, you know, I was listening to what you were saying.
I think you've heard me say this to you before.
I don't know if the rest of our listeners have.
But if Donald Trump walked across the Potomac River, which, by the way, you could pretty much do today because it was ice.
But if he walked across it when it was liquid, the Washington Compost and the New York Times and all the other media would say Donald Trump can't swim.
I mean, it's just cannot do anything right.
I think if he gave every American a million dollars.
No, look at, well, you know what?
America's going to be a far wealthier place because of the tax bill that he got through just before Christmas.
You know, the stuff that's going on with this nuclear button thing, first of all, the President of the United States, he knows this.
I mean, it's not like this is a shock to him.
He doesn't have a button.
He has an electronic football with encrypted SIOP and PAL codes in it and the ability to transmit from anywhere in the world.
The scary part of this whole thing is not what Donald Trump said back to on Twitter, back to Kim Young-lu, Kim Young-un.
The scary part is that Kim may well have a button on his desk.
That's the scary part of it.
And then he might hit it.
That would be a scary part.
Good point.
Just bump it on the way out the door to see one of his girlfriends.
I mean, it is a scary thought.
And I look at what's happening now, and the media is trying to make this business about the Olympics and the conversations that are happening between Seoul and Poigny about the Olympics as somehow separating the South Korean government from the United States.
I would point out, as you just did, there's lots and lots of things that have happened in the world that apparently the current masters of the media don't understand.
There's a lot of history to what I call athletic and cultural diplomacy.
The ping-pong with the Chinese back in the Cold War, the ballet diplomacy with the Soviet Union, the art exchanges we did with Spain back when Franco, the dictator, was still alive in Spain, the antiquity exchanges when Egypt was still dominated by the Soviet Union.
Yes, they were.
And the baseball defectors that we've gotten out of Cuba.
All those are great opportunities to gather intelligence, to recruit potential spies, and encourage more defections from these evil regimes.
And so that kind of thing happening between Poign and Seoul is good.
What's not good is what's happening right today in terms of the response to the protest movement in Iran.
This is a tremendous opportunity for the United States to do the right thing.
And I'm not talking about what Eisenhower did in 1956 with Hungary.
It's not enough to simply encourage people to stand up to evil.
We have to be able to back them with more than words.
And there's a lot of things that we could be doing.
It's young people who are protesting in Iran today.
They're primarily young.
Average age is about 25.
And that's about 40% of the country right today.
They are onto the fact that the Ayatollah have been ripping them off the graft, the greed, the corruption, and the billions, as you just pointed out, much of it in cash from both the United States and the Europeans since the sanctions were lifted after the so-called Kerry-Obama-Iran deal back in 2014.
If the Supreme Leader, Khameni, and his hand-picked toady president, Rouhani, were half as smart as they pretend to be, they'd have created hundreds of thousands of good jobs rebuilding the Iranian crumbling infrastructure.
And instead, they pocketed billions because they're the richest people in Tehran, the Ayatollah.
They've squandered the rest of it on funding the North Korean nuclear weapons and ICBM programs, propping up the Assad regime in Damascus, paying salaries for the IRGC.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps works directly for the Supreme Leader.
The rest of the entire country's government doesn't have a damn thing to say about what the IRGC does, what the Qud force does.
And they've spent billions on doing that kind of stuff, paying salaries for the IRGC and Quds force militias fighting ISIS, arming Hezbollah in Lebanon, arming Hamas in Gaza, arming the Houthi forces in Yemen.
And what they've got is people that are now onto them for what they've done for, quote, others.
And of course, all of it's to spread dissent, hate, discontent, all kinds of terrorism around the world.
Well, they've been fighting these proxy wars.
Yes.
Well, in fact, what they've been doing is wasting the money that they've gotten on that kind of stuff and themselves, unlike helping the people of Iran.
Well, and it's also now backfired and created an unprecedented alliance that nobody anticipated with Israel, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, and the UAE.
When we come back, Colonel Oliver North is with us.
I want to ask you, how do we deal with both situations, Iran and North Korea?
What would you do?
We'll get to that.
We have a lot more news we've got to get to today.
All right, as we continue, Colonel North with us.
All right, so let's start North Korea.
We don't have a lot of time, but what's the best option?
Because I don't see a lot of good options here.
Well, there actually are.
There's more sanctions that can be imposed on those people who do business with North Korea.
Over the course of the last month, there have been several times when we've observed through satellite and other surveillance means, ships transferring oil, for example, into a country where in the north, north of Pyongyang, the temperature is now minus five degrees.
It's going to get colder before it gets warmer.
They need the oil.
And the fact is, you could impose more sanctions on the Chinese who are allowing some of this stuff to happen and anybody else who trades not just oil, but other things that are important to their economy.
The idea that the United States is powerless is nuts.
Now, we've got the means to literally decapitate the regime without using a single nuclear weapon.
We ought to encourage the conversation that's going on between Pyongyang and Seoul about the Olympics.
We ought to make sure that everybody understands we're deadly serious.
The president needs to say every time he opens his mouth about this thing is that there's an existential threat to civilians in America with a North Korean, Iranian-supported North Korean nuclear weapon and ICBM program.
And it is the Iranians that have made this possible for them.
They could not have done it without it.
But we've got lots more sanctions that can be imposed.
And what you do is you say unilaterally, you don't have to get the Europeans and everybody else in Asia.
If you do any business with the regime in North Korea, either named individuals or companies or the entire country, you cannot do any business in the United States.
The banking system is going to look at this and say, wait a second, we can't afford to lose American business.
We're going to stop doing business in North Korea.
We've not even flexed our muscles yet on this, despite what the State Department says, there's a lot more latitude.
All right.
So let's go to these students.
In 2009, we abandoned them.
Oh, yeah.
Well, we.
But we don't.
Well, okay, Obama abandoned them.
Yeah, no, that's true.
Meaning the United States under Obama.
Good point.
I stand corrected, sir.
Good buddy.
But the point is, is that, look, we're not going to intervene in the sense that we're going to send troops.
But those kids aren't going to win with slingshots either, Colonel.
No, they're not.
And one of the things we have to be very much on guard against is what happened in 1956 with Hungary.
When President Eisenhower encouraged them to stand up to the Soviets, they did.
We did nothing else afterwards.
Here's what we ought to be doing right now: the United States ought to, every single day on Radio Farda, which is an arm of what used to be Radio Free Europe, and on Voice of America, remind everybody that the world is watching and admiring your stand for liberty and opportunity.
Send that same encouraging message from every democracy on the planet Earth.
And if we had a CIA program worthy of the name, we could launch a massive political action program and a propaganda campaign to expose the crimes and the human rights violations of the Iranian theocracy.
We need to be able to do that.
Look at these guys are perverts.
They're psychos.
They use prostitutes.
They export drugs.
We can't have a nuclear-armed Iran.
The world will use it.
All right, safe home, my friend.
Semplify, Maureen.
We appreciate it.
We'll continue.
Joining us now, we have Gary Byrne.
He served in federal law enforcement for nearly 30 years in the U.S. Air Force Security Police and the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service.
Also with us, Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent, NYPD, contributing editor of Conservative Review.
Welcome both of you.
You know, one of the new narratives that has emerged now that the Clinton, I'm sorry, Trump-Russia collusion story seems to be, you know, gone by the wayside at this particular point.
And after a year of breathless reporting and hysteria by the media, the only thing that they've been able to come up with is, oh, General Flynn lied to the FBI.
Oh, and Paul Manafort did something long before he ever met Trump, not with Russia, but with Ukraine.
And those cases, I guess, are moving forward.
So now the next thing is to say, well, anybody that looks at Jim Comey and his conduct and the fact that he wrote an exoneration along with Peter Strzok, with him and his girlfriend that hate Donald Trump and think he's so loathsome, you know, anybody that questions the tactics here, somehow, you're against law enforcement.
You're against the FBI.
You're speaking out against these incredible institutions.
Well, I've been a supporter of law enforcement my entire life and career and will always be.
Having many of my family members in law enforcement everywhere from the FBI to the NYPD and working in jails and working in family corps, probation and all sorts of law enforcement.
So that's just a lie.
And if we say, well, why did Robert Mueller not stop, you know, when he had an insider, he had somebody inside of Putin's network in America involved in bribery and extortion and money laundering and kickbacks, why didn't Mueller stop or inform the differing agencies as it relates to the CFIS deal in Uranium One?
And if you raise this question, apparently it's just, whoa, way over the top.
Now, James Comey has been out there tweeting up a storm lately, lecturing the country about what is morally right and good and correct.
And I see that, you know, Dan Bongino has fought back.
He says he pretends the FBI should be free of political influence.
And then Bongino says James Comey has a God complex.
James Comey seems to think that he is the single arbiter of what is true and moral and good in the country these days.
And if James Comey wanted to be a politician of his clout score on social media, then James Comey should have run for office.
But this charade, this embarrassing charade, where he pretends that he was above it all, and by the way, pretends that the FBI should be free of political influence, which it should, by the way, while he oversaw an investigation of the Clinton email scam.
You know, all good points.
Is it wrong?
Is it somehow an offense if I'm raising questions about exonerations before investigations?
I'll start with you, Dan Bongino.
Well, Sean, a couple of things you brought up.
On your first point on the narrative, that's just freaking laughable.
I mean, if it wasn't sad and tragic, the narrative that conservatives, I mean, and they point out names, yeah, people like you and me and all of our friends in talk radio that we're anti-law enforcement.
Like, are you clinically insane?
Are you seriously nuts?
When the Obama administration was inviting into the White House the pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.
What do we want dead cops?
When do we want them now crowd?
We were the ones saying, wait, what's going on here?
Is this for real?
I mean, we have always had law enforcement's back.
So that switch in the quote narrative is disgusting.
And secondly, on Comey, it's the last point I made, and I appreciate you reading that, that I think is the most salient here.
Jim Comey's out there claiming somehow that he's been above this all.
He's not a partisan actor.
He's not political.
When Sean, you and I both know the only explanation for the Clinton email exoneration and the fiasco that was that investigation, the only explanation is political.
So spare us all, Jim Comey.
You know, your Twitter trying to bump your clout score on Twitter with your nonsense.
Take it a rest.
Gary Byrne, what's your take on it?
Well, what I see with Mr. Comey is the same issues I see inside the Secret Service with executives of the Secret Service, which is one of the reasons I wrote my book, Secrets of the Secret Service.
Sean, these people stay in government for so long, they think the government owes them a living.
Comey is a good example of it.
The other former FBI director that's doing the investigation is another example of it.
Dan knows as well as I do.
These people, they start out in the Secret Service or the FBI and they jump from one agency to the other.
When people talk about the deep state, this is really what they're talking about, in my opinion, is these government employees that start out with a good intention and then they become politicians and they jump from one agency to the other.
I saw it in the Secret Service where they would run their course in the Secret Service and then go to another government agency.
We had a gentleman 33 years in the Secret Service, Bill Livingood.
Then he spent 17 years at the Capitol, the sergeant-at-arms.
The two sergeants-at-arms at the Capitol right now are both former Secret Service agents.
These people never leave government service.
And then eventually it seems like they become corrupt.
You see, I make a distinction between rank-and-file officers and those at the highest level of power.
And, you know, everyone says, oh, Robert Mueller, that his integrity is unimpeachable in any way.
And they say the same thing about Jim Comey.
And I'm looking at Jim Comey leaking information that he shouldn't have leaked that may be illegal, as why would he do that if he's not acting politically?
And why would James Comey write an exoneration of Hillary Clinton before he even interviewed her or 17 other witnesses involved in the case three or four months earlier?
Because they're completely corrupt.
And I go back to my first book, or actually the book now, Secrets of the Secret Service.
You have to ask yourself this.
Where did the FBI become corrupt?
It became corrupt in the beginning of Bill Clinton's administration.
How did 900 FBI files get from FBI headquarters three blocks down the street into the White House complex and nobody knew about it?
Come on, that's when they went corrupt.
And I bet you, if there was a name on those files of who brought them down, let's find out who's running the FBI today.
That's exactly how these things happen.
Yeah.
I mean, Dan Bongino, you've been involved in a lot of investigations in your life, and I'd never heard of an investigation where you're writing the exoneration before you do the investigation.
That sounds to me like it's rigged in the fixes it.
You know, it's funny, Sean.
I know you talk to a lot of cops, but you acknowledge you weren't even a cop, and you can figure this out pretty simply.
Here's how investigators.
I think anybody with half a brain can figure it out.
I mean, it's not a massive mental task we're talking about here.
No, and that's what's sad.
I mean, again, we're not doing mental gymnastics to figure out that this is common sense.
The way you investigate a case at the federal, local, or state level, it doesn't matter, is you pinch a guy involved in the scheme, right?
You get a low-level guy.
In our case, we did a lot of counterfeiting cases.
You get a guy for passing counterfeit.
All of a sudden, you say to him, hey, listen, here's what we got you on.
We got you on passing counterfeit.
We're going to charge you with this, this, and this.
And then the guy says, you know what?
He talks to his lawyer.
He goes, all right, I'm going to talk.
Here's who I got it from.
And then you go up the chain and you get the kingfit of the crime.
You don't get the guy who passes the counterfeit in the beginning, the low-level guy, and say, listen, brother, you're all good.
Don't you worry.
You're exonerated.
Don't say anything.
But by the way, but we've got to see it in a bigger context.
Because if you look at it through the prism of this exoneration, allows her to continue her run for the presidency.
He's now trying to impact history here.
This is not a small exoneration of any kind.
And then it raises questions, well, if they didn't have a legitimate investigation the first time, don't we, if we have equal justice under the law, don't we need one now?
And I would argue, yeah.
And I would argue my biggest problem with Robert Mueller is did he have to pick all Democrats?
There's not one Republican that he could have chosen.
Did he have to pick all Trump haters?
And then it gets worse.
And then he picks Andrew Weissman, overturned 9-0 in the U.S. Supreme Court in his obstruction case against Anderson accounting.
Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of what he did in that case.
And then he puts four Merrill Lynch execs in jail.
That was overturned, too, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And I'm saying Peter struck.
He's involved in everything.
And I'm thinking that, you know, who's going to investigate the investigators?
Really, we're going to put a 35-year general in jail because he lied to the FBI?
Well, I'm thinking— Right, meanwhile, Sean, you had John Solomon on your show this week.
If Solomon's piece, one of the operators of the Clinton server admitted lying to the FBI.
He said, oh, I don't know anything about deleting these emails.
Then if you read John Solomon's piece, he had a O-blank moment where he goes back to the FBI and says, you know what?
I forgot about deleting all those emails.
I may not have told you the truth, Sean.
And what happened to him?
Well, surely if justice is blind, just like Mike Flynn, he got charged, right?
Well, no, that's not what happened.
He got an immunity deal.
It's a total scam.
You're all being hoes with this ridiculous investigation.
Well, it's more than that.
I mean, he apparently promised to cooperate with Mueller and his team.
And I don't know what it is that he knows because we haven't heard anything that rises to any level of Trump collusion unless you believe that the dossier, you know, if you're paying for a dossier and you're hiring Fusion GPS and they're using a former MI6 guy and he's using Russian sources that may have been paid by him, and then they're coming up with salacious details that we all know are not true now.
Aren't they trying to use, isn't that Russian collusion, Gary, in some way, shape, matter, or form?
No, it absolutely is.
And Sean, something I wanted to mention that you and Dan both brought up.
The idea that you guys, as conservative commentators, can't criticize the FBI or the Secret Service, or I can't criticize the Secret Service running my book, Secrets of the Secret Service, is wrong.
Because, look, we're not criticizing the rank and file.
We're not criticizing the GS-12s and 13s that are doing the work.
We're talking about the management that has been in there for so long and in the FBI and in the Secret Service that they become these corrupt people.
I mean, anybody in their right mind, could you imagine Comey trying to explain that?
The fact that he wrote the letter exonerating her before?
How is that possible?
How is that even under question?
But the rank and file did weigh in, and this goes back to Solomon's column, and that is the sheer volume of classified information from the Clinton server was seen as criminal by the FBI.
And Comey's answer was to take it in-house, not provide the field offices that would normally do a good job and a thorough job to do their job.
Well, that's special privilege.
Do I get special treatment if the FBI is investigating me?
No, you will not.
And by the way, what are we telling Americans like Sean Hannity that if the FBI ever comes to me and says we need some information about X, Y, or Z, my FBI friends tell me don't talk to them.
No, don't.
Now, why is that to me appalling that you're telling me that?
And that I know your advice is solid.
Because if I say one wrong thing or I misremember one thing, I could be charged with lying.
You're talking to the guy, the first Secret Service employee who had to testify against the sitting president in a criminal law case.
I was there.
I was being told, you can't say this, you can't say that.
The FBI threatened to arrest me in front of my pregnant wife.
I learned the hard way.
I respect the agency, the rank and file, but if they show up at my front door, I don't say a word.
I call my lawyer.
I let him do the talking.
Well, let's take a break.
We'll continue.
Gary Byrne, Dan Bongino, your call's coming up.
800-941-Sean, as we continue.
All right, as we continue, Dan Bongino and Gary Byrner with us.
All right, let's go back to where we left off, and that is that is it possible that Hillary Clinton's bought and paid for the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC that Donna Brazil says she was running at the time, that all the tens of $12 million that they spent on this phony Russian dossier filled with lies and salacious details about Donald Trump from Russians to influence an election.
What if, in fact, that was used as the basis to get a FISA warrant against either an opposition candidate at the time, Donald Trump, or a president-elect at the time, Dan?
Well, I got an even worse question for you.
You know, what if the dossier to get a FISA warrant was, in fact, a way to get a FISA warrant to get on the record transcripts for information the FBI already had?
I don't want to confuse anyone, but put two and two together here, Sean.
Why is it that all these Trump campaign officials were seemingly randomly approached by alleged Russian co-conspirators with email?
Why is that?
Was this all random?
Was it really the Russian government?
I mean, I'm not trying to sound all conspiratorial here.
This stuff actually happened.
I'm just suggesting to you that the dossier may have, in fact, been a reverse targeting tool.
In other words, they claimed they were monitoring foreign agents to get Trump people on tape to confirm information they may have.
Well, that's the whole thing.
We do know a crime was committed against General Flynn because aren't we supposed to minimize when if they're targeting his future counterpart, that's perfectly legitimate.
But then if they realize an American's on the line, aren't they supposed to practice minimization?
Aren't they supposed to similarly practice they're not supposed to unmask?
They're not supposed to leak raw intelligence, all of which happened to General Flynn, Gary.
Yeah, it did.
And, you know, the funny thing is, is that one of the same people that's responsible for unmasking General Flynn was one of the same people running around telling everybody that it was a videotape that caused Benghazi.
These people just keep giving the American taxpayer bad service and criminality.
And it all goes back to the Clintons and when they came off of market zone in the early 90s.
It'll be interesting to see, Sean, how this comes out.
I mean, General Flint got railroaded one way or the other.
Yeah, in a lot of ways.
There's no doubt about it.
All right, guys, thank you both.
Happy New Year to both of you, Gary Byrne and Dan Bongino.
We really appreciate you guys stopping by.
800-941-Sean, our toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
Stay right here for our final news roundup and information overload.
First, the hurricane that blew through the West Wing today.
Steve Bannon turning on this White House, turning on the president's family.
President Trump's one-time chief strategist and close friend now calling that meeting at Trump Tower with Don Jr. Jared Kushner and that Russian lawyer, quote, treasonous.
Michael Wolfe, which paints a stunning picture of dysfunction in the Trump campaign and White House and contains stunning quotes from Steve Bannon, who is, let's remember, the president's former top political advisor.
Now it seems Bannon has turned on his old boss.
I want to pull another quote where Steve Bannon says, this is all about money laundering.
The White House, obviously, on the attack in the wake of these allegations by Steve Bannon and Michael Wolfe.
It's not just Steve Bannon allegations.
It's actually allegations from the entire West Wing about a dysfunctional White House and a president that doesn't even read.
You can hear it from Democrats, money laundering, money laundering, money.
But to hear Steve Bannon raise this issue of money laundering, that is pretty extraordinary.
The fact that you're having someone like Steve Bannon, of all people, former White House strategist to President Trump, making these comments, which are a lot more revealing than you would end up hearing from any Democrat at the House Intelligence Committee or the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Some explosive new quotes from former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon talking about the Russia investigation.
The indictment right now of Bannon to Trump is personal, rather incendiary.
Bannon is going at the character and nature of the president.
You can love Steve Bannon or hate Steve Bannon, but he's no dope.
He's a smart guy.
He's distancing himself from Steve Bannon because if this is true, if what Steve Bannon said in this book is true, this is a very unflattering picture of the president.
He looks like someone who was kind of fumbling, who everyone was calling him names behind his back, and no one really thought that he was a serious person.
Thank you, Sarah.
The president says that when Steve Bannon was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.
Does he feel betrayed by Steve Bannon?
Does he regret hiring him?
I think the president's statement is extremely clear what his position on Mr. Bannon is.
It was pretty lengthy and pretty detailed, and there's not really much to clarify or to add.
But is there a regret there?
I mean, he said a lot in this book, and they did have a long and close working relationship.
So is there a sense of betrayal?
Once again, I think the president's statement fully addresses what his position and what his relationship with Mr. Bannon is.
April?
Sarah, when was the last time the president talked to Steve Bannon?
And this is a serious question.
Is the president now blocking Steve Bannon from calling his cell phone?
I'm not aware that he was calling a cell phone, but I believe the last conversation took place at the first part of December.
What does this do to the base that these two powerhouses are fighting for the Republican Party?
What does this do to the president's base?
I don't think it does anything to the president's base.
The base and the people that supported this president supported the president and supported his agenda.
Those things haven't changed.
The president's still exactly who he was yesterday as he was two years ago when he started out on the campaign trail.
His agenda hasn't changed, and he's continuing to fight for and push for that agenda.
And I think the base is extremely excited and happy with the job that this president has done in his first year in office.
Look at all he's accomplished.
I think they're pretty happy with where he is.
Peter has a distinct following.
Steve Bannon has a distinct following.
The alt-right and some people who may not necessarily be for the other people who are xenophobia.
What happens to you?
I think that's a question you're going to have to ask Steve Bannon.
The president's base is very solid.
It hasn't changed because the president hasn't changed and his agenda hasn't changed.
And we're continuing to accomplish a lot of the things that were on the president's agenda as we did last year.
And we're going to do a lot more this year as we move into the beginning of 2018.
Hi, news roundup and information overload hours.
Sean Hannity show, 800-941-Sean, our toll-free telephone number.
There's media reaction to Steve Bannon and Michael Wolf's new book, which I take issue with a number of things in there.
Sarah Sanders at the press conference explaining her position and the president's position on all of this.
You know, it's three days, two days ago, the media in this country, well, all they cared about.
Well, he's about to start a nuclear war.
And it's the same reaction every time.
There is in this country, I have been saying journalism is dead.
It's dead and it's buried in this sense.
When do you ever hear the media talk about any of the president's successes?
Never.
Why not?
Because they got an agenda.
What's the agenda?
Well, it's certainly not the Trump agenda.
And there is anger.
You know, look at the Trump economy.
His approval rating is at a six-month high.
He created last year 1.7 million new jobs.
We learned today that payrolls at U.S. companies increased in December by the most in nine months, consistent with further progress in the labor market.
And private payrolls rose by 250,000 jobs, exceeding all estimates in a Bloomberg survey.
On top of that, we have the lowest usage of food stamps now in two years in this country.
You have the latest census figures showing Americans fleeing high-tax, high-spending blue states in droves.
You got another record high, the Dow now popping past 25,000.
And by the way, in just 23 trading days from 24,000, you had 60 big records there.
And I can go on and on.
There's a lot of good news out there, but I know they only want to talk about collusion, collusion, collusion, Russia, Russia.
We now have, you know, we have a media that is void of ever talking about solutions, void of talking about the American people, void of talking about substance of any kind, advancing conspiracy theories every single day, and never, ever in touch with where real people are in this country.
And the only thing they apparently want this president to do is to duplicate the stupidity and the failure of Bill Clinton and what he did by giving billions to Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un's father, with the hope and the promise, this is a good deal for the American people.
We're going to make sure he doesn't build nuclear weapons.
That did not work out very well.
Just like the Iranian deal is not going to work out very well.
Just like they hated Reagan for saying the evil empire and bombing begins in 10 minutes.
And they hated George W. Bush for the access of evil.
Unless you're bowing on bended knee before a dictator and kissing their ass, the media is not going to be happy, meaning two-bit murdering dictators.
Anyway, let's get to our phones.
And, of course, our guests here in the final hour, free-for-all.
We have Jonathan Gillum, author of the brand new book, A Best Seller, Sheep No More, Christopher Hahn of the ever-exploding Christopher Hahn Show, now on three affiliates across the country.
Welcome, both of you.
Well, okay, but last year was three affiliates.
You didn't get one new affiliate in a year.
I'm waiting for my friend Sean Hannity to hook a brother up.
I don't know what's happening to you.
Well, we're up to 575 in terms of stations.
We'll try and maybe ask a couple to take your hour.
Anyway.
Get him.
It's two hours.
It's two hours.
Two hours.
Happy New Year.
So let me ask you.
You're a big Clinton guy.
You like the Clintons, right?
I do.
When Bill Clinton said and announced the deal with Kim Jong-il and said this is a good deal for the American people and they're not going to get, we'll make sure we have assurances they're not going to get nuclear weapons.
Didn't that prove that bribing, murdering dictators doesn't work?
Look, I don't think that all these deals we did with him were good deals.
You got to pick up your phone, by the way.
You got to pick up.
I disagree with everything.
I don't disagree with everything you're saying.
I don't disagree with most of what you're saying about the media just covering the extraordinary stuff, but some of the things that...
All right, well, let's see how intellectually honest you are.
And you've got to pick up your phone if you want to be on the show, okay?
Okay, I'm on it.
Okay.
It sounds like you have a sports illustrated football phone.
If you could talk into the mouthpiece, that would be helpful.
An off-speaker.
I've never heard more noise in my life from a guest.
And by the way, it's coming from a blizzard, by the way.
No, Chris is, he's supposed to be the radio guy that understands these things, and we shouldn't have to explain it to him.
That's what's really outrageous about it.
Can you say what do you like?
Like trying to hide.
Okay, dress in white, and you can hide.
You'll be in the blizzard, okay?
Put on your snowsuit, your little white snowsuit with your hat, like you're going out polar bear hunting.
So name me three things that President Trump did in the last year that you really think are great for the country.
What do I think that are great for the country?
Well, I did like what he did with the Veterans Choice Act.
I will say that.
I've said it before.
Okay, one, that's a good deal.
Two.
Go ahead.
I'm happy with the choice of General Mattis.
Okay, good.
Mad Dog Mattis, yeah.
Good.
And I like that he has retained Obama's FEMA team.
So there you go.
I didn't know that he kept Obama's FEMA team, but whatever.
But the point is, Bill Clinton made a bad deal with North Korea.
Can you admit in retrospect when he told us that giving them billions and energy and supplies and able to keep their nuclear rods, that that was a bad deal?
You can admit that in retrospect, right?
I think that, you know, looking at it right now, I think that it lasted for a couple of years, but it wasn't going to last forever, and it didn't last as long as we would have liked it.
So in that respect, it's bad.
Okay, and you would admit giving radical mullahs that chant death to America $150 billion in currencies is a bad idea, too, right?
That's not smart.
Look, if it buys us any peace, it's smart.
You think you can buy peace?
You really trust the Iranians if we give them $150 billion, you trust that they're not going to build nuclear weapons?
I think right now it looks like they aren't building nuclear weapons.
I think right now they are building nuclear weapons, and I think you're naive to believe otherwise.
Well, I think that's something that we could test in this agreement, so we should use that test.
So you believe that bribing dictators is a good foreign policy?
I think it's been our foreign policy.
I didn't ask you that.
Is it good policy to bribe dictators?
Whether it's good or not, it's our only choice at the moment.
Well, it's not our only choice because there's no bribery going on, Jonathan Gillum, with Donald Trump.
No, absolutely not.
And can I just say this one thing about Chris and his phone?
It doesn't surprise me.
He's a Clinton supporter.
It sounds like he's in the bathroom, which is where the Clintons kept their servers.
So that doesn't surprise me.
Stop.
That's where they all say all go to.
Well, I don't know.
They had to fire a Chappaqua, and I mean this sincerely.
I'm glad nobody was hurt.
But I mean, they might have burned him.
We'll find out in a couple of years.
I mean, they tried bleach pit.
They tried acid wash.
They tried deleting.
They tried hammers.
Why wouldn't they just try burning the thing?
Well, it doesn't surprise me, but the FBI can still recover stuff.
Yeah.
And for all of you in the liberal media, please know that was an attempt at humor.
If you didn't laugh, you have no sense of humor.
I laughed.
All right, go ahead, Jonathan.
So, you know, here's the deal when it comes to dictators and comes to all these different people out there.
I mean, here's the reality is that we have really since 1947 when we put a Secretary of Defense in place.
We've never won a war since.
We've gone into deep diplomacy without any force to back it up.
And this is the problem with any type of sanctions or diplomacy is that there's no force backing these things up.
Is there a place for diplomacy?
Absolutely.
Is there a place for sanctions?
Of course.
It's a tactic.
But the problem is we don't have force.
We don't show force.
This president has actually changed that.
And what I see is the most effective thing here is the Trump effect.
Just like it happened with immigration when he came on board.
His words and for a large part of his tweets have caused a ripple effect where people say, I'm not going to go across that border right now.
And I think what we have to do when it comes to these dictators is that we have to stand up to them.
We either use force or in the case of Iran, we get on board with whatever type of protest there is, and we do the same thing that's been done in counterintelligence and counter and espionage for hundreds of years.
We get in there and we try to help subvert them and give them the support they need to overthrow that absolutely cult-like leadership.
Chris?
I'll tell you what.
We'll take a break and we'll see if we can get Chris organized and inform him of the rules of being a guest on a radio show.
I guess now that he's hosting, he doesn't understand what it means to put your phone on and pick it up and not use a sports illustrated football phone.
We'll go over the rules.
We'll come back.
We'll continue with Jonathan Gillum and Chris Hahn straight ahead on the Sean Hennessey show.
All right, as we continue, Jonathan Gillum and Chris Hahn both back with us.
All right, Chris, you got the rules now on being a radio talk show guest?
I got the rules.
I hope you can hear me okay.
We hear you fine.
I'm buying you a new phone for your birthday.
What give me an example that you think bribing dictators works, especially murdering dictators.
Sean, you're asking me to argue a point that I don't agree with.
I don't like this.
You said it's our only choice, and it's not our only choice because we're not doing it.
It's a temporary fix to a broader problem that we need to have real conversations to try to come up to a solution to.
You don't just pull the rug out from something that, you know, for the most part, has bought us a little bit of time and a little bit of peace.
But you're right.
It's not the best possible.
It's not something that I want to continue forever, but it's something that I think that we have to understand has worked in some situations.
Jonathan?
That's the big lie.
It has not given us any type of leeway or time to get things going.
It's the same thing with North Korea.
It's a perfect example.
For 50 years, either it's been diplomacy.
It's where we've been trying to give them stuff like Bill Clinton did or sanctions.
And now where are we?
50 years later, we're dealing with a madman that has nuclear weapons that can definitely kill 27 million people 30 miles away and potentially can hit the continental United States.
These long-term sanctions and debates back and forth and paying people off does not work.
It just unrealistic, and we've created this thing in our minds to say that, you know, in the world, things can be fair and can be worked out.
With these types of people, it's not.
They'll kill us if they get a chance.
It's the bottom line.
And sometimes, I hate to say it, but you have to use force and you have to use it effectively.
And you have to have a strategic plan to go all the way.
That has not been the case in anything we've done in the past 50 years.
We've got to leave it there.
Thank you both for being with us.
Jonathan, appreciate it.
Happy New Year.
Chris Hahn, Happy New Year.
Thank you for being here.
Toll-free.
Our telephone number is 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of this extravagant.
A lot of the things, a lot of the things in the book make a lot of sense.
For example, the guy never gives a press conference, Trump.
We never see him.
We never see him interviewed.
He said no to 60 Minutes because he doesn't know what you're going to ask him, and he doesn't have the answers.
So he goes to his pal, Sean Hannity, who's been trashing me, by the way.
So let's discuss Sean Hannity for a second.
Sean Hannity.
Sean is my Sean as my friend.
I worked with him for years.
I told his father.
No, no, I'm just waiting for my friends.
And I didn't say my thought, and I'm not in favor of him trashing you or you trashing him, just aside.
But he is the one that would give Trump the questions ahead of time.
Now, how much Kool-Aid has Sean Hannity drunk before he drowns?
Is the question?
You know, she's got a thicker New York accent than you do, Joyless Behar.
I mean, she's just, she's so angry and so bitter.
Here's my question.
Whatever happened to any media ethical standards?
Does anybody, I will give the New York Times credit when they did the Sunday magazine piece on me.
No, I will.
They literally had fact checkers call everybody like five times to make sure what they were writing was accurate and correct and dates and commas.
And I mean, they wanted to get everything accurate.
They wanted to get quotes accurate if they had questions about things that I had said.
And I'm like, all right, I got to give them some credit.
How come Michael Wolf doesn't pick up a telephone and call me and say, hey, you know what?
The irony is, if anybody that knows me, I don't write questions down.
I write notes to myself.
And when I'm doing interviews, I look down and I see like one word, immigration.
And I go from there.
This whole show is extemporaneous.
You know, the other thing is, and I was saying this earlier to the guys, you know, I mean, I've been here over a decade.
Yeah, I know.
It's a long time.
Aren't you sick of me yet?
Yes.
No, but seriously, like, I never, I mean, I've never given a guest questions.
Oh.
I've never said, oh, we're going to talk.
First of all, I have no idea.
First of all, I have no idea.
Okay, I'm going to call you Joy because you're sounding like a.
Oh, that's a low blow.
Oh.
That's a low blow.
Oh, you just said you were sick of working for me.
That was a low blow to me.
This is not okay.
Not okay.
Once I agree with Hillary.
But no, you know, we never give questions.
We give topics.
Do people even ask you for them?
They do.
No, we tell them what the topic generally is.
They always say the same thing.
I'm like, guys, I don't have questions for you.
I have no idea what he's going to ask you.
I have no idea what I'm – listen, how many times have you told guests that, well, that's the topic now, but when he gets on the air, it's going to probably change?
I have a few guests that have been coming on the show for a long time that don't even ask me for topics anymore because they know when I send it to them, you're going to do the opposite of what I said.
Not by design, because I don't know.
No, I know that.
I'm not saying it's nefarious.
Listen, if you're going to be a good interviewer, you have to have your facts, number one.
All right.
That's just, you have to study.
But I study all the time.
The only thing that I write down is I write down like I'm writing, it's not questions.
I'm writing down facts.
It's a reference.
Yeah.
It's like immigration.
And what it does is it's a means of me sparking memory.
So when I'm in the interview and you're in the moment when all of a sudden a candidate that I'm interviewing says something about immigration, okay, I know what I want to ask on that.
I already thought about that.
But it's not a specific question I write down.
I usually have a here's the trick.
I have a manila envelope, and on the envelope, I have the questions.
You can't read my handwriting.
I can't read my handwriting.
It's atrocious.
You know, I just, whatever happened to just calling and asking and, you know, I mean, I don't know if somebody said that.
I don't even know if it's made up.
Who knows?
You know, it's a funny thing is nothing bothers me anymore.
I just don't care.
I don't care what these people think anymore at all.
I'm so over it.
It just doesn't bother me in the least.
You know, Fox writes me today, well, do you want to respond to this?
I said, not really.
Respond to what?
Yeah, I said, it's not true.
Next question.
And that was about the amount of attention I gave.
And if I'm going to sit there and care about joyless Behar.
But I mean, in all seriousness, what is this doing for anybody?
This isn't solving what's happening with North Korea.
No.
This isn't solving what's happening.
I mean, let me tell you something.
I know what my biggest fear going to sleep now is, besides always worrying about your kids, is that we're going to wake up and we're going to see, you know, 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 students mowed down in Iran because those mullers are going to do anything to hang on to power, cling on to power.
That scares me.
You don't win revolutions with slingshots, but it's only the superfluous.
This was my drug addict analogy that I was making the other day.
Yesterday, as a matter of fact, I made it on radio and TV.
It says they're like crack and heroin addicts in the media.
And by that, I mean they wake up every day and they need a Trump something to hate.
And if it's a tweet, it's going to be a tweet.
If it's a comment, it's going to be a comment.
If somebody says something about Trump, we'll make that, you know, that's their drug now.
That's where dopamine fix comes in.
That's where they get high.
And there's no substantive reporting of any kind anymore, which, in a way, I guess I should be pretty happy about in this regard.
And the sense that, okay, they leave a wide open void.
It wasn't by accident that we were the number one show on cable news last year, both in total audience and the magical demo.
By the way, this is what they do in the media, too.
If you don't win total audience, then you're going to go look for some obscure demo.
He lost women 12 to 13.
He lost that.
He got killed.
And women 13 to 14.
Done.
We slaughtered him.
And that's a game they play, too.
But it's never been this bad.
It's never been.
You know, I said the other day when I was on vacation, I was listening to Howard 100 on Sirius XM Radio, and it had the best of his interviews.
And he had some really good interviews.
One of the things about how he does interviews, he knows about the people that he's interviewing, knows a lot about them.
But more importantly, he listens to what they say, and he is curiously asking questions.
And, you know, that makes him a good interviewer.
And that's how I do interviews.
You can't plan that because something that someone says sparks the question.
How do I plan three hours of radio?
You don't plan three hours of radio.
And that's why radio is such an honest medium because you can't fake it for three hours.
I'm a conservative.
What am I going to do?
Start trying to write out a three-hour show one day about how I'm going to be a liberal?
Well, to write three hours of radio would probably take me 22 hours to do it.
It wouldn't be enough time in the day.
And either you can talk or you can't.
Either you're interesting or you're not in some way.
You know, my kids would always come in to my radio studio.
Daddy, why are you shouting?
Hello, how are you?
Welcome.
And I'm just like, I don't know.
But the first time the mic went on, that's what I did.
And it just, you throw more energy in radio than you do in TV.
Now it's because you're deaf.
So that's a little different.
I'm totally deaf.
Yeah, it's bad.
You know, it's really bad in like a busy, crowded restaurant.
On New Year's Eve, we're sitting around the, I can't hear you.
Felt like my, I felt like Granny Janny.
She can't hear.
So we always say, act like we're talking, and she like starts playing with her hearing aid.
And I'll say, well, And I'm moving my lips and she's like, this damn thing?
You know that's really mean, right?
It's horribly mean.
Exactly.
Does she see how you do that?
Oh, yeah.
She's hip to it.
You know what the headline is going to be.
Mean to old people and his own.
Granny Janny loves me.
Are you kidding?
I'm not mean to Granny.
I'm very nice to Granny.
She is the matriarch of the family right now.
So, of course, and the only grandparent my kids has, and she's been a great grandparent.
All right, let's get to our phones.
Let's say hi to Tom in Fort Lauderdale.
What's up, Tom?
How are you?
Glad you called.
Yeah, me too.
It's the first time I've been out together.
I've been trying it for a year.
When you're talking about wiretapping phones, I think the government, this really happened to me.
Last year, after the election, I was talking to a client, a financial advisor, and we were talking, and we were mentioning Republicans, Democrats, Trump.
And all of a sudden, a voice came on the phone, a recorded voice.
He said, this phone call is being recorded.
So I told my client, I told my client, I said, hang up.
So she hung up.
I called her back and I said, tell me you heard what I heard.
Yeah, I absolutely heard that.
So when you're talking about.
Listen, Bill Binney says, Bill Binney says every call, text, email is being metadata stored.
And this is a 34, five-year veteran of the NSA.
And I've had other long-term professionals say the same exact thing.
You know, do I know for a fact?
No.
It would be scary because that would be against unreasonable search and seizure, especially if the government uses it.
And I think that's what the fear of our founders and our framers were, that, in fact, government would misuse and abuse their power.
That would be an abuse of power in every way.
Ray in New Mexico, what's up, Ray?
How are you?
Glad you called.
Hey, Sean, how are you?
I'm good, sir.
What's happening?
Hey, a couple things.
One, I wanted to say I really enjoy your show.
You know, I don't know if anybody's ever told you this, but you think, and the way you act is just like a contractor.
You were a contractor, right?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, so am I.
I just retired, plumbing and fire sprinkler.
And I like the way your brain processes.
Contractors, you know, that's what I love about Trump.
He's got that same thinking mentality.
That's the beauty of it.
You know, you don't put a roof on a building that ain't been stick-framed.
It seems like that's the way the liberals think.
They want to, you know, pour the slab after the house is completely built.
Their whole brain process is completely screwed up.
But I wanted to say that.
That's what I've been really enjoying.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
You know, you got to think well, you got to think when everyone thinks being a contractor is easy.
It's not.
It's hard work.
No, no, no.
No, it's not even close.
This is an easier job, I can tell you right now.
Yeah, I can imagine.
I bet you're happy to be doing that.
But look, you still get the living crap beat out of you every day.
So everything has an upside and a downside.
Isn't that the truth?
I have a missing chip at this point.
I've turned it off.
I don't care.
Catherine, Providence, Rhode Island, what's up, Catherine?
How are you?
Hello.
How are you?
I listened to you yesterday, but I didn't get on the air to call in.
But I just wanted to say, and I hope you don't take it too critically, but I'll try to explain it well.
You know, you were really very emotional about the unrest in Iraq, and I know there's a lot of people in Iran, not Iraq.
I'm Iran, Iran.
Thank you very much.
I know there's a lot of people suffering over there, but I guess I just worry a little bit about the United States getting a little bit too involved in other countries' issues.
And I remember in Iran, as a matter of fact, you know, we did have a pro-U.S. guy over there, the Shah of Iran, and he had his own, as I recall, he had his own little private jails and torturers and all that.
And finally, there was a revolution there, and people really resented the United States for having kind of a yes man in there who was causing a lot of suffering, I guess.
And now they have the Islamic Republic as a result of that.
So I guess I...
Catherine, let me ask you a question.
I think you agree with me.
You don't want, you know, America to get involved in foreign conflicts.
I don't want that either, right?
Yeah, right.
Okay, because you know what?
Too much American treasure.
You know, we fight these wars.
We don't fight them.
You know, we put handcuffs on our troops.
They have rules of engagement.
I don't want any such thing.
Yeah.
But on the other hand, if we can help the freedom fighters there overthrow this regime, it would be good for them because I believe the natural state of man is to be free.
It would be good for women and minorities that are persecuted in that country and killed on a regular basis and tortured on a regular basis.
It would allow freedom that they have not had since the days of the Shah.
That would be a good thing.
It also would probably result in a better geopolitical situation for the U.S. and the entire Middle East because Iranian hegemony and radical mullahs with nuclear weapons has the potential of a modern-day Holocaust, and that would be a disaster.
Well, I guess so.
I guess, you know, I think a lot of some people would dispute the fact that when the Shah was there, there was a lot of freedom, and those are the people that rose up.
Listen, I'm not sticking up for the Shah, but it was certainly better than the Ayatollah Khomeini coming out of exile back in 1979.
Yeah.
But look, I am just saying that if you saw a neighbor screaming for help next door to where you live, don't you feel that if you can help in any way, you're supposed to help, right?
funny i was going to use the same analogy only a little different i was going to say if there's a if there's a family on your husband and wife that live on your street and they're they're shouting at each other and they're obviously having a big a big battle and a discord you know i i think it's the better thing for a neighbor to do to kind of like but if you think it's if it's rising to the level you think it's going to get violent or it is violent what are you gonna You call the police.
I don't think you can call it.
I don't think there's.
Okay, but with all due respect, there is no world police.
And you have these students now risking their lives.
And all I'm saying, the first thing we should offer is moral support.
If we can offer communication support so they can get those images so the world can see what's going on there, that'd be a good thing.
And the next thing is, you don't win revolutions with slingshots.
If the world would help in some way, they've got to fight their own battle.
We had our revolutionary war in this country, and many, many died for the cause of liberty and the cause of freedom.
And I don't think it's our job to go in there and fight that war for them.
We can't afford it anymore.
And nor does it work because every war now gets politicized.
Anyway, I'm glad you called.
I think we just have to stand in solidarity and hope and pray for the world's sake and their sake that they can succeed somehow and that somebody will take these radical mullahs out.
That'd be the ideal situation.
Hannity tonight, I hope you'll join us 9 Eastern Sentya DVR, the Fox News channel.
We have the nine different versions, never seen before, of James Comey's exoneration of Hillary Clinton without the investigation and the dates and the timeline and the people that he didn't interview.
Now, if that's not an obstruction case, I don't know what is.
John Solomon, Sarah Carter, will join us tonight.
Also, we have Sebastian Gorka.
How do we handle in any way what's going on in Iran?
Can we help those students?
We got Geraldo tonight.
We got Tommy Laron and Jessica Tarlov tonight, tonight at 9.
See you then.
Thanks for being with us back here tomorrow.
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