Author Dino Scaros joins Sean to discuss his book, "Stop Calling Them "Immigrants": They are PHIs." PHI or person here illegally is the new term that Scaros wants to use to remind Americans that there are many immigrants who've contributed great things to this country...legally. Listen to this great conversation and here the latest on immigration reform. 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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When I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Let not your heart be troubled.
You are listening to the Sean Hannity Radio Show Podcast.
You know, it stays like today that it's hard to know exactly where to start.
And I guess the best place is always at the beginning.
Let me just tell you who we have coming up in the program today.
Peter Schweitzer, author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash, the untold story of how and why foreign governments and businesses help make Bill and Hillary rich.
May come back to bite them.
Fox News legal analyst Greg Jarrett, he'll weigh in on our top story.
I'm getting to in a second.
Matt Gates of Florida is going to give us the congressional angle into all of this.
James O'Keefe has an amazing video out today.
Remember, yesterday he did the first in a series of undercover videos, second out this morning.
It's been on the cover of the Drudge Report all day, and that is Twitter.
Now, it's funny because Twitter said, well, the one guy James O'Keefe interviewed yesterday, that one person is acting on his own.
Well, they got eight more people today.
And it's about shadow banning.
For those of you who are not on Twitter, I'll explain as the program goes on today.
And it basically comes down to blocking opposing viewpoints and also looking into people's personal direct message accounts.
I mean, total, complete violations.
There are a number of lawsuits now.
Charles Johnson, one of them, that are out there against Twitter.
And it's only the beginning.
I think these social media outlets that don't put in protections for people that believe they have a right to privacy, they're going to be paying huge sums of money to settle these cases.
There's a prediction I'm putting down now.
You can put that on your markup.
But our big story remains what we have now been telling you since yesterday.
And that is Sarah Carter's breakthrough article and our own sourcing, which now confirms that this phony fake news, Clinton bought and paid for Russian propaganda dossier with all that unconfirmed, salacious material was in fact used in some capacity to obtain Pfizer warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign and the Trump transition.
Which, by the way, you understand how deep, how big a problem this is.
That would mean that dossier was if used to obtain a Pfizer warrant, that it was fraud upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
You know, as my buddy Greg Jarrett's been pointing out, a lawyer who is an officer of the court would be violating the law if they knowingly used false or deceptive documents to deceive the court.
This is only the beginning in all of this.
Now, this is only, according to my sources, the tip of the iceberg.
There's so much coming probably by the end of next week that I'm told it's stuff that I can't even imagine.
It's so bad.
Among the little tidbits that I'm getting is: you know, imagine this scenario: Hillary Clinton, you know, we find out it's her campaign, her money, that is used to fund Fusion GPS that hires Christopher Steele.
Now, every talking point Democrat's going to say, oh, wait a minute, there was a Republican that used Fusion GPS for Trump op research.
Okay, but that was all prior to anything involving Christopher Steele.
And Christopher Steele is the nexus here.
But once Hillary's campaign began the process and took over the funding of Fusion GPS and their investigation into Donald Trump, they're the ones then that brought in this former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele.
Now, whether Christopher Steele paid or didn't pay these Russia connections, it doesn't matter because Fusion GPS never even verified.
It's all over this leaked Senator Diane Feinstein interview.
It's all over the place.
And, you know, the fact that she leaked it, hang on one second.
Good or bad.
That's a great question for an attorney, isn't it?
Good or bad.
It's what I deal with all day.
All right.
Anyway, so now you got if that, in other words, if Clinton buys, pays for lies, salacious lies about an opposition candidate, which he did.
And Hillary Clinton pays for salacious details on Donald Trump.
All right.
Now, that material that was never verified because we now have the testimony of Glenn Simpson, thanks to Diane Feinstein, who apparently was suffering from a cold.
And Diane Feinstein, whoops, I shouldn't have made that mistake.
Oh, I should have talked to Senator Grassley.
Oh, I shouldn't have leaked it.
Well, anyway, there's actually maybe a good thing she did.
Did you take steps to verify the information?
That question was asked in the hearing with Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson.
He did not take any steps to verify the now salacious lies that we know about.
He said he simply trusted or believed the information because it was Christopher Steele, the British spy, that wrote the dossier, and he thought it was credible.
So that was enough.
It's like Michael Wolfe's book writing things about me and doesn't pick up a phone and ask me if it's true or not true.
That is not journalism.
And it even gets worse than that from there.
I am told that it may go as far as this: that Hillary buys it, bought and paid for, that it's used to get a warrant on an opposing candidate and a president-elect.
It turns out that all the information is false.
Nobody even checked on the information.
And a source that I have, see my journalistic chops now showing, the source that I have said that there might have been verification, especially of the more salacious details.
And I am told that it is a name that everybody will know and associate as one of the most vicious people that surrounds the Clintons.
That's coming.
Just giving you a preview of coming attractions today, if you're following the bouncing ball with us here.
Now, all these details are just, it's breathtaking that this could all have happened.
Let me walk you through this again.
We're now confirming the Clinton bought and paid for fake news Russian propaganda dossier was used in part to obtain the FISA warrants.
By the way, some have told me it was of significant use.
That would be a pretty big distinction.
And that then justified the FISA court's decision.
We first reported this.
Nobody else reported it back in March of last year.
That's when we began this journey with Sarah Carter and John Solomon and Greg Jarrett and a number of us have been all over this.
And there have been many people in the media that have never touched it because they have been fixated and focused on their phony, false narrative where we have no evidence and no proof.
I was told yesterday, Hannity, not only are you over the target, he goes, a person that knows, you are going to be proven so right.
And when compared to everybody else in the media, they will be proven so wrong on levels you can't even begin to imagine.
A very good source told me yesterday.
And so I always ask the question of people: if they're not going to give me answers and information that I'm looking for as I do my journalistic duty, you're not a journalist.
Oh, I am a journalist, actually.
I'm an advocacy journalist, an opinion journalist.
I still do plenty of reporting, my own reporting and corroboration.
By the way, if Hannity gets one thing wrong, let's start a boycott.
Let's boycott Hannity.
Let's get him thrown off the air as quick as we can.
But in other words, this onion, the layers of which we have been unpeeling every day and night, is now it's reached the top of the mountain and it's beginning to snowball down the mountain.
And it's going to become very fast and furious here in a very short period of time.
And when we get to the end of this whole thing, it means that Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the DNC, the Donna Brazil said Hillary Clinton controlled and the money she controlled literally spent at least $12 million, if not more, for a phony document full of Russian lies, full of salacious materials against an opposing candidate.
Sounds like collusion with the Russians to me.
That was then used by the Obama administration to get a FISA warrant so they could surveil members of an opposition party and an incoming president.
It's the same dossier that former FBI director, in other words, Fixer, the guy that rigged the Hillary email investigation along with Peter Strzzok, James Comey, testified under oath as being salacious and unverified.
Well, if that happened, how did he sit there as the guy that was in charge of the FBI and not stop it?
And that information, it is only the beginning.
This is now the beginning of a journey where we are going to discover crimes that have been committed at people at the highest levels of our government within the Justice Department, within the State Department, within the FBI, and many, many others.
We are going to see abuses of our Constitution and our civil liberties and our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure that you never imagined.
That's how serious this is all getting.
This is just the beginning.
And we have more shocking information that shows that there was systemic FISA abuse out there, that this is not the only incident.
And this goes way beyond this one incident.
And that we really do have a Russian scandal.
And it's not what the media has been spoonfeeding the American public for a year.
The dossier used to target an opposition party and criminalize, as we had in the open, Alan Dershowitz saying, political differences.
Now, why nobody in the quote media cares at all or one whit about this, that's their problem.
And the fact that they're going to be proven so wrong is their problem also.
You've got to understand this is unprecedented in the history of this country.
You need to understand this profoundly, that we are now on the precipice of one of the largest abuses of power in American history.
Real crimes committed by real top people in government at the highest levels of government.
We're talking about shredding the Constitution.
That's how serious all of this is.
This information confirming what we have suspected now for months, that the powerful tools of intelligence have not only been politicized, but they've been weaponized.
And these powerful tools have been used and abused to influence a presidential election.
Yeah, the same lady that fixed the same campaign that fixed the primary.
They tried to fix the general election as well with lies paid for that came from Russia.
Make no mistake about it.
This scandal will reach the highest levels of the Obama intelligence community, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the State Department.
Now, also, I mean, all of this now, you've got to understand this dossier, anything that was in this, it's a fraud upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Lawyers are supposed to be officers of the court.
Now, did the FBI, the DOJ lawyers, know that this was all fake?
They should have known.
They should have gone to Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson and said, did you verify any of this?
Because the answer would have been no, because that's what he said in his congressional territory, testimony, not territory.
Now, they had known the dossier was false and unreliable.
It was quickly debunked.
Examine the contents.
It becomes immediately clear it's based on double, triple, quadruple hearsay.
You know, I'll give you another example of that when we get back, but I got to take a quick break here, or else our cock stations are going to get mad at me.
I can't have that.
We need friends in this business.
There is collusion, but it's really with the Democrats and the Russians far more than it is with the Republicans and the Russians.
So the witch hunt continues.
But I will say this: I am for massive oil and gas and everything else and a lot of energy.
Putin can't love that.
I am for the strongest military that the United States ever had.
Putin can't love that.
But Hillary was not for a strong military, and Hillary, my opponent, was for windmills.
And she was for other types of energy that don't have the same capacities.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I also have a question for the Prime Minister, but if I could address the President first.
Sarah brought up the Russian investigation.
Your legal team, sources have told us, believes that in the next few weeks, the special counsel Robert Mueller will ask for some sort of an interview with you.
Your legal team believes is part of wrapping up his investigation.
Are you open to meeting with him?
Would you be willing to meet with him without condition, or would you demand that a strict set of parameters be placed around any encounter between you and the special counsel?
Well, again, John, there has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians or Trump and Russians.
No collusion.
When I watch you interviewing all the people leaving their committees, I mean, the Democrats are all running for office and they're trying to say this, that.
But bottom line, they all say there's no collusion.
And there is no collusion.
And when you talk about interviews, Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn't sworn in.
She wasn't given the oath.
They didn't take notes.
They didn't record.
And it was done on the 4th of July weekend.
That's perhaps ridiculous.
And a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach.
And it really was.
But again, I'll speak to attorneys.
I can only say this.
There was absolutely no collusion.
Everybody knows it.
Every committee, I've been in office now for 11 months.
For 11 months, they've had this phony cloud over this administration, over our government.
And it has hurt our government.
It does hurt our government.
It's a Democrat hoax that was brought up as an excuse for losing an election that, frankly, the Democrats should have won because they have such a tremendous advantage in the Electoral College.
So it was brought up for that reason.
But it has been determined that there is no collusion by virtually everybody.
So we'll see what happens.
But Mr. Clapper then went on to say that to his knowledge, there was no evidence of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.
We did not conclude any evidence in our report.
And when I say our report, that is the NSA, FBI, and CIA with my office.
The Director of National Intelligence had anything, any reflection of collusion between the members of Trump campaign and the Russians.
There was no evidence of that in our report.
Was Mr. Clapper wrong when he said that?
I think he's right about characterizing the report, which you all have read.
All right, 25 till the top of the hour, 80941 Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
We've got so much other news we're going to get to today.
Project Veritas and James O'Keefe out with a brand new undercover video about Twitter.
This is the second in a series.
You know, Twitter says, well, this is one rogue individual yesterday.
Well, now we've got eight more rogue individuals.
Pretty interesting.
So it begins to create a pattern of deceit, doesn't it?
We'll play it for you.
We'll show you on TV tonight.
Matt Gates, Greg Jarrett, and Peter Schweitzer over this whole fusion GPS dossier now being used for a FISA court warrant.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
That's the amazing part in all of this.
And there's going to be one more unbelievable development after another.
The DNC Clinton campaign-funded dossier obtaining warrants to look into opposition candidates and transition teams.
Wow.
Welcome to America.
And the stuff that I know is beginning to shake out in this, there is a lot of corrupt people involved.
You know, all you people around the Clintons that were there during the Clinton presidency, you're going to be hearing names from your past.
And it shouldn't shock or surprise anybody.
You've got Diane Feinstein.
Maybe she did us a favor, sneaky Diane, as Trump calls her, for leaking the Trump dossier testimony because all it does is verify everything we've been saying about it as GPS, Fusion, they did nothing.
I also want to know on a fact-based, whether it's a fact that either Comey or McCabe authorized payment to Fusion GPS or to Christopher Steele.
That's going to be an interesting allegation.
And the funny thing is, is Michael Cohn, Trump's attorney over at Trump Tower, he's now suing BuzzFeed, Fusion GPS, for defamation over the dossier.
And I'm beginning to think, in light of these new developments, that there's a good chance a lot of this may, in fact, turn out to be true.
I mean, how great would that be in terms of a boomerang?
By the way, it is true.
Fusion GPS admitted they used John McCain to pass the anti-Trump dossier to Obama-era Intel agencies.
And the co-founder On the Trump dossier, Steele doesn't sell baloney.
Apparently, he does.
And this phony dossier, you know, what else was it used for?
You understand everything with the Clintons, the fix is in.
Now, think about this.
We now know through Donna Brazil's book, the fix was in.
Bernie Sanders had no shot.
The fact that some of you are not more outraged about that is unbelievable to me.
You know, we learned something that nobody else in the media talks about, which I think is a big deal.
We discovered that there are people out there paying off people's mortgages and offering them $750,000 and more money to make allegations against then candidate Trump.
That's a big deal if you're paying people huge sums of money to say things in a timeframe that you don't even have time to vet before an election.
All this is about elections here.
All this is about obtaining power.
Then Hillary funds the salacious, phony Russian propaganda dossier.
Well, why did she do that?
Because she wanted to influence the American people in her direction.
In other words, she wanted the fix in as it relates to the general election, just like the fix was in in the primary against Bernie Sanders.
And then it gets worse than that.
Then they can't win that.
Then they'll use the phony dossier so they can spy on an opposition party and on an incoming president at a level that is unprecedented in American history.
And then we find out the FBI director, along with the biggest, it's like this guy, Peter Strzzok, is the nexus for everything.
Peter Strzok is involved months before he was one of the people in the room that interviewed Hillary Clinton over the email server scandal.
He was there.
Now with these emails with his mistress, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, we know how much he hates Donald Trump and loves Hillary Clinton and he's trying to help Hillary win.
Now we understand why Comey and Strzok decided to write the exoneration letter before the investigation into the email server scandal.
I mean, you can't make this up in a spy novel.
The corruption is that deep.
And I'm not even talking about the weaponization of these powerful tools of intelligence.
I mean, it's so powerful.
All they have to do is literally point in your office direction and they'll pick up everything that's going on in your office.
Every email, every text, every phone call, everything, everything that you're watching, every website you're visiting.
That's how powerful all tools of intelligence are.
Now, we give them to the greatest people in the world.
I thank our intelligence agents for the work they do.
I think they should be rewarded for the genius they have to come up with these great weapons.
But when you start weaponizing at the top levels in the intelligence community and turning it on the American people and circumventing the Constitution and going against unreasonable search and seizure, I'm not even talking about the surveillance, the unmasking, not following proper procedures and minimizing, and then, of course, leaking raw intelligence.
There was a crime committed against General Flynn.
Nobody ever wants to talk about it.
We should be talking about it.
And how many other people were surveilled illegally and unmasked illegally and spied upon illegally.
Why does Samantha Power, a UN ambassador, unmask a person a day?
And then we got Susan Rice.
And of course, she's up to her eyeballs and everything.
Then you got Loretta Lynch's issue.
I mean, again, I'm just touching the surface on all of these issues and all of these abuses.
What a top source told me yesterday is that probably at the end of this, we are going to see, and what will unfold before the American people, is the biggest abuse of power in the history of the country.
The biggest misuse of power in the history of the country.
I mean, stuff, the type of stuff that happens in, you know, places like the former Soviet Union.
Remember when they'd hire neighbors to be spying on neighbors and people ratting out their neighbors.
You know, it's the stuff of a spy novel with modern-day technology.
And then, of course, we have more than that on top of it.
Now we have to, then it gets to the issue of the email server that wasn't really investigated.
So James Comey and Peter Strzok, they made a decision long before they investigated.
They're going to let Hillary.
The person knows there are going to be a movie called The Dossier.
I don't know who's going to play my role in this.
Welcome to.
You're already a movie star.
I'm not a movie star.
You should produce it.
You should produce it.
All the presidents.
Well, I'll tell you who deserve Pulitzer Prizes in all this.
Sarah Carter does.
And people like John Solomon do.
And people like Greg Jarrett deserve something.
And Victoria Tunsing.
Sidney Powell.
Peter Schweitzer, Sidney Powell.
I mean, we can go through the whole list of people.
I'm just a conduit for all of this with the biggest bullseye on his forehead than anybody else at this particular time, according to sources.
It's not a joke, but it's funny.
Who would have thunk it?
My parents are looking down from heaven and saying, what the hell did we create here?
Well, what were we thinking?
We should have stopped at three.
That's what they're saying.
Don't say that.
Oh, no, that's what they're saying.
Oh my God, that's horrible.
Saying he lost his mind.
He won't stop.
He's like a dog on a bone with this issue.
They saw the officers of the court, they saw criminals.
They were good people.
They were cry, you know.
You were an improvement based upon that.
I stand on their shoulders, but probably the weight is too heavy for him at this point.
Oh, my God.
Even if they have angels' wings.
Poor Hugh.
Oh, of course.
My father, he wouldn't be able to live through this.
He'd be like, what are you doing?
Because it's time to retire.
Get out of the business.
All right.
And again, she got away with it.
And then now all of a sudden we get to revisit now that the fake, they wanted Hillary to be the candidate.
So Peter Strzok hates Trump, loves Hillary, and they made it possible by fixing the email server investigation, which is the most obvious in terms of crimes being committed.
I mean, it was obvious that when she put the email server in a mom-and-pop shop bathroom closet and then said, oh, I deleted 33,000 subpoenaed emails.
Oh, and just to make good measure, I decided to acid wash it and use this thing called bleach pit just to make sure there's no remnants of any of those emails.
And then on top of that, they destroy any device where the emails may have made it to.
You know, the original incarnation of the letter that Comey was drafting with Strzok, not only did they have the legal standard of gross negligence, but they also had in there that classified top secret and special access program information was obtained by foreign intelligence agents.
Well, that's what we reported a long time ago at Fox, five of them.
That would probably be Iran.
Let's see.
Let's go through our list of who knows.
Could it have been an Islamic terrorist group?
We certainly got to believe Iran, North Korea, maybe China.
You know, I can only guess who the other ones are.
Maybe Pakistan.
I don't know.
But they had access to everything Hillary had.
So she gets to delete them all.
She gets caught in lie after lie.
And then she has her fixers come in, James Comey and Peter Strzzok, and they rig the investigation.
Just like the primary was rigged, just like the dossier was designed to rig the general election.
The investigation was rigged.
Everything with the Clintons is rigged.
This is a crime family.
And on top of that, I haven't even gotten into Loretta Lynch.
And, you know, what do you think that meeting on the tarmac was about?
That was about rigging that investigation on another level.
We cover all our bases.
No, it was about grandchildren.
Yeah, grandchildren for 40 minutes.
We're not any of.
Yeah, we'll talk about our grandchildren.
And even then, and Comey let it all happen.
Then we got Uranium One.
18 months before Cipheus, the nine agencies of which Eric Holder, Hillary, are all a part of, Robert Mueller was the FBI director.
And Robert Mueller, he knew about Vladimir Putin's ambitions to get a foothold into the uranium market in America.
He knew that to get that foothold, they had people in the United States, Russian agents bribing, extorting, using kickbacks and money laundering to get there.
He did nothing to stop it.
Then Hillary's agency is one of, of course, she didn't do it.
She didn't know about it.
Sure, we'll cover that up.
Eric Holder, too.
We'll cover that up.
Then, of course, we give 20% of America's uranium.
We don't have enough uranium.
We need to import uranium.
Well, it never left the United States.
That turned out to be a lie, too.
Went to Canada, went to Europe, and we believe it went to Asia.
Well, there goes some of our precious uranium.
Did it make its hands into the way into the hands of the Mullahs in Iran?
Maybe Obama packed it with the plane loads of cash and other currencies.
Who knows with these people?
And, of course, all the money that's kicked back to the Clinton Foundation.
Robert Mueller could have stopped it in the beginning.
Why didn't he?
And then you got Mueller's team of corrupt Democrats.
By the way, you know, he hired, he hired now this guy that was involved in Kim.com's case, the Megaload case, which, by the way, that has backfired big time, the tactics that were used in New Zealand in terms of raiding the home of Kim.com.
And he got an apology from the Prime Minister of New Zealand for what happened there.
And that whole patent case was about, you know, oh, Mega Upload has customers that put things up there that's patented by other people.
How could YouTube be responsible what somebody posts on YouTube?
That is the equivalent of what that case is.
They raided that guy's home.
I think that had a lot more to do with the fact that he was helping Julian Assange.
Julian Assange, according to reports yesterday, got an ID that would allow him to get a passport from Ecuador, which means that, which we've confirmed it, which means he may now be on his way out.
And God knows what he's going to release at some point.
Because he's got the answer.
Interesting that if the whole thing was a real investigation in the Trump-Russia collusion, the one guy that had the emails, the one guy that released it to the world, the one guy that would know the source, the one guy that said to me, it's not a state, it wasn't Russia, nobody involved in the investigation of Mueller, nobody went to Julian Assange and asked him.
That's a little odd because he'd be the one guy on earth that would know.
Maybe he says no, or maybe he says, give me a plea deal and I'll make a deal with you.
But he has the answer.
Hannity, why do you talk to?
Because I'm doing my job.
I'm a reporter.
And that's a logical place to start.
I would start any investigation with the one guy that knew where the emails came from.
Well, that would be Julian Assange.
Why didn't they go to him first?
Anyway, 800 Washington Post is saying Congress has reached a deal to build the border wall that would include DACA.
What comes first?
The chicken or the egg?
I hope it's the wall.
We need the wall.
Build the wall.
It's not that hard.
Build the wall, build the wall first.
White House, though, is saying no deal.
So forget that.
You know, it's good for Congress to make their declarations.
All right, 800-941, Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
All right, a lot coming up today as we have a big, busy breaking news day.
We'll get right back to our top story, and that is, was the fusion GPS Hillary bought and paid for phony Russian dossier?
Was that used as the foundation for or used in a capacity to get a FISA warrant against a candidate and an incoming president?
We've got a lot of people to check in with, not the least is Greg Jarrett, Peter Schweitzer, and Congressman Matt Gates.
Also, James O'Keefe, new breaking video, Twitter, shadow banning, blocking opposing views.
This will take your breath away straight ahead.
I spent a tiny fraction of what she spent and we won.
Didn't she spend $12.4 million on a dossier that was a total phony?
$12.4 million.
Boy.
So we spent a tiny fraction.
Think of it.
A tiny fraction of the money and we won.
Why did you decide to do that?
Oh, because I think people are entitled to know what was said.
And the lawyers also wanted it released.
I see no problem with releasing it.
Senator Meinsheim, Senator Grassley says you jeopardize their ability to get certain witnesses like Kushner.
Your reaction?
Oh, I don't think so.
That's been difficult in any event.
Senator Grassley has criticized your leaking of the GPS fusion transcript.
The one thing I regret is that I didn't have a chance to talk to him before.
And I've looked for him.
I want to apologize for that, and I will apologize for it.
But we were written to by the lawyers of the company asking that it be released.
And the reason, of course, is because it has been used by rumor and innuendo and falsity so much that the time came for people to see exactly what was said.
And I think in these hearings, more should be released than held back.
Because when you hold something back, it gives all of the people that have an axe to grind an opportunity to grind that axe to a fine edge, and they do.
But if the facts are out, then that isn't a problem.
What about GPS's bank records?
I've got to go.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I also have a question for the Prime Minister, but if I could address the President first.
Sarah brought up the Russia investigation.
Your legal team, sources have told us, believes that in the next few weeks, the special counsel Robert Mueller will ask for some sort of an interview with you.
Your legal team believes as part of wrapping up his investigation.
Are you open to meeting with him?
Would you be willing to meet with him without condition, or would you demand that a strict set of parameters be placed around any encounter between you and the special counsel?
Well, again, John, there has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians, or Trump and Russians.
No collusion.
When I watch you interviewing all the people leaving their committees, I mean, the Democrats are all running for office and they're trying to say this, that.
But bottom line, they all say there's no collusion.
And there is no collusion.
And when you talk about interviews, Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn't sworn in.
She wasn't given the oath.
They didn't take notes.
They didn't record.
And it was done on the 4th of July weekend.
That's perhaps ridiculous.
And a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach.
And it really was.
But again, I'll speak to attorneys.
I can only say this: there was absolutely no collusion.
Everybody knows it.
Every committee, I've been in office now for 11 months.
For 11 months, they've had this phony cloud over this administration, over our government.
And it has hurt our government.
It does hurt our government.
It's a Democrat hoax that was brought up as an excuse for losing an election that, frankly, the Democrats should have won because they have such a tremendous advantage in the Electoral College.
So it was brought up for that reason.
But it has been determined that there is no collusion by virtually everybody.
So we'll see what happens.
All right, two big issues that we are following today as it relates to the phony Russia investigation.
Diane Feinstein, you heard her leaking the entire transcript of the Fusion GPS guys.
Oh, but she had a cold and she didn't know what she was doing, but she's going to apologize for it.
Let not your heart be troubled there.
I wonder if a Republican did it, if they'd get the same pass as she is apparently getting.
And the blockbuster report that we started talking about yesterday, and now sources confirming more and more every hour that, in fact, the Clinton bought and paid for phony propaganda Russian dossier was, in fact, used, in part at least, if not significantly used, to obtain the Pfizer warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign and transition teams.
Pretty unbelievable story.
Joining us now with a reaction to all of this, Peter Schweitzer.
He's the author of the New York Times, number one bestseller, Clinton Cash, The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Help Make Bill and Hillary rich.
And also Greg Jarrett, Fox News legal analyst.
Thank you both for being here.
Let's go to the legal side of this.
Greg Jarrett, and you sent me some amazing notes yesterday on this whole issue as it relates to the dossier being used to gain a FISA warrant.
That's fraud upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It is, Sean, because a lawyer is an officer of the court and is violating the law by knowingly using a false or deceptive document to deceive the judge.
And so the question is, did the FBI and the DOJ know that the dossier was false?
For goodness sakes, all you have to do is take a look at it.
It's based on double and triple and quadruple hearsay, none of which is reliable or even admissible in court.
And yet, apparently, you know, these FBI and DOJ lawyers represented the judge, it was reliable on its face.
It is a false and fictitious document.
That's a fraud on the court.
And, you know, these FBI and DOJ lawyers ought to be held in contempt of court for that.
You know, it's a pretty amazing thing.
Peter Schweitzer, I mean, we've been speculating, we've been wondering, we've been thinking.
And now we have some corroboration and certainly some evidence now that, in fact, that phony dossier, this would be how it works.
Now we know after a year of denials, Hillary Clinton and the DNC that Donna Brazil said Hillary Clinton was controlling and running, that they paid, what, $12 million plus for this phony Russian dossier filled with lies and salacious material.
Well, that was all designed to manipulate and lie to the American people to get an upper hand in the election.
And we find out now that, in fact, it's even worse than that.
And that is that the phony paid for, Hillary Clinton bought and paid for dossier was used to get warrants to spy on an opposition candidate and a president-elect and his team.
I don't even know where it goes from here, but I'm told it even gets worse than this next week.
Well, you know, Sean, all you have to do is look at Glenn Simpson's leaked testimony, page 175.
And he says, and I quote, I was really careful throughout this process to not ask a lot of specific sourcing questions, end quote.
So think about that for a second.
That's a stunning admission.
They have been hired to put together, allegedly, a fact-based dossier.
And Glenn Simpson is admitting that he was careful to not ask a lot of specific sourcing questions.
You do a lot of research.
I do a lot of research.
If you are going to look at something in a serious way, you are going to ask a lot of sourcing questions.
And that, I think, is just further evidence that this was not a serious investigative piece at all.
Well, it even goes further, though.
And I'll throw this to Greg, Fusion GPS.
They never verified anything in that dossier, did they?
No.
Page 147, the first time Glenn Simpson is asked question, did you take steps to verify any of the information?
He hems in awes for three full pages and eventually says, no, he didn't.
The only reason that he thought the dossier had merit was because, quote, Christopher Steele had a good reputation, end of quote.
That's it.
That's all he did.
All right, so then what we're talking about here is if he doesn't have any direct evidence of Trump-Russian collusion and he does not, and he formed an opinion or impression that Russians were, you know, interested in making friends with Republicans.
I actually thought yesterday that there was a good point that was made by the president himself.
I don't think Vladimir Putin wanted the military buildup and the tough, you know, confrontational talk of Donald Trump on the world stage.
I think he'd rather have it to himself, like he did with Barack Obama and, you know, just tell Vladimir a lot of more flexibility after the election.
And I also don't think that he liked Donald Trump talking about and has now followed through on America's move towards energy independence.
That's the lifeblood of their economy, and now they've got the biggest competitor they ever dreamed of.
Well, I think that's right, Sean.
This Russia hysteria has triggered a greater vigilance in the United States.
I would say that it's needed in the sense that I don't trust Vladimir Putin.
But the bottom line is that to sort of plant that this was a sophisticated Russian plot to get Donald Trump elected not only is not supported by the facts, but it's completely backfired in the end result because what you're getting from Trump is a far more hawkish position on a number of levels, energy independence, for example, that's damaging to Russia than you would have got to Hillary Clinton.
And just to further underlie the role that Steele played in this, if you go through the testimony, the thing that stands out, Sean, is that not only did Simpson have opinions on Trump, he had opinions on the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
And in his testimony, he talks about the fact that he can't believe that the FBI is considering in October reopening the investigation, that this is political manipulation.
At some point, they cut off communications with the FBI because of concern.
And that, to me, just speaks that his role in all of this was what?
It was to do the bidding of his client, which was the Hillary Clinton campaign, whether it was a Russian dossier or whether it was trying to undermine any kind of Clinton investigation by the FBI as well.
All right, let me move on from that point of this because I think we've been lied to again by the news media, which has been regurgitating the same lie, and that is that Papadopoulos was the one that actually triggered the Trump-Russia investigation.
Now, you know, Greg, I spent an awful lot of time around the campaign, and I knew everybody that was working on the campaign.
I don't remember anybody by the name of Papadopoulos on the campaign.
I might have met him.
I have no idea if I met him.
I never remember talking to this guy.
I never heard of him from anybody of significance.
But anyway, the New York Times has been, you know, pushing the idea that, in fact, it was Papadopoulos who mouthed off to an Australian diplomat that heard the Russians had dirt on Clinton.
And as you pointed out in a pretty funny note to me last night, that that would be quadruple hearsay, which would never trigger a criminal investigation because a guy in Russia tells a guy in London who tells Papadopoulos who tells an Australian diplomat who tells the FBI.
That's the, I mean, come on.
That's funny.
You're right.
I mean, look, no FBI official in his right mind would think that that would justify a criminal probe of anybody, much less a presidential nominee.
And so I think the New York Times is simply being used by people, probably within the FBI and the DOJ.
They're trying to justify the original Trump-Russia investigation that launched the first week of July of 2016.
They know that the dossier was the reason they launched it, this fake fabrication.
But they went to the New York Times and they're trying to use the New York Times to give an excuse that makes no sense.
We'll take a break.
We'll come back with Peter Schweitzer and Greg Jarrett.
We'll get to your calls coming up.
We've got a busy day here on the program as we will also be checking in with Matt Gates of Florida.
He's been doing a lot of digging on all of these questions, James O'Keefe and his new Project Veritas video, and also much more coming up, our debate on immigration.
But as we continue with Peter Schweitzer, author of the best-selling book, Clinton Cash, and Fox News legal analyst, and our friend Greg Jarrett is with us.
So if in fact the phony Clinton paid for, DNC paid for Russian propaganda debunked salacious dossier was used for a Pfizer warrant, Greg Jarrett, and that information was false and a court was lied to or given false information, what would that mean for any, quote, evidence or any information that they may have received as a result of a warrant that never should have happened?
Under the law, all of that gets thrown out.
It can't be used for anything.
All of it.
All of it.
Yeah.
Is there a chance that impacts General Flynn?
You know, it arguably could, depending upon whether they were using a FISA warrant based on the dossier to obtain information on him, which was used against him, to threaten him with charges and provoke a plea.
Quite honestly, if I were Flynn's lawyers, I'd go back to the judge and say we have discovered new and compelling evidence that all of the information the FBI was using against our client was illegally obtained, fruit of the poisonous tree, can't be used.
We withdraw our plea.
And I take it.
Peter Schweitzer, we'll give you another shot at this.
What do you think?
Well, I think, look, they were trying to accomplish a couple of things, Sean.
One was it was a form of political warfare.
You know, there had been these issues that had been raised in the media about Trump and wanting to do deals in Russia back in 2009, and they wanted to try to force the hand of the FBI so they could leak that Trump was under FBI investigation.
And to that extent, the Steele dossier achieved that political purpose.
It's a massive manipulation of our political system, not like anything I've seen in modern American political history.
The legal issues I think Greg has laid out clearly, but you have the political ones, which is, you know, where do we go now?
When you have an FBI that was this easily steered to investigate a presidential candidate based on third hearsay evidence, as Greg laid out, it raises a real question about the integrity of the FBI and when it comes to sensitive investigations in the future.
And it's just not very promising.
I think it argues for cleaning house and really trying to figure out how we can change the process, where if something like this legitimate were to happen in the future involving some future candidate or some other national security issue, it could be handled a lot better than this one was.
Unbelievable information.
We got to thank you both.
And we'll see you both on Hannity tonight.
Lara Logan of 60 Minutes joins us tonight.
We'll explain that and much more coming up.
800-941-Shawn is a toll-free telephone number.
We'll continue.
Ben, you've been doing this for a long time, and you know that all kinds of, in effect, dossiers come across the desks of investigators and intel agencies, law enforcement agencies, and politicians, and people cover them.
And they're not made public because their contents are unverified, sometimes unverifiable, and they're defamatory.
And so, you know, you see a lot of stuff that you don't pass on because you don't know if it's true.
And the words hang in the air.
You libel someone, in effect, so you don't run it.
But you did run this because it was Trump.
Your inbox and mine, as you say, are full of all sorts of would-be dossiers, of tips, of allegations, of claims.
They are not full of documents that are being briefed to the president of the United States, to the president-elect of the United States, being fought over in an intense tug-of-war by intelligence officials.
That, you know, for instance, imagine covering the week that we just had, right?
Imagine covering the Simpsons testimony to the intelligence committee, the battle between Feinstein and Grassley, in a situation which you were not allowed to, in which you had no idea what they were fighting about.
I mean, I just think that it's hard that Americans would have a lot of trouble understanding without the document.
But you're making a retroactive argument.
I mean, I guess I would argue that this was true at the time.
The dossier was a piece of dark matter that was pulling the FBI, that was pulling Harry Reed.
It's important to understand what those guys are doing.
That's the point.
That's the point, is that we now have the context for it.
And we didn't then.
A lot of us we knew then.
A lot of people.
No, well, it wasn't reading six.
I didn't read it on BuzzFeed.
I didn't know this was part of a Hillary Clinton OPO operation that she took up from a Republican, anti-Trump, Republican donor operation.
We didn't know the extent to which Steele apparently had gotten some of this information from Russian intelligence and shady Russian sources.
There's a lot we didn't know.
So I guess here's the point.
So you're arguing, well, okay, it's at the center of the news, so we were right a year ago to run it.
And I'm actually not even attacking you for running it.
I would just like you to acknowledge that partisanship played a role.
That is just not true.
If we were in the exact same situation with a president of Hillary Clinton, we would have run that dossier at the same time.
I can't prove that to you.
All right, that was on Tucker Carlson last year.
A pretty interesting exchange that took place between Ben Smith defending BuzzFeed and their publishing decision of the Steele dossier, which we all know had fake and phony and fraudulent information in it.
And that's one year ago, by the way, that BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief stands by the decision to prevent, to print the unverified Trump dossier.
Anyway, joining us now to discuss this and so much more, there's so many questions that he wants answered is Matt Gates of Florida, member of the Freedom Caucus.
And Matt, welcome back to the program.
Good to be back on, Sean.
And the important context for so many of these issues is that this is what Russia does around the world.
They go and make things up about people running for office, and then they use that to discredit the institution of democracy.
But the real story here is that Russia's willing partner was inevitably the Democratic National Committee.
And as a consequence of some of the revelations in the Simpson testimony, it appears that the FBI was using some of the same tactics that Russia uses around the world.
I mean, we had Peter Strzok, who was, you know, communicating with his mistress, Lisa Page, about leaking information, you know, from this dossier, from other things to the Wall Street Journal.
And it just shows that the real collusion here was not with the Trump campaign.
All right, let's go to, because there's so many unanswered questions.
Is there one single thing that we now know about this dossier a year later?
In other words, was any one thing proven from that phony Hillary Clinton DNC paid dossier?
Not a thing.
And, you know, the left, they love to go back and forth on Comey.
You know, they think Comey's a hero when he says something bad about the president.
But when Comey says that this dossier was salacious and unverified, all of a sudden Democrats don't want to take his word for it.
So there's nothing in this that we would say we could verify based on anything.
The trouble is the FBI won't tell us whether or not they use this campaign document as an intelligence document.
That should trouble all of us.
Okay, but it's even more important than that.
And I spoke to three separate sources yesterday that when the Department of Justice late last week finally agreed to give information to the House Intelligence Committee.
Now I'm getting varying degrees in terms of how much the dossier played as it relates to, you know, what role did the dossier play in acquiring the Pfizer warrant.
Some people said it played a significant role, and others say it just played a role, but everybody says that dossier was used to get that Pfizer warrant.
Well, we asked the question of the Attorney General, and it's really frustrating to me that he wouldn't answer it and settle that critical question.
According to all my sources and Sarah Carter, we know it played at least a role, if not a significant one.
What does that mean?
And that makes sense.
Makes sense, Sean.
The reason it makes sense is that, I mean, there's two narratives out there, right?
There's the narrative that George Papadopoulos gets drunk in a London pub and runs his mouth about Putin hating Hillary Clinton and that that launches some massive intelligence investigation.
Or you've got a situation where the wife of a senior official at the Department of Justice gets hired by a firm looking to get paid by the Democratic Party and potentially the FBI and that that is the basis for the FISA warrant.
So of course that is the most logical outcome.
What it would mean is that we have crossed the Rubicon on the impartiality of the FBI.
If the FBI is willing to take a political campaign opposition research document and use that to try to go.
Have you not, in your position, been able to corroborate as we have that in fact it was at least used in part to gather that FISA warrant?
Well, Sean, I've got to be careful because some of the information we've received has been in a confidential setting.
I can tell you that all of the information.
You know what, you could say, you could say, Hannity, as usual, you're hanging and hovering above the target.
Hannity, as usual, you're hanging and hovering above the target.
But the sad thing is, let's talk about how profound this is.
That if that bought and paid for Hillary Clinton propaganda dossier with all that salacious material that was printed a year ago by BuzzFeed, but the impact we're talking about now, that's a FISA court.
That means the court was lied to.
That was bought and paid for political information used to get a warrant against a president-elect and a candidate and his team.
You're right that issues of prosecutorial misconduct very well may be implicated here.
But to me, the thing that should raise the hair on the neck of every American is that unelected people thought that their viewpoint was more important, was better, was more virtuous than the will of the American voters who elected Donald Trump.
And this didn't just happen before his election.
They were still trying to discredit him with this dossier after the election.
I mean, you know, it's always something.
It's either, well, you know, he didn't win or he only won because of Jill Stein.
He only won because of the Russians.
Now they're saying, well, he's run, but he's won, but they don't think he's mentally stable.
The left is in total meltdown mode because while they create these distractions, we are cutting taxes, reforming government, and getting the economy moving again.
All right, but this president should be able to.
But here's what the American people have been told vis-a-vis the New York Times.
They say that what triggered the Trump-Russia investigation was this guy, Papadopoulos.
Now, Matt, I don't know if you know it, but I was pretty active and involved in hanging around all the campaigns like a gnat you can't get rid of.
And I knew everybody that was involved.
I know Paul Manafort.
I know Corey Lewandowski.
I knew Hope Hicks.
I knew Steve Bannon, Kelly Ann Conway.
I knew them all.
Steve Miller.
I knew everybody in the course of this campaign.
I never heard of a guy named Papadopoulos until this all comes up.
But the New York Times would have the American people believe in what is nothing but quadruple hearsay.
In other words, that a guy in Russia tells a guy in London who tells Papadopoulos who tells an Australian diplomat who tells the FBI.
And that triggered the investigation.
I don't believe that.
Of course not.
That is a ludicrous proposition, especially when the alternative fact pattern is that Fusion GPS went and hired Mellie Orr, the wife of Bruce Orr, and then the FBI had become so politicized under the Obama administration that they were literally valeting information bought by the Democratic National Committee to a FISA court to get permission to spy on their political enemies.
That's what we're talking about, and it's the biggest scandal in the 2016 election.
All right, let's move on because we don't know which was given more weight, but it's certainly, I think, the Australian ambassador story, that would never meet the smell.
Do you understand that if we go for hearsay, that that is not admissible in any court?
In other words, no FBI official in their right mind would ever justify a criminal probe of anyone based on that type of hearsay.
And more importantly, what is the status of the judiciary investigation into the text messages?
Doesn't everything seem to connect to Peter Strzok and his mistress girlfriend?
It really does.
And it's just not a coincidence that Peter Strzzok is central to the Hillary Clinton investigation and then migrates over to persecute Donald Trump while he is bringing with him not only a sense of bias, but an action plan.
He was going to be the insurance policy.
He was going to be the James Bond that was going to save America from Donald Trump by leaking information and going and curating lies about the president.
It's truly despicable that he was able to undermine our democracy in such a critical way, both in the Hillary Clinton investigation and in the Donald Trump investigation.
The Judiciary Committee is involved in taking sworn testimony.
As you know, we interviewed Andrew McCabe days later.
He announced his retirement.
Oh, by the way, Andrew McCabe's senior attorney and legal advisor was Lisa Page.
Absolutely.
And one of the problems we have in this case, Sean, is that the attorneys who were fact witnesses were allowed to sit in the interviews.
And so everybody was able to get their story straight when normally you would never do that.
I mean, at a municipal police department, every single detective knows that you would never do that.
But here at the highest levels of the FBI, you've got people doing favors for each other, creating an environment where you couldn't get prosecutions, you couldn't get evidence against Hillary Clinton.
And then when we couldn't possibly get evidence, everybody was given an immunity deal, and no facts were proffered as a consequence.
So we're going to have an Inspector General's report in our hands.
I think that will be very soon.
It could be this month or next.
And I think that it's really going to detail the extent to which there was a pro-Hillary Clinton bias, an anti-Donald Trump bias, and there was an infection of both investigations.
Well, I hear it's even going to get worse than that.
In other words, that, you know, people that were actually corroborating information in the dossier were all Hillary inner Circle people.
Have you heard any of that?
Well, frankly, I haven't heard of a single piece of credible corroboration.
All right, then let me ask you this.
If James Comey and Peter Strzzok are writing an exoneration of Hillary on the email server scandal, you know, months before they ever even interview the main people involved in the case, including Hillary and 17 other prominent people.
Doesn't that sound to you like a rigged investigation by Strzzok and Comey?
And that's when they changed the word from the legal standard gross negligence.
Is that a rigged investigation?
Sounds rigged to me.
Well, it's completely rigged.
Hillary Clinton was never in any jeopardy of facing consequences as a result of her conduct.
Any other American who had mishandled classified information would have had a different process and a different outcome.
But Hillary Clinton got a special process, and she got a special outcome.
And that is what has undermined the rule of law.
And it's just indicative of the extent to which during the Obama administration, the highest levels of our government at justice and at the FBI were infected with political bias.
All right, stay right there.
We'll come back.
Matt Gates is with us, Freedom Caucus member, and he's asking all the right questions.
You know, it really comes down to the Freedom Caucus basically doing all of Congress's work, it seems, sadly.
800-941 Sean is our toll-free telephone number if you want to be a part of the program.
James O'Keefe, this is an explosive development.
His new undercover video showing Twitter's shadow banning, blocking opposing views.
We'll get into that.
We'll show you that video tonight on Hannity.
All right, as we continue with Congressman Gates, as he's been pushing hard for some of these answers about this dossier, which apparently now was used in part, at least, to get the Pfizer warrant against, well, then candidate and then President-elect Donald Trump.
All right, so now that we know that it played a role, and now we saw Dianne Feinstein leaking as she did, and then we've got Michael Cohn, the attorney, former attorney for the president at Trump Tower.
Now he's suing BuzzFeed and Fusion GPS over defamation.
When is the public ever going to get to see this?
Do we ever get to see the truth?
Well, we need to, Sean.
And one of the concerns I've had is that too many of the interviews and examinations of witnesses have been behind closed doors with members of Congress.
Now, I'm kind of new to Congress.
I don't know what the traditions and rules are.
Yeah, you're like the rookie that's batting 400 in his first year.
I kind of appreciate that.
Well, I appreciate you saying that, Sean.
But I just think that transparency is going to be the best antidote to this corruption and really this bad conduct we've seen at the highest levels of our government.
So I've been pushing for more open hearings, open testimony.
Frankly, if Glenn Simpson and Diane Feinstein wanted to have an open hearing where he told his side of the story, I think we should have accommodated that.
What's crazy is that we had a confident, the Senate chose to have a confidential hearing, and then Diane Feinstein decides to release the transcripts.
Apparently, did you see this, Sean?
Because she had a cold.
I saw that earlier today.
Yeah, poor Dyfi had a cold, so she didn't check with Chuck Grassley.
Isn't it?
The nerve of the left to say that Donald Trump is like unstable for office, but Diane Feinstein releases these transcripts without even talking to the committee chairman because she has a cold.
Let's hope she doesn't get the flu.
She might set up her own email server.
Oh my gosh, that's uh, that's pretty darn funny.
All right, I think we're gonna get a lot of news on this in the next week.
So I'm keeping focused.
I hope you guys in Congress, the few of you that are doing your job, stay focused on it.
Matt Gates, appreciate it.
Thanks for being with us.
An explosive new undercover video from James O'Keefe of Project Veritas showing Twitter shadow banning, which is blocking opposing views.
We'll get to that.
We'll play that for you.
And much, much more coming up, including our immigration debate as the Sean Hannity show continues.
We got an amazing show tonight at 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
All right, so here is part two of Project Veritas, and James O'Keefe is going to join us on the other side of it.
By the way, glad you are with us.
News Roundup Information Overload Hour.
And what is he describing here?
Eight new people, former current employees of Twitter, involved in what is known as shadow banning or blocking opposing views.
Listen to this undercover tape.
Let's say it pulls up pro-Trump thing and I am anti-Trump.
I was like, oh, I say I banned this whole count.
They'll go to you.
And then it's at your discretion.
And if you're anti-Trump, you're like, oh, you know what?
Mom was right.
Let it go.
Narai's job at Twitter was to review content flagged as harmful, offensive, or in violation of Twitter policy.
And ban it if it was.
Content review is an integral part of any social media platform.
But as Narai describes, it is highly susceptible to abuse.
On stuff like that, it was more discretion on your viewpoints.
I guess how you felt about a particular matter.
Oh, so it wasn't automated.
A user in services person would deem it pro-Trump and take it down.
Yeah, they said, oh, this is Pro-Trump, you know, I don't want it because you know what offends me, that's that I say I banned this whole thing and it goes, goes over, and you're like oh, you know what, I don't like it too.
You know, that's right, that's it.
You're like, let's carry on.
What's next?
Keep it yeah come yeah, bring me another one to take down.
Yeah, swap flag, something that's gonna go by.
You know, you look at it, you're like oh hey this uh, this is Pro-Trump.
You know, and this might probably be like oh, I don't like it.
Yeah, and also, in the reverse of that, they're they would just let a lot of the, I guess, left-leaning or liberal stuff to go through unchecked and come through check, and then I'll be like oh, you know what this is okay, let it go.
Narai suggests Twitter's content review is more than a safeguard against hate speech.
It's a tool used to promote a political agenda.
You made the comment that you know Twitter maybe wouldn't, you know, verbally say some things that they, you know, wanted to put in their company policy, but they were kind of unwritten rules as far as the content that they would allow or disallow.
Very, a lot of unwritten rules and being that we're in central fiscal, we're in California, very little said where we say you have to be, I mean, as a company, you can't really say it because it'll make you look bad, but behind, Behind closed doors, a lot of stuff were like, hey, you have to do this this way, or something like that.
It will never rain, it was more said.
One strategy is shadow ban so that you have ultimate control.
The idea of the shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting but no one sees their content.
So they just think that no one's engaging with their content when in reality no one's seeing it.
Shadow banning is a way of blocking users from a social media platform without notifying them.
Tweets from a shadow banned user still appear to their followers, but don't show up in search results or anywhere else on Twitter.
It's an effective way of deterring Nigerian scammers and other online fraudsters.
But if abused, shadow banning is dangerous.
You just sort of turn off all of the features for them.
So like they still see everything, it's all there.
You can like it, you can favorite it, or you can like retweet or whatever.
But at the end of the day, no one else interacts with your no one else sees what you're doing.
So all that data is just thrown away.
It's risky though.
Why is it risky?
Because people will figure that out and be like, you know, it's a lot of bad press if like, you know, people figure out that you're shadow banning them.
It's like unethical in some way, you know.
So I don't know.
In the past, people have been really, really pissed off about that.
And even people who haven't been shadow banned have called it like a really terrible thing to do.
So yeah, it's a risky strategy.
And so you go ahead and keep on tweeting.
Yeah.
And you've been banned and don't even know it.
Yeah.
I definitely know Reddit does this, but I don't know if Twitter does this anymore.
But how do you keep like my timeline?
Like, how do you keep certain things off my client?
So like people will like retweet if you want to downrank it, but you'll need to also have a control of their timeline.
I've tried to like block people like Fernovich and stuff like that and mute and stuff like that, but they still show up like all the time.
That's something we're working on.
I mean how, I don't know if it's on there right now where we're trying to get the people not to go off.
to a Jurassic World.
He has a really good point.
Pranay Singh is an engineer for Twitter's direct messaging team.
Oh, it might be the US government pressure.
What?
Yeah, they do that.
They do.
Yeah.
Why?
Because they don't like people messing with their politics.
And you're at least a lot of people.
Wow, what the fuck?
He said the US government would have done that.
What if Adam would have been you in?
I've heard talk that it's a good thing because they'll use it to ban, like, Trump supporters or conservatives.
So I didn't know if like that's just a rumor or if that's true.
Get the thing.
That's a thing?
Get the thing.
Yeah.
So how?
How is that done?
Okay.
Basically two years like a huge set of like the tweets and shit loads of futures on top of it.
Okay.
That's one of the futures on top of it.
Okay.
That's about it.
Like that's as much as I know about it.
There's a feature on top of it.
Yeah, like imagine like you have all the tweets ever that happened like from the beginning of time reverse criminal cars.
Right.
So like until we get to the actual system that it rains it, I'm like, we just like, we have a bunch of futures removing some tweets.
So like we have a stream of tweets and we have like one future just kicking out some of them.
All right, that is the latest in Project Veritas and their undercover investigation of current and former Twitter employees caught on camera explaining steps that the social media giant is taking, apparently to me, to censor political content that they don't like.
Now, the video follows the first part yesterday of an undercover Twitter expose released showing Twitter's senior network engineer, a guy by the name of Clay Haynes, saying that Twitter is more than happy to help the Department of Justice with their little Donald Trump investigation.
And Twitter responded with a statement shortly thereafter saying that the individual depicted in this video is speaking in a personal capacity and does not represent or speak for Twitter.
Now, we have Project Veritas and its founder and chief executive, James O'Keefe, is with us.
This is pretty damning in terms of what shadow banning is or blocking opposing views are.
Can you explain to this audience what that means and explain what they just heard?
Sean, this is one of the most amazing stories because it shows eight different engineers on tape describing how they do the shadow banning.
So they mute things from the timeline if they don't like your ideas.
One of them actually talks about specifically targeting rednecks and people who talk about American flags.
And it's an algorithm.
They find correlative things about people and they target you.
And they speak flippantly and they speak candidly.
And it's yesterday it was one guy, now there's eight people.
So it's really one of the most amazing pieces of video we've ever done.
And at the end of the tape, one of the engineers says they want to, quote, ban a way of talking.
What is your response to what Twitter said yesterday?
Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you, Sean, because you have the courage to put this stuff on the air before anyone did.
They said it was an isolated incident.
They said it was a rogue employee.
Yeah, by the way, they don't know James O'Keefe the way I do.
I said there's got to be five versions of this now coming.
I was actually laughing when they responded.
Yes, I saw on TV last night that you put the statement up.
They said it was a guy who doesn't speak for Twitter.
So now we put up eight people, former people, and a couple of current people who know far more damaging things.
So they don't understand RMO.
I mean, the media, I mean, the media should be ashamed of themselves because my guys are putting their skins on the line here.
We spent a year, Sean, undercover while we do other things, and we have them dead to right.
So it goes all the way to the top.
It's now on the CEO's responsibility to make these things public.
They're a private company.
They can do what they want, but they can't lie to their users.
So we're asking for people to tweet at Jack.
That's J-A-C-K on Twitter.
The story is trending on Twitter, Sean.
Shadow ban is trending on their own platform.
Well, I mean, listen, I have been getting a heads up from a lot of people on Twitter.
I actually have met people that are really friendly.
People send me information I didn't know and articles that I'm interested in.
I mean, Twitter is a great, great source of news gathering to me.
But people had been telling me that they have been experiencing this for a long time now.
And it's not something I just like, you know, what do you want me to do?
You got banned.
Now, there are two lawsuits that I know that are pending.
One is the Charles Johnson case and another case.
And I think what's going to happen here, I actually believe that your tapes are going to be pivotal in those upcoming suits.
I mean, I've spoken with James Daymore, who's suing Google.
I've spoken with Dennis Prager, who's suing YouTube.
Everything they're alleging in these lawsuits, they're saying on the tape.
And I hate to let the tape speaks for itself, but the policy manager, this is probably a low-level person, Alinda Hassan, from the Trust and Safety Council, explains, quote, we're trying to downrank people to not show up.
Quote, we're working on that right now.
Another guy says that it's at our discretion to ban pro-Trump things.
Another guy says they targeted Julian Assange.
The government put pressure on them.
The United States government put pressure on them to target people with moderate ideas.
We're not talking about white supremacy here.
Let me ask you: is anything anything coming tomorrow?
Yes.
Shocking.
This is so big now that I almost might want to wait till Monday because I think they're going to respond.
And I'll say this exclusively on your show about what's coming.
About the direct messages and about the things that people, you know, husbands and wives say to each other.
We have these engineers on tape talking about how they use that information against individuals personally.
And it's really bad.
It's so inflammatory, some of these things that, you know, it's just unbelievable.
But we got to let these eight employees' comments simmer.
And Sean, I think a lot of people are going to ask why.
And I say that, you know, this is the new town square.
Yeah, it's a place where people can, if they take away our rights to Google and YouTube, where are we going to go?
I mean, where are we going to express ourselves?
Well, I know that is a gab, the next one, but anyway, I got to run.
James O'Keefe will be looking forward to the next installment.
We'll have more on it tonight on Hannity, and we always appreciate you sharing your hard work and your time.
We really thank you for it.
Thank you, Sean, for being a friend and an ally in this fight.
Yeah, because I believe in truth and what you're doing.
I love how the media can do all this, but James O'Keefe, if he does it, oh, somehow it's sinister.
Hey, look, here is another piece of what we've been playing.
Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, they're undercover video about Twitter and shadow banning and blocking opposing views.
Let's go to a random tweet, and just look at the followers.
We'll all be like, guns God, America.
No one's really that.
Who says that?
Who talks like that?
For sure, a bot.
I'm poverty.
Yeah.
Or a redneck.
Yeah.
Can you get rid of them?
I want to know.
Can you get rid of them?
Yeah.
Like, how do you do that?
You just leave them.
But the problem is there are hundreds of thousands of them.
So you've got to write algorithms that do it for you.
Pranay Singh described how one Twitter algorithm removes users they believe to be bots, Russian bots.
How do you know if it's a bot and not another thing?
Oh, you use machine learning.
Oh, yeah.
That's neat how we do it.
Yeah.
You should be an engineer.
So like, so can you just write them hands like so?
Like say someone has a problem in the name, like, or like conservative or like America first.
Yeah.
Can you just like write algorithms?
Are you sure you're not a programmer?
Well, that's what you know how you do it.
Weeding out fake users is an important tool for Twitter, but according to Pranay, this tool is not applied equally across the political spectrum.
Do you think the majority of the algorithms are going to be censored in the world?
Um, I would say the majority of it are for Republicans, because they're all from Russia and they're going to come to win.
So you'd mostly just get rid of them.
I knew that was in my direction.
This secret project you're working on is going to help people communicate better.
That's the goal.
So what I'm working on, okay, this is the goal of what I'm working on.
Okay, I'll send me.
The goal of what I'm working on is going to make it so that everything in Twitter is dynamic.
This is Twitter software engineer Steven Pierre.
He told our undercover journalist about a secret project involving machine learning.
In the tech world, machine learning refers to algorithms that teach themselves how to solve problems, eliminating the need for human input.
It may sound like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie, but machine learning is all too real, and it's about to take over your social media feed.
Every single conversation is going to be braided by a machine, and the machine's going to say whether that's a positive thing or a negative thing.
And the way it's possible negative, the more it's like, somebody's being aggressive or not, right?
Somebody's like just cursing at somebody, like, oh, whatever, whatever.
They might have a point, but it'll just like vanish.
So is it going to like essentially ban certain mindsets and or people who could be negative?
No, it's going to.
It's not going to bend a mindset.
It's going to bend like the way of talking.
All right, we'll take a quick break.
When we come back, the latest on the immigration debate, an amazing Hannity tonight, 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
Hope you'll join us.
Just say, I think Dick and I agree with what Chuck Grassley just said.
It's hard to believe.
When was the last time that happened, Jeff?
We need to take care of these DACA kids.
And we all agree on that.
86% of the American public agrees on that.
With all due respect, Bob and Mike and Lindsey, there are some things that you're proposing that are going to be very controversial and will be an impediment to agreement.
But you're going to negotiate those things.
You're going to sit down.
You're going to say, listen, we can't agree here.
We'll give you half of that.
You're going to negotiate those.
President, comprehensive means comprehensive.
No, we're not talking about comprehensive.
No, now we're talking.
We are talking about comprehensive.
If you want to go there, it's okay because you're not that far away.
President, many of the things that are mentioned ought to be a part of the negotiations regarding comprehensive immigration reform.
If you want to take it the step further, you may have to rely on you.
You may complicate it, and you may delay DACA somewhat.
I don't want to do that.
You said at the outset we need to phase this.
I think the first phase is with Chuck and Stenny and I have mentioned others as well.
We have a deadline looming and a lot of lives hanging.
We can agree on some very fundamental and important things together on border security, on chain, on the future of diversity visas.
Comprehensive, though, I worked on it for six months with Michael Bennett and a number, Bob Menendez, and Schumer and McCain and Jeff Flake, and it took us six months to put it together.
We don't have six months for the DACA.
People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally.
The president's decision to end DACA was heartless and it was brainless.
When we use phrases like undocumented workers, we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration.
Hundreds, hundreds of thousands of families will be ripped apart.
If you don't think it's illegal, you're not going to say it.
I think it is illegal and wrong.
Tens of thousands of American businesses will lose hardworking employees.
And the argument there, Mr. President, is Americans don't want to do the work.
We just can't find American workers to do the work.
Mr. President, that is a crock in many instances.
It's just not true.
In my view, Trump's decision to end the DACA program for some 800,000 young people is the cruelest and most ugly presidential act in the modern history of this country.
I cannot think of one single act which is uglier and more cruel.
We've got to do several things, and I am adamantly against illegal immigrants.
People have to stop employing illegal immigrants.
Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx.
You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.
You know, itty, this is not a problem that the people who are coming into the country are solely responsible for.
They wouldn't be coming if we didn't put them to work.
My proposal will keep families together and it will include a path to citizenship.
The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century.
If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole, it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and puts strains on an already overburdened safety net.
Immigrants aren't the principal reason wages haven't gone up.
All right, there you have.
Well, hypocrisy, by the way.
That was only five years ago.
A lot of those comments were being made by top Democrats.
They sound like Donald Trump today.
But now, if you don't support their position, which is what we've always known they wanted, which is full-on amnesty.
Anyway, we have a lot on the table here.
Joining us is Jessica Vaughan.
She is the Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Stephen Camerada, also of the Center for Immigration Studies.
And Dino Scaros is with us, presidential historian, practiced, taught, and wrote about the immigration laws and author of Stop Calling Them Immigrants.
Welcome all three of you to the program.
We appreciate you being with us.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
Throwback Thursday there.
Yeah, exactly.
Stephen, let me start with you because you give out a lot of good statistics that I want to get into, but the issues at hand are the following.
The president wants the wall.
The president even wants it done if possible in a year and under budget.
I know the president well.
When he says it, he means it.
I know we've been promised the wall in 2006 and 2013, but I do believe he's the guy that's going to get it done.
That also, the chain migration issue appears to be one that he's won, and the visa lottery will go away.
And in exchange, there's going to be DACA, which has angered a lot of conservatives.
I don't even think we should discuss anything else until the wall is built.
But what have your studies now prove?
Well, I think when it comes to DACA, we might want to do it and actually make that trade.
Remember, you could see it as a package, right?
Because if we have an amnesty, you encourage more illegal immigration.
So enforcement, including at the border, will deter that.
And you don't want the people who get the amnesty to then be able to sponsor their relatives, particularly their parents, who are the ones who caused the problem in the first place.
And so ending chain migration helps cut that down.
But if we do do that, we have to recognize that DACA population is not that well-skilled.
The Congressional Budget Office put out some estimates looking at all the taxes they're likely to pay once legalized and all the services they're likely to use.
And it's negative $26 billion over the first 10 years.
And there's a simple reason for that.
Only about 7% have a four-year college degree.
Maybe another 8% have a two-year college degree.
The rest don't even have a college degree, including a full third who look like they didn't even graduate high school.
And again, we're talking about adults.
So it's a low-skilled population.
So if we do make the deal the president wants, which I think you could make a good argument, we just have to be honest with the American people.
No, because we always get the taxation level.
You always get the spending increase.
You never get the tax cut.
You always get the amnesty, the consideration.
You never get the wall built.
You know, we've been promised this wall in 2006, 2013.
You know, when the president first began his run for that office, Jessica, you know, he talked about, you know, the disproportionate amount of crime that some illegal immigrants are responsible for.
Has he been proven right or wrong?
Oh, I think that the studies that have been released, the statistics released by the Justice Department, certainly confirm what the president knew from talking to law enforcement officials and what Americans see in their communities, that there is a serious public safety problem when we don't enforce our immigration laws, particularly in the interior of the country, you know, with sanctuary policies and criminal aliens being released.
That's absolutely true.
And that's why some people are concerned about a deal that has an amnesty immediately without some improvements to immigration enforcement, because those problems are urgent and of concern to Americans.
And so, you know, that's why the bill that's been put forward by the House by Representatives Goodlatt, Labrador, and a couple others that deal more seriously with the enforcement problems that we have and would shore that up without actually offering an immediate amnesty for people with DACA.
Do you know?
Shouldn't anything else, I mean, I think as part of any deal, if it, look, and this is just the fact.
There are many Republicans that want DACA.
And that's what's like the Republicans that said repeal, replace, they didn't mean repeal and replace.
As we discovered, they'd vote 65 times in the House, and then when they had the opportunity to actually do it and do it the right way, they wanted no part of it, just like seven senators voted a complete repeal on Obamacare, but then when it would have mattered two years later, they were all against it.
So a lot of these Republicans are just full of crap.
But with that said, if the president gets chained migration, an end to that, an end to the visa lottery program building the wall first, and yet DACA is delayed till after it's built, is that a good or a bad deal?
It is a good deal if you, well, first of all, speaking to what Stephen and Jessica said, the reason I called my book Stop Calling Them Immigrants is because we need to stop calling them immigrants.
If they are here illegally, unauthorized, without documentation, they can't be immigrants.
They are PHIs persons here illegally.
The reason the open borderists want to call them immigrants is so they can lump them into a big category and then through sleight of hand give us false statistics which are glowing about actual immigrants but not about PHIs.
Now, the main problem, which is what everybody should be focusing on, is on sanctuary cities because that is a bigger problem than DACA.
The fact that we have mayors of American cities directly violating Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act violates the supremacy clause and gives Donald Trump the authority to federalize those cities' police departments, just like President Eisenhower did in 1957 when the governor of Arkansas refused to enforce Brown versus Board of Education.
So I think we need border security, but the first thing we need to do is end sanctuary cities immediately.
So what should they do out there?
Well, yeah, California is now a sanctuary state.
What do you do out there?
Same thing.
You bring in the federal troops, game set, and match, because that's what happened.
Eisenhower didn't take on the mayor of Little Rock.
The mayor of Little Rock was on his side.
He took on the segregationist governor of Arkansas because you cannot mess with the federal government.
States can do whatever they want as long as they do not contradict federal law.
And the federal law says it is a crime to do anything to perpetuate the continued illegal status of an alien.
And that's exactly what these mayors and sanctuarist governors are doing.
Yeah, let me go back to Stephen.
Stephen, give me the statistics that your group has now pulled together as it relates to illegal immigrants and costs on the American taxpayer and how percentage-wise the number of crimes that are created.
Because it seems when anyone brings them up, somehow that's a racist statement.
Well, one of the big challenges we don't have good statistics at the federal, at the local level, where most of law enforcement occurs.
The one place where we do have good statistics, the analysis is very troubling, and that is at the federal level.
It looks like about 21% of non-immigration-related crimes are committed by people who are not U.S. citizens, and non-citizens are only about 8% of the population.
So that's about 2.5 times their share of the total.
And of that 8%, only about 4% of the U.S. population is illegal immigrants.
And it does look like most of that 21% of the crimes being committed are being committed by illegals.
So that would look to be several times out of proportion to their share of the population when we look at the one place where we have good statistics, which is the federal government.
And that's very disconcerting.
At the state and local level, it is a more muddied picture.
We have to be clear about that.
But as my colleague Jessica said, there's no question that illegal immigrants are often associated with drug distribution or gang activity, and not enforcing immigration laws creates real public safety issues.
That's the bottom line.
So I actually had the opportunity, Jessica, and I went down to the border.
I've been down there 12 times.
I've been in drug warehouses.
I've been on horseback, all-terrain vehicle.
Let's see.
I've been in helicopters and boats, and I've seen people being arrested that later turned out to be gang members.
The drug warehouses, the tunnels.
I've seen it all everywhere from the Rio Grande straight on across into San Diego.
And it seems to me that, you know what, we have never ever cared about securing that border.
And to me, if it doesn't get done this time, it's never going to get done.
I agree with you.
And that's, you know, you've just stated the rationale for the wall and other kinds of barriers and infrastructure at the border.
It's true.
It's causing problems far from the border.
And it's a necessary piece of, you know, really should happen before any amnesty if possible.
But we have an opportunity now with the expiration of DACA to get some legislation done.
And the President has made it clear that border security has to be a part of that deal.
But there's much more that has to be done.
No matter what we do at the border, it's all going to be undermined as long as people can get here illegally and someone will employ them.
And only about, you know, maybe half or more of illegal immigrants are coming over the border.
Lots of them are overstaying visas as well.
So that's another reason why that interior enforcement is so important.
And that's one aspect of enforcement that's been turned around by the Trump administration.
And they are taking enforcement seriously and removing more people.
But there's some, you know, Congress needs to get into the act as well and fix some of the problems in immigration law and provide ICE and other enforcement agencies with more money and make it possible for local jurisdictions to cooperate and to crack down on sanctuaries.
All that needs to be done as well.
So, you know, it's not like all the problems are going to be fixed by this DACA deal that they come up with, you know, assuming that it's going to be worth signing.
Thanks, all of you, for being with us.
We'll have more on this tonight on Hannity.
Also, Lara Logan from 60 Minutes and CBS will join us tonight.
And we'll have the latest with Sarah Carter and her breaking investigation.
Yeah, in fact, that phony dossier was used in part to get that FISA warrant against Trump and his team.
Nobody else in the media seems to be paying any attention.
One of the biggest breaking news stories of all time.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
Amazing Hannity tonight, Nine Eastern on the Fox News channel.
All right, the fake news dossier timeline.
Also, the dossier being used to get the FISA warrant.
Not going to want to miss any of the Sarah Carter, Greg Jarrett, Peter Schweitzer, Jason Chavitz tonight.
Also, the latest on Media Bias, Joe Concha, Ari Fleischer.
We'll have the latest on the Iranian deal to sanction or not.
By the way, Lara Logan of 60 Minutes will join us.
9 Eastern, Hannity Fox News.
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