Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey drops by 'Hannity' to discuss the ongoing trouble that Conservatives have on Twitter and his stance on the social media giant's efforts to monitor content. Conservatives are welcome on the platform but Sean has a few challenges for Dorsey... The Sean Hannity Show is on 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.
You are listening to the Sean Hannity Radio Show Podcast.
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All right, glad you're with us.
90 days.
That's it.
Three months.
Here we go.
Game on.
And we got a lot of news to get into today.
You know, all this stuff that is going on, Alex Jones, InfoWars, Lewis Furrakhan, YouTube, and, you know, Facebook.
I, for the most part, have just used my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts.
I have them.
But I've taken them all off my phone.
And I'm going to tell you the real reason why.
Now, we use it.
I still will fight with somebody.
Who did I take a shot at?
Oh, Jim, Jimmy Acosta recently.
And I, one night, you know, if I see something that I want to, if I want to do the old Hannity thing, which is I kind of used to in the day enjoy really fighting on Twitter.
And I had some fun wars with a lot of different people, even Alec Baldwin.
It was sad.
His own daughter asked me to stop fighting her father.
I'm like, okay, if you want me to stop and be the bigger person, I'll be glad to.
I don't know why you're asking me and not your own father, but that's interesting.
Interesting.
Interesting.
The greatest talk show segment ever in the history of radio.
But all of this is happening.
Now, on the surface, you might think, oh, this is easy.
No, it's not so easy.
How do you make the decision?
Where's the slippery slope?
I think probably everyone would agree when it comes to certain things that people post.
If you're calling for violence or threatening violence, I think that's kind of a no-brainer for any social media group to get rid of.
Like, for example, remember years ago, we had the anarchist cookbook was out.
Teaches people how to build fertilizer bombs and or the likes or whatever it is, these type of bombs that could kill people.
That was a big controversy at the time.
Now, we all believe in freedom of speech.
Now you have a sidebar issue, and that is that, well, these companies are either privately, publicly held, but this is not the government banning your speech.
These are people making editorial decisions, which, by the way, people make every single day.
They can decide who they want, what they want.
But I think it's a slippery slope if you're going to ban this person with this political point of view and you don't like what this person says.
You know, where does it stop?
And who decides?
And how do you decide?
And what does it do to your business model?
Let me tell you right now, these companies are in total freakout mode over this.
And while I know Alex Jones is controversial, I don't listen to other radio shows.
I've seen segments of his show on MediaIte, for example.
I know that he's got this lawsuit and some comments he made, I guess, post-Sandy Hook, That he didn't think it happened and he calls other things red flags or whatever.
I know he also had supported Trump, but I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to it.
And then there was a great column on media.
Well, okay, where's the ban of Louis Furrakhan?
Now, now you've got a dilemma, don't you?
Because he's a known racist and anti-Semite.
And I'm not comparing the two in any way.
I'm just looking at, I'm just picking out examples as they exist.
You know, I look at Twitter, for example, and I have seen more brutal, hateful, despicable, disgusting comments about me and I don't care.
Memes about me and I don't care.
And people attacking me and I don't care.
I tend to be, as I think many of you know, a First Amendment purist in the sense that as long as you're not advocating violence, you know, look, if I'm a company, you're going to want a white nationalist, Klansman, racist on your site.
I wouldn't.
Nobody really would.
And that's a no-brainer.
What about people that then, you know, on the other side support Lewis Furick?
I wouldn't want him on the, you know, knowing his background and the things he said.
I wouldn't want the things he said on any site that I own.
All right.
What about those people that think they're clever and they're obviously making, you know, as dog whistles, as MSNBC says, you know what they're saying.
You know, they're racist.
You know, they're anti-Semites.
You know, they're virulently anti-gay and hateful.
You know, I don't particularly like bigoted people.
I wouldn't want any of that on my sites.
And so it's, but it gets to be a little more slippery.
You're going to decide how many people would like to have me banned as a mainstream conservative just because they don't like my political points of view.
You know, are you going to ban somebody because they say, you know, oh, this or that?
I can't even bring up all the examples here, but Twitter, for example, decided not to ban Alex Jones or InfoWars.
Anyway, I do have an interview announcement.
Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter.
I think this is far more difficult, far more nuanced than I think a lot of people imagine.
I think that, you know, while Facebook and YouTube officials are hiding under their desks, not knowing what to do next, I really give Jack Dorsey a lot of credit because he agreed to come on the program today.
And really, this is not a confrontational interview I want to have with him.
I want to ask him, how do you decide?
I want to ask him about shadow banning, which has been a big, legitimate complaint by conservatives.
It's sort of like what they do is they do this stealth banning of either a handle or an individual or an account, sort of like ghost banning or comment ghosting.
And in other words, you're sort of blocking from other people the ability to see the content.
And it's sort of isolated from the online community.
And it's a way of kind of censoring them without saying you're censoring them.
And so we'll talk about those issues, which I think are very important.
But the good thing, you know, when we asked Jack to come on the program, he said, look, I don't have all the answers.
We've made mistakes.
I want to get it right.
I want to hear all points of view.
I don't want to be in the censorship business.
The one big thing that we always have to remember in these cases is you get to decide what you look at.
You don't have to look at anything on these social media accounts.
You get to choose.
You get to make the final editorial decision.
And to me, if you have that power, to me, that's everything.
You know, I can't reach through my microphone here, you know, across the airwaves on 570 stations and, you know, grab you and say, listen, now for three hours every day.
I can't.
Best thing I can do is put on the best program I can put on every single day.
And that's my model.
That's what we try to do.
And so far, thanks to all of you, we have been successful.
And we're going to continue because we're looking at this as a news information reporting, investigative reporting, fun, entertaining radio talk show.
Yeah, we're journalists.
Yeah, we're also opinion people.
Yeah, we're also investigative reporters.
Yeah, we sometimes moderate debates.
We interview newsmakers.
Like my interview with Jack Dorsey, I promise it's just going to be a news interview, basically.
I want to ask him, how do you deal?
Where is the line?
How do you find the line?
How do you determine the line?
Do you worry about a competitor that's going to come out and say, all right, but for violence and threats of violence, everything goes, which probably would be appealing to a lot of crazy people.
But I have noticed my own personal self is that while it was fun for me for a while, it just, it started to become an extra job because Twitter can be so addicting.
Social media can be so addicting that I find you just don't put it down.
All right, that's it.
I'm done.
Wait, somebody just responded.
Let me say this to them.
Wait, I just, one more thing, or I'm in a fight with, you know, that idiot over at ABC.
What's that comedian's name at late at night that nobody watches?
You know, we have twice the ratings that this idiot has.
You know, nobody knows.
Everybody thinks you're on a network and that these networks have the numbers they used to have.
No, they don't.
They don't have anywhere near the numbers that they used to have.
You know, all these late night shows, we have higher ratings than.
All of them on hand, well, thanks to you, on Hannity, on cable, not on broadcast.
You know, when the Singapore summit took place, we beat everybody.
CBS, ABC, NBC, obviously, whatever so-called news competition we have on cable, we beat them all.
It is a new environment.
That's why I was surprised.
I know that Stern, Howard Stern, is friends with Jimmy Kimmel, which is fine with me.
He said, what is Kimmel getting in a spat with Hannity for?
You know, Hannity's on cable.
Hannity probably is dying to be on network.
And I'm like, Howard, where have you been?
You know media more than anybody.
We get twice the ratings this friend of yours gets every day.
And anyway, but they're earning their low ratings in most of the fake news media, but that's a different story for a different day.
All right, so he'll join us coming up.
We're going to look at, well, the polls.
We're 90 days out of the election.
John McLaughlin and Doug Schoen join us in the course of the program.
The president's attorney, Jay Seculo, will also be with us.
Everybody, I think, in the media is getting wrong.
Look at, by the way, Kolbach's comeback.
It looks like he's going to win defeating a sitting governor for the Republican nomination in, where is it?
Missouri.
Now, um, what are you, what are you eating?
I'm sorry, I'm having a piece of biscotti.
I didn't know you were going to talk to me.
Uh-huh.
Because your accent is less less pronounced when you have biscotti in your mouth.
You know, by the way, Linda eats the single most disgusting food I've ever seen in my life.
She literally talked about all the, but she didn't give me any, so good, good luck.
John James in Michigan.
I don't want any, but that's not the point.
She eats something that is grotesque that looks like pumpkin orange.
And it's like, it's like a fuel.
First of all, it's but it reminds me of Oliver.
Please, sir, I want some more.
It's like squash soup.
We don't want this thing.
Don't give it to me.
Oh my God, his wife made it.
Just eat it.
What's wrong with you?
No, because I got it because I asked him for, because I reminded him, he gave all of you pieces.
He didn't give me one.
Are you afraid you're going to put on a couple of ounces?
Is that what you're worried about?
All right, listen, Mr. I'm in shape back there.
You're getting in better shape, which I applaud you for.
I've actually done sit-ups the last three days.
Three days.
Ooh, amazing.
Yeah.
You know how many I had to do today?
200.
I'm up to 200 sit-ups a day.
Oh, cry me a river.
Yeah, but now I'm doing different sit-ups.
I do the sit-ups where I have to get up like Rocky and throw punches left, right, left, right?
It's hard.
It's just, but I do it.
All right, let's go to the election last night.
And the president pointed out rightly this morning, the media will never point it out, that he was five for five in last night's elections, very close in the Ohio 12th District.
It's not final, but as of right now, we know that Troy Balderson leads by 0.9 percentage points, 1,754 votes over Democrat Danny O'Connor, 100 Precincts fully reporting, but they've got some provisional absentee ballots.
Here's what's fascinating in the media won't tell you about that race.
There's a number of things.
Number one, the early voting was devastating, absolutely brutal to Troy Balderson.
He was getting killed.
Matter of fact, I spoke to a really good friend of mine in Ohio that knows all the numbers there.
He was so far behind, he didn't think he'd be able to come back.
The only reason I would argue is because Trump went in on Saturday night, literally dragged this guy across his back over the finish line.
A guy, though, Franklin County is in his district, one of the biggest counties, in his petition, the Ohio 12th District, and he trashed the whole county because his opponent, Danny O'Connor, is from there.
I'm like, how stupid are you?
And then he's talking about taking away people's Medicare.
That's also dumb.
But in spite of it, he won.
He needs to rectify that, in my humble opinion, in the next 90 days if he wants a chance.
But, you know, as the president pointed out, five for five for him.
Republicans have now won eight out of nine House seats.
If you listen to the fake news media, you would think that they're being clobbered.
We're being clobbered.
Why can't they play it straight?
It's unfair to the Republican Party, in particular, your favorite president.
Then he says, as long as I campaign support Senate House candidates within reason, they're going to win.
And he said, if I find the time to hit the campaign trail, we'll have a giant red wave.
I'll get into all of that.
We have some really blockbuster, big, massive news as it relates to the deep state.
We have the latest on the Manafort witch hunt.
And now Democrats are scared to death because the Mueller team has been beaten up so badly by this judge, Judge Ellis, in this case.
We'll get into the details and the revelations.
We'll see if maybe Mueller's guy cried again in court.
Big cry baby.
All right, 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program?
You know, if the anti-Trump resistance was counting on a big blue wave this year, they failed miserably.
Now, you also have to understand one other thing: you cannot transfer charisma.
There are some horrible candidates, by the way, both Republican and Democrat.
I mean, they're just horrible.
And I'm just not going to start mentioning names, but I'm just telling you that they're dumb.
They have no charisma.
They have no personality.
They can't speak.
They can't communicate.
And they make it very hard.
And just because somebody that does have charisma or is light, they can't necessarily pull them over the finish line.
Even the Washington Post pointed out that Democratic resistance hit a wall in last night's election.
And, you know, they're pretty much the Democratic Party's leading, you know, go-to newspaper along with the New York Times, but admitting that the left wing of the Democratic Party, the engine of the Trump resistance, crashed and burned in last night's primary.
That's not being reported.
I think the funniest thing is you got Hollywood nut jobs, Alyssa Milano and company.
They're blaming the Russians for all the Democrats losing last night.
And all the candidates that were endorsed by the Democratic socialist rising star, Ocasio-Cortez, went down to defeat.
We'll get into all of that and much more.
And we've got some big breaking news as it relates to the deep state.
Stay with us.
And Jay Seculo will join us.
And the CEO of Twitter joins us today.
Hi, 25 to the top of the hour, 800-941-Sean.
Toll-free telephone number.
So in Kansas, what is wrong with me sometimes?
I was up late last night like a maniac following every one of these election results.
Anyway, Chris Kobach has upset the sitting governor 40.6% to 40.5%, 126,257 to 126,66 votes, 191 vote difference.
Now, I know they got other absentee ballots, just like in the Ohio 12.
I don't think Ohio 12 is in any danger of changing, and I tend to think that probably the same is true in Kansas, but new state law allows ballots postmarked as of Tuesday to be counted so long as they arrive three days after the election.
But you have the sitting governor and Chris Kolbach virtually tied atop a seven candidate field, two-thirds of the precincts counted.
And Kolbach, who is the Kansas Secretary of State, is a strong conservative, tough on immigration and believes in strict voter ID laws.
But, you know, given the close margin here, we know that there were some final results were a little slowed by Johnson County.
They had some tabulation problems.
You never know what that means.
But anyway, the presidents of thousands as yet uncounted provisional ballots, extraordinary problems with the count.
Johnson County election is too close to call, but Chris Kolbach is winning.
We'd love to see him win that seat.
Another race that a lot of people were paying attention to, the president talked about Michigan Republican Senate candidate John James, who will be getting on this program, is a star of the GOP.
He's a conservative.
He's an Iraq war veteran.
And he won the state's primary on Tuesday, happens to be African American.
President tweeted out, congratulations to future star of the Republican Party, future Senator John James.
A big and bold victory tonight in the great state of Michigan, the first of many.
November cannot come fast enough, the president tweeted, which I thought was, you know what?
This race, that's going to be very interesting.
Wisconsin's going to be very interesting.
You know, I think the biggest problem for the Democrats in 90 days is they don't have a vision.
They don't have any plans except, oh, we want, even though they're crumbs, we want them back.
Remember, they're saying, oh, the tacket's only mere crumbs for people.
Well, they're just crumbs, you know, $1,000, $2,000 a family.
Why do you want the crumbs back so bad?
Why are you running on taking the crumbs back?
Why are you running on eliminating ice and open borders?
You know, that's not good for national security, and it's not good for job opportunities for Americans.
Doesn't mean we can't have a big door in the wall that we build with Mexico.
Can.
I'd like an opportunity to vet anybody that comes into the country or that wants to come into the country.
Vet them based on, we want to make sure they're friends of this country.
What do you see what we're doing with Secretary Nielsen tonight on Hannity?
You know, the drones by these drug cartels in Mexico, they fly drones into our airspace.
And what they're doing is they're basically scoping out where the security people are so they can literally dictate and guide drug smugglers to the route that is safest for them to get their drugs into the country.
And worse, human trafficking as well.
You know, we can't, if that one such drone, you know, they got these small drones now.
They fly them everywhere.
And networks are now beginning to use them instead of helicopters.
And you can actually arm even a small drone.
It's pretty scary.
You know, remember the video of the Amazon package being dropped on your door?
Okay, but you can arm it.
And the problem is, is you think we could actually take that drone out of the air and say, stop using drones to see where our security forces are?
No, we can't because we have to get a warrant.
It's a drone that comes in from Mexico, as I understand it.
Apparently, we have video of it.
And we're not allowed to do a thing violating our airspace, making sure that whatever smuggling is going on, human trafficking, drug trafficking, that they can know exactly where our security forces are.
Why would we need a warrant to take that out of the air?
It's not risking human life or capture it.
Do something.
Anyway, we'll get into that.
But the biggest problem, look, the Democrats, they want to impeach the president.
They're not saying it.
They're basically, it's a lie by omission, but they do, the left wing of their party.
So they've tried to silence everybody who was saying it.
And they want their crumbs back.
They want to rescind the tax cuts.
They're running on hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Trump.
Impeach, impeach, impeach, impeach Trump.
Then they want to open borders, eliminate ICE.
They want to keep Obamacare.
And they have no agenda.
They want to basically take us back to what the Obama years were like.
I'm not going to go through all of Obama's statistics.
If you listen to this program regularly, you know how bad it was.
And if you're just watching, you know how bad it is and how things have turned around economically.
You know, on top of 14 states with record low unemployment, on top of women in the workforce record low unemployment, and Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans and African Americans, historic lows.
Told you the news out of Bloomberg yesterday under the president's watch in the three months through July, the employment to population ratio for black Americans is in Bloomberg, average 58.3% employment to population ratio.
In other words, what's happening in the labor market, that is just a 2.3 percentage point difference between white Americans.
Again, everybody breaks things down demographically.
Why is that important?
It's the smallest gap on record going back to 1972.
What does that mean?
We want equality of opportunity in America.
What does that mean?
That means that everybody is prospering under the conservative economic policies of the president, the tax cuts of the president, the deregulation of the president, the energy production increases of the president.
It's only the beginning.
If we ever really tap into our energy resources, I mean, it's going to be amazing.
I love how all these Chicago Democratic legislators have given up on Deadfish Emmanuel.
They're begging the president intervene, you know, to stop the carnage.
Look what happened last weekend.
Oh, but Deadfish is blaming Chicago's residents for the 71 people shot over last weekend.
And he said that it's up to the city residents to put an end to the rolling massacre that's sweeping his city.
Oh, really?
It's their job?
What are we supposed to do?
We're going to get moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and, you know, little old ladies out with, you know, what, a broom?
We're going to take our kitchen knife outside when they're firing bullets at you.
How are you going to defend against that?
No, we need a police presence to protect and serve our fellow citizens in Chicago that are being massacred.
Just like Rudy did in New York, successfully.
Comes in, New York is a pit, an absolute disaster.
You had these squeegee guys.
They'd stop you at a red light, try and clean your windshield with filthy, dirty water, and demand money.
Not ask for money.
They demanded money.
Homeless was out of control.
Homelessness, averaging almost 2,500 murders a year.
That was driven down to like three, four, less than 500.
And it stayed that way because of tough policing.
And people's lives were saved.
This takes the cake, by the way.
This was on Foxnews.com, an MS-13 killer held in the Nassau County Jail.
My mom worked there, I think, what, 25 years as a prison guard.
Know all about the Nassau County Jail.
She kept predicting I might end up there myself.
Anyway, this guy is complaining that, you know, not all that far from where I live, he's apparently murdered so many people.
His nickname is the Reaper.
Turns out the Reaper doesn't like the fact that he's been put in jail.
And he's complaining.
Long Island's newspaper is called Newsday.
I even delivered that paper.
I delivered the Daily News.
I delivered the Long Island Press.
All three of them, at some point, I had a paper out for all of them.
Yeah, and I don't want the Daily News to go out of business.
And the Daily News hates me.
Didn't they put me on the cover for something?
I was on, I think it was over the Michael Cohn, I'm the third client thing that wasn't true.
I think they put me on the cover.
Didn't they put me on the I finally got a tabloid cover?
It was great.
Anyway, he says he's suffering in America, that he's a victim of discrimination, and he's ticked off that his fellow inmates call him El Chapo.
I don't know who you're going to complain to.
Nancy Pelosi, maybe she'll sympathize with you.
Anyway, he's an alleged major drug trafficker.
He's accused of being a kingpin in the brutal MS-13 gang, telling a judge that life in lockup is unbearable, complaining about a lack of phone access and discrimination.
He's facing in jail.
I don't even know what to say to all that.
Anyway, back to last night's elections.
So president's saying he's five for five.
Trump candidates winning.
A big, big win in Missouri, where the Attorney General won the GOP Senate primary.
This guy by the name of Josh Hawley, he's the guy that I hope takes out Claire McCaskill.
Pay close attention.
All these people will be on the show in the next 90 days, the important races.
Their resistance hit a wall.
I mean, it was fascinating to watch that every single solitary person that the new rising Democratic star, Ocasio-Cortez, supported, didn't win.
It's like a kiss of death if she gave you her socialist endorsement.
Washington Post says the Democratic Party's left-wing insurgency found its limits Tuesday night with voters favoring establishment candidates over the more liberal challengers in almost every closely watched race across several states.
They go on to give a list of those states.
I think my favorite item of the day, though, is about Hollywood.
You know, what would we do without Hollywood?
Alyssa Milano.
What show was she on?
Do you remember what show she was on?
Who's the boss?
Who's the boss?
Charmed.
Who's the boss?
I don't know.
She blamed the Russians after the Democrats lost Tuesday night in the special election in Ohio.
You know what sucks, she writes, because of our unwillingness to pass policy that protects our election integrity.
I immediately think the Green Party votes tonight are Russian meddling.
Why else would anyone cast a protest vote in Ohio when there's so much at stake?
It turns out even the Green Party candidate out of the race, but by the way, the Green Party without the race, still the Republican would have won.
Maybe we should get her a calculator for Christmas.
You know, all these candidates, celebrities trashing Ohio voters.
That's another thing.
It shows what contempt they have.
You know, it's Chelsea Handler tried to weigh in.
Breaking news, special elections, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, John Legend, Bette Midler, Alyssa Milano.
I don't even know half these people.
Deborah Messi.
I hate Hollywood.
I think I'm the only person on earth that has every, you know, Cinemac, Showtime.
I got all those HBO.
And there are some good series occasionally, good shows occasionally.
I got Netflix.
I got it all.
I think I'm the only person that literally can go through everything.
I will scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll.
And then I'll still go back to like Gladiator or Braveheart because there's nothing good.
I think these shows are awful.
It's amazing the garbage that gets put out there every day.
You know, if you want to go back, you know, well, Democrats have gained 44 state legislative seats in, what, the almost two years since Trump's in office.
Everybody seems to forget nearly 1,000 state legislative seats were gained by Republicans under Obama.
Nearly 1,000.
I mean, if you look at it, it is remarkable the damage that Obama actually did to the country and to the Democratic Party.
You know, but we do know that there are some good things, you know, with the economy that are going on.
All right, we've got a couple of stories that are emerging here.
And one of them really has to do with Bruce Orr.
And we broke this with John Solomon last night.
Everything that we know is even worse than what we thought.
You know, clear evidence that the former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Orr was exactly at the very center of the Clinton's campaign effort to influence, yes, rig Steele with your federal government as a tool to do it, an election against Donald Trump.
You can't make up what's happening.
And we've got two breaking stories that should be ready by tonight for Hannity at nine that are even going to take this further.
It is so much worse than we ever thought.
Senior DOJ official helping Bruce Orr, helping Democratic researchers.
In other words, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, Bruce Orr.
They're all meeting.
They tried to defeat Trump before the election with these lies and then after they tried to undermine him.
It's all true, every bit of it.
So we'll get into that when we get back.
A lot to get to.
Also, the Twitter CEO, in light of what's happened to InfoWars and a decision by YouTube and others, Facebook, to get rid of Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan was another one, but they only partially banned him.
How do you make the decisions?
It's a little more nuanced and complicated, I think, than people think.
There's some obvious choices.
What do you do when it's not so obvious?
All right, as we roll along, Sean Hannity Show hour two, 800-941.
Sean is a toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
I am getting word that the story that we broke last night on Hannity, everything that we thought we knew about how the deep state, high-ranking officials, Justice Department, FBI, et cetera, were coordinating in their attempt to derail the Trump candidacy.
And then later the Trump presidency has now gotten extraordinarily worse with the revelations that came out, hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails and memos providing the clearest evidence yet that Fusion GPS with the funneled money from Hillary and the DNC to find dirt on Donald Trump,
which resulted in the hiring of a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, and how that not only was that disseminated in an effort to debunk lies from Russia to influence the American people, but also then after the election, that in fact that there were a series of emails and meetings and correspondence with the Deputy Attorney General Bruce Orr, who reported to the Deputy AG Sally Yates,
where they maintained contact with Fusion GPS and in particular their primary source, British spy Christopher Steele.
This is both before, during, and after the election.
And it's worse than we thought.
And we have Orr's own notes.
He's far more extensively involved.
Remember, his wife worked for Fusion GPS for Glenn Simpson.
And the emails and text messages show that he communicated extensively with Christopher Steele, who in an interrogatory in Great Britain under the threat of perjury actually said, well, that's just raw intelligence.
I don't know if any of it's true.
50-50 chance may be at best.
But these notes now show these documents now have been turned over in recent weeks, and now we're slowly beginning to get them out.
What we're learning today, I'll just give you a headline of what we expect to be out by the time we get on at 9 Eastern tonight, is that you have Steele, you know, writing or, and apparently, there was an effort and an attempt repeatedly to meet with, contact, and perhaps even had contact with Robert Mueller, you know, and the special counsel and the special counsel colleagues,
And that they were disappointed because they would risk everything to help reach the truth, even though this whole thing was debunked.
On top of lying to FISA court judges.
We'll get into all of this in the course of this program and also tonight on Hannity 9 Eastern.
First, joining us, he is the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, counsel to the president.
Jay Sekulo is back with us.
Good to talk to you, sir.
How are you?
You too.
Good.
I want to first go to the biggest question that everybody seems to now be asking, and it seems like a decision is in the process of being made, and that is whether the president, who had stated himself that he would not mind speaking to Robert Mueller, will in fact speak to Robert Mueller, which every attorney that I know is saying is a bad idea.
You happen to be the president's attorney.
Right.
Well, look, we've said this is an ongoing process, and in that process, you evaluate the situation and you make recommendations.
Look, I've been very clear.
It was on your broadcast last night on television.
I've said it on my own broadcast.
My inclination, the inclination of the legal team is not, we haven't been shy about this, is not to allow the president to sit down for an interview for a whole host of reasons, the most significant of which is we believe that it's inappropriate under Article 2 of the United States Constitution.
Having said that, and as I've said before, the president has expressed a desire to sit down, so that's why you continue negotiations, because ultimately the president's the one that makes the decision, but we have strong recommendations.
And as more of this information comes out, as you just reported, that goes to the fundamental issue that I've been saying for a long time is you look at what commenced in the beginning of this inquiry.
What started this investigation?
And there has been, I mean, corruption from the start of this, and unfortunately it permeates the whole situation.
And you could go through the parade of horribles, as I call it again.
But in the reality, there's not a lawyer in America that would say under those circumstances, oh, just let the president walk in for an interview.
We're not going to do that anyways.
I mean, no one's going to let anybody just walk into an interview.
So there's a process you go through.
And part of that process, the most significant part of that process, is you weigh the issues as it relates to the United States Constitution, the impact on the president, current, and the office of the presidency.
And that's what we are dealing with.
And at the end of the day, we will then make the conclusion.
We sent in a response today.
I'm not going to get into the content of that response.
But needless to say, what we are proposing is something that we would be comfortable with.
Whether they are, whether Bob Mueller's team is or not, that's going to be up to them.
Well, I mean, I got to assume at some point this is now going to come to a head here.
Is it coming to a head?
Are we going to know for sure in a relatively short period of time?
Because as far as I can tell, and looking from the outside in, it seems like this has been going on now for quite a long time.
So, look, I mean, if you look at it historically, it's not that long in the sense of the negotiation about an interview because this is what happens in these kind of situations.
There's a back and forth.
But I've been practicing law a long time.
I've represented you for a long time.
I mean, let's be realistic here.
You know me, and you've known me for a long time as your friend and your lawyer.
I don't give dates.
I don't say.
No, and you're a very tough lawyer.
Look, I love you both as a friend and a lawyer.
And I know how tough you are, and I know you're very methodical.
And I think I have a pretty good understanding of how you think.
I just think to me, look, I look at, you know how I feel about Robert Mueller.
You know how I feel about Andrew Weissman.
You know how I feel about, you know, the team of Jeannie Ray.
Why is she there?
She worked for the Clinton Foundation, Andrew Weissman's track record.
You know, right now we're watching the trial of the century.
Paul Manafort is, you know, this has nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with collusion, nothing to do with the president, nothing to do with the campaign.
But there's an indictment about tax charges from 2005.
Judge Ellis in the case said this is to put the screws to Manafort so he'll sing or compose for the purpose of impeaching or prosecuting President Trump.
That's scary.
This is the situation that we have.
And this is what my colleague and friend Rudy Giuliani said.
He said today that millions of pages of documents have already been given.
Testimony from dozens of witnesses have been provided.
And we're restating what we've been saying for a long time, and that is it's time for the Office of Special Counsel to conclude its inquiry without further delay.
We believe that.
We believe that we've been the most transparent of any type of presidential inquiry there's ever been.
We've handed over, I mean, that's just from the White House side of 1.4 million documents.
There's others as well.
I mean, 1.4 million documents, campaign documents, part of that.
I mean, there are a lot of documents, millions, and witnesses.
So there are two witnesses to go hold it.
And we've allowed those witnesses to go forward.
And now they want to ask the president, what were you thinking when you fired James Comey?
The answer to that is no.
You don't get to ask that question in our view.
So you come back with, as these things work through to answer your question, you come back then with a response to the special counsel that says, this is what we're willing to do.
This is where we're not willing to go and see if there is a place that we can arrive at.
You know, you always hope you can.
We'll see.
There are two issues.
One is, quote, obstruction.
The other would be some type of collusion, or now they're using the word conspiracy with Russia.
You know, I'm looking at, I don't think from the beginning this was a legitimate special counsel.
I think there's a certain illegitimacy to this.
Number one, I think that politics.
I think he started as a counterintelligence investigation and morphed into this other because why?
Because there's not evidence of collusion with the Russians on the campaign.
Okay, there's none.
And what's frustrating to me as somebody that has been peeling every layer of the onion and pointing out that there is evidence of some Russian interference and collusion that nobody seems to want to pay attention to, and that's Hillary funneling money to a law firm, Perkins Cooey, and Perkins Cooey hiring Fusion GPS, and they're hiring a foreign agent by the name of Christopher Steele.
And Christopher Steele is then, you know, providing salacious details that had never been verified about Donald Trump.
As a matter of fact, now have been debunked.
And that becomes the basis of a FISA warrant.
More importantly, that information is spread to the American people, which is nothing but propaganda, misinformation, and lies.
And it was used to get a Pfizer warrant to spy on an American citizen who happened to be a campaign associate of Trump in an election year, Jay.
Yeah, this is, look, I call it the parade of horribles.
You remember, I was critical of James Comey when he intervened by, you know, doing that whole stunt he did where he laid out all the facts and then said, I'm not going to, I don't think he should have said anything.
Then he reopens it, then he closes it again.
That kind of what he did there, as the inspector general said, was wrong from the start and violated the internal rules and regulations of the United States Department of Justice.
Now, we're still waiting for the IG report as it relates just to James Comey.
But the issues of bias, all of this, look, all of this factors in.
You have to look at all of this when it comes down to the question that everybody's debating today and talking about, and that is whether there will be an interview or not.
And I think what we have to understand, and this is, I believe, in our view, as the president's lawyers here, that we have to look at all of these factors and then make the recommendation that we think is correct.
And as I said, we're not inclined to have him sit down for an interview.
That doesn't mean it won't happen.
But that's not our inclination.
And so far, we haven't been, we have not, in our view, have not really seen anywhere near the standard.
First of all, I think there's a whole prohibition under the Constitution.
And then under the ESP case, which I don't want to get in the weeds here, which is a case that governs the District of Columbia, there's a two-part standard.
I don't believe they've met that.
Having said that, the president has said he would like to interview if possible.
I hope at the end of the day he will, and I believe he will, listen to his lawyers.
But we'll make an informed decision.
Do I think it's coming sooner rather than later?
Yes, but that's not an answer to your question on when.
Sooner rather than later.
Yeah, I think that's.
I do think it's time for this to be put to bed.
When does this end?
I mean, and how do you think it ends?
Well, it ends with a report.
I mean, remember, this is not a trial.
This is a report.
There'll be a report.
That report will say whatever they put in.
We're drafting our own, as you can imagine.
We've been involved in the evidence for over a year now on the legal side of this.
And I think, as Rudy Julian Honey said, there's still a lot of negotiating to be done if there's any kind of movement on a possibility of an interview.
We'll see.
Written questions as a form of an interview, too, and there's a historic precedent for that.
Lawrence Walsh did that with Ronald Reagan.
So there's historic precedent for that.
We'll see.
You know, look, I'm hopeful that it gets resolved quickly for the good of the country and for the fact that I really believe that there's no more witnesses to interview as far as we know.
There's no more documents to turn over.
That's where it is.
Let me ask you.
I want to say this.
A demand to interview the president is this is not like interviewing any other person that's a potential defendant in a case.
It's the president of the United States, and the constitutional impact of that is very significant.
Well, the Constitution is with the president.
And if Mueller were to subpoena, what is that?
Potentially a year or longer long fight that goes to the Supreme Court?
Look, I mean, I can't remember.
I came in this case because that's what I do, is Supreme Court practice.
And look, the constitutional issue here is significant.
You'd go to a district court with a motion to quash.
That would take a period of time.
Then you go to a court of appeals, and then probably the entire court of appeals for the District of Columbia.
It's called an unbank review.
And then either side wins or loses.
They'll take the case up on a petition for surferary.
That'll be argued for a period of time.
Yeah, it could take any ⁇ I mean, it could easily take a year.
Let me ask you a question.
I don't know if that's where this goes.
I think that, you know, maybe it does, but I'm hard-pressed to me to believe that the Department of Justice would do that in light of their own policies and guidelines in light of the existing precedent.
With all the talk about, well, oh, what the president had said well over a year ago that, yeah, at this meeting at Trump Tower, there might have been some talk about, oh, we've got some information on Hillary you might be interested in, which is perfectly legal, and every politician would take that call and meeting.
But there is evidence of collusion or conspiracy because we got a tape of Adam Schiff, Jay Secul.
I want to play a little bit of it for you where he's dying to get information and dirt on Donald Trump from a Russian.
Okay, and so Buceva met with Trump in New York at some point after the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
Absolutely.
And she got compromising materials on Trout after their short relations.
Okay.
And what's the nature of the compromise?
Well, there were pictures of naked Trump.
Okay.
And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the compromising material?
Yes, of course.
Buzava shared those materials with Sobchak, and Sobshak shares those materials with Putin because she's a goddaughter of Putin and Putin decided to press on Trump.
And the materials that you can provide to the committee or to the FBI, would they corroborate this allegation?
Sure, of course.
When they were in Ukraine, we got their own.
Just for the sake of time, I mean, and it goes on.
How is that any different from what they're accusing the president of and his family of?
I'll give you the biggest difference.
The conversation that took place based on what Don Jr. and others have said was based on what?
Was ended up being not about compromising campaign material, but ended up, the substantive conversation ended up being about the Maginsky Act and the Russian adoption.
So there you have it.
That would be a very important thing.
There's nothing illegal of somebody to meet with somebody.
Oh, you got information on my opponent.
What is it?
Doesn't that happen every?
And then you got the dossier that Hillary paid for, except that was Russian lies she paid for.
You know, here's what people do gloss over, and I think Alan Dershowitz has been really effective on this, and that is in the context of campaign finance law.
And I argued one of the campaign finance cases at the Supreme Court.
20 seconds.
No, it was actually a portion of McCain fine goal.
I had Title III, which involved minors not being able to contribute to campaigns.
Same kind of rationale of what it would mean to elections.
And I won that case in my section 9-0.
And there's overriding a lot of this, and you have to put it under the context.
You have a statute that has to be interpreted consistent with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Jay secular.
Give information, but receive information.
Thanks, Jay.
I've got a role here, the CEO of Twitter.
Jack Dorsey, next.
A lot has now come up in recent days as Facebook and YouTube are banning Alex Jones.
And, you know, a couple of things that are in play here.
One, people saying, well, it's a violation of First Amendment rights.
And, well, they actually do.
It's not really a First Amendment issue in the sense that as long as it's not government censoring, these are companies.
And if companies make decisions that they don't like the content, but the question is, what's going to happen?
You know, who gets to make these decisions?
Who gets to decide?
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a decision not to ban Alex Jones, but then the issue of Louis Furrakhan comes up, and that was brought up immediately after Alex Jones.
And then YouTube only banned part of Louis Furrakhan, not other parts of Lewis Furrakhan.
And I think what you've got here, very complicated issue.
Then the issue of shadow banning or stealth banning or ghost banning or comment ghosting is what it's an act basically that some companies have used to block a user and their content from the online community such that, yeah, they might have put it up there, but there's no way anybody could either see it or spread it because of the algorithms that these guys are able to put in place.
It raises a whole host of issues here.
My prediction is that if certain people are banned, and listen, if you're on any social media, you know how vile it can get.
And I'll just speak for myself and my experience.
The things that have been said, the pictures that have been made up, the vile, vicious threats that I have received are all there.
I tend to be myself a First Amendment absolutist.
In other words, I think, for example, on television, on radio, and on social media, we all make decisions about the content that we choose to engage in.
In other words, you are the final arbiter.
And if these companies are going to decide, well, this person stays and this person goes, and maybe they have one political bent over another political bent, I would imagine over some period of time that there's going to be alternative competitors that allow everybody to say pretty much anything they want.
Now, it gets more complicated.
What if somebody is giving out instructions?
Like years ago, the anarchist cookbook was a big controversy.
What if you're teaching people how to build bombs to hurt people?
What do you do in cases if people are making direct threats?
What do you do with people that are just plain absolute hate racists, bigots, anti-Semites?
What do you do in that case?
Where does the line get drawn?
It's not the simple.
It's not as simple when you really want to have an honest discussion about it as it may seem on the surface.
Anyway, it's his first, and I think it's going to be his only interview.
Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter.
I really appreciate you coming on because I'm sure this is probably the last thing you want to do is come on my radio program.
But I appreciate you coming on and answering the questions.
You have decided not to ban Alex Jones in his particular case.
Your argument was he hasn't violated your rules, but I think this is far more complicated than I think some people might understand.
How are you?
Well, thank you, Sean, for the first for the opportunity to talk with your listeners and also painting a picture of the complexities that we're facing.
This is definitely not easy, but we're trying to approach this with a very simple principle: how do we earn more trust?
And the way for us to earn more trust around how we make decisions, the algorithms that help us enforce these decisions, is try to be as open as possible about them.
We haven't done a great job at that in the past.
We're trying to communicate a lot more in a clear and straightforward way, but there's a lot of nuance in everything that we're facing.
And we want to make sure that where have you not done a good job, Jack?
Where do you think you've fallen short in terms of this particular issue?
Well, I think the first thing is that we, you know, in the past, we did not communicate why we would take action on tweets or why we might suspend temporarily or permanently.
We want to communicate those reasons to the person who was suspended or tweets in question and also the reporters.
So simple communication within the product.
But more broadly, we haven't done a great job at communicating our principles, the guidelines that help us make the decisions in the first place.
So we're getting better and better step by step, but we have a lot more work to do there.
Let me ask about specific questions.
Has Twitter ever been involved in shadow banning?
We do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content, period.
Every model that we have on the network is really looking at the behaviors on the network.
We take those behaviors as signals.
And I do want to point out that these signals evolve minute by minute, hourly by hourly.
These are not scarlet permanent letters that people then take on as a badge and will never be ranked high in search or not allowed to trend or ranked high in conversation.
So these are models that are looking at behaviors and behaviors of bad faith actors who intend to manipulate, distract, divide a conversation or to unfairly amplify their content, which they didn't earn.
So those are the signals that factor in.
And we do rank search.
We do rank trends and we do rank conversations accordingly.
That does not affect one's timeline.
If you follow someone on Twitter, you're going to see them in your timeline.
Now, we do rank the timeline for relevance.
So it might take some scrolling to see everything.
But you can also turn that ranking off in the settings so you can see everything in recency order.
What about, and I think this might be something everybody agrees on.
Let's start with people that are calling for some type of violence of any kind or threatening violence against an individual.
I think that would probably be an easy, we're not going to allow that, right?
Yes, that is much easier.
Any sort of violent speech encouragement towards violence, harassment is directly against our terms of service, and we take immediate action on it.
What if somebody, now it gets more nuanced?
Oh, I wish somebody would just punch Hannity in the face.
What do you do then?
Well, we have to, in all these considerations, not to get into specifics, we have to take the context.
We have to really understand what the context of the conversation is.
And this is extremely hard for an algorithm to do and certainly hard for humans to do.
So we make sure that all of our folks understand the cultural context that something is said.
Because some cultural contexts allow for some speech that enable some speech that other cultural contexts don't.
So as we review cases of reports or blocks or mutes, we have to make sure that we're taking into consideration that context and then acting appropriately and doing so with warnings, with notices, with a temporary lock of the account until that tweet is reviewed or deleted and ideally giving them the exact reasons why it violates.
And you have enough people that would be able to monitor and handle that, that you won't miss threats?
We'll certainly miss things.
We're certainly going to make mistakes along the way.
That's why it's important for us to make sure that we have...
I think it's more complicated than everybody knows here.
Now, what do you do in the case of a figure that is known either a white racist or supremacist or a KKC member, or maybe on the other end of the spectrum, you've got Louis Furrakhan, known anti-Semite racist?
What do you do when they set up an account?
Is it that you monitor them?
And if it's a certain video that they're linking to, if it's a certain article that has racist ramblings in it, then it becomes a little, again, it becomes a little more nuanced sometimes.
Or maybe somebody is an overt racist and they use horrible language.
And then maybe somebody is more subtle and they use code language that is racist.
In that sense, it becomes harder, does it?
Does it not?
It does become harder.
So we rely on a bunch of signals, including reports from those who that account might attack or from bystanders.
And then we also take into consideration, again, the context of everything that's happening around it.
Some of the groups that you mentioned earlier on, there might be violent extremist groups that try to get onto our service.
And we take that into consideration.
We also look in those particular cases at off-platform behavior as well.
So things that aren't just happening on Twitter, but happening on other platforms or in the real world.
All right.
Well, at Jack, by the way, if you ever want to write the CEO of Twitter, and I know you're trying to respond to many people because I've seen your account, we'll come back.
I want to discuss the slippery slope aspect of this, if it's political content or controversial content, and how do you make decisions on those things?
And as we continue, Jack Dorsey is with us.
He is the CEO of Twitter.
At Jack is his handle if you want to write him about any of the issues we're discussing as it relates to, okay, how are the decisions made that some people get to post and some people...
Well, let me ask you about this particular case.
I know people, there are a lot of people that like Alex Jones.
He has a fairly significant audience.
Yeah, he said what he said about Sandy Hook.
I've actually never really heard his show.
I've only seen clips on like Mediaite of him.
I don't listen to any, really anybody else's show.
I just try to focus on my own shows.
But now, what I think most of your Twitter people that use Twitter are probably concerned about is when it's a slippery slope.
You know, who gets to decide what's controversial content?
Who gets to decide what gets pulled off and what doesn't get pulled off?
Who gets to decide any of this?
Isn't there an argument to be made, Jack, that the people should decide, meaning they don't have to go to that Twitter account.
They don't have to read certain things.
And from my own experience, you can go look at my timeline, and I promise you, you're going to see horrific things about me.
And by the way, they make up, what do you call these things, memes that they make up?
You know, they're pretty vicious and hostile.
I prefer my kids not see them, but I'm a kind of First Amendment purist in a way.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things here.
So first, yes, people should decide who they follow and who they want to hear from.
And that's a, you know, that's a fairly mechanical action, hitting the follow button.
And those tweets should appear in your timeline.
Do try to rank them for relevance of what you think, of what the algorithm thinks based on all your behaviors, what you should see first, but everything is there.
Second, there are areas of the service like search and trends and replies where anyone can inject themselves.
And one of the things that we have noticed is there are certain behaviors that silence speech.
They silence voices.
And we want to make sure that people have a lot more control over their experience to make sure if they want to engage in that sort of conversation, they're able to.
But if they don't, it's downright.
So they don't have to see it immediately.
But if they want to see it, it is there.
Are you concerned that if you make a decision, say, on Alex Jones or somebody, Louis Farrakhan is controversial?
I'm not comparing the two and anything.
I'm just giving two names just out of a hat.
That if this happens, do you see an alternative Twitter universe that lets it all go?
Maybe with the exception of violence or threats to individuals.
I mean, is that like, for example, I mean, look, at least you're willing to come on this show and answer some questions for people.
I applaud you for that.
Facebook and I know YouTube are in hiding right now under their desks and they don't want to respond.
And I think you deserve a lot of credit for that.
But you know what I'm asking here.
I mean, is there a competitor that's going to come up and say, we're going to let everybody say whatever they want to say, too bad, as long as it's not a threat?
Well, I think there's always boundaries to that.
I mean, you enumerated a number of them around violent threats or giving up personal information around someone's home or office or identifiable information that people could utilize to put them in real physical harm.
So we need to balance all of those constraints.
We've tried to codify them into our terms of service.
Those terms of service are a contract that we have with people signing up to the service.
These are the rules of the road.
And if you're allowed as a private company, even a public company, to set up standards and rules.
This is not about freedom of speech where the government is intervening, correct?
Right.
Well, I mean, we do believe in the power of free expression, but we also need to balance that with the fact that bad faith actors intentionally try to silence other voices.
And that is not allowing everyone to freely express themselves.
I bet you over the years have gotten people to say, hey, you need to ban Sean Hannity.
Is that true?
I haven't heard those requests directly, but I'm sure someone is saying it somewhere.
But that's okay.
But it's just a question of how we balance these aspects.
And to answer your question, I think the only way to do this and earn trust is to be open about it and to work really hard to explain why we make decisions, how our algorithms make decisions, which is even more complicated and more nuanced.
But it's work worth doing because people need to see the whys and the reasons behind our actions or inactions.
I honestly applaud you.
I know these other guys are hiding under their desks.
And you know what?
I know some people will like what you have to say and not like what you have to say, but I appreciate your approach of dealing with this directly.
I will offer the show to you, my TV show, anytime you want because I think it's an important issue.
And I do think it is far more complicated and far more nuanced than maybe some of the headlines I've been reading.
But I am concerned if it's going to turn into a ban-only conservative issue, which I could see happening.
But anyway, Jack Dorsey at Jack on Twitter, the CEO of Twitter.
Thank you for being with us.
And we really do appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you for the opportunity and the time.
All right, 800-941-Sean, our toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
News Roundup Information Overload.
We'll look at yesterday's election results, what they mean.
Do they foretell anything about the election, the midterms in 90 days?
That's next.
I'm honored, very honored, for the opportunity to represent the voters of the 12th congressional district and who they have bestowed on me.
I have so many people to thank tonight.
Some behind me right here, my son Joshua, his fiancé, Chelsea, who's getting married next April.
And girlfriend Melanie.
I want to thank God.
More importantly, my mom and dad, who aren't able to hear it with us this evening, I'd like to thank President Trump.
Tonight, I'm going to promise to you that I'm going to work relentlessly, relentlessly for this 12th congressional district.
America is on the right path and we're going to keep it going that way It's time to get to work.
Over the next three months, I'm going to do everything I can to keep America great again so that when we welcome, when we come back here in November, get ready, we've got to come back here in November.
I have earned your vote for a second time.
Danny, can I ask you real quick?
You're live on CBSN.
What's your status tonight?
Have you conceded or are you waiting to see?
No, we feel great.
This is too close to call.
We're fighting for every vote.
You know, this fight continues.
Working people need a voice.
They need a champion.
What's your understanding of how many votes remain outstanding at this point?
Too few to call this a night.
I think we need to make sure that this process is respected because too many people have worked too hard.
Too many people want to have a real voice in Washington.
Too many people want a congressman that's going to represent every county.
And we need to make sure that we're doing this the right way.
All right.
That was the important Ohio 12 yesterday, which was held by a Republican in what was a tight race.
There still are votes out to count and some provisional ballots, et cetera, absentee ballots.
What was really fascinating about it is the early voting.
I talked to a friend of mine who knows Ohio politics so well, it was devastating.
This guy was going to lose.
Anyway, meeting Troy Balderson, Trump went in on Saturday, and it was day of voting that ended up saving his opportunity here, or certainly would have been a seat that got lost.
He made a couple of dumb decisions in the course of the campaign, talking negatively about one of the biggest counties that is in his district, Franklin County.
We don't want to elect a guy from Franklin County.
Great.
I'm sure the people of Franklin County really love that remark.
Did it about another county, and then he also talked about the third rail taking, you know, changing and shifting and getting rid of Medicare.
I mean, just the dumbest campaign I've ever seen.
So he's going to have some work to do with the constituents in the Ohio 12, but I don't think there's any doubt about it that President Trump helped him.
He's now 0.9 percentage points ahead, 1,754 votes.
Exactly.
Danny O'Connor, you know, we have 100% of the precincts reporting, but the president also now declaring victory this morning after the candidates that he endorsed in yesterday's primaries all scored big wins.
And he tweeted at about 10.30 this morning, five for five.
And in a second tweet, he accused the media of downplaying the Republican Party's record of success in special elections.
Republicans now winning eight of nine House seats, but yet if you listen to the fake news media, you'd think we'd been clobbered.
You know, why can't they play it straight?
So unfair.
Republican Party, in particular, your favorite president, he wrote, he also claimed that as long as I campaign and or support Senate House candidates within reason, they will win.
And he said Republicans could have a red wave in November's elections.
We're now 90 days out.
It is, to me, the most important midterm elections in our lifetime.
I see absolutely nothing from the Democratic Party in terms of helping the forgotten men and women, except they would stop the progress that the president has made in 18 months.
And by that time, it'll be two years.
And, you know, this is an important election.
We know that the Democrats have stated publicly, although now they're being silent, but they want to impeach Trump.
We know that Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren have said the tax cuts are crumbs.
And, well, that's $1,000, $2,000 for working families.
And excuse me, if they're just crumbs, why are they demanding to have them back?
They want to rescind the tax cuts.
They want to keep Obamacare.
That has not exactly worked out well for people and keeping their doctors and their plans and paying less.
And we know they want to eliminate ICE and they want open borders.
I don't think that's a good idea either.
Anyway, here to discuss John McLaughlin, pollster, founder of McLaughlin and Associates, Doug Shoan, also a pollster, political analyst, Fox News contributor.
Welcome both of you back to the program.
Thanks, John.
Let's get a headline from you, John McLaughlin.
I'll tell you, having polled for the president in Ohio during his campaign and set up a strategy where he could win the rust belt by bringing in millions of new voters in a record turnout, the president saved the GOP establishment's butt yesterday by bringing out Trump voters.
Trump got 206,000 votes in that district.
Balderson got 104,000 votes less than the president.
Now, here's a fun fact from the Gateway Pundit article: 87% of the Democrats that voted in 2016 turned out in this race.
Only 40% of the Republicans.
The Republicans were losing until the president went in there.
They better get on his agenda and get things done like immigration, like making the tax cuts permanent.
They better get with the president's agenda or they're going to get a shock in November because the president can only pull so many of these guys out of the fire, and that's what he does.
And by the way, you really can't do a transplant of charisma.
I mean, I watched this guy on Saturday night.
I was like, oh, my gosh, this is not going to be easy.
Doug Shoan, you know that from years past as well.
I do, but what you haven't said is that there's been at least an 11% swing because of the absent voters to the Democratic Party.
And if we get that in the midterms, we'll have a Democratic pickup of far more than the 23 seats they need to put the House in the Democratic home.
So there were harbingers of ill.
I wrote a piece for FoxNews.com, which said it was a good night for the Democrats and a good night for Donald Trump.
That's how I see it.
All right.
Let's now look at, you know, there had been predictions of a massive blue wave.
I think the senatorial map in particular looks good for Republicans.
I certainly see a pickup in Florida.
I think Rick Scott is a very popular governor, and I think he'd beat Bill Nelson there.
I think Claire McCaskill is in a heap of trouble.
In Missouri, you've got Heidi Heichamp.
You've got Joe Manchin, and you've got a bunch of others.
I would imagine that the Republicans have an advantage in the Senate.
Doug, what do you think?
I think there is a slight advantage, but John McLaughlin is pointing to what the issue really is in the election.
Not so much a Democratic wave in the sense of people rallying to the Democratic Party.
There's enthusiasm among Democrats to come out and vote for change, and the Republicans, not so much.
And that's really the issue.
I think John put it exactly right.
But what do they want to change to?
Let's be real here.
What are the Democrats, give me a specific program that they're advocating that's going to make our lives better?
Because I don't see it.
They want policies other than Trump.
They don't want a wall.
They don't want the kind of immigration policy the president has pursued.
They want different policies.
It's unfocused, Sean.
I'll be the first to agree.
Is it unfocused or they basically want us to go back to the horrific eight years of Obama?
Even you acknowledge they were horrible.
I've said it many times on your program.
A large percentage of the Democratic primary voters disagree.
I disagree with Hartley.
They're socialists.
I'm not.
I'm a capitalist.
But you know what?
You can win elections by voting for things and against things.
And this is going to be a negative election.
Of that, I am certain.
What do you think, John McLaughlin?
I would say historically, just a matter of fact, that, yeah, it's going to be very difficult as it relates for any Republican.
Well, you've got, you know, in this race in Ohio 12, the Democrat rejected Pelosi.
So the Democrat ran to the right, if not the center.
And you've got senators like Donnelly in Indiana today was talking about supporting the border wall.
You're going to see Democrats trying to blur that distinction that Republicans really need to vote on and make the Democrats have a clear contrast.
And by the way, the primaries are still going on.
Like yesterday, in yesterday's primaries, Chris Kolbach comes out of nowhere to look like he's going to beat the incumbent governor in Kansas because President Trump supported him.
You had John James up in Massachusetts, who was Michigan, pardon me, Michigan running for U.S. Senate.
He won decisively in the primary.
And the Trump-like candidates, like, you know, I'm running races for candidates who support who are like President Trump, like Bob Stefanowski in Connecticut.
He's running for governor.
He's got a plan to phase out the income tax.
And he's on the ballot on Tuesday, and everybody's attacking us because Donald Trump has put his imprint on this party, and the Trump candidates are winning the primaries.
And with that, hopefully, they can carry an agenda that will basically create the red wave instead of having a blue wave going on.
Because right now, the Democrats are blurring the issues.
Yeah, I think there's some truth to that.
But they seem to always go back to the same playbook.
And we know what the playbook is.
Republicans are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic.
They want dirty air, water.
They want to kill children, and they want to throw Granny over the cliff.
It doesn't change very much.
Now, we could use you on our side.
You do that very well.
Listen, I've been in this business too long.
It's every single election cycle.
It never changes, ever.
And, you know, the sad part is, is, you know, then America forgets, you know, how bad it was under people like, I mean, 13 million more Americans on food stamps, 8 million more in poverty, accumulated more debt than every other president before him, combined lowest labor participation rate since the 70s.
And then you compare it to what Donald Trump has done in a short period.
I mean, I would say, if I would say to Republicans that their biggest problem is they've been weak.
Yep.
And I agree with you 100%, Trump, because I'll tell you what, if the Doug Show Republican, Democrats, who are almost Republicans on a lot of issues, if we ask Democrats.
No, no, no.
Let me tell you something.
He's not a Republican.
He's got to be a physical conservative.
I don't go for all this debt, Sean.
No, I'm with you.
Listen, I agree with you on that too.
But, you know, if we get the GDP growth to where we need it to be, you and I both know that it's going to be great for the American people and the economy.
I got to take a break.
I hope it happens.
Well, just stay tuned.
I mean, certainly we got 4 million new jobs.
We got two or three fewer million on food stamps.
We got manufacturing jobs that Obama said were never coming back coming back.
We've gotten rid of burdensome regulation.
Companies now are incentivized to actually build their factories and manufacturing centers in America.
And we see dramatic increases in those jobs all across the Rust Belt.
And it's looking good for people.
All right, quick break, 800-941.
Sean, toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
As we continue with our pollsters, John McLaughlin and Doug Shoan.
All right, so one of the other things is: all right, so it was a Trump sweep in terms of the people that he endorsed, which is good for him.
Washington Post has a headline: Democratic resistance hit a wall in last night's election.
The Democratic Party's left-wing insurgency found its limits.
We know that, you know, Hollywood nut jobs are now blaming Vladimir Putin for last night's loss in Ohio, which is a little nuts.
Every single candidate endorsed by the rising Democratic star, Casio Cortez, they all went down to defeat.
What does that say, Doug Shoan?
I hope it says that the Democrats' flirtation with Democratic socialism is over and that we'll have more Danny O'Connors and Connor Lambs who are centrists who vote against Nancy Pelosi explicitly, clearly, and unabashedly to set the party in a new centrist, fiscally conservative.
And the odds of that happening, let's be real here, are zero.
Got a bridge for you to buy, Sean.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and I know, and John knows that the party's going solidly left, which I actually think helps Republicans in the end come this midterm election in 90 days.
John, absolutely, because like most of these Democrats winning primaries, they're supporting like Medicare for all, single-payer, government-run health care.
The Mercatus Center found out that's going to cost us $3.2 trillion over 10 years and would double the personal income taxes, all the personal income taxes, and all the corporate taxes in the country.
And that's why you don't have it.
The Democrats who tell you they want to repeal the Trump Tax Act, guess what that means?
You cut the child tax care credit in half from 2,000 to 1,000.
You cut the personal deduction in half from 2,000 to 1,000.
And you raise the rates on 90% of the taxpayers.
And most of them are middle class, the vast majority.
So we ought to make the Democrats vote on this.
We ought to let those votes percolate so the Doug Schoen Democrats will bail on these crazy ideas that are just nothing more than socialism.
Is it a good idea, John, to demand wall funding up front before the election and maybe shut down the government?
I don't like to see the government shut down, but you know what?
That funding ought to be in the middle of the year.
I must be the only person that doesn't care because we all know the government doesn't shut down.
It's just a big game that Washington plays.
And the few people that get paid holidays, you know what?
They're happy as can be.
Well, the last time, Schumer misplayed it because you know what happened?
The military didn't get paid because they hadn't passed that appropriation bill.
So they're willing to shut down the government for illegal aliens and not pay the military.
That's how crazy these Democrats are.
All right, we're going to let you both go here.
We appreciate it.
Well, 90 days, we'll be having you guys on regularly, looking at the polls, looking at the numbers, seeing which way this important midterm election is headed.
Doug Schoen, thank you for being with us.
And John McLaughlin, 800-941-Sean, toll-free telephone number.
We'll come back on the other side.
You're going to meet an individual that is trying to work.
Iran is in deep trouble.
We now see a restlessness that is taking place among their very high youth population.
And with the president's new sanctions, does that mean a change could be on the horizon?
That's next.
These were terrible deals, but I would say that the Iran deal was one of the worst I've ever seen.
I will say, speaking of the Iran deal, since we got out of that deal, and we could do it very easily because they never had it approved by Congress.
It was just president.
Must be approved by Congress.
I want it to be approved by Congress because otherwise it really doesn't mean very much.
I would think anybody would want it approved by Congress.
But since we took out of that deals we got out of that deal, I think Iran is a much different place.
Well, that's another promise made, another promise kept.
And what we're learning and what we're seeing is that, yeah, the president got us out of that horrific Iranian deal.
And we're seeing a restlessness.
There's a very high percentage of young people in Iran that are dying for freedom.
Many of them were abandoned by Barack Obama back in 2009 when we had an opportunity, frankly, that was second to none and we didn't take advantage of it.
And we've also learned that dropping $150 billion in cash and other currencies on the tarmac in Iran doesn't stop the mullahs from chanting death to America, death to Israel, burning our flag, burning the Israeli flag.
Amir Fakhravar is the National Iranian Congress Senate Chairman, founder of the Iranian Confederation of Students.
He happens to be in town.
We asked him to pop in for a few minutes and give us an update on what's happening there.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Sean.
Thank you for having me.
And you like what the president's been doing?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
And what about, look, you have a lot of contacts within Iran.
They find ways to get on the internet, even though they're kind of banned from using the internet.
And where is the population versus the, you know, Khamani and the leadership and the mullahs that keep saber rattling and keep pursuing weapons of mass destruction that they can marry to their sick twisted radical ideology?
Sean, yes, I'm very well connected to the new generation in Iran, to the protesters there in the street.
On my Instagram page, I have 10 million viewers, which they are checking every day because they cannot trust the Iranian state on media to see what is happening right now, specifically after President Trump.
Don't they make it very hard to get on the Internet and get real news?
It's really, really hard.
But the people that we are facing the very smart generation in Iran who they, maybe you don't believe it, they love United States.
They love to be friends with the United States and with the world again and be part of the world.
We are isolated by the small group of fanatic mullahs who, if you look at the polls right now, we are doing some polls and more than 100,000 people are participating in those polls.
96% of these people, they're saying they hate Iranian supreme leader and the people.
How could they like it?
Isn't it true that women are treated like fifth-class citizens?
Women are abused.
Marital rape is not a crime.
A man can divorce his wife by saying, I divorce you, what, three times?
All is true.
And extra to that, the women's, based on Sharia law, the Islamic Shiaism, the women, they are not real human.
They are calling women animals with the skin of humans, which they can give come to the mans.
That's their meaning of that.
Some women are told how to dress.
They're not allowed to leave their homes without a man.
And I don't know if they can.
Can women drive in Iran?
I don't think so.
They can drive.
It's a big fight between women's, half of the country, and the mullahs.
Even the bigger fight than the could you practice Christianity or Judaism within Iran?
No.
Definitely you will be.
Are gays and lesbians put to death in Iran?
You know, as Ahmadinejad said, it looks like we don't have gays and lesbians in Iran.
But how it's possible?
No, they are, if they can find them, definitely they are trying to just wipe them from the map.
All right, let's talk a little bit, if we can, about their pursuit of nuclear weapons and also the ramifications of it in a very strange way.
The fear of Iranian hegemony or nuclear-armed Iran has united allies and it is a new alliance that has emerged between the U.S., obviously Israel, but also Egypt and Jordan and the Saudis and the Emirates against Iran.
And Israelis, you know, all of them, they came together.
That's the historical point in the Middle East and North Africa right now.
Everybody, they came together.
Who could believe Saudi Arabia and Emiratis can come along with Israelis to fight with the Iranian regime, with Iranian mullahs?
That's the historical point for us, the Iranian freedom fighters.
We are talking about 96% of the country and for the Americans and for the West to use this opportunity to maybe this will not come again soon, to wipe this regime forever from the planet.
All right, let me ask you specifically, what would you like to see the president do further here?
I mean, he pulled out of the Iranian deal.
We know the Ayatollah, your supreme leader, Khamanei, has said negotiations with the United States are useless because they don't abide by agreements.
Well, the Iranians don't abide by agreements.
What is the next stage of this?
Will the Iranians test Donald Trump?
Because I think if they do, they're going to have the biggest wake-up surprise of their life.
And I could see the United States, Israel, and these other countries that I've mentioned coordinating and taking out their nuclear sites, although it would be difficult militarily because they're spread all throughout the country and many of them are underground.
But we have the capability of doing all of that.
Where do you see this going?
First of all, eight months ago when I was here, January, I had the honor to be in your show.
That was the time the new phase of revolution in Iran was started, which we are calling the constitutional revolution in Iran.
And President Trump heard the voice of Iranian people in the street.
And then President came out of Iran deal after that.
And he changed Rex Tillerson and brought the good man, Mike Pompeo, as the Secretary of State, and another good man, John Bolton, on board.
And with the new strategy, right now, regime is bankrupt.
Last time when we were talking eight months ago, up to now, Iranian currency lost a lot of value.
Maybe it's right now one-third of the value it had eight months ago.
And right now, they are at the point of collapse.
Millions of people, they are in the street.
They are chanting debt to dictator, debt to Islamic Republic, debt to regime.
And outside, we can see how allies of United States, they are ready to take care of this regime forever.
President Trump is doing a great job.
I guess it's not a good idea to think about talking with the regime.
I'm giving suggestion to the State Department first to clean up Obama holdovers from Iran desk, which was designed by Obama at the State Department.
Iran desk should be shut down from the State Department.
And then they can start talking with the opposition leaders.
This is a strong message to Iranian regime that your time is gone.
And then this is the new generation.
They want to have control of their country.
And even Shan, we drafted our new constitution for future Iran, which I want to give you on the show as a record, a gift.
This is what you want to be, the new constitution, Declaration of Freedom, proposed draft of the Constitution of Iran.
I was actually surprised the last time, Amir, you were here that you actually told me that people in Iran actually know who I am, that there is an underground viewership, that they pay very close attention to American media.
If I walk through the streets of Iran, would anybody recognize me?
Oh, they love you.
And for sure, when Iran is free, for sure you will be surprised how much the people in Iran, they know you.
This program, in 10 minutes, will be translated in Farsi and will be all over Iranian media, specifically on cyber world.
Well, I have a message for all of them, and this is a problem, though, for anybody that wants to win a revolution.
You don't win a revolution with a slingshot.
And the bottom line is you have the Iranian guard that will violently and viciously, in their evil way, they will beat down any opposition and beat them into submission and kill as many people as they have to kill.
Is that not right?
I agree with you.
And let me give you the news.
Right now, the revolutionaries in Iran, I'm talking about the new generation, not the old revolutionaries, the terrible ones.
The new generation, right now they do have a gun and they know how to use it.
And we are at the point which maybe soon you will hear the fight will happen over there.
And it's something is coming soon.
What do you mean, how soon?
It's very soon.
It's maybe a couple of months.
You will hear a lot more about Iranian new revolution.
And you're saying that you believe that there is an opportunity where they will be able to fight back.
Oh, they are doing that right now.
They're fighting back.
The people in the street, they're fighting back, but not with the gun.
But pretty soon, in a couple of months, you will see they are going to fight back with the guns.
All right, Amir, good to see you again.
Thank you for being with us.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for that copy of the proposed Iranian constitution.
You know what?
Stranger things can happen, and it has happened before.
And then, of course, the Shah of Iran was overthrown, and the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini resulted in this tyranny, and now on the brink of potentially getting nuclear weapons.
Mr. Fak Ravar, thank you for being with us.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good luck to you.
All right, let's get to our busy phones in the meantime.
Kirk is in Salt Lake City in Utah, Radar Ketland.
What's happening in my favorite Krownberger territory?
How are you?
What's going on, Kirk?
Sean, I am doing really good, and thank you for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know I am 100% on your side.
I think your work wife, Linda, she is way too mean to you.
Totally too mean to you.
I'm on your side no matter what.
What do you mean by work wife?
I don't have a work wife.
I am the boss.
No, no, no.
This is a simple equation.
I am the boss, and I have people that work for me, but she definitely does interject herself more often than she should.
No, I interject myself as often as is needed, which is a lot.
Now do you see what I mean by work wife?
And that's not all.
That's right.
She's the executive producer of the show.
What do you want me to do?
That's right.
I'm the neck that turns the head.
You're welcome.
Well, when did you ever get permission to just turn your mic on?
I didn't invite you to turn your mic on.
I was needed.
I was needed.
You weren't needed.
Well, you were having a conversation about me, which means I'm needed.
Now, how thick is that accent, Kirk?
I mean, don't you think that absolutely permission should be granted?
I'm only kidding, of course.
Listen, we love Linda.
Linda works very, very hard on the show, just like everybody else on our team.
It's a collaborative effort.
You know what happens in collaborations?
It takes two people for relationships.
And you know, Kirk, one of the most beautiful things of relationships is communication.
And you would be surprised.
Surprised.
How hard communication can be from someone who works in communications for a living.
It's just shocking.
Yeah, they don't like the way that I text.
I text three words, and they're...
First of all, you text like a teenager, so don't even start.
Because I don't have time to spell it out.
You guys can figure it out.
Just no, that means you use text all the time.
You know what you could do?
What?
I could go to group therapy.
I'll tell you what.
You go to.
I'm never going to therapy in my life.
I think that would be interesting.
I think if we went to a therapy session, that the therapist would be like, you all need to leave.
I can't help you.
The therapist would need therapy.
Yeah, the therapist would probably.
We're talking redneck group therapy now, where the tighter the group, the better gun control you have.
Fantastic.
Oh, great.
That sounds great.
You're taking us to a great level here, you know, really.
Well, the thing is, I honestly, I think therapy is great for people.
Remember my biggest surprise when I interviewed Stern, Howard Stern.
And I said to him, You have more money than anyone could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes.
You know, and he says he goes to therapy once a week.
I'm like, I'm not going to talk to any therapist once a week.
Oh, I didn't get fed Twinkies.
What is therapy?
You know, you read self-help books, you try and improve.
You know, you work hard.
And who has time for therapy?
I don't get it.
To me, it's a luxury.
I know some people need it, and thank God they get it.
And there are professionals that can help people that are really sick.
And there are medicines that can also help people that I believe in.
But if I don't have to, I am not spending my time on somebody's couch pondering, you know, why I have feelings from back in the day.
I'm just not going to do it.
Why are you laughing?
Because this was such a fun call with Kirk, and he got all serious and weird on it and took the therapy thing for real.
He talked about redneck therapy.
You know what redneck therapy is?
Drinking.
Drinking and getting drunk and talking in a circle.
It's good therapy.
I like that.
Are we going to like put like a bonfire of the vanities of the brain?
Kirk, am I right, Kirk?
No, it's going to the shooting range.
Going to the shooting range.
You see, you don't even know what it is.
This is another direction.
And so I think our redneck therapy would be pork rinds and moonshine.
That's correct.
Yeah, because we get people that send us moonshine ever since I've been talking about watching that moonshine.
And then you can use it in my pillow and go to sleep like a baby.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Well, I do use my pillow.
It's the best.
By the way, my pillow now has something you put over your mattress.
It is so, so amazingly mattress topper.
All right.
Thanks, Kirk.
We appreciate it.
We have an amazing Hannity tonight.
You're going to love tonight's show.
Rudy Giuliani, by the way, among our many guests.
We've got a lot of ground to cover.
We've got breaking news stories.
And it's going to be pretty amazing tonight.
We have, let's see, Dershowitz, Rudy, Andy McCarthy, Jason Chaffetz, Greg Jarrett, Secretary Nielsen.
What a story she has to share.
You know, if a drone by a drug cartel is flown into America so they can scout out whether there are any agents in a particular area, we can't take that drone out of the air.
And they're able to arm those small drones.
You have to get this.
You have to get a warrant to take a drone sent in from Mexico to take it out.
Anyway, 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
We've got a lot of breaking news tonight about Bruce Orr and Christopher Steele.
And were they contacting Robert Mueller?
We reveal the new emails and evidence tonight.
We'll break it at 9 Eastern Hannity on the Fox News channel.
You don't want to miss it.
Also, we have so much coming up tonight.
Secretary Nielsen, Greg Jarrett, Jason Chaffetz, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, and much more.
