The Russians are coming! Senator Rand Paul announced today that he has traveled to Russia and lawmakers there have agreed to visit Washington in the coming months. "Instead of having a big debate and blaming President Trump for things that happened under Obama," began Paul, "We ought to be securing our own elections." Paul reminded 'Hannity' audiences of Reagan's success with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev. Plus, Paul talks about his visit with Gorbachev and other Russian officials. 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.
All right, glad you're with us.
82 days.
I know, I know.
I'll be, we're going to wait till after Labor Day to go full bore because I know many of you are on vacation, maybe listening to me on a boat, and maybe you're about to pull in a big fish and have a great day.
Maybe you're about to drink a beer and say, Hannity, just don't get me all riled up today.
I'm not, I'm in a good mood.
I'm relaxed.
I'm vacationing.
Not something we do a whole hell of a lot of in the summer, but we, you know what?
We get our days here and there like everybody else.
And fishing is one way that you can have fun.
I'm good for a good couple hours of fishing, and then I'm done.
It's like, get rid of me.
We are awaiting a verdict in the Manafort trial, and the jury is deliberating.
And so if that verdict comes in in the course of the show, we will get a heads up ahead of time and we'll bring it to you.
I would say the odds are very much against Paul Manafort because of just the way the federal system works.
And, you know, it's how many people got immunity?
How many people got it?
Well, Rick Gates, their lead star witness, gets a get out of jail free card.
I mean, the whole system to me is absolutely ridiculous.
I mean, so you take somebody that's an admitted liar, somebody that embezzles, somebody that admits multiple felonies, somebody that's facing over 100 years in jail, and you sit him down and you say, okay, you tell us about your partner.
You won't go to jail, but he will.
What do you need?
What do you want me to say?
Say, it's all his fault.
You don't think that happens?
Happens every day.
I talk to more lawyers.
And look, some of you say, well, that's the only way you're going to get information on bad people is from other bad people.
There's got to be other ways.
And to me, in this particular case, you know, you probably could have just used the numbers, used the accounting, use, you know, if it's about bank fraud, if it's about a tax issue and not paying taxes, I don't know.
It's just the whole thing leaves a horrible taste in my mouth.
But that's what my guess is.
But the media will go nuts.
They'll act like it is the biggest conviction in the history of mankind if it does go down that way.
And what you're going to know, because you listen to this program, is what we've been saying.
How did we get from an investigation in a special counsel that's supposedly looking into Russian collusion in the 2016 election?
And how did we go so afar from that mandate to end up with a 2005 tax issue and tax case and tax, you know, going into other years as well, dealing with a guy that worked for Trump about 100 days and was the former campaign manager.
You don't think he was, you know, singled out for prosecution, persecution, because this had already been resolved.
They literally pulled this case out of mothballs, and it had pretty much been resolved that they weren't going to prosecute it.
But because of the connection to Donald Trump, the name of Donald Trump, the fact that he worked for Donald Trump, they went full bore.
The case has nothing at all to do with Donald Trump.
Nothing.
Case has nothing to do with collusion.
The case has nothing to do with Russia.
The case has nothing to do with the campaign.
Then you have to ask yourself, well, why is it such a big deal?
And why are they covering it on TV all the time?
Because the guy worked for Trump for 100 days.
So that's, you know, that's the benefit you get if you want to put yourself in the public arena.
And for politics, they want to get a name so they can, see, we convicted somebody of what?
What in this particular case?
You know, Ken Stark, everyone forgets, got Webb Hubble.
Remember back in, he actually had some substantive results in the case.
Anyway, we'll watch.
We'll wait.
We'll let you know.
It is interesting.
Zogby has polled numbers out.
Remember, Trump hit over 50% in the Rasmussen poll.
He's been around 50% now for some time.
Rasmussen, who got it right, by the way, in the 2016 election.
I think the American people are seeing the success in a different view than the average news media person.
On top of that, Zogby shows by a pretty wide 45 to 34 margin that voters find Donald Trump more likely to grow the U.S. economy.
And by a similar margin, they also trust Trump to keep America safe.
Well, the first one was trust Trump to grow the U.S. economy.
Both cases, the Trump approval numbers show steady gains.
Democrats have pretty much flatlined in this.
That's going to mean a lot in 82 days.
I think the most important factor you're going to have to understand or people are going to have to get, and I'm a little concerned 82 days out.
Number one, I don't see the sense of urgency.
Not that I would necessarily expect it in a midterm election year, but I don't see the sense of urgency for people that like the president's success and like the fact that things are getting better and, you know, millions of jobs are created and burdensome regulation has been decimated and taxes have been lowered.
And, you know, millions more Americans are back to work and the president's lobbying, you know, big corporations to build their factories and manufacturing centers here in America.
And he's incentivized others.
others who literally have parked their money overseas because of ridiculously high taxation.
They now have an incentive to bring that money back to America to create American jobs.
We see it in the manufacturing sector every day.
I think we're going to see the biggest energy boom the country has ever had.
But unfortunately, the lead time to build up to the new environment is difficult, but I think we're going to get that done.
And I think that's going to be great for the American people.
And, you know, watching Maxine Waters have her birthday wish to impeach Donald Trump.
You know, she was, I'm sure they've talked at length with her and others who are saying it.
Don't say it.
We'll do it, but don't say it, which is pretty much a lie to the American people.
It's not like they can run on the eight years they supported Obama's mess.
It's not like they can run on Obamacare.
It's not like they can really run.
I mean, I'm not sure how you make the case that the tax cuts that Americans see in their checks every week or every other week or every month, depending on how they get paid, that somehow they're not looking at those thousands of dollars as crumbs.
They're looking at it as real money in their pocket that helps their families.
And interestingly, they were defined as crumbs by Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren.
Well, if they're just crumbs, why are you fighting to get them back so badly?
Why do you want the crumbs?
You like crumbs?
So I think that's revealing or getting rid of ICE and eliminating the protection of our borders seems like a pretty dumb idea.
Then you got the hard left taking over as, you know, any chance you hear them, it's kind of scary.
I mean, you even have Andrew Cuomo.
This guy thinks he's going to be the president of the United States.
He does believe it.
He does have presidential aspirations for his life.
Andrew Cuomo giving a speech yesterday.
This is what he said.
America was never that great.
Here's what he said.
Look, the simple point is all this comes down to this.
We're not going to make America great again.
It was never that great.
We have not reached greatness.
We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.
Oh, America's never been great.
I think it's true.
I think there are legitimate criticisms.
America is not a perfect country.
There's been no perfect country ever in the history of man.
And I stand by.
There's never been a country that has accumulated more power and abused it less than the United States of America, or that has used its power to protect and serve and advance the human condition the way the United States of America has.
We could talk about wrongs and injustices.
And also, if we're going to look at the full historical context, how in their brilliance, our framers, our founders, they created a system under which we can change things for the better.
And we've proven we do change things for the better.
But I think if you look at America's pivotal role in numerous conflicts around the world, it's America that takes on radical Islamists more than anybody.
We're paying the price for that.
And we've lost how many American, you know, how much of our American treasure our sons and daughters.
How many other people have been disfigured and lost limbs and legs and arms and have sacrificed for the cause of liberty and freedom in other countries as well as our own?
You look at America beating fascism.
America led the way in defeating the tyranny of communism and the tyranny of fascism and the tyranny of Nazism and Imperial Japan.
And, you know, what would the world look like but for the United States of America?
America was never that great.
Well, I'm sorry, but I actually think, yeah, America is a pretty great country.
And I'm proud to be a part of it.
And I'm thankful and I'm appreciative.
And when you really get down to it, we all should be humbled that so many others before us were willing to risk everything so we could have better lives and we could live in freedom and have discussions like this, although there's plenty of people that would like to shut programs like this down.
America was never that great.
Anyway, CNN, yeah, even one of their, I don't know, I guess one of their political analysts, I never heard of Angela Rai.
She's echoing those comments.
I mean, there are a few radical leftists that are slamming it and a few people that are speaking out against it.
One is, I guess, his opponent, Cynthia Nixon, who is mocking him for what he said.
And in his, what, you know, she called a failed attempt of sounding like a progressive.
She's trying to unseat.
She's best known, I guess, from what's the name of that show that she was a part of?
Sex in the City.
She's running.
They didn't give a very good campaign speech when I saw her recently.
I was like, oh, good grief.
She's running to the left of Cuomo.
That's even worse.
You know, we've got a lot of work to do in this country.
One thing I do want to talk about, though, is there are a lot of people that need to lose their security clearances like John Brennan.
John Brennan never deserved a security clearance.
How he got one, I think, is a question that needs to be examined in and of itself.
How did this guy ever get a security clearance?
Now, the federal courts have no jurisdiction over an executive branch decision.
This is an Article II issue of the president to revoke anybody's security clearance.
Greg Jarrett's point out, there's even a Supreme Court decision on such.
Department of Navy versus Egan.
Now, there's some limited recourse for procedural claims if it wasn't, if it was done improperly.
I think we were the only show on television last night to actually take the time and read to people what it actually says in terms of CIA policy.
It's very direct.
I mean, if you want to keep your security clearance, well, you have to do certain things to keep it.
And the CIA rules say such.
In the case of former directors, well, that would be Brennan.
The agency holds their security clearance and renews it every five years for the rest of their lives.
However, that requires former CIA directors to behave like current CIA employees.
Well, I mean, we have example after example of how Brennan and people like him have lied.
And in the case of the dirty dossier, was spreading false Russian lies to influence the American people in a lead up to an election and other issues as well.
All right, we're going to get into it.
I think there's a whole list of people that we ought to just get rid of all their security clearances based on their conduct.
It should be standard operating procedure.
If you get fired like James Comey or Peter Strzzok or Andrew McCabe or Sally Yates and you get caught lying and you're involved in improper conduct, you ought to lose, as a matter of course, your security clearance.
James Clapper's insane rhetoric, he's another one.
Susan Rice, Lisa Page, Bruce Orr.
You know, what was the Samantha Powers?
Why was she unmasking as a UN ambassador, 300 people in an election year?
You know, I'm just going to be very honest here.
People lose their security clearance because they're a national security risk.
It's an honor to have such.
Now, if you're out there insinuating that the president of the United States is treasonous or, you know, you're making claims as a former CIA director, oh, Donald Trump colluded with Russia.
There's tons of evidence and there's no evidence.
And you lie to Congress, which, by the way, a lot of these people have lied to Congress and have lied so repeatedly.
I mean, this media meltdown about John Brennan.
Yeah, well, he did accuse the president of treason, you know, and he's getting paid by a so-called news agency to do so.
And, you know, Brennan, you know, is, frankly, I think he's a little unhinged and his erratic conduct and behavior.
I suspect he knows that a lot of this is going to come back to him.
And I think there's fear in John Brennan's heart for the things that he knows that he's done and it's going to be proven.
You know, I also think, and nobody seems, I can't believe the country does not get outraged that Bernie Sanders was robbed in a primary.
I really, for the life of me, I don't get it.
I mean, this is the United States.
You rig a primary, you try and rig an election.
That ought to be problematic.
You know, the whole issue of the dossier and people like Brennan propagating that phony, unverified dossier, he is the CIA director.
And he's literally purposefully misinforming, propagandizing the American people because he wants the said candidate to win.
And he's out there calling the president a traitor and accusing him of treason.
And I want to know Clapper's role in all this.
At the end of the day, there are a lot of people that should lose their clearances.
We'll maybe name those names when we come back.
A lot to get to today.
800-941, Sean.
10-25 till the top of the hour, 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program.
The manager of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, now warning fellow Democrats, do not campaign with the Democratic National Committee co-chair, Keith Ellison, after now two women have accused Ellison of domestic abuse earlier this week.
Minnesota Democrats have largely been silent about the Keith Ellison domestic abuse allegations, but not former Clinton manager Robbie Mook.
And he had the following exchange on CNN fake news.
And he says, to your point, I think it's still very early.
I think we need to let the process play out to look and see if this is true.
And if it's true, I think he needs to be held accountable.
And I don't think people should be campaigning with him.
Apparently, there's a tape of this that goes on for some two minutes.
You know, a blanking B is, you know, in that type of language and physically, you know, pulling this woman off of bed, according to one.
The only thing I would say is a lot of you probably haven't heard about it because Keith Ellison, top-ranking DNC official, is not Donald Trump or anyone associated with Donald Trump.
Because, of course, at that point, it would be, well, a different ballgame.
Sunday, a former Ellison girlfriend claiming that in a fit of rage, he dragged her off the bed, feet first, saying some pretty awful things.
Two days later, a police report emerged documenting claims by a second woman who alleged that Ellison visited her house uninvited, assaulted her, causing her to call 911 and report the domestic assault, which is now a matter of record.
So we'll see.
I guess you're only in trouble in life if you're a conservative or a Republican.
Doesn't matter if you're a Democrat at all.
I want to go back to this John Brennan thing because the media, do we have the media freak out montage over this whole Brennan issue?
Let's play that and just set the table because this is their outrage of yesterday.
And my hope is that Brennan is just the beginning.
Let's play it.
This is without precedent in modern American history.
I mean, security clearances have never been used to punish people for speaking out.
This is nothing short of extraordinary, and we should all be scared about the state of our democracy.
The president sent his White House press secretary out there today to basically poop on the people from the press secretary podium and not only threaten, like they didn't just make a threat, it was a promise.
They're snatching John Brennan's national security clearance.
We begin tonight with a chilling action taken by the president of the United States that looks something like something you might see out of a dictatorship or authoritarian regime.
Trump is under fire for Nixonian enemies list tactics.
Those are the accusations of at least one former FBI official after the White House is publicly admitting that it is retaliating against former CIA director John Brennan.
I think what John Brennan did more closely associates what they did in a former Soviet Union, as he was the one that leaked the unverified, dirty Clinton-bought and paid for Russian dossier for the purpose of really swaying in an American election.
Why else would you do that?
You didn't verify it.
You didn't corroborate it.
You didn't do any of those things.
You just handed it off to Harry Reid.
Harry Reid writes a letter to Comey.
It now becomes a big deal.
The salacious details leak in the hopes that Hillary's lies, Russian lies that she paid for, are then used to influence the American people before they go to the voting booth.
Excuse me, I would say that is the far bigger problem by a long shot, if you're going to be honest.
And again, nobody seemed to care that Bernie Sanders.
Well, I care about it.
Hear a lot about it.
You know, and John Brennan himself goes on, you know, fake news MSNBC.
And by the way, we have some of his lowlights.
Let's play John Brennan and who he is as a commentator, the former communist, how he ever became a CIA director is mind-numbing, but here's some of the crazy stuff he said.
Donald Trump has badly sullied the reputation of the office of the presidency with his invective, with his constant disregard, I think, for human decency.
He is, I think, the most divisive president we've ever had in the Oval Office.
He is feeding and fueling hatred and animosity and misunderstandings among Americans.
I think there's a big question, first of all, in terms of those who are on Mr. Trump's national security team, whether they can continue to serve in good conscience an individual who basically betrayed his nation.
What Mr. Trump did yesterday was to betray the women and men of the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and others, and to betray the American public.
And that's why I use the term that this is nothing short of treasonous.
I think he's afraid of the president of Russia.
Why?
Well, I think one could speculate as to why, that the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.
Mr. Trump continues to have his ignorance of the facts or willful disregard of them.
Again, just to follow through on these campaign promises that really were very flawed.
I and so many other former national security officials are speaking out because of the abnormal and aberrant behavior of Mr. Trump.
This is a very large and painful national kidney stone.
The relief we feel afterward is going to be just exhilarating.
I've seen this from despots and tyrants, John Brennan goes on to say in his paid gig over at Fake News Conspiracy TV, MSNBC.
Well, speaking of yanking security clearances, it did look like the Obama holdovers at the Pentagon, they didn't have any problem pulling a whistleblower security clearance when his complaints threatened to expose the spy operation that they were running against the Trump campaign.
You have a Trump-supporting Pentagon analyst was stripped for his security clearance by Obama-appointed officials after he complained of questionable government tactics as it relates to Stefan Halper, the FBI informant that spied on the Trump presidential campaign.
Adam Lovinger is a 12-year strategist in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, complained to his bosses about Halper and contracts in the fall of 2016, said his attorney.
And then on May of 2017, his supervisors yanked the security clearance and relegated him to clerical chores.
Now, there's been other cases as well where, you know, Paul Wolfowitz and others, they were never brought in for anything.
The question is, why do we say that it's okay?
We know what Brennan has done over the years.
We know his background.
I don't even think he ever should have had one.
I read to you earlier what the CIA protocol and statute says.
It says in the case of former CIA directors, the agency holds their security clearance and renews it every five years for the rest of their lives.
However, that requires former CIA directors to behave like current CIA employees.
Well, we know that's not true.
As far as the law is concerned, I mentioned this a little earlier.
The federal courts have no jurisdiction over any substantive decision by the president.
This is an Article II power of his to revoke a person's security clearance.
There's some limited legal recourse for procedural claims that it was done improperly, but that applies only to agency decisions to revoke.
So that has no application in this particular case.
But the president does retain his own inherent authority derived from Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the vesting clause, and his broad authority to provide for the common defense and protect national security because the president has unfettered authority over national security matters.
He's permitted to revoke for a stated reason or no reason.
Person who loses their security clearance by presidential order has no due process rights whatsoever.
He is the commander-in-chief.
And just as the president can classify and declassify any information he wants, he gets the control who has access to top-secret information.
And the granting of a security clearance, well, is not a right.
It's given to you.
And the president has the full power for reason or no reason, stated or not stated, to revoke it.
He's not depriving anybody of any right they have.
So let's be clear here.
Now, because, you know, it just is, and I mean, it'll be interesting.
I'm sure there'll be a lawsuit here, but John Brennan didn't deserve in the beginning.
He was on the wrong side of the Cold War for crying out loud and supporting communism at the height of the Cold War.
You know, my friend Greg Jarrett put out in a column today, you know, Brennan's partisan attacks against the president create the very real risk that the former CIA director might improperly use classified information to damage Trump for political reason and jeopardizing national security in the process.
And Brennan has repeatedly shown how unhinged he is and that he can't be trusted with classified or top secret information, how he has a history of leaking, and that makes him a massive national security risk.
And the same thing would apply to Clapper.
You know, he's got the same inflammatory rhetoric problem.
That's a risk.
Again, they might utilize this information improperly.
And we already know, according to information uncovered by the House Intel Committee, that Clapper was involved in leaking the dossier to the media and specifically CNN.
And we know Brennan leaked the dossier, Russian lies, to Harry Reid.
And Clapper also lied to Congress about the NSA's metadata collection on millions of Americans.
That's a proven lie.
We know James Comey, you know, seriously, already he's had access denied, but as far as I know, he's still eligible.
He should have it revoked also.
Why?
He was fired for misusing his office and leaking such information to his Columbia professor buddy, who then leaked it to the New York Times for the stated purpose of getting his friend as the special counsel.
And by the way, it was Comey that cleared Hillary Clinton, exonerated her with Peter Strzok with an exoneration before an investigation.
You know, that's obstruction of justice.
I don't care what anybody says.
If any of you in this audience did what Hillary did, you'd be in jail.
Remember, he also stole government documents, presidential memos.
That was not his property.
That's what he leaked to the professor that leaked to the New York Times.
That's the theft of government property.
That's a crime.
Any of the documents were classified, as Senator Grassley has stated, well, that's a violation of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793, the very thing that Hillary was guilty of violating when she put her top secret, classified information on an illegal server in a mom-and-shop bathroom closet, you know, or knowingly removing classified documents with the intent to retain them.
Well, Comey did that too, and Comey signed off on the FISA warrant application.
Remember, you're signing off on something.
You're verifying it.
You're saying you have confirmed and corroborated it yourself.
Now, that would fit for Sally Yates.
That would fit for Rod Rosenstein.
That would fit for people like James Comey and others.
And you got Peter Strzok.
Why?
Peter Strzzok was just fired.
They should have fired him a long time ago.
And by the way, as part of anybody's firing, you would think it would be standard operating procedures for everybody to take away their security clearances.
We know what Peter Strzok did.
We know we used his position in the FBI to clear his favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, absolve her of her crimes for political reasons, part of the exoneration before investigation.
Go ahead, try and take subpoenaed emails and erase them, and then acid wash your hard drives with bleach bit and bust up your devices.
You know, no, that's not obstruction of justice.
I don't know what is.
And he played a continuing role in using this phony dossier himself, all part of the attempt to get a FISA warrant, which became a fraud on FISA courts and four separate FISA judges.
It would be deprivation of rights under color of law.
18 USC 242, conspiracy to defraud the government.
While we're at it, we ought to take Andrew McCabe's as well, you know, lying to the DOJ Inspector General.
There's an obvious reason you can't be trusted with classified information.
He signed one of the Pfizer warrants, which is a fraud on the court.
Sally Yates fired for insubordination for failing to carry out a presidential directive.
Well, I'd say she's a security risk.
Take hers.
Susan Rice, yeah, I would take it as well.
You know, didn't she lie on five separate shows when we knew otherwise?
You know, Lisa Page, Bruce Orr.
And the list goes on.
Take them all.
Why is that a big deal?
The president has the absolute power and authority to do it.
These are all people involved in an effort in some way, shape, matter, or form to propagate false information to the American people vis-a-vis FISA, which was the paid-for dossier that was the basis of that warrant that was used four times on top of, you know, circular reporting to the judge by, you know, vis-a-vis Christopher Steele to Michael Izikov and acting as if it's an independent source when it's not.
And then, you know, literally standing up for Christopher Steele, even after he's fired for the FBI.
And by the way, the FBI paying him 11 separate payments.
It's unbelievable.
All right, we're going to get to the bottom.
Sarah Carter's article from yesterday, which I think is so damning.
Yeah, why was there so much contact between Christopher Steele and Bruce Orr?
Hey, wondering if you have any news.
Obviously, we're apprehensive given the scheduled appearance of Congress on Monday.
That's two days later when Comey was going before Congress, hoping that important firewalls will hold.
Uh-oh.
Or rights back.
I don't believe my earlier information is still accurate.
Really?
What are the firewalls?
Also, Brennan loses his security clearance.
Who else should lose it?
Sarah Carter, Greg Jarrett, David Schoen, Ram Paul.
Much more coming up.
All right, hour two, Sean Hannity show.
Write down our toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
Two big issues we're still following today.
All right, it's official John Brennan stripped of his security clearance.
How the former communist ever had a security clearance is a question we're going to get into here in a second.
And Sarah Carter's big discovery that I think is a blockbuster and frankly a game changer.
This is now we now know about Bruce Orr, his contacts never ending with Christopher Steele, and the desire for Christopher Steele to get this information, working with Bruce Orr to the special counsel.
That would be Robert Mueller.
That is the unverified, salacious dossier that he himself wouldn't even stand by.
And then, of course, a series of 70-plus contacts, including text messages and meetings and emails, et cetera.
Anyway, what is really fascinating in all of this is this last round that Sarah had just picked up yesterday where they're talking about, remember, you got to put it in the context.
The most important aspect of this is a firewall, the next smoking gun.
But, you know, it was two days before that, or two days after that there was going to be the testimony, in fact, of James Comey before Congress.
So then the question is, okay, well, can you explain when he says, hi, I'm just wondering if you had any news.
Obviously, we're a bit apprehensive given scheduled appearance before Congress on Monday, hoping the important firewalls will hold.
Or writes back, no, I believe my earlier information is accurate.
I'll let you know immediately if there's any change.
Sounds to me like I haven't heard anything else.
I assume the firewalls are holding.
Remember, he was afraid of Senator Grassley's inquiries about Steele.
He was afraid of the Senate Intel Committee's inquiries into Steele.
Steele was afraid of media coverage of him.
And anyway, so the questions we've got to really get some answers to.
Why was Monday so important?
Monday was the day Comey was going to testify before Congress.
They're nervous here.
We're a bit apprehensive about this.
What are they apprehensive about?
What are the firewalls that they're talking about holding?
What does that mean?
What are they trying to cover up here?
Sarah Carter, who broke this story, Fox News investigative reporter and contributor Greg Jarrett, three weeks and running now, the number one New York Times best-selling book in the entire country, The Russian Hoax, The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and frame Donald Trump.
Attorney David Schones, civil rights attorney, liberties attorney, and criminal rights attorney.
Sarah, I've just gone over this again and again and again in my mind.
And to me, the firewall is that basically everybody has come up with a story and they're all going to stick to it.
Exactly.
And this is exactly why Congress has to question everybody involved.
Not just Bruce Orr, but today George Toskis is being questioned.
And remember, he was the DOJ, head of counterintelligence, also involved in this.
I'm sure they're going to be asking him a lot of questions.
How was Bruce Orr involved in this?
Who authorized Bruce Orr to be the back channel for Christopher Steele in the DOJ?
And then who authorized the FBI to continue to use Christopher Steele through Bruce Orr.
And this firewall bombshell, which it really is, suggests that they had put in place parameters, methods of protecting themselves from Congress, from the government, you know, hiding this information.
And it's not surprising, Sean, because all you have to do is look at the foreign intelligence surveillance warrant that was taken out on Carter Page, which was originally written about by the House Intelligence Committee in their Russia report and later, you know, released in a redacted version to the public and to Congress, where you can see that they never mention that Bruce Orr is being used as a conduit.
They never mention that they had fired Christopher Steele and that he was no longer supposed to be a part of the Bureau's investigation because he basically broke all their rules, but they continued to use him and where they never really at all mentioned that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee was using their Perkins-Cooey cutout, their law firm, to pay for this information.
I mean, there's just so much here.
And let's not forget that Bruce Orr's wife, Nellie Orr, was working for Fusion GPS in 2016.
And now there's stories out there that she got a ham radio that year, and there's curiosity about that in Congress.
Why would she be using a ham radio to communicate all of the sudden?
You know, what was she worried about?
So there are a lot of questions out there.
There are a lot of significant information in these text messages and in these emails that were eventually given to Congress, and I'm sure they're going to be asking those questions.
Greg Jarrett, let's go to you.
And my interpretation is pretty clear on this.
And, you know, what are the firewalls plural?
And what does it mean that I believe my earlier information is still accurate?
And why was he so apprehensive because Comey's testifying on Monday?
Well, Christopher Steele knew that he had committed various acts of illegality.
He had used a phony document that he just made up, frankly, because he had a stated purpose.
The purpose he told the Department of Justice was that he would do anything to stop Trump from becoming president.
And, you know, our government knew this.
The FBI knew it.
The DOJ knew it.
And they didn't care.
They were more than happy to use a phony document that was preposterous on its face.
So Steele, once Trump gets elected and things begin to unravel and his name emerges in the media, by March of 2017, he is frantic that he's going to be exposed for his illegality.
So in one text message, he tells Bruce Orr at the Department of Justice that Senator Grassley's letter may implicate him.
In another text, he's worried about Comey testifying before Congress and exposing him.
In still another, he's fretting about the Senate Intelligence Committee contacting him with questions that he can't answer honestly without admitting to his illegal conduct.
Let me throw one question back to Sarah.
Would Orr have written 302s on the context or the conversations or the con, maybe just the e-person or person contacts that he had with Christopher Steele?
Would that be standard operating procedure?
I would assume that those 302s were all written by the FBI when they interviewed Orr.
Now, Orr, I would think, would have standard operating procedure.
I think it would be, I would think it would be a shame if he did not take notes when he was talking to Christopher Steele because he wanted to document them.
And that's why we see these law enforcement sensitive documents where, you know, Orr had basically written down notes every time he was conversing with someone.
Why are there some 13 requested 302s as it relates to Orr and Steele, if I'm not mistaken?
Because those are, as they're related to Orr and Steele, because those are the ones that the Congress wants that in my, and now Greg may have different information here on this.
Those were the ones, from my understanding, that the FBI, when they interviewed Orr, had on him.
And those were the conversations in which in the Russia document, which we see the Russia report handed out by the House Intelligence Committee, which revealed that Christopher Steele had told Orr that he would basically do anything to ensure that Trump was not elected president.
And that was so important because why at that moment, knowing the bias of this foreign spy, why at that moment would they continue to work with him without any actual evidence of any type of collusion or any type of connection between the Trump campaign and Russia?
Why were they willing to continue to take this?
And I think we know the answer to that is because they were also willing, Sean, to do anything to ensure that Trump would not become president.
Let me bring in David Schoen as you read these words.
You've done a lot of criminal cases in your life, and a lot of text messages and emails come back to haunt people.
I've got to imagine when he's talking about we're apprehensive about Comey's testifying in two days and hoping the fire walls hold and so on and so forth.
Why is it so important?
What does that sound like to you?
Well, apprehensive sounds like petrified to me, frankly.
I could not agree more with your characterization of this whole new chapter here.
This brings your investigation, frankly, of the Mueller investigation and what's been going on to a completely different level.
Nobody in the country should be able to say now that we don't need a special counsel to investigate, or someone should go begging to Mueller to call it off.
Call all bets off, because the can of worms has been open now with this ore business.
Look, you already proved all that you needed to prove with the Comey, the Struck, the Rosenstein, all of the misconduct that's gone on.
But this is beyond the pale.
This is now a Justice Department official.
This is his wife.
That's not an afterthought, of course.
Her GPS fusion connection.
This is really heavy, heavy stuff.
I don't think you have any sense yet of how big this could be.
And now you know, if there are any question remaining why these documents have been withheld.
I think what we're going to discover, we still have to get the unredacted FISA applications, and I think we're going to find, as we have already learned, but now we'll have the proof of it, that it relied heavily on this unverified, salacious dossier that Hillary paid for with Russian sources, that they basically recycled the same information to the court vis-a-vis Michael Isakoff, and that they probably defended Christopher Steele's character,
even though they had ended up firing him for lying, among other things, and leaking.
By the way, what you also know now is what a joke it is to suggest that the footnote in the FISA application was sufficient in any way to discuss the liability.
They knew Hillary paid for it.
It was a lie by omission and a fraud committed upon the court.
And I think all of this now is going to come into the forefront.
Let me just jump in with one thing here.
I have, among the 63 pages that I have of Bruce Orr, his texts, his emails, I also have 32 pages of his handwritten contemporaneous notes of all of his conversations, or most of them, with Christopher Steele.
They're dated, and some of them are very hard to understand.
He has really poor handwriting, like a doctor, and some of it is cryptic.
But, you know, in one case, I'm just reading one of them right here.
He's talking about how Christopher Steele is worried about Comey and Comey testifying before Congress.
And so when Orr testifies behind closed doors on the 28th of this month, I am positive that the questioners will ask him to decipher line by line all 32 pages of his contemporary contemporaneous notes.
What does this line mean?
What did this sentence mean?
What does this even say?
And it's going to be a very difficult, laborious process, but it needs to be done because I suspect it will be very revealing.
All right, we're going to pick up our discussion.
Also, Brennan loses his security clearance.
Who else should be losing those clearances?
Why is that important?
We'll get to all those details as our panel continues.
Greg Jarrett, David Schoen, Sarah Carter, 800-941 Sean is our number.
All right, as we continue with Greg Jarrett, three weeks in a row now, his book is number one on the New York Times list: The Russian Hoax, The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton, frame Donald Trump.
David Schoen, civil liberties attorney, criminal defense attorney, Sarah Carter, investigative reporter, Fox News contributor.
I want to go back to this Trump Tower meeting and Fusion GPS, and we have Sarah, Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson.
They're meeting with this Russian woman.
You're really good at saying her name much better than I am.
I just say the Russian lawyer.
I may say it wrong, Sean.
Who knows?
Okay, but they met before the Trump Tower meeting and after the Trump Tower meeting.
And we find out now that she's a client of Fusion GPS.
And in other words, Fusion GPS has Russian clients.
Yes, so she is actually a client through Previzon Holdings, which hired Fusion GPS, a man by the name of Dennis Katsev, who was actually barred.
He was considered an oligarch, connected to the Russians and the death of Sergei Magnitsky, who remember was William Browder's partner.
And this was part of this whole thing about the Magnitsky Act, where we barred oligarchs, Russian oligarchs, from the U.S., from owning homes or in our banking systems or conducting business here.
And we also, which set off this big battle between us and Russia.
And then the Russians stopped the adoption of Russian children.
And this was apparently what was supposed to be discussed at this meeting at Trump Tower.
What we find out is that Natalia Veselnitskaya, or Veselnitskya, however you want to pronounce it, she was the Russian lawyer that basically was supposed to have this information on Hillary Clinton.
And she came to the tower to speak with Donald Trump Jr. and the others.
And along with her was actually a Russian intelligence officer, a former Russian intelligence officer by the name of Renat Akhminishan.
He shows up as well.
Now, he's living in the United States, and there's some suspicion that Renat Akhminoshan may have something to do with Christopher Seale, and that he was actually supplying a lot of the information to Christopher Seale, a lot of this erroneous information.
Now what we know is that the night before and the night after, she had been meeting with Glenn Simpson.
And according to her own testimony, now, whether or not this is true, who knows, this is what she stated, is that she was given pointers on what to discuss when she went by Glenn Simpson, when she went to Donald Trump to meet with Donald Trump Jr.
And remember, he didn't reach out to her.
It was through a familiar friend that reached out to Donald Jr. and said that this Russian attorney wanted to meet with him.
I mean, this is yet another connection, if you will.
His Russian connections all over this, except none of them have to do with Donald Trump.
800-941-Sean is on number.
We'll have more with Greg Jarrett, Sarah Carter, David Schoen, and we'll be getting to your call.
Senator Ram Paul just back from Russia.
He'll tell us about the meetings that he had.
He went on behalf of the United States to talk to these officials.
That more as we continue the Sean Hannity show.
Donald Trump has badly sullied the reputation of the Office of the Presidency with his invective, with his constant disregard, I think, for human decency.
He is, I think, the most divisive president we've ever had in the Oval Office.
He is feeding and fueling hatred and animosity and misunderstandings among Americans.
I think there's a big question, first of all, in terms of those who are on Mr. Trump's national security team, whether they can continue to serve in good conscience an individual who basically betrayed his nation.
What Mr. Trump did yesterday was to betray the women and men of the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and others, and to betray the American public.
And that's why I used the term that this is nothing short of treasonous.
I think he's afraid of the president of Russia.
Why?
Well, I think one could speculate as to why, that the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.
Mr. Trump continues to have his ignorance of the facts, a willful disregard of them.
Again, just to follow through on these campaign promises that really were very flawed.
I and so many other former national security officials are speaking out because of the abnormal and aberrant behavior of Mr. Trump.
This is a very large and painful national kidney stone.
The relief we feel afterward is going to be just exhilarating.
This is without precedent in modern American history.
I mean, security clearances have never been used to punish people for speaking out.
This is nothing short of extraordinary, and we should all be scared about the state of our democracy.
The president sent his White House press secretary out there today to basically poop on the people from the press secretary podium and not only threaten, like they didn't just make a threat, it was a promise.
They're snatching John Brennan's national security clearance.
We begin tonight with a chilling action taken by the president of the United States that looks something like something you might see out of a dictatorship or authoritarian regime.
All right, there's the insanity, the reaction to John Brennan, the former communist CIA director, stripped of his security clearance and some of the unhinged comments he's been making about the president, even calling him a traitor.
The coverage in the news media is so abusively biased and corrupt, it's hard to even really describe it to you because we've now had years of serious misconduct from this guy.
We know that he is in many ways nothing but a liar.
We know that he's lied to Congress.
We know that he's made accusations of treason against the sitting president.
We know what the CIA statute says.
You know, during his time as Obama's CIA director, he was responsible for the proliferation of Christopher Steele's dirty dossier.
He's the one that gave it to Harry Reid in the hopes that it would be leaked to the American people, which it was in a letter Reed wrote to James Comey, and the purpose of which was to purposely misinform and propagandize the American people to influence the outcome of an election.
I mean, this is right out of the former Soviet Union, KGB type of book, Lie to the American People with a brazenness that we've never seen before.
And he helped perpetrate this lie.
That is a gross abuse of power.
And then he used the federal government weaponizing what is the Clinton campaign opposition research against Donald Trump.
And he did it both before the election and after the election.
And then after stepping down as the CIA director, well, he's now getting paid by a so-called news organization, you know, conspiracy TV, MSNBC.
And look at his conduct.
He's anything but nonpartisan.
Now, the problem is, one question is, how did a former communist ever get a security clearance?
They're not particularly easy to get.
Okay, he's Obama's CIA director.
He gets through.
But as it relates to CIA directors that retire and their ability to keep their security clearances, well, there are direct rules that the CIA has put out.
I'll read it to you.
In the case of former director, the agency holds their security clearance and they renew it every five years for the rest of their lives.
However, that requires the former CIA directors to behave like current CIA employees.
Now, there's nothing in the behavior of John Brennan that represents how a current CIA officer would behave.
And on that, for that reason alone, it is a slam-dunk case.
Anyway, we continue now.
Sarah Carter, investigative reporter, Fox News contributor, David Schoen, civil rights and liberties attorney, criminal defense attorney.
And now three weeks in a row, the number one New York Times bestseller, Greg Jarrett, the Russian hoax, the illicit scheme to clear Hillary Clinton and frame Donald Trump.
David, let me bring you into this.
The president has every right to revoke the security clearance.
Frankly, I think a stronger question is why did he have one in the first place?
Right.
Look, I'm going to try to encapsulate this issue in just a couple of seconds.
The president, you're absolutely right, has absolute authority, comes under Article II as an executive power, and specifically the court has said, under his power as commander-in-chief, there's the United States Supreme Court case, Department of Navy versus EGIT, which they said flatly, no one has a right to a security clearance.
It's at the discretion of the president.
Listen, the best argument the other side has that they keep rehashing here is, well, it's always been done.
Donald Trump wasn't elected to keep business as usual.
It had to be examined.
There's no reason for someone like Brennan to have a security clearance, and he has abused it.
When he says things like Trump is afraid that the Russians have something on him, people see him as a former CIA director with access to security clearance, and therefore he must know what he's talking about.
He doesn't know what he's talking about, and he just continues to talk.
By the way, no more than he knew what he's talking about on policy issues.
Remember, he was the person in 2016, 2010, who gave a speech as the Obama CIA director that Hezbollah was a moderate group that we should try to incorporate into the Lebanese government.
That was his position.
He undercut attacks on Hezbollah and so on.
So he's not a person of judgment in the first place.
But the courts have said over and over again that the merits of security clearance decisions are insulated from judicial review.
Alan Dershowitz last night said, well, maybe the ACLU would sue if he's being singled out because of his criticism of the president.
So that would be so-called viewpoint discrimination.
Listen, the courts, not on security clearance issues, but on other issues have said you can't, even if there's no right, you can't exclude someone because he or she is black or green or whatever, or a gay person or something like that.
That's not this.
And this isn't about a viewpoint.
This is reckless talk.
This is calling the president of the United States treasonous when there's no treason.
It's an open and shut case.
And my commentary last night, and I stand by this today, is, well, who should have their security clearances revoked?
It shouldn't just be Brennan.
I think James Clapper is one, and James Comey is one, and Peter Strzok is one, and Andrew McCabe is one, and Sally Yates is one.
And people like Susan Rice and Lisa Page and Bruce Orr, just to name a few.
Greg Jarrett.
You're absolutely right.
And, you know, John Brennan was an obvious case.
I wrote a column about it today.
His partisan attacks on President Trump create the very real security risk that the former CIA director would improperly use classified information to harm Trump for political reasons.
This is a man who has a history of leaking, and he's disposed to exploit confidential material for partisan purposes that would jeopardize national security.
But you can say the same thing, Sean, about many of the other people you just listed.
Clapper, same reason.
Inflammatory rhetoric.
He's a risk that he's going to utilize classified information improperly.
Comey's actually already had his access denied, but he is still eligible, which means he could regain access.
People like Comey, Struck, McCabe, these people were fired for misusing their office.
So there is a real and distinct risk they'll misuse classified information.
Well, I agree.
Sarah.
I also am in total agreement with Greg, and I just want to go back to Clapper really quick.
Remember, Clapper is being investigated also by Congress because there is insurmountable evidence that Clapper was the one that actually leaked the dossier, the contents of the dossier to Jake Tapper.
So, I mean, he's another person that abused his power, and to many, many believe that he actually set up that meeting, that briefing with President Trump, and put together the pieces of that brief that was given to then President-elect Trump so that it would be leaked to the media to give it validity so that it can be leaked.
And let's go back to Brennan really quickly.
Sarah, before you get back to Brennan, one quick question.
The fact that they have a security clearance, does that mean at any point, any time they want to go look at something, they have access to it, or they can just demand access to it?
Have they been taken advantage of that?
Or is it only if they are brought into something?
I think it's compartmentalized, Sean.
So it's only if they're brought into something, if they're asked something.
But remember, they have access to all the previous information, if they so choose, that they were involved in.
That was an issue also with Susan Rice.
It's called historical information.
And they have access to it.
I think some other people that we haven't mentioned is Samantha Power as well.
Remember, there was over 300 unmaskings with her signature on it, and nobody's gotten to the bottom of that.
And the number of unmaskings that occurred with Susan Rice as well, and that was looking at those very private tech cuts or conversations that people had that were intercepted by the NSA overseas.
So these are issues that still haven't been brought to the forefront that still need to be investigated.
And going back to Brennan, who, of course, had access to all, I mean, one of the highest levels of access to classified information, he did.
He voted for a communist.
It's been very curious to me that in the 1970s, remember, this was a different time.
The, you know, Russia was Russia.
The KGB was in full force.
And here was a man who supported the Communist Party.
And I have never gotten a straight answer from anyone as to how John Brennan made it through his security clearance to work for the Central Intelligence Agency when one of the main questions asked by the Central Intelligence Agency during a poly or any of that is, have you ever belonged to or supported a communist party?
How did Brennan pass through that?
I will never know, and I will never understand that because it would be like saying I was a terrorist, but I'm no longer a terrorist, and I'd like to come work for the CIA.
All right, Sarah, you're right.
Stay right there.
We'll continue more with Sarah Carter, Greg Jarrett, David Schoen on the other side as we continue.
All right, as we continue, Greg Garrett is the author now three weeks in a row, the number one New York Times bestseller, the Russian hoax, the illicit scheme to clear Hillary Clinton, frame Donald Trump.
David Schoen, civil liberties attorney, criminal rights attorney, Sarah Carter, investigative reporter, Fox News contributor.
Greg, as far as everybody that gets fired here, whether it be, you know, look at Clapper and his inflammatory paid-for rhetoric now, or Comey being fired, or Strzok being fired, or Yates being fired, or McCabe being fired.
Or, you know, to me, you would think with the firing comes an immediate end of any access to confidential top secrets that we might have, and their security clearance would be taken away at the time.
Why isn't that part of the firing?
It really is, and it is really the underlying basis and reason for revoking a security clearance.
Sally Yates, for example, was fired for insubordination by failing to carry out a presidential directive.
So she's automatically a security risk to the president who fired her because she refused to carry out an order.
If she has access to classified information, just like John Brennan, she might use it to try to harm the president politically.
She was a hyper-political partisan.
Why should the nation be put at risk?
And I don't think that Donald Trump is ever going to seek or request at any point their help and assistance on any matter.
No, so it's a practical matter.
Nobody's going to contact these people for any assistance.
And, you know, I just want to follow up on something David said.
The president has unfettered authority over national security matters.
He has broader authority under the vesting clause, Article 2, but he is permitted to revoke for a stated reason or actually no reason at all.
Yeah, something we're not hearing in the media.
It's shocking.
David, we'll give you the last word today.
No, look, both of these stories you've covered today are vitally important.
This Bruce Law thing is tremendous.
But as for the security clearances, this should be a no-brainer.
Again, it's not a matter of tradition here.
It's a matter of national security.
We got rid of these folks in public policy positions for a reason.
They were voted out.
To operate now as a shadow sort of a cadre of former intelligence officers and Justice Department officials holding forth on policy matters is inappropriate, and they don't deserve the access.
And by the way, Obama cut off the access of people whose viewpoints he didn't care for.
That was Pennett, Wolfovitz, and others.
They weren't invited to any of the briefings anymore.
That is absolutely correct.
So ostensibly cut them off.
You're absolutely right.
Sarah, we'll give you one more final thought also.
Well, I think the final thought here for me is, Sean, finally we're getting to the crux of the matter and more and more evidence is coming forward and eventually the American people are going to seek the truth.
And I've been told by a number of sources that there probably is a very good chance that the president will intervene and declassify those pages of the FIFA that the House Intelligence Committee wants in order to tell the public once and for all what actually happened.
All right, we're going to leave it there.
Thank you all for being with us.
Very important questions.
We're still waiting and seeing if a manafort verdict comes in.
We'll have full coverage of that.
Also, Rand Paul, when we get back, he just made a recent trip to Russia, and Russia's agreed to come to the United States to meet with our government.
Some people say, why would you talk to them?
Why would we talk to Kim Jong-un?
Why would we say to the mullahs in Iran, you better take down your nuclear facility or we'll take it out?
Fallout tonight in the Russia investigation.
Russian.
Russia.
Russian.
Russians.
Russia.
Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
The Russians.
Russia.
Russians.
Russians.
The Russians.
Russia.
Russia.
The Russians.
Russia.
The Russians.
The Russians.
Russia and the Russia.
The Russian Russia.
The Russian Russia.
Russia, Russia.
Russia.
Russia.
And then, of course, there's stormy, stormy, stormy.
And then, of course, whole, you know, and it goes on from there.
And now it's lately the Amarosa reality show 24-7-365.
Every minute, every second, every hour of every day, every month, every year.
This is what they do.
They feign moral outrage and never talk about really anything of substance.
They just doom and gloom and fear-mongering and zero talk about major significant improvements that the country is making.
Great strides we're making.
Anyway, glad you're with us.
800-941-Sean is our toll-free telephone number.
Joining us now, he just got back from Russia, is the senator from the great state of Kentucky.
Rand Paul, welcome to the program.
Hey, Sean, thanks for having me.
All right.
First, let me say you are one of the few outspoken people that took a victory lap after Brennan's security clearance was revoked.
I can't believe he kept it as long as he did.
We know he literally propagated false information, leaked that dirty dossier with Russian lies to Harry Reid, which became a letter to Comey.
So the American people were fed these lies to influence the outcome of an election and the nefarious work that he did both before the election and after the election in terms of his deep state involvement in undermining both candidate Trump, President-elect Trump, and now President Trump.
Yeah, I think that John Brennan should have had his privileges, his security clearance revoked long ago for cause.
I think he's a risk to our national security.
And I think he's been a risk to actual agents in the field.
In 2012, he revealed to the media and to ex-CIA officers that there was a double agent in Yemen when we discovered the underwear bomber.
Right.
He put this agent's life at risk and showed just as callous disregard for things that the head of the CIA ought to know you cannot reveal while an agent is in the field.
He also was involved with spying on senators' computers when they were doing an investigation of the CIA.
So, yeah, time after time, he's shown himself not to be a responsible keeper of national security secrets.
And so I don't think we should let him within a mile of anything that is top secret.
All right.
You were, by the way, and I got to give you credit.
You had filibustered Brennan's nomination to head the CIA.
You had his number as early as 2013.
What was it at the time that bothered you besides the incident you mentioned?
I was very suspicious about him.
That incident was one thing.
But also, I was suspicious that the CIA was using drones without sufficient understanding of who they were actually killing.
We were killing people at the time through what are called signature strikes.
So if a line of trucks were leaving somewhere, we just suspected they were terrorists and we'd kill them with a drone.
And I think that's a little bit sloppy and leads to a backlash and unfortunately may lead to more terrorism.
So there were a lot of reasons I didn't like John Brennan.
Before I get to the issue on your trip to Russia, I saw you put out a tweet yesterday as it relates to WikiLeaks Julian Assange and that he should get immunity in exchange for the information that he has.
Now, it seems to be pretty much a consensus belief that even though I interviewed him, he said he did not get the emails, et cetera, from Russia or any state party.
Pretty adamant about it, and I asked him a couple of times about it.
But I would think that he would have evidence of where he did get it from.
He'd be the one person that would have the evidence, wouldn't he?
And it seems like if we're going to do Russia collusion, that that would be one guy that you'd want to talk to.
Why hasn't anybody ever talked to him?
Well, because I'm not so sure people really want the truth.
The truth in the minds of the liberal media is they just want to get Trump any way they can.
They don't like the president and they want to get him.
I think if Mueller really wanted to get to the truth, of course he would offer Assange immunity in order to testify because Assange knows where he would presume he knows where he got the information.
And you're right.
He said over and over again he didn't get it from the Russians.
Now, everything has to be taken with a grain of salt, but I think you could get to the truth or closer to the truth if he were offered immunity in exchange for his testimony.
Well, you could even, ahead of time, don't you come up with a proffer agreement that you're going to agree to say ABCDENF and provide evidence to such, or there's no deal.
I mean, that's all negotiated.
Yeah, a lot of times an immunity deal, they already get to see up front what it is.
You just send testify to it.
So, yeah, no, I think that we ought to keep an open mind on that because I think that if we really wanted to get to the truth, that'd be a good idea.
I just have not seen the evidence.
I mean, I know it's basically anyone I talk to.
They always say, no, we know it's Russia.
Well, was it Russia and China?
Was it Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran?
We know Hillary was hacked.
Her email server was hacked by multiple foreign intelligence agencies.
And to me, if, again, we wanted to get to the bottom of this, and Devin Nunes and people like him and people like yourself warned about the Russians and others and election hacking because it had happened in the past.
And it was Barack Obama, and by the way, under his watch and everybody that worked for him's watch that all of this nonsense happened.
And he told us no serious person would believe it could happen, that Trump needs to stop whining about it.
Well, it turned out it did happen.
I think what people need to realize is, look, I've said that the Russians should stay the hell out of our elections and that they should be informed that it's made relations a lot worse.
I think they do understand that now.
But I've also said that we should protect our elections.
You know, instead of having this big debate over partisanship and trying to blame President Trump for something that happened under President Obama, we should be trying to protect our elections.
I'm a big believer in having a paper ballot as a backup.
I'm a big believer in having election judges at the local level know the exact number of people who voted and know the outcome in their precinct and check it after it's recorded, you know, and sent to a state capitol.
There are a lot of ways we can make sure our elections are secure.
And so we ought to be doing that instead of getting lost in this.
But one of the things I did, you know, I had an amazing conversation with Gorbachev when I was in Russia.
And a lot of people have forgotten that Ronald Reagan, you know, one of our greatest, most conservative presidents, did have the courage to defy orthodoxy and sit down with Gorbachev and reduce nuclear missiles by 2,700.
This is an amazing feat.
2,700 less nuclear-tipped weapons because of the conversations between Gorbachev and Reagan.
And Gorbachev's point is we still need to have those conversations.
We still have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 100 times over.
And we still could have conversations and should have conversations with Russia about reducing this.
Let's talk about how this meeting came about and who you met and what you discussed.
I know part of the outcome of it is that, in fact, Russian lawmakers have agreed to visit Washington.
Tell us the other people that you spoke to when you were there.
And how did it come about?
We had about an hour-long conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev.
We also met with the Foreign Relations Committee of their upper house, which is called the Federation Council, and their lower house, which is called the State Duma.
So we had three big important meetings, as well as meeting with their foreign ministry.
And the bottom line is, is that nuclear arsenals, nuclear armaments, nuclear weapons control came up in every meeting.
Sharing of information on terrorism came up.
The Russians remember well that they tried to give us information on the Boston marathon bombers that our FBI act on.
But they did try to help us.
And actually, earlier this year, we helped them thwart a plot in St. Petersburg by giving them information.
My goal is that we should continue to have conversation with Russia so we can share information on potential radical Islamic terrorism.
And they have information to help us.
And we need to make sure we have good enough relations that we are helping each other.
Let's talk about what the long-term prospects are.
I couldn't understand the reaction of everybody when Donald Trump took on Kim Jong-un, North Korea.
We've seen a lot of benefits from that relationship.
One is nobody's firing missiles over Japan.
He's not threatening to hit the continental United States.
Missile testing has stopped since last December.
Hostages have been released.
The remains of our soldiers have been sent home.
I don't know, obviously, the details have to be hammered out, but there is a possibility they at least have brought up the idea of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
I think the president keeping his promise on Israel and making Jerusalem the capital is another example of the president doing what he said he'd do, getting us out of that horrific Iranian deal.
That was a good idea.
And he doesn't seem to be trying or attempting to bribe dictators with cargo planes full of cash and other currency.
And that, to me, seems like a position that Reagan would support, and that's peace through strength.
Yeah, and I think there are some analogies between Reagan and Trump.
For example, Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
He said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.
He wasn't afraid to call them out, but then he was also unafraid to actually sit down with them.
And you needed to be able to do both.
Both call out someone for what their faults are as we see them, have a strong military that is the backup military force to your words.
But then also, at some point in time, you need to be willing to sit down with your enemy.
And the fact that Trump has had strong words on North Korea, but then he's been willing to sit down with them actually reminds me a little bit of Reagan sitting down with Gorbachev.
Well, let me go back.
I mean, you know, everybody on the left seems to be pretty hypocritical here.
I mean, we've got the image of that dopey, you know, exchange with Hillary handing over the red reset button.
By the way, it looked like a button you'd hit to launch a nuclear weapon, so it looked pretty stupid to me.
But anyway, she went over there.
Didn't Bernie Sanders have his honeymoon over there in the USSR?
And, you know, is it such a bad thing that we're going to improve relations so we don't have to send young Americans to fight, bleed, and die in a war like that one that we're never going to finish because it eventually becomes politicized, like Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam?
Well, I think we're going to have some breakthroughs.
You know, some from my trip and a lot, obviously, from Trump being willing to meet with Putin.
But I've already been talking with Democrats in the Senate about forming a bipartisan committee that will look into nuclear arms control and begin the discussions with Russian legislators to try to de-escalate the tensions between our countries.
And I've already found some people that are very open to it.
And I think in the next week or two, we'll be able to announce the formation of a new group that will be getting together with the Russian legislators as early as November.
Yeah.
What do you think?
What is your impression of Putin?
I think he's a bad actor.
I think Russia's been a hostile regime.
While I know that Robert Mueller's indictments of these bot companies and their equivalent of the KGB are never going to come to any fruition of any kind, I do believe they want to create chaos in the United States, and they're hitting us with cyber attacks.
But then I look at, you know, I mentioned Julian Assange earlier.
He was 16 when he hacked into NASA and the DODs, now in his, what, late 40s?
You know, at some point, when do we start defending ourselves and hire the right people so they can't hack into any of our systems?
Seems to me now that's our responsibility to defend ourselves.
That is exactly my point.
I think we are so distracted by the partisan politics of this and all the ranting and raving.
I mean, you've got people on some of these networks that are saying, oh, my goodness, it's the end of democracy as we know it.
Authoritarianism is coming.
And it's like, are we really so weak that the Russians buying some Facebook ads is the end of the American Republic?
That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
People laugh around the world thinking, oh, America is so weak that you buy some Facebook ads and our democracy and our republic's going to crumble.
That is just so naive and simplistic that I can't believe that that's all over television.
If you watch some of these networks, it's from morning till night saying that, you know, Trump is a dictator and the American Republic is in demise because the Russians have taken over.
And it's like, my goodness, wake up, people.
We are a much stronger country than that and much more resilient, and we will survive all of this.
Yeah, I think you're right.
What's the latest with your relationship with the president?
It seems to be extraordinarily good.
Well, I'm hoping to see him in the next couple of days.
And he speaks about you often, fondly.
I mean, we talked about the trip, you know, the Russia trip before I left.
I took a letter from the president to Putin.
Did you open it?
I'm open to see him in the next couple of days, the president, and talk to him about the Russia trip.
All right, hang on.
More with Ram Paul on the other side.
800-941-Sean is our number.
All right.
And as we continue with Senator Ram Paul, so you took a letter from the president and what, hand delivered it to Putin's office, but you didn't get to see Putin while you were there.
You saw Gorbachev and members of their legislature.
Putin was not in town, so we delivered it to the foreign ministry.
I met with the deputy minister for foreign affairs.
It was a letter that was open for us to see.
And we discussed it.
So you read the letter.
Can you share any of the contents of it?
Yeah, and it's a letter that I would say has nothing that's really secret.
I can tell you in general what it is, and the White House can release it if they want to.
But in general, it said that we need to look for areas where we can engage in dialogue that is beneficial to both countries.
This would be things like, obviously, terrorism, nuclear arms, you know, legislative exchange, meaning that our legislators should talk to each other.
And this is one of the problems that we've found with the sanctions.
The current sanctions, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in Russia is not allowed to visit the U.S. because of sanctions.
And I think that backfires.
I don't think we should put their legislature in sanctions because how are you going to complain to him or how you're going to have any kind of dialogue or try to improve dialogue if you're not allowed if he's not allowed to travel to our country?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, do we really want to have a better relationship?
And I think the answer is yes.
All right, Ram Paul, the good senator from Kentucky.
You don't mind me saying that, do you?
Well, I don't mind being called good.
I said the good senator from Kentucky.
All right, Ram Paul, 800-941-Sean, toll-free telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
All right, we got Andrew Cuomo's insanity and yeah, NBC's insanity.
Like, you never end insanity over at NBC.
It's 24-7.
All right, 25 till the top of the hour.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
So, Andrew Cuomo, who does have presidential aspirations for later in his political career, makes the statement: America was never great.
An outburst yesterday, I think, probably ended his presidential ambitions once and for all.
He never had a shot anyway.
Nobody needs seven bullets to kill a deer.
It's simple.
No one hunts with an assault rifle.
No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.
Sorry, 10 bullets.
Then we had to go down to seven bullets.
Then we went back up to 10 bullets if you have a carry permit in New York.
Nobody needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.
Good luck with that as your slogan.
Every single ad that is now running in New York as he's up for his third election now is about him saying he wants to put the NRA to bed.
And, you know, thoughts and prayers if you end up not being an organization anymore.
Thinks he's being a wise ass.
But anyway, so literally, apparently, you know, I guess this is getting picked up because over there at Fake News CNN, they had a commentator, somebody named Angela Rai, who I've never heard of before, ended up saying America has never been great.
And I go back to what I said yesterday: name one country in the history of the world that has accumulated as much power as the United States has and abuse that power less.
No, we're not a perfect country.
Or name one country on the face of this earth that has accumulated more power and used it for the advancement of humankind more than us.
Anyway, here's what Cuomo said yesterday.
Look, the simple point is all this comes down to this.
We're not going to make America great again.
It was never that great.
We have not reached greatness.
Anyway, joining us now, we have Jonathan Gillum.
Remember his best-selling book, Sheep No More, Danielle McLaughlin, attorney, constitutional expert, left-wing radical.
Thank you both for being on the program.
Hey, Sean.
Is America great, Danielle?
Is America a great country?
America is a great country, and I say that as an immigrant and somebody who works every day to get my little piece of the American dream.
I want to defend Cuomo, and I want to put what he said in context.
You know, number one, I think he was attacking the slogan of the president.
We all know that Cuomo is not a big fan.
And what he was talking about, and it's a huge gap, and this is going to be, you know, tattooed across his forehead for years to come.
He was talking about the fact that the long arc of America and our progress is we're still getting where we need to go.
But I understand people are upset.
I don't think that you can look at him as someone who has spent a lot of time in public service and really believe that in his heart he doesn't think that this country is a really great place to live.
No, it kind of sounds like, you know, there is something revealing when, you know, in Peter Strzzok's voice, I always thought that, Jonathan, he thinks he's a super patriot that knew better than we smelly Trump Walmart people, or that Hillary's irredeemable, deplorable comments, or Obama spread the wealth and, you know, a bunch of bitter people clinging to their God, guns, religion, and Bibles.
I think these are very revealing moments about the contempt that the left has for, you know, the people that are the ones that really make the country great.
It's not the politicians.
They do the worst job of anybody, but the people that get up every day and work their 14 hours, take care of their kids, pay their taxes, obey the laws, and contribute to society by producing goods and services that we all want, need, and desire.
Yeah, let me first say, you know, if Cuomo meant to say one thing, he would have said that thing.
What he said, though, was so detrimental and insulting to everything that this country is about, to everything that the men and women that risked and gave their lives, the founding fathers, to come over here and everybody that's ever fought or defended this country since then.
I think it's almost unforgivable for what the guy said because in a political arena, when you say something that inflammatory, it's really a disgusting just throw in the face of all these people who have served.
So I don't think Cuomo said anything other than what he meant.
And as far as people like Peter Strzok and the rest of these individuals, I don't separate any of them from Brennan and this thing with the security clearances and all these people.
These are elitists who have no vision.
They either never had it or they lost a vision of what America is about.
And in the case of Cuomo, you know, this is a guy that's wanting to use that type of language that he is using is similar language to people when you're going into foreign countries when they've been taken over by a dictator.
When these people roll into power, they use this type of language where they try to make it sound as if they're going to take care of the communities and take care of the people when really he's just trying to get himself into a position of power.
Well, Danielle, I mean, the facts speak for themselves.
I mean, Obama added 13 million Americans to food stamps and 8 million more Americans to poverty.
And he's the only president never to hit 3% GDP growth in a year.
And he literally took on more debt than every other president before him combined.
Now, Donald Trump, what do you mean?
Yeah.
These are facts.
No, no.
Eight years, that's what his record is.
His record is also that he halved black and Hispanic unemployment.
And now Excuse me.
We now have under Trump the lowest unemployment levels in the Hispanic and African-American communities.
Right.
And Obama halved those numbers, and Trump dropped them by one percentage point.
So we have to be intellectually honest about failures and situations.
Well, then, how do you explain?
We have millions of Americans now that have left the food stamp roles, millions fewer in poverty.
We now have, we went from the lowest labor participation rate in the 70s now to the highest labor participation rate ever in history since Donald Trump's become president.
And how did he do it?
He cut taxes.
He allowed for repatriation of trillions of dollars overseas.
He ended all the burdensome regulation that was stifling business creation in this country.
And he personally lobbies companies to keep their factories and manufacturing centers here, jobs that Obama said were never coming back.
Well, we have nearly a million more of those, thanks to this president.
And you can't even give him credit for that.
No, I can.
And I will give him absolutely, I will give him credit for economic growth for the stock market, but I want him to be honest about the trends that were happening before he took office.
You know, those tax cuts, about 5% of Americans either got a raise or got a bonus.
And we did see a huge amount of benefit went to big corporations, right?
And we care about individuals that we care about and we should care about small business owners.
And I want to go back to this idea that what Cuomo said is sort of unheard of.
You know, at his inauguration speech, Donald Trump talked about American carnage.
He tells us that the world is laughing at us.
Like, he's not immune to kind of these kinds of criticisms.
So it's not just Guamo.
It's not just Cuomo.
You know, that's different because when Trump is talking about that, he's talking about the position that the country has been put in by politicians.
He's not talking about that the country has never been great.
I mean, that's totally different.
He was talking about inequality and the fact that we haven't been able to solve that, right?
He was talking about the fact that women earned so much less than men, even in 2018.
He wasn't attacking American people.
He was, I think, attacking the fact that politicians had failed and that we still have so much more to do collectively and politically.
That's how I saw it.
Do you realize that if we're going to go down that road, the whole world had to evolve into the modern era that we are now of equal rights and opportunity?
I would never say equal opportunity because there's no such thing.
It's opportunity.
What you make of it is what you get.
But if the founding fathers and these individuals had not stepped forward, we wouldn't have women voting.
We would still be oppressed.
We would still be under a monarchy.
America has been great, and these people have been given the opportunities because of these great founding fathers and because of this great country.
Let me give another example.
Let me give another example of the type of thing I'm talking about.
And again, irredeemable, deplorable, smelly Walmart people, bitter people clinging to God, guns, Bibles.
And this one comes courtesy of the liberal Joe Show over at the Conspiracy TV, MSNBC, and John Heileman.
I want you to listen to what he says about Trump voters.
I would like a pollster test this question.
How many people in the Republican Party think that it would be okay for Donald Trump to dissolve their own grandparents?
I'm virtually certain that if it was a Donald Trump-related question, you'd get like 10% that would be like, Donald Trump has the power to do whatever he wants, including kill my parents.
You know, like that's the strength to which I'm being hyper-biological.
Don't make it look so appalled.
I'm not.
I was just working through it.
I'm trying to make the point.
I think it's just a, I think it's kind of a, it's a test.
There are certain things that there is some number of people who they, to Noah's point, that they just hear the question is: the media is trying to test my loyalty to Donald Trump.
And if it's a question of whether Trump has the authority to do anything, they will say yes no matter what that thing is.
Well, it's actually just the opposite.
I mean, these people in the media are so fixated in their hatred of Donald Trump and their derangement syndrome.
You know, Donald Trump daily makes them bubble and fizz predictably, feigning moral outrage over a tweet, a word, and they go, you know, that becomes the daily outrage of the day, whether it's Amarosa, Amarosa, Amarosa, or stormy, stormy, stormy, or Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
And it just goes on.
There's nothing this guy, if Donald Trump cured cancer, they wouldn't like him.
I mean, I don't, there are words that I can't say on radio that I would use to describe that guy.
So I'm not going to support it.
I think that's horrendous.
Yeah, I'm not going to defend it because it's indefensible.
But I also think that we should expect from our commander-in-chief, and I would hope it, and I think about it the way I raised my three-year-old.
Like, don't call women dogs.
You know, don't criticize women's faces.
Like, I know people love his policies.
I know people love him as a man, as a president.
I want him to succeed, but I don't want to hear that stuff.
I don't want to hear that.
But you know what?
If we look at this president, and I know lots of people that have voted for him that didn't like some of the things that he said as well, but that's the difference between those with Trump derangement syndrome and somebody who is a conservative and is looking for effective thinking.
But if they are willing to criticize this president, I think that's what makes it so great is that you have a president that you could say, this guy's not perfect, but he does some amazing stuff.
And if you look at the quality of work that we say, this is a problem.
How do we fix it?
That's the way he has faced these things, not what is best for my party.
He looks at the problem and he says, this is the problem.
We've got to fix it.
And I think they don't see this on the left.
For some reason, they can't even fathom the fact that he's done something correct.
And it is, and I've never really tried to, you know, having a degree in psychology, I've never really tried to entertain this thought, but it really is some type of illness where they cannot see what's going on.
They just well, the American Zogby now, the president has his, he's over 50%, or has been this week, over 50% on the Rasmussen poll, which was the most accurate in the 2016 election.
People seem to forget Zogby has a poll out, pretty wide percentage margin, 45 to 34, and it found that voters trust Donald Trump more to grow the U.S. economy.
And by the way, by almost the same margin, they also trust Donald Trump to keep America safe.
And in both cases, the Trump approval numbers show steady gains.
Democrats are flatlined.
And you can add to that the 29% approval rate that the president now has with African Americans.
I think it is directly related to the better economic environment that this president is creating jobs that, again, we were told are never coming back.
And his policies are working.
And nobody seems to want to pay any attention to it in the media because they just hate him.
And, you know, they fixate on ridiculous questions like Liberal Joe.
Yeah, I mean, I agree that if everything is an outrage, then nothing is an outrage.
And I can completely understand how this gets a bit much.
But, you know, Jonathan, you talked about this illness where Noah, where people are looking at Trump and they can't find a single good thing.
But you know what happened to Obama as well?
You know, this is the president who got Osama bin Lada.
This is the president who pulled us from an incredibly bad economic situation.
And we're still getting out of that.
But, you know, what he faced on the first day of office was complete and utter economic collapse.
And yet there were plenty on the right, frankly, who could never give him credit for any of those things.
So this is politics.
All right.
Last word, Jonathan Gillam.
Well, you know, there were a lot of people that were conservative that would agree with some of the things that Obama did.
But in the totality of the circumstances, the majority of the things that people were angry about with Obama, they were justified in their anger.
And it wasn't a syndrome where they were just absolutely having parties talking about how bad Trump was.
You know, real quick, there was a couple that were killed because they decided that human beings are not evil by nature, so they're going to ride their bikes around the world.
They went into an ISIS-controlled territory and they got killed because they had this fake belief that human beings are all good, and they paid the price for it.
And I would say that liberals in this country are doing the same thing when they believe what the Democrat Party is saying to them.
They're being drawn into a lie that is deadly.
Well, it is deadly.
All right.
Jonathan Gillum, Danielle McLaughlin, thank you both for being with us.
We appreciate it.
800-941-Sean is our toll-free number.
You want to be a part of the program.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
Let not your heart be troubled.
We're watching for a Manafort verdict.
If it comes in, the jury can go long, the judge said today.
Joe DeGenova, Sarah Carter on her blockbuster find.
Hey, I'm hoping these important firewalls hold.
Greg Jarrett joins us.
Michelle Malkin is in tonight.
And an important monologue, why everybody should lose their security clearances.
In other words, the opposite of what everyone else is saying.
