Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, will walk us through the confirmation hearings today on the hill for Judge William Barr. What should we expect from this Judge, after his comments that he will support Mueller’s right to finish this investigation? How will the news related to Strzok/Page and Comey affect his decision making. And finally what about this news that James Baker was the media leak inside the FBI, which has now just been discovered after a letter from a high ranking republican house oversight member was sent to the US Attorney’s office. 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.
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I'm getting a mixed reaction, mixed bag over the hearings that have been going on today as it relates to William Barr, who we expect is going to be the next Attorney General.
And look, I supported Jeff Sessions, and that was a huge disappointment.
And I always loved Jeff Sessions.
Thought he was a very nice, smart, decent guy.
I don't know why that job did not fit him in any way.
And to recuse himself immediately after he took the job that, you know, three days after was he really owed the president and he owed the president a fully engaged attorney general.
And none of this would, we would not be where we are of two years of this witch hunt if in fact Jeff Sessions had not done that.
And it in many ways has been very harmful for a lot of people.
Now, we've got a lot of news going on today that you're not going to hear in the mainstream media.
And one of the things that has happened is James Baker.
Now remember, Andrew McCabe was the Deputy Attorney General, Deputy FBI Director.
And James Bay and James Baker, by the way, was the bureau's general counsel.
These are the top positions now.
You got Comey, who is the FBI director, Deputy Director McCabe.
Now you've got the chief counsel at the FBI, the Bureau's general counsel, by the name of James Baker.
Now you can add Comey, Strzok, Page, and others, and then go to the Department of Justice, Bruce Orr, his connection to Fusion GPS, his close relationship with Christopher Steele.
Anyway, so we learned today, to borrow a phrase, the walls are closing in on a top figure involved in the Russia gay probe, and it's not President Trump.
And the aforementioned walls are closing in, I believe, on James Comey himself.
Long time ago, I tweeted out to James Comey.
Remember, this was before his book came out.
And he's a huge Trump hater, as we all know, and he's got this sanctimonious side of him and the self-righteousness about him that in arrogance that I don't think he fully understands that he himself could be in serious legal jeopardy.
Now, Comey's former top lawyer, James Baker, we now have learned today, the Bureau's general counsel is now under an official criminal investigation.
We learned that today.
And the crimes Baker is being investigated for, the same types of crimes Comey has already confessed to.
Unauthorized leaking to the news media.
Remember, Comey admitted that he purposefully leaked information to a friend, a professor at Columbia University that handed it off to the New York Times for the purpose of getting a special counsel, his buddy, it turns out, Robert Mueller, appointed.
So, you know, the crimes that Baker's being investigated for are the same crimes Comey's admitted to.
And that is, you can't leak this type of government information.
Now the question is, and we all want answers to, and we can look as deeply as we want and speculate based on these hearings today as much as we want.
We don't really know what is ultimately going to happen.
I need my cut sheet, by the way, if you have an extra one.
And, you know, I'm watching Bart today, and he says that he doesn't think Mueller is on a witch hunt.
That concerns me because I think the team, although he did mention that you should have a better team.
Anyway, so he's out there today, and he promised Lindsey Graham when he becomes Attorney General, he'll look into the FBI DOJ counterintelligence investigation into Trump.
That was what we learned yesterday, that after the firing of Comey for no reason, with no evidence, no probable cause whatsoever, just out of pure revenge of the after the firing of Comey, who we now know deserved to be fired.
And Comey even admitted that he could be fired without any cause.
Anyway, so the soon-to-be new attorney general said he would look into why would they bring this up out of nowhere.
Now, the backstory of that is it already had been happening for nine months.
And Comey himself and McCabe himself and Strzok and Page themselves had all said just the same point in time in May of 2017 that after nine months, because they started this Trump-Russia thing, the same people that exonerated Hillary, who we know committed crimes, violated the Espionage Act and obstruction, that they had no evidence at all after nine months of investigating so-called Trump-Russia collusion.
But yet Comey's fired.
Then they say, well, did he do it because of Russia?
They just ask a random question.
Why would he fire Comey?
Well, Comey deserved to be fired.
Sally Yates deserved to be fired.
Frankly, there are a bunch of people still there that need to be fired.
And if we're going to have equal justice under the law, which I hope the new Attorney General will bring and equal application of our laws, then a lot of things are going to change very, very quickly here.
And maybe we're beginning to see the work of John Uber, who was appointed by Jeff Sessions, you know, on leak issues.
Maybe now that work has come into fruition.
We still have Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General.
He is to report back on FISA abuse.
We already know that did take place.
We know that the president has five different buckets of information that he's holding in his hand that will reveal corruption at levels we never dreamed or we never thought of.
So we'll get to all of that.
So anyway, so some of the other things, some of the things that Barr said today to me were promising.
Some of them may have been political.
Some of them, you know, people that I've talked to, most people I've talked to say he's a pretty straight shooter and he believes in equal justice under the law and he believes in equal application of the laws.
Now, if that's true, what I'm going to do on Hannity tonight is I'm going to put up the pictures of all the people that I'm going to make it easy for the new Attorney General.
You know, he's coming in.
He may not be fully up to speed.
So I'll make it easy and I'm going to put up the pictures and the crimes that need to be investigated and the people that are involved.
By the way, story out today.
You know who's most pissed at all of these people in the upper echelon of the FBI?
FBI guys.
And how often have I said it's going to be rank and file that turn out to be the heroes in this story at some point?
I think it's beginning to happen.
But we'll wait and see, you know, over time if in fact that happens.
So Barr in the opening questioning by Lindsey Graham, he said that he'd look into the counterintelligence investigation.
In other words, the revenge conspiracy theory after Comey was fired.
He also, after listening to Lindsey Graham read the Strzok Page texts, by the way, I think a question and a witness in this case needs to at some point be Robert Mueller.
Why did Robert Mueller send those phones out and allow those phones to be deleted when they were both let go because of their bias?
And he never told us about it, their bias, but that's the reason he let them go.
They let those phones get wiped clean.
And if it wasn't for the Inspector General, Horowitz, we wouldn't have gotten any of the text messages, but we're still missing a key part at key moments.
Some of those messages have not been retrieved.
So he promised Lindsey Graham that he would look into the Russia-Hillary investigation, which I think is very, very important.
And that means the dossier that she paid for and the DNC paid for.
That same dossier that she probably violated campaign finance laws by giving a check to a law firm, Perkins Cooey, that hired an op research firm that hired the foreign national that used Russian, dubious Russian sources.
And we find out every player involved in this is a hate Trump person.
Strzok, Paige, Comey, McCabe, Baker, all of them hate Trump.
They all do.
They've all got a political agenda, even going as far as, well, Trump should win.
He's a lonesome human being.
Hillary should win $100 million to nothing.
And that's why the exoneration of Hillary that was written in May of 2016 before the interview of Hillary and 16 other witnesses was so crucial in determining that the fix was in on that original investigation.
And then days after, the same Hillary-loving Trump haters start this phony Russia investigation, you know, which has ended in a bunch of process crimes, an innuendo pushed by the media that is the, you know, extension of the Democratic Party.
And then William Barr said that he will investigate if the steel dossier used to get the FISA warrant against Carter was accurate.
And then he also went on to say, which concerns me and some other people, I believe Mueller will be fair to the president.
He doesn't believe that Mueller is involved in a witch hunt.
Well, I would just then respectfully ask the new attorney general to look at the people that Mueller appointed.
Why would Mueller ever appoint all Democrats?
most Democratic donors.
Why would he ever appoint Genie Ray, who was Hillary Clinton's attorney at the Clinton Foundation?
Are you kidding me?
You think that's fair?
That's a fair investigation?
They couldn't find one Republican in the whole country, not one Republican?
You know, how is it that the pit bull, Andrew Weissman, that's Robert Mueller's pit bull, according to the New York Times, you know, with his track record of holding back exculpatory evidence in cases, his botching the Enron accounting firm investigation where tens of thousands of people, innocent people, lost their jobs.
You know, we keep hearing about furloughed employees that are going to get their back pay, but what about people that lost their whole career because of Andrew Weissman?
Remember, overturned by the Supreme Court 9-0.
You don't get the Supreme Court to overturn something 9-0 unless it's a slam-dunk case.
And then the malfeasance that took place, he puts four Merrill executives in jail for a year, and then that's overturned.
I mean, you read License to Lie by Sidney Powell, and you learn that Andrew Weissman is the worst person to appoint.
Anyway, so he says that he thinks it's not a witch hunt.
I don't know if he's saying that politically because he did write a memo.
Democrats are mad about the memo that he thought the Mueller investigation was not handled properly, so there's hope there.
He agreed with Lindsey Graham in the sense that Sessions was right to recuse himself.
That's not something that I agree with at all.
And I think the biggest mistake that Jeff Sessions made, if he knew he was going to recuse himself, he should have told the president because the president for two years didn't have an attorney general.
You know, he got one appointed to him by the name of Rod Rosenstein, who has his own issues, a guy that's also conflicted.
He's a witness in terms of recommending the firing of Comey.
He's also a witness as it results to him signing the fourth FISA application, the bulk of information, the phony Clinton bought and paid for dossier.
So if this guy does his job, he's going to look into the phony dossier.
We're going to get to the bottom of the presentation and the fraud committed against FISA courts.
And then if he's really going to do his job, then we're going to get to the issue of Hillary obstructing justice and deleting those subpoenaed emails after she had violated the Espionage Act with top secret classified information on a mom in pop shop bathroom closet.
Barr also told Dianne Feinstein that he would release as much of the Mueller report as he could and obstruction reports as possible based on DOJ guidelines.
And he said that Mueller would be allowed to finish his job, which supposedly is happening.
And, you know, so there's some things that are interesting.
And he said he would not allow Trump to edit Mueller's report.
Well, how would Trump be able to edit Mueller's report?
Mueller's report's going to be Mueller's report.
It's a stupid question by Dianne Feinstein.
Now he's being asked about enhanced interrogation.
Anyway, we have a lot more to get to on this.
We also will be getting to our Hannity Watch update today on border security.
There is a new caravan that's being formed.
How does Carter Page feel about the whole issue now of the dossier being put front and center and the Pfizer warrants being put front and center?
And I'll give Carter Page my list of people that I'd be suing.
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Let me be very clear.
You don't need or want an activist attorney general.
All you're looking for is them to follow the law.
If they follow the law, Hillary violated the Espionage Act and when she deleted and acid washed and busted up the that's obstruction.
You want the same laws applied to everybody equally.
No more, no less.
I'm not looking to put people in jail for no reason whatsoever at a political vengeance.
You know, that's what these top echelon guys at the FBI tried to do.
Oh, Comey's fired.
Is the president guilt?
Did he do it for Putin?
We have no evidence, but maybe we can look into that.
I mean, that's abusing power, just like the powerful tools of intelligence the deep state uses, you know, to surveil, unmask, not proper, not follow proper protocol and minimization of conversations of Americans, setting up people like, oh, you don't need a lawyer, General Flynn.
Don't worry.
Oh, it's just a conversation.
And Comey saying, I was pop, I wouldn't do this and any other administration took full advantage, bragging about it.
Now, the, you know, the lead story in the fake media that you hear is that he's going to allow Mueller to complete his, everybody's going to allow Mueller to complete his investigation.
That was never an issue.
But that's just, you know, everybody says, oh, that's so important.
Supposedly, we're getting near the end of the runway and getting to the runway and this plane is going to land.
I didn't hear anything today that would preclude Mueller being fired for cause.
And the difference between, say, Barr and Rod Rosenstein is we hope that Barr is going to be an honest broker.
If he's an honest broker, we're going to give a list of names of people that will be going to jail for different crimes we know they committed.
So we know he's been critical of the Mueller probe.
We hope that he believes in equal justice and application of our laws.
It's that simple.
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All right, 25 till the top of the hour.
So William Barr, the hearings continue.
He had a back and forth with the senator from Hawaii, Hirono, and, you know, this issue of whether or not the Mueller report would be made public.
And he said, as the rules stand now, the rules, I think the special counsel will prepare a summary report on any prosecutive or declination decisions, and that shall be confidential and be treated as any other declination or prosecutive material within the department, Barr said.
Now, what he's referring to are these memos that are written by Justice Department officials where they decline to file charges against individuals, essentially ending an investigation.
Those memos are held very closely inside the government, not released to the public.
And by comparing any Mueller report to such a memo or prosecution memo, Barr's answer suggested the long-awaited report from the special counsel may not see the light of day.
By the way, why should the president be treated differently than anyone else?
Especially when he has been treated differently and there has been a witch hunt.
And now we even discovered, you know, a full-on investigation of whether he committed treason just because he fired James Comey.
He said, my goal and my intent is to get as much information out as I can.
He was then criticized for not promising to follow any recommendation of Justice Department ethics officials who may review whether Barr should recuse himself.
Literally, that's their biggest hope is they want him to recuse himself so they can get their favorite Rod Rosenstein back on the case.
And he said, I'm not going to surrender the responsibilities of the Attorney General to get the title.
I don't need the title.
He was once already the Attorney General.
You have it within your power to follow the ethics advice of your own department, and you're telling us you're not going to, he said.
And then he said, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.
And he's just basically saying, I don't think there's a conflict.
And Barr said the president is free to fire his officials that he's appointed, and he wouldn't stand by if someone was removed to stop an investigation, which makes sense.
That was asked by Richard Blumenthal in a particular moment.
You know, he's asked about everything.
He's not going to interfere in state marijuana laws that even contradict federal marijuana laws.
You know, I don't think people understand.
We had this caller yesterday, talked about both her kids had become addicted to opioids.
Narcan say both of them.
One is going to jail for six years.
The other is in a rehab, a Christian rehab program that she says is very effective.
But I mean, it is an insidious evil in small towns, big cities, all across this country.
I'm going to tell you one of the things you need to do as parents and grandparents.
You know, you probably don't think twice about leaving medicine out.
But these kids are looking for these medicines.
The kids are, you know, at young ages.
You need to lock it up, especially, let's say you get some type of medical procedure.
You're given some strong painkiller, Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin.
Have you ever taken any of these ever?
It's so weird.
I had my wisdom tooth out.
Yeah.
And I had a very weird thing called a dry socket.
Like one in 100,000 people get it, and I got it.
Because you're very strange, right?
Very, very strong.
It's not even 4 o'clock.
Right.
So, long story short, they gave me Vicodin.
Right.
I had never, I wasn't a drinker.
I didn't do any of that stuff.
Took the Vicodin.
I was asleep.
Not kidding you.
My dad, I was in New York alone at that time.
My dad came and stayed with me.
I slept for 36 hours.
Wow.
36 hours.
My father called the surgeon.
Yeah.
He said, Blair thinks it's the MyPillow.
Wait, wait.
My daughter is asleep.
He's like, my daughter's asleep.
She's been asleep for over a day.
I'm a little concerned what happened during this Winston surgery.
Right.
And they're like, they're like, wow, your daughter must have never taken a drug.
He's like, no, man, she's a purist.
Definitely not.
Right.
So they gave me a whole bottle of these, and I flushed them down the toilet.
I was like, whatever is in this, I don't want any plot of it.
I never took, I never took anything again.
I've never taken a Vicodin, a Percocet, any of those pain pills.
Now, I have a kind of weird tolerance for pain.
Like, for example, whenever I go to the dentist, I do not, I do not want Novocaine.
And I hate the numb feeling.
I hate it.
And I'd rather, and what people don't realize is, and I have really deep cavities because, of course, I didn't have the proper dental care when I was growing up that I should have had.
Long story short, I was, you know, my parents weren't focused on dentistry in their lives.
Grandma and grandpa had their dentures on the side of their table every night.
I can't believe that so many people had dentures back in the day.
And it was so common.
And so, but I'd go in and I said, no, no, novocaine.
No, no, no, no.
This is just going to be, no, we have fast-acting Novocaine.
I said, no, no, novocaine.
Just do it.
I promise you, it's going to be fine.
They go, okay.
They never want to do it.
The doctors never, the dentists never want to do it.
I'm like, get it over with.
Let's go.
And get in there.
And it hurts, but it's not the most.
What about laughing gas?
I never tried that either.
Oh, that could be fun.
Well, what scares me about the pain pills is I know doctors have gotten addicted and professional people that have gotten addicted, lawyers that have gotten addicted.
And if you have in any way an addictive personality, you don't want to take those drugs.
I mean, and then apparently there's like doctors that are known in every community that just write scripts.
You know, Dr. Feelgoods are everywhere.
And so you're going to be able to get the medicine because you go to the doctor.
Oh, I'm in pain.
I ask all my doctor friends all the time.
Do people try to get like, yeah, every day.
Every single day, people are trying to get those pills from them.
And they'll say anything.
I have a pain in my back.
Oh, it hurts so much.
And they just know.
And most of my doctor friends will not give them the pills.
They're just like, no, that's not what we do.
And then they have these pain management centers.
And then you can get seriously, if you're really addicted, they'll even give you methadone.
And you can get a prescription for methadone.
I mean, so to me, it's so insidious.
It actually is something that scares me.
Now, I take Excedrin migraine when I'm, but I feel any little headache coming on.
I take one pill and it works, knocks it right out every time.
And then we have Pain Day with my Sensei, my ninja guy.
And literally, I have to put out my arms and he bangs them as hard as he can to build up calcification and also pain tolerance because you can't be in a fight if you can't.
I'll do that for you for free every day.
Just come on in.
Your hardest punch.
I'll smack you all.
Your hardest.
No problem.
Your little baby slap is not going to do the job.
First of all, I do not have a baby slap.
Okay.
I guarantee you, we'll go punch for punch in the stomach and we'll see you'll last longer.
I'm not hitting a girl.
Stop it.
We're just teasing.
First of all, I work out every day.
You don't work out every day.
I work out every day.
Work out every morning.
You do not work out on your Peloton every day.
Yes, I do.
You said you do it two days, three days a week.
I said that last year.
Last year.
Oh, the new year resolution?
No, since June, I've been doing every day.
Well, five days a week.
It might not be consecutive days.
So that's what I do with Ninja.
But then I have to stand there and take really hard punches to the stomach.
Because the whole notion of this, it's a very, it's funny.
Somebody from, I think Politico called me today, wanted to talk.
The guy asked, this is the question the guy asked me.
He goes, did you notice when you were at the border with the president on what day was it?
Thursday?
It was last Thursday, January 20th.
Did you notice that the president had a band-aid on?
And were you yourself wearing a band-aid on your hand?
That's what the guy asked me.
And I go, well, actually, I got band-aids on both hands right now because we actually do real sparring.
You know, it's an eclectic blend of martial arts rolled into one.
We really, you know, it's a, I'm now Brown second degree.
I'm trying to get my black belt.
And I train with these other guys that are awesome.
And the good thing is, is when I train with these guys that are much better than me, you know, that have their black belts, everyone's so respectful.
Nobody wants to, we don't want, they don't want to give me, you know, stitches over my eye knowing I work in television.
You know, we're just all, we all want to go home without a broken bone.
So everybody respects.
Now, in the interim, we're doing real hitting.
You're doing real throws.
You're doing real kicks.
You're doing real punching.
But you just do it in a way everybody knows right where the thing is.
I'm not going to arm bar and bust somebody's arm off or rake their jaw right off its hinge, which we all can do easily.
These are targeted strikes, very specific.
The whole process, mine is more specific towards situational fighting.
And for example, I work on firearm disarmament.
If somebody puts a gun at your head, puts a gun in front of you, puts a gun in your back, or I find it easier to deal with a firearm than to disarm somebody with a blade.
If somebody has any knowledge of how to use a blade, you're dead.
It's very, very hard because you go to disarm.
In the meantime, okay, you're going to grab it in your hands.
Your hand's going to be cut in two, depending on the sharpness of the blade.
So it's much easier at close range to disarm somebody with, say, a pistol.
Again, close range.
The last time I said this, people wrote me, you so stupid.
You said you can, at close range, I would much rather deal with the firearm attempt at disarmament than a blade, especially if somebody has knowledge of how to use a blade.
I mean, you can tell very quickly if somebody, you know, if somebody sticks it out like this and you just watch the way they're holding it, that's probably going to be much easier to disarm.
But if somebody's, you know, doing X's in a pattern and they know how to do it, it's going to be really, really hard.
Anyway, I have no idea why I got started on this.
Yeah, what did Politico want to know about band-aids?
Oh, so they asked, they said, did you notice if the president had a band-aid on his hand?
And I said, no, I didn't really notice.
Well, we think we saw a band-aid.
We saw a band-aid on your hand.
And I'm sure they were thinking, oh, Hannity likes Trump.
So they put band-aids on in solidarity together.
And I'm like, what kind of question is that?
Did I notice that the president had a band-aid on?
Now, I happened, so we were doing situational fighting and sparring, and we have these days that are called Keeping It Real, and we do wear gear, and on both my hands, you know, the way I hit, I actually both ripped open both hands in the same day.
I mean, it's pretty violent cuts in there, but I didn't get some of that.
Maybe the president is doing some training.
The president is not doing training.
The people around you.
New healthy style.
Oh, and then somebody else writes a story.
Oh, Hannity said hello to all the people in the administration, and he didn't hang out with us in the press.
First of all, I hate you people in the press.
Number one, why would I want to hang out with you?
I say it every day and night.
I can't stand you people.
I think you're a bunch of liars, and you deliver nothing but lies and fake news and hatred for the president.
And then I'm like, oh, so I saw, let's see, my former boss that I work with 20 years, Bill Schein.
So I said, hey, what's going on?
You know, been a friend of mine for 20 plus years.
I saw Sarah Sanders, who's frequently a guest on my show.
I said hi to Sarah.
I saw Jared Kushner, who's also been on my show.
I said hi to Jared.
I said hi to Secretary Nielsen, who's also been on my show.
I saw Steve Miller, who has been on my show.
So I'm supposed to talk to a bunch of liberal strangers that I can't stand anyway.
And Hannity said, hi, I'm like, and then he got special treatment.
I was there to interview the president, you dopes.
I mean, how stupid of those people?
Just so dumb.
I announced that I was going to interview the president.
I had better things to do than to say, hi, where do you work?
I'm Sean Hannity from Fox and the Sean Hannity Radio Show.
You know, these people are so, you know, to watch their hatred every day emerge, it is, it is, they've taken it to an art form.
And like these arrogant people in the upper echelons of the FBI, you know, the great irony is rank and file FBI are very humble people.
All my friends in the FBI, they're all humble guys.
How cool was it when my cousin called in Billy, who worked for the FBI?
What was it last week?
You know, I'm staying in touch with him.
And he heard me say, I said, my family was all law enforcement.
My mom, my dad, you know, all my cousins, everybody were cops, but there were two, him and his brother Pat, Billy and his brother Pat who passed away.
You know, they were deity.
You know what he says to me?
We didn't know we were a deity.
He goes, but you'd see them, and it's either they look like a hippie freak, you know, because they were doing undercover work, or they'd be, you know, there was always some disguise, but everybody thought that nothing could get better.
They reached the highest level in law enforcement.
We were all so proud of them.
You know, my FBI friends now, I love these guys.
And every one of them, and there was an article out today.
Let me see if I can find it real quick.
It was an article out today that the FBI is disgusted with the, here it is.
Nope, that's not it.
Oh, here it is.
It was in the Washington Examiner.
You know, the FBI rank and file are disgusted by these leaders.
Every one of my friends is disgusted by these guys.
Every one of them sees what they did and they are disgusted.
And, you know, Comey bragging about sending over agents that he, you know, taking advantage of the chaos on the fourth day of the Trump administration, having McCabe call over to General Flynn and say, you don't need a lawyer, then sending his agents in.
They had the full transcript.
They set them up.
Unbelievable.
800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program?
Hey, we'll have full coverage of all of this.
Jay Seculo is going to check in today.
Carter Page today, our friend Pastor Darrell Scott, much more.
Known Mueller a long time.
Would you say you have a close relationship with Mr. Mueller?
I would say we were good friends.
Would you say that you understand him to be a fair-minded person?
Absolutely.
Do you trust him to be fair to the president and the country as a whole?
Yes.
When his report comes to you, will you share it with us as much as possible?
Consistent with the regulations and the law, yes.
Do you believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt against anybody?
I don't believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt.
And I want to say one final thing on the rule of law because it picks up on something you said, Mr. Chairman.
What is the rule of law?
We all use that term.
In the area of enforcement, I think the rule of law is that when you apply a rule to A, it has to be the same rule and approach you apply to B, C, D, and E, and so forth.
And that seems to me to suggest two corollaries for an attorney general.
The first, that's why we don't like political interference.
Political interference means that the rule being applied to A isn't the rule you're applying to A.
It's special treatment because someone's in there exerting political influence.
The corollary to that, and this is what you're driving at, Mr. Chairman, is that when you apply a rule, when a prosecutor is applying a rule to A, you've got to be careful that it's not torqued specially for that case in a way that couldn't be applied down the road, or if it is applied, will create problems down the road.
And I think the Attorneys General's job is both.
It is both to protect against interference, but it's also to provide oversight to make sure that in each individual case, the same rule that would be applied broadly is being applied to the individual.
All right, that was from the hearings today for the new Attorney General, William Barr.
And a lot of people get a lot of different feedback on it.
Some things he said I found to be interesting and the right way to approach the law and his job.
And I am a little concerned that he doesn't see the witch hunt aspect as it relates to the Mueller investigation, the team that Mueller has put together, a group of heavily partisan Democrats, including, well, Hillary Clinton's former attorney, a guy that has ethical issues, once cited for withholding exculpatory evidence and involved in a case where tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs at Enron Accounting.
And then that case overturned 9-0 in the Supreme Court.
Four Merrill executives go to jail for a year.
Andrew Weissman puts them there.
That's overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And he's supposed to be Robert Mueller's pit bull.
So a lot of people are concerned.
Joining us now, Jay Seculo.
He's the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and also counsel to the president.
I think you know Bill Barr.
Is that true?
I do.
I've known Bill Barr a long time.
What do you think of his testimony and the things that he was saying, some of which contradict your client and what he's been saying?
Well, I don't think it's contradictory.
I think you've got to understand the different roles and the different approach.
I thought the most enlightening part of the discussion was when the Attorney General nominee, Bill Barr, was being pressed by Senators Blumenthal and later by Senator Hirona, where the issue was, would you guarantee us that you will, for instance, allow the special counsel to basically do whatever he wants?
Will you guarantee us a subpoena right?
Will you guarantee us that his report will be public?
And what Bill Barr said correctly is that Bill's going to follow the law, but he also said he's not surrendering his authority as Attorney General in the United States under the rules and regulations that have been set up.
And it's pretty clear that a lot of these senators don't know what those rules are or the regulations that govern the special counsel.
They keep conflating Leon Jaworski and the Watergate Counsel and the independent counsel with the situation of a special counsel.
It's apples and oranges.
The rules are different.
They're not independent in the sense that they don't report directly to, say, Congress or directly to a three-judge panel.
They report to the Attorney General.
So, look, Bill Barr is a man of tremendous integrity, tremendous reputation.
I've known him for three decades.
He's going to be fair, which is all you can ask for.
He's going to apply the law without a bias, which is something that's desperately needed.
And he's aware that the Department of Justice has challenges.
Look at the biggest challenge today: the general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Baker, James Baker, is under a criminal investigation for leaking information.
Now, we also know that William McCabe, McCabe, was the number two guy.
He was the deputy FBI director under Comey.
He's the FBI director.
He's under investigation for leaking.
We know that James Comey leaked because James Comey said it.
So, I mean, look, the FBI and the Department of Justice need a steady hand.
And Bill Barr did not need this job.
He's older than me, 68 years old, and has had a distinguished career.
And I think people are overreading on both sides what he's saying here.
It's a confirmation hearing.
He is answering forthrightly.
There are distinctions between what he's saying and the way others would say it or phrase it.
Is Bob Mueller on a personal witch hunt?
I picked up all that.
Now, look, here's the thing: Bill Barr does not know the, and no one does except Bob Mueller and his team, as to exactly where all the tentacles of this investigation are.
Nobody knows that.
I mean, we have general ideas.
We have more specific ideas as the president's counsel.
But this is someone that has raised the issue of the obstruction inquiry in a memo that's being widely discussed now.
He was critical of that.
He's been critical of the 13, the people that were hired.
And he said there should be no partisanship involved in these decision-making.
But he also said I think the most important thing today he said was he's going to apply the law fairly.
He's not surrendering his authorities as attorney general.
They already asked him to recuse himself, Sean, early in this hearing.
Well, he actually thought Jeff Sessions did the right thing by recusing himself.
Now, there is a difference between Barr and Rosenstein.
You got to hope that Barr is going to be an honest broker.
Now, if Barr is an honest broker, Jay, that would mean that we'd have equal application of our laws and equal justice under the law.
That then brings us back to the exoneration of Hillary.
That brings up the Espionage Act.
That brings back top secret information and classified information on her server.
That also goes to the heart of, you know, when he issued a subpoena when she deleted and acid-washed and broke up her devices.
That brings up the issue.
He did say he would be looking into the Pfizer abuses, but bought and paid for Russian lies that were disseminated to the American people and used as the bulk of information to get four Pfizer warrants that were never verified, meaning the dossier.
Is he going to do all of that?
Because short of that, we don't have equal justice under the law.
Well, let's talk about what we do know.
He already said to Lindsey Graham, to Senator Graham, that he's going to look into, once look into the leak of what came out over the weekend, the purported counterintelligence investigation that you and I talked about last night on TV.
I mean, he's already said he's going to take a look at that.
That's number one.
And number two, I think here, what's equally important is you've raised these issues of these other inquiries.
You know, there is a U.S. attorney in, I believe it's in Nevada or Utah, Utah, excuse me, that is investigating this.
And we don't know what he's uncovering, for instance.
This is John Huber, who is supposed to be investigating the leak aspect that was identified by then Attorney General Sessions.
I think he said some 20 or 30 leaks at the time.
So now we know today that, in fact, The general counsel of the FBI under James Comey is in fact under a criminal investigation.
And we didn't know that until today.
Jim Jordan wrote a letter that talked about the testimony that was given.
That his lawyer, Jim Baker's lawyer, wisely would not let him answer a series of questions because of that.
I would have been the lawyer.
I would have done exactly the same thing.
I wouldn't let him answer those questions either.
And you look at it and you say, okay, there are things going on here we don't even know that are going on.
And by the way, that's the way it's supposed to be.
These investigations are supposed to be going.
You're not supposed to be leaking them.
So I think, look, I think between someone of the credibility and stature of William Barr, Bill Barr, coming in, and the fact that there is ongoing efforts right now to clean this mess up, and it is a mess.
You know, I thought about this today, Sean.
I filed, as you remember, three years ago, that massive suit against the IRS.
It took us three years to get it resolved.
It took us three years to get the rules changed.
It took us three years to get the people out.
But the same, I had a Freedom of Information Act request.
We talked about it on our broadcast today.
That has one of the, you know, they fight you on every document.
But one document I got has guess who won it?
James Billy.
James Baker.
You got it.
Right.
And by the way, Peter Strzok.
And these were involving James Comey.
See, I am wondering, look, a lot of these people have been fired, and these investigations never materialized, seemingly, under the old Attorney General sessions, which I know became a great source of frustration for me.
I know the president was very frustrated.
I remember asking very key people in the Justice Department: is this a violation of law?
If you delete, acid wash, or hard drive after information has been subpoenaed, you're a good lawyer.
Could you get me out of obstruction of justice if I did that in a charge such as that?
Well, you know, I would fight for it.
You'd fight for me, but it would be an uphill battle, wouldn't it?
Of course.
So here's the rules that are different.
I think what the message Bill Barr sent today was: there are not going to be two sets of rules here.
We're going to play by the rules.
We're going to deal with the law as the law is written.
We're going to apply it in an equal and fair way with integrity.
He said he's not surrendering his authority.
He's not starting his tenure as Attorney General by surrendering his authority.
And that was the message today.
I thought he did a very effective job.
Okay, and he's going to, and as it relates to the Mueller report, he said he would release all that he was able to based on, I guess, Justice Department guidelines.
According to guidelines, my understanding is he doesn't have to release any of it.
Well, that's right.
It's a confidential, I mean, this is what people do not understand.
I've been saying this for 19 months, 20 months now.
It's a confidential report under the regulations.
It goes to the Attorney General.
And then what the Attorney General says, he will release as much as he can to be transparent as the law allows, as the law allows.
And that raises the whole specter of A, the regulations that he's governed by, and B, the various privileges that may or may not exist or that would exist.
It's executive privilege.
There's been a little flack that my colleague, you know, in an answer to it, he was asked a question, will you allow Rudy Giuliani to correct the report?
And he said, no, I will not.
And some have interpreted that as, oh, my goodness.
But that's not what, first of all, that's not what Rudy said.
Rudy didn't say we're going to correct the report.
We said we wanted an opportunity to respond to the report, which is just due process.
And Bill Barr correctly just said that he's, of course, he's not going to let anybody correct a report, but the report he's talking about that Bill's talking about is his report that would go to Congress.
Because it's not necessary that Bob Mueller's report goes to Congress.
That's not the way they set the rules up.
And that's not the way the law was established.
Continue with Jay Seculo, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.
Why don't we get regular updates from the Inspector General?
Last time he took 18 months to get the information out.
Now, to his credit, he's the one that found a majority of the page and struct texts.
Now he's looking into FISA abuse, and I've been told he's also been pulled.
Congressional requests have pushed him in other areas as well.
But it seems like anything that is anti-the president is out there in three seconds.
Anything that, like, for example, it's been very, very slow to get information even today that James Baker is being criminally investigated, just like Andrew McCabe is under criminal investigation.
I would suspect over time, if we do have equal justice under the law, James Comey might find himself in such a position.
Strzz and Page would find themselves in such a position.
Does that seem far-fetched to you?
No, I think here's what's happened.
You know, these investigations are supposed to be going on, and no one's supposed to know.
But these things have been leaked, and that leaking situation is out of control, as you and I have been talking about, for two years.
But now you look back and you said, why is it taking Horowitz so long?
Let me tell you something.
I've got, I'm holding in my hand a report that our team put together of all the FOIA cases we're involved in involving all these issues you just mentioned.
Some of these go back to letters we sent in 2016, Sean.
We're just now getting the documents.
Horowitz, these people have lawyers.
The lawyers are being cautious, the defense lawyers, and that's why it's taking a long time.
But you've got to say the final product of what Horowitz was put forward on both these issues has been very, very well done.
Well, again, just how long?
Like, for example, tonight I'm going to put up on the TV, on television, I'm going to put up the names of people that I think should be under investigation and what the crimes are that I think that the new attorney general should be investigating.
And I'm worried that if he doesn't do his job completely, that there's a real threat to equal justice in this country.
Nobody could have gotten away with or gotten the exoneration.
You know, Hillary, how lucky is she?
She gets a guy to interview her that thinks that she should win $100 million to zero.
She has James Comey, obviously, in her court, as he exonerated her in spite of, was writing an exoneration long before they investigated.
None of those considerations ever happened to the president, just quite the opposite.
You get crazy wild allegations and even reports now that the FBI, after the firing of Comey, after they had already spent nine months investigating Trump-Russia collusion, they're sitting around a table basically arguing whether or not they should investigate the president for treason with no cause whatsoever, no evidence at all, just out of revenge for the firing of Comey.
Well, I mean, that whole thing's so absurd because James Comey told the president he wasn't under investigation.
Peter Strzok says in an email to Lisa Page, I don't know if I'm going to go over to the special counsel's office, I mean, I don't think there's any there there.
And he'd already been investigating it for a year.
They fired James Comey two days before that, and now all of a sudden it's literally a federal case and there's supposedly a counterintelligence investigation.
That's why you need an attorney general to get a handle on what is actually going on.
And as he said, he told Senator Hirona, it sounds like you know more about this investigation than anybody else because there's a lot of speculating going on.
But I think he's going to be an exceptional choice.
He's got tremendous integrity.
Look, all you want, in Attorney General, you want a leader, you want fairness, you want the rule of law applied equally.
That's what you want.
I think we agree with the Bill Bar, you're going to get that.
All right.
I hope so.
We'll find out in fairly short order, I think.
Jay Seculo, Chief Counsel, American Center for Law and Justice Counsel to the President.
Thank you for being with us.
We appreciate your time, as always.
Later on, we're going to check in with Carter Page and the program, considering now that the issue of FISA is back in the forefront.
Also, our friend Pastor Darrell Scott is going to join us about an urban revitalization coalition plan that they have.
And we'll go over that in great detail and much more straight ahead.
President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis.
This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis.
This is a manufactured crisis.
No crisis exists, and anyone making the argument is most likely guilty of fear-mongering and willfully misleading the American people.
Locals will tell him on the border, even conservatives, is that there isn't a national security crisis.
The notion that we have a crisis there, security crisis, is absolute nonsense.
This is a manufactured crisis and a crisis that was manufactured by the Trump administration.
This artificial crisis of the president isn't going to justify his appropriating money for a wall that Congress is unwilling to give.
Is there a crisis at the border?
The president said there's a humanitarian crisis at the border, is there?
Absolutely not.
We have a challenge.
Oh, our humanitarian issues are challenges for us.
The big scam of the whole address was that there's a crisis.
There's not a crisis.
Folks, the president has manufactured one heck of a political crisis for himself.
Donald Trump is manufacturing a national security crisis.
You will hear them say that this is a manufactured crisis.
It's not a national security crisis.
It remains a Seinfeld shutdown.
All about nothing.
What happens when there is a real crisis?
When there is a real emergency?
Does he take to the airwaves?
Do we give him the airwaves?
Do we believe him?
Some question if there is a crisis at all, as the president has claimed.
There is not a crisis at the border.
It's a manufactured crisis for the president to get a political win.
The crisis can have, as we see now, a very elastic definition.
He's determined to convince you there is a crisis at the border.
Even though an intelligence official tells Sinnon, quote, no one is saying this is a crisis except them.
All right.
Of course, that was last week, and the media mixed in with the Democrats because they're all on the same page and they work hand in hand on basically every issue, especially those that involve Donald Trump, which they can hate.
As we have our Hannity Watch segment on the border, an update you, Democrats were invited to the White House today.
They boycotted going to even talk to the president.
That's how much they care about the furloughed employees that they say they care about that are not getting their checks at the present time.
Not a crisis at the border.
Okay, tell that to the families of 4,000 homicide victims or 10,000 sexual assault victims or 100,000 acts of violence and violent assault victims.
Tell that to the parents, the angel moms and dads that were on my show Friday night, all of whom lost children because illegal immigrants were set free from our criminal justice system and they were involved in killing their own kids.
You telling me that's not a crisis for those families?
90% of heroin.
How much do we talk about the opioid epidemic in America?
A lot.
And 90% of the heroin coming into this country comes across our southern border.
Now, there's a couple of really interesting aspects.
We have had unbelievable record-setting economic growth in the country, including our lowest unemployment records for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, women in the workplace, youth unemployment.
Our vets are going back to work in record numbers.
There was a real clear politics article.
Black America faced the facts on illegal immigration.
And in it, they actually quote Barack Obama in his book, The Audacity of Hope, appealing to America's working class.
He said, if this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole, especially by keeping our workforce young, it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.
And then the Washington Examiner had an article in March of 2016, headline, expert, amnesty, illegal immigration hits black wages the hardest.
And they go on to say that illegal immigration has disproportionately had a negative impact on the wages and employment levels of black Americans, particularly black males, according to Peter Kersenau.
Here to deal with this issue and many more.
Pastor Darrell Scott is back with us.
He's the chairman of the Urban Revitalization Coalition.
Also, Candace Camper, Community Affairs Director, Los Angeles Urban Revitalization Coalition.
Pastor Troy Martinez, he's a community affairs director, Urban Revitalization Coalition, to talk about the efforts to lift up the minority community that is suffering and getting lower wages because of illegal immigration.
Welcome all of you to the program.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Do you all agree, Pastor Scott, with the assessment that because of illegal immigration, that black Americans have been disproportionately, negatively impacted by this?
Absolutely.
We've been impacted on a number of different levels, the economic level, social level, as far as crime and drugs and gang activity in our communities.
You have to understand, Sean, when these people cross the borders, especially let's take a somewhere state like California, they're not moving into Brentwood and Burbank and Beverly Hills.
They're going into the urban communities.
And they are once again denying us or taking advantage of opportunities that were once afforded to us.
And there's a criminal threat, that the MS-13 gang has become the premier gang in California.
And I was talking to someone from the Department of Justice on last week, and they told me what makes it so difficult in addressing the MS-13 gangs is the fact that they employ minors in their activity.
And so when they arrest the minor, they can't prosecute.
They simply have to release them.
And that's what makes them effective.
I'm in the Midwest.
I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, right down the road from us in Columbus.
The MS-13 gang has a huge footprint there.
And so, you know, there are segments of this that are infiltrating American society, and it's negatively impacting the black community.
Well, but do you feel the same way, Candace?
Are you seeing the same thing where you live?
In Los Angeles?
Yes.
Yes, I actually have been boots on the ground.
And actually, right before this phone call, I just received a call from Skid Row where they found a black American woman in her 50s that was found dead in her tent.
And she had been there for five days or more.
My son got attacked by two illegal immigrants while waiting at the bus stop.
He got stabbed.
So this is affecting the black American community.
They have pushed out all the black Americans here in Los Angeles, California, homeless on the street, living in inhumane living conditions, living with rats, roaches, feces,
you name it, as illegal immigrants and other foreigners take over communities such as Watts, Inglewood, and Compton and pushing out all the blacks and gentrifying those neighborhoods and those communities away from black American families that used to have a large footprint there in those communities.
So it is affecting the black American community.
There's a lot of things that are not being said publicly that are happening on the street.
And the media is not communicating this information publicly.
The black American race is being affected drastically due to illegal immigrants.
They are in all the homeless agencies.
They're in the Department of Social Services.
They're at the city's attorney's office.
They are in every agency here in Los Angeles, California, and they are taking care of their own race of people as they push out the black Americans who have been in this country for the past 400 years.
And our ancestors paved the way for our black American families.
My father is a Vietnam veteran.
He fought for this country to pave the way for black Americans and their children and their families for decades to come.
They did not fight for this country for other people from other countries to come into the United States and take over our territories.
Because that's basically what it is.
Another country has been allowed to come into the United States and take over whole communities.
And the federal government and these Democrats have allowed it to happen.
They are taking care of people that are here in our country that aren't supposed to be here illegally.
I don't agree with everything you're saying.
And as much as, look, I'll say 98% of people that cross the border illegally, I think, just want what we all take for granted, freedom, liberty, opportunity, a better life for their kids and grandkids.
And many are just law-abiding, you know, in every other way.
But then you have the worry about, oh, gang members, drug dealers, human trafficking, and all of the impact that's had on Americans.
Also, our social services are overwhelmed.
Our educational system, our criminal justice system, our health care system.
I think I would agree with you to a point that wages for some Americans, and according to the Washington Examiner, African Americans have been disproportionately, negatively impacted by this, driving wages down, et cetera.
And I also think that it's fair, Pastor Troy Martinez, that we be able to vet who comes into this country and we be able to vet whether they're able to take care of themselves and not be a burden on the people, the American citizens that are here.
And thank you for that, Sean.
And, you know, right here in Las Vegas, Nevada, we are in the middle of a group of illegal immigrants from El Salvador that have went on a serial killing spree for the last year.
And now they're all in federal custody.
And there's an ongoing right now federal case against these five individuals.
The youngest is 17.
The oldest is 24.
Again, all illegal from El Salvador.
We have 10 bodies that have been kidnapped from our inner cities, taken out to the outskirts of our town, which is desert, mutilated, tortured, and murdered.
And it wasn't just illegal people that they were killing.
They were killing American citizens.
They were killing people that had migrated here legally.
And it was affecting the black, the Hispanic, and the white community.
We have a young man, Isaac Lowry, just 23 years old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid, lives with his mom, took a 10-minute walk to his friend's house to go play a game.
He was kidnapped by this gang.
His mom reported it on February 9th, 2018.
His body was not found until February 25th in the desert, dismembered.
These gang members took a machete and took turns chopping him into pieces.
It's horrible what we're going through.
If anywhere else in the country, if it wasn't because it was so politically charged, if there was five people on a serial killing spring with 10 mutilated tortured bodies, this would make national headlines.
Why aren't we hearing about this?
These are facts.
Look, I've interviewed angel moms and dads, people that lost their children because of illegal immigrants, and the numbers are much higher than people admit.
And Pastor Scott, I think on the competitive side of it, I mean, America, we've got to make sure that Americans have opportunity first.
There are certain needs I think we have where jobs are available.
I think people can get work permits.
People can apply to come into the country legally, and then we can vet them and make sure that they are able to provide for themselves.
I didn't know this level of resentment, though, existed in this particular case.
You know, I guess because I'd never really heard that the black community was so disproportionately affected this way.
Oh, yes, we are.
And, you know, even though some illegals might come into this country because they want the American dream, it can't come at the expense of other Americans.
And so if we, you know, in a lot of respects, blacks are at the lower rung of the social order in this country.
And what happens is when the illegals come in, they don't move us up that ladder.
They move us off the ladder.
Even Barack Obama in his book, The Audacity of Hope, said that illegal immigration threatens to depress the wages of blue-collar workers.
So they're affecting our community.
And, you know, once again, we'll talk about the economic part, the jobs.
That's one thing.
But, you know, unless you're living with these people, unless you're living in a community that's teeming with illegals, you don't see the other negative aspects of it.
And so that's what a lot of us do see.
We do see the crime.
We do see the drugs.
It's one thing to hear about it.
It's another thing to experience it.
We do see the negative impact, and we take offense to that because, you know, it seems as if we already feel marginalized as a people anyway.
It seems as if the American government, the Democratic government, is more concerned about the rights and the opportunities and the benefits of illegals than it is of African Americans.
I think it's one of the greatest accomplishments of this president, record low unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women in the workplace, and youth unemployment.
And every American has a better shot at the American dream, which is what we want for our kids and our grandkids.
But I got to let it go here.
We'll continue to follow the story.
Darryl Scott, Candace Camper, and Pastor Troy Martinez.
My thoughts and prayers in the case you were describing, Kansas, from earlier today in Los Angeles.
It's horrible to hear stories like that.
You're aware that on numerous occasions, he met with Mr. Steele while his wife worked with Fusion GPS.
I've read that.
Okay.
The warrant certification against Carter Page on four different occasions certifies that the dossier, which was the main source of the warrant, was reliable.
Would you look in to see whether or not that was an accurate statement and hold people accountable if it was not?
Yes, Mr. Chairman.
All right, that was from the hearings earlier today.
800-941-Sean toll-free telephone number.
Well, every time we talk about FISA abuse, FISA warrants using Clinton's unverified, uncorroborated, bought and paid for with funneled money through a law firm into an op research firm, into Christopher Steele, who uses dubious Russian contacts.
And many of these issues in his dossier have been debunked.
Well, we got to go to the guy that was being investigated, and that's Carter Page.
Now, as you watch this, I'm watching very closely.
And tonight on Hannity, we're going to lay out who are the people that the new Attorney General needs to investigate and for what.
And at the top of the list has to be everybody that signed off on a dossier so they could spy on you for a year.
without probable cause, without verifying the information they were presenting to the court, purposely withholding from the court, Hillary Clinton paid for it, and the DNC paid for all this.
So as you're watching this, where do you stand?
Sean, it's been incredible watching this today.
You know, soon-to-be Attorney General Barr, he's just, it reminds me of my time at the Navy where you have a captain.
You know, some captains were so-so.
Others just have great control of the vessel and just really incredible competence.
And, you know, throughout his hearing today, you got a sense of that.
And you compare that to exactly as you're alluding to, these people that are basically rogues on a rowboat out in the middle of a swamp somewhere.
I mean, this is just complete night and day between what we've seen previously and what we have in store.
So I think that clip with Chairman Graham is great, very promising, and I think there's great things ahead.
So really excited.
Now, let's talk about your very specific experience.
I mean, we keep hearing that maybe the Mueller investigation is wrapping up.
We know there's an ongoing investigation into FISA abuse by the Inspector General of the DOJ, Michael Horowitz.
I don't think anybody has a clue what this guy from Utah is doing, John Huber.
We haven't heard from him, but he's supposedly looking into a lot of these matters.
So from your vantage point, I guess, have you been before Mueller's team yet?
Well, typically I don't talk about those things, Sean, but it's sure enough, as you talked about last night on your show, the New York Times, it was leaked to the New York Times that I spoke with him, and I won't deny the information that's been leaked.
So yes, I've spoken with him.
And how many times were you brought before him?
Well, it was, again, it was reported last November and December.
So it was right around that time.
And sorry, November of 2017.
So it's been over a year, so a long time ago.
Okay, and did they ever have any follow-up with you on that?
Has anyone ever, was there any threat to you or did your lawyers at any point think that you were a target of this investigation?
And what is it that they obtained having surveilled you illegally for over a year?
Well, I think what they obtained, Sean, is a huge embarrassment.
And I think, you know, now that we have a solid captain on the bridge of this ship, I think things are about to get turned out.
Why are you so confident that the new Attorney General will be that person?
Well, I just think he is just tremendous experience.
And also, just listening to him today and also reading some of his prior legal work.
I've been studying the law over recent months and years and just reading some of his work.
He's just a really solid seasoned player.
So very excited.
Now, part of what you did as your work life caused you to travel to Russia and places like that, correct?
Yes.
And the government knew every time you were going to a place like Russia, it is a hostile regime.
Vladimir Putin is a hostile actor.
You don't deny that, right?
Again, things that have been leaked, which I can only confirm.
How long did you live in Russia, considering that's everybody's fixation and focus?
How long did you live there?
I was there three years, 2004 to 2007.
And you were a professor, right?
You were a lecturer?
No, no, I actually was the me and another guy opened Merrill Lynch's office there in 2004.
So it was a fast growth market.
And Merrill actually closed down their office in 1998 when the emerging market financial crisis.
And me and another guy went over to open it back up when it was a booming market in 2004 and ended up living there for three years after that.
Okay.
Now, when you were going to a place like Russia or China, is it something that you would inform the government?
Because you had worked with government agencies, I'll put it that way, in the past, correct?
They knew you.
Well, again, I'm a U.S. Navy veteran myself, and I'm not sure.
You're being very obscure today.
I don't know why.
You seem to have buttoned up here.
You have worked hand in hand when you would travel to what we would consider hostile regimes, meaning hostile towards the United States.
It was a general practice of yours that you made the government aware of your travel plans.
And when you would return, oftentimes you would sit with very important people and talk to them and voluntarily give them information.
I think that's a fair characterization, yes.
And why were they so interested in the trips?
Just because you were going there?
They understood this was how you were making your living, right?
Yes.
Yep.
Was there any and was there at any time any hostility?
Did they seem to appreciate the fact that you were willing to talk to them and give them information?
Always very cordial discussions, absolutely.
So what was different about this time?
And what do you think the rationale and the reason was behind, you know, Hillary Clinton's bought and paid for unverified dossier and a whole fraud committed on a FISA court to obtain warrants so they can surveil you?
I believe it's a slam-dunk case of your rights being violated illegally, especially when you had, when you got back from Russia, how soon thereafter had you spoken to, let's just say, people associated with our government that would be interested in the information you had.
You know, it's been a while, Sean.
I can't remember precisely, but, you know, it's.
Were you there three consecutive years without coming home?
No, no, I've always been sort of back and forth.
Yeah.
But you lived there for three years.
That was your residence.
Yes.
Now, when you would come back home, would it be regular practice to talk to these people?
Absolutely.
And, you know, I actually lived right next door to the U.S. Embassy.
I lived in one of these big Stalin skyscrapers right on Kudrinskaya Square there, right next to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
And so I had worked out in the gym there pretty much every day almost.
Did you always assume, because you're an American, that you were being surveilled in your time there?
Yeah, absolutely.
Again, I've got nothing to hide, so nothing to worry about.
So, yeah.
Well, that's really not my question.
I mean, in other words, when you were in Russia, did you assume the Russians were likely surveilling you?
Sure.
You did?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like your whole life has been surveilled.
You have lived your life.
When did you first get wind that you might be surveilled after the FISA warrant was issued?
Well, actually, I think it was the journalist/slash blogger Luis Mensch.
She had a piece, you know, about a week or so before the election, and she started talking about that then, saying that there might be some FISA warrants out there.
So you got wind of that, and did that change your behavior in any way, or no?
Absolutely not.
No, there's nothing no concern.
So you're now moving forward with a series of lawsuits, correct?
Yes, yes.
And who would they be against?
Well, I think later this week, the DNC, Perkins Cooey, and a couple of their partners, they have another court filing in the background against them.
Well, they hired, you know, they were the masters of, you know, there's a master and servant relationship, right?
They were the overall masters paying for and managing him.
So why wouldn't you sue the Clintons considering they're the ones that initiated this dossier that became the bulk of information presented to the FISA court to surveil you illegally?
Why wouldn't you sue them?
Well, actually, it came out in a letter from Perkins-Cooey in October of 2017 that Perkins-Cooey was representing both of them.
And since DNC is more of a going concern, you know, the Clinton campaign has sort of gone by the wayside here.
DNC I mean, you wouldn't sue, for example, everybody that signed on to the Pfizer warrants, and that would be like Sally Yates, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, everybody else?
Sean, the way I look at the world is, remember this Clapper Comey Brennan Intel report that was really negative towards the Trump transition team in January of 2017.
And they kind of split the world into two different pieces.
One is sort of government propaganda, and the other is hacking.
My current lawsuits are about the government propaganda, right?
And so I, you know, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is an agency of the U.S. government, was working alongside Yahoo to put out this fake news before the election, you know, in violation of U.S. law.
So this is my first lawsuit.
We'll see about hacking.
I think, you know, similarly.
Well, the fact is everybody.
But we have certain Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
There are laws against committing a fraud before the FISA court.
I would think all of those people should be a target of a lawsuit.
Let me ask you this one.
We now have Lisa Page's testimony, which was released yesterday.
And she talks about, she had referenced Steele's handler and said when the first FBI receives the reports that are known as the dossier from the FBI agent who is Christopher Steele's handler, this was in September 2016.
Now that becomes the bulk of information that they use to surveil you.
We do not know who.
We do not know why these reports have been generated.
And it says, she goes on, Steele's handler is most certainly Michael Gata, G-A-E-T-A.
Do you know Michael Gata?
I don't believe I've crossed paths with him, but yeah, I've read the reports.
He's the head of the FBI's Eurasian crime squad.
All right, got to take a quick break.
We'll come back to your phone calls in the next half hour.
Why wouldn't you want everybody involved in illegal surveillance of you?
Why wouldn't they be a target of a lawsuit, a civil suit by you?
Well, I think, you know, it's still early days, Sean, you know, and I think you've been on the front line of this for the last two years, right, trying to get the information out there.
And unfortunately, the government has been very slow on disclosures.
And again, this is part of why today is such a historic moment for soon-to-be Attorney General Barr, just really taking the reins of that department and helping to right the ship, hopefully.
So I think there's going to be great opportunities in the time ahead.
So, and we're still working on these days.
You were more open in previous interviews we've had about your desire and willingness to help our government against a foe like Russia and that you cooperated fully.
And I think it's important that people know.
And I think when obviously unverified information and fraud is committed on a court and you're the victim of it, you certainly have a lawsuit in front of you.
Absolutely.
And I think everybody involved should be held accountable.
Don't you want everyone involved in that fraud to be held accountable?
Absolutely, Sean, and I'm working on that.
And I think we'll have more to say on that in the weeks and months ahead.
But again, I think if you have constructive, solid leadership at the top of DOJ, it will help to turn around a lot of this corruption.
And again, the civil division within DOJ is the ones that are responsible for the lawsuits that I'm involved in.
So, you know, I think when we have better, more effective leadership.
Well, we're hoping.
I mean, if we don't do it right this time, this is our last shot.
So I hope the new Attorney General Barr, you know, does his job.
Because if he does, we're going to lay out who should be investigated.
We'll give him, we'll do his job for him tonight with all the evidence, all the laws that are in play.
Carter Page, thanks for being with us.
Thanks a lot, Sean.
You're doing too good of a job.
I think things are changing.
I just want a cake with a file.
That's all.
All right.
Thank you.
Carter Page, 800-941.
Sean, when we come back, wide open telephones next.
25 now till the top of the air.
If you missed some of the hearings today, let's go over William Barr, the soon-to-be new Attorney General.
Some things you hear you might like, some things you might be a little cautious about, but let's go over some of what he said earlier today.
In terms of people who are actually enforcing the law, don't we want to make sure they don't have an agenda?
That's right, Mr. Chairman.
Do you know Lisa Page or Peter Strzok?
I've heard their names.
But do you know them personally?
No, I don't.
This is a message, August 8th, 2016, a text message.
Trump's not ever going to become president, right?
Right.
Strzok responded, no, no, he's not.
We'll stop him.
Strzok was in charge of the Clinton email investigation.
Ms. Page, Warden, Department of Justice.
August 15th, 2016.
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office, that there's no way he gets elected, but I'm afraid we can't take that risk.
It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.
March 4th, 2016.
Page destruct.
God, Trump is a loathsome human being.
October the 20th, 2016.
Trump is an effing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.
To all those who enforce the law, you can have any opinion of us that you like, but you're supposed to do your job without an agenda.
Do you promise me as Attorney General, if you get this job, to look in to see what happened in 2016?
Yes, Mr. Chairman.
How do these statements sit with you?
I was shocked when I saw them.
Okay, please get to the bottom of it.
I promise you we will protect the investigation, but we're relying upon you to clean this place up.
Bruce Orr was Associate Deputy Attorney General for Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement.
His wife worked at Fusion GPS.
Are you familiar with the Fusion Group?
Yes, I've read about that.
Fusion GPS, Mr. Barr, was hired by the Democratic National Committee in the Clinton campaign to do opposition research against candidate Trump and maybe other candidates.
But we now know that they hired Fusion GPS Michael Steele, who is a former British agent, to do opposition research and produce the famous dossier.
Were you aware that Mr. Orr's wife worked for that organization?
I've read that.
Does that bother you if he had anything to do with the case?
Yes.
Are you aware that on numerous occasions he met with Mr. Steele while his wife worked with Fusion GPS?
I've read that.
Okay.
The warrant certification against Carter Page on four different occasions certifies that the dossier, which was the main source of the warrant, was reliable.
Would you look in to see whether or not that was an accurate statement and hold people accountable if it was not?
Yes, Mr. Chairman.
Do you believe that Attorney General Sessions had a conflict because he worked on the Trump campaign?
I'm not sure of all the facts, but I think he probably did the right thing recusing himself.
I agree.
I think he did the right thing to recuse himself.
And I want to say one final thing on the rule of law because it picks up on something you said, Mr. Chairman.
What is the rule of law?
We all use that term.
In the area of enforcement, I think the rule of law is that when you apply a rule to A, it has to be the same rule and approach you apply to B, C, D, and E, and so forth.
All right, so there's some hope in some aspects of this.
I mean, you know, promising that he's going to look into the FBI DOJ counterintelligence investigation just because they were angry that Comey got fired.
And after listening to Lindsey Graham Reed Struck and Page text, Barr promising he's going to look into the Russia Hillary investigation, which I think is really, really important.
That means the FISA abuse.
That means the dossier.
That he's also going to investigate if the steel dossier was used to get a FISA warrant against Carter Page was accurate.
We now know it was not, and it was never verified, and it was never corroborated.
He seems to like Mueller and Rod Rosenstein.
That's a red flag to me, but maybe he's just saying he likes them because, or maybe he has respect for them, but he just disagrees.
As we know, he had written a memo disagreeing with what Mueller was doing some time back.
And he said that Sessions was right to recuse himself, but he will not be recusing himself.
And also saying on the rule of law, the law should be applied equally to everyone.
No special treatment.
Well, if that's true, then we are going to lay out for you tonight, if we have equal justice, equal application of laws, we'll make it easy for Mr. Barr.
And we'll name names and we'll also go over the crimes that should be investigated.
He said he would release as much as the Mueller report is possible following DOJ guidelines.
And he said Mueller's going to be allowed to finish his work.
It's almost supposedly done anyway.
And the regulations, Mueller could be only terminated for good cause, nothing big or jaw-breaking.
Now, the other big story is that James Baker, we now have confirmed, is under a criminal investigation.
Just like we know, Comey's number two, Andrew McCabe, is under a criminal investigation.
We don't know the latest in terms of what the Inspector General Horowitz, where he is in the FISA abuse investigation.
We have John Uber, the guy that was appointed by Jeff Sessions, now looking into all the leak allegations, where they came from.
Rod Rosenstein wants to make it easier to go after people in the media and get their information.
That's not going to happen.
That's called freedom of the press.
Maybe you can learn about that.
Maybe we'll give him an education one day.
All right, let's get to our busy phones.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, let's say hi to Denny.
He's in Statesboro.
Denny, hi, how are you?
And we're glad you called.
How are you doing, Sean?
I appreciate you taking my call.
What's going on?
Okay, I'm really upset at the fact that you have governor officials that are going overseas and enjoying themselves on their vacation, yet you have employees, military personnel like Coast Guard out there without pay.
Well, no, actually, the president intervened, as I understand it, personally to get the Coast Guard paid.
That was one thing.
Look, I don't want anybody that's furloughed to have tough economic conditions.
There might be a way to thread that needle.
My sources in Washington are saying that there is a bipartisan group that maybe as early as tomorrow will approach the president, you know, an equal number of Republicans and Democrats and say, we would like an opportunity to be able to do our job, which the president has been trying to get Congress to do.
They were invited even today to the White House.
They just refused to go and not negotiate at all.
But there are Democrats that are now saying we want to work with the Republicans and come to a solution.
And there are issues where maybe, you know, there'll be some give and take, probably I would assume, on DACA and on Dreamers for the president's wall.
And there are even Democrats now speaking out saying that they agree with the president that a wall should be built.
If they did that, I think it might allow the opening of the government.
And then if that doesn't work, if they can't get their job done, then the president has said, and I believe he will do it, he'll declare a national emergency, and at that point we'll do it a different way.
I don't care which way it gets done.
Yeah, but isn't there some kind of ethics committee that stopped these tripleheads from doing things like that?
They know that government shutdown.
They know that people that are going out paychecks, yeah, they're going to get paid.
I understand that.
But there are some people out there that live paycheck by paycheck, and they're counting on that with, you know, with children.
And yet these guys are going out having a good old time thinking that there's no problem.
Well, look at what we saw over Christmas.
The president stayed in Washington.
The president, I'm sure, would have loved to have gone down and had a great time at Mar-a-Lago.
But he stayed back and waiting for, you know, even like tweeted, here I am, Christmas Eve, all alone.
I'm in the Oval Office.
Anybody want to negotiate?
You know, that's a part of Donald Trump that nobody will ever get.
You know, 10 days into their job, we got all these senators flying down to Puerto Rico to live at a rich resort, putting sunscreen on each other and having big parties.
Well, it looked like Menendez was putting sunscreen on somebody.
That's what it looked like to me.
All right, so he's talking to a girl in a bikini, whatever way you want to put it.
And then when Fox asked him about it, he was pretty pissed off that he was asked about it.
They're only 10 days into their job.
Let me tell you about the greatest job on earth is being in Congress.
They don't work at all.
And by the way, I'd rather they work two weeks a year.
That's it.
There's only so much damage they can do in two weeks, except with the confirmations and important things like that.
Look, these elected officials, they don't do their job.
What's my biggest criticism?
Democrats are radical, hard, hate Trump left, and a lot of Republicans are just weak and afraid and want to hold on to power.
And I don't know what it is about people that they love to be called congressmen.
They love to be called senator.
They love to be called governor.
I don't know what it is.
Now, some people do it because they want to serve.
Other people, you know, look at the president.
You know, I had a conversation with kind of like a never-Trumper person recently in the last couple of days.
And the person is conservative.
And I said, well, I've been fighting for everything the president's doing for my entire 30-year radio career.
I haven't changed who I am, my values, my belief system.
On some issues, I have changed and grown a little bit and maybe become more libertarian, but I've always believed in lower taxes, less government regulation.
I believe in border security.
I've always believed in peace through strength, energy independence.
I believe that, you know, we have got to incentivize business in this country and not destroy business.
And, you know, that's what the president is fighting for.
I think America's got to reevaluate our role in the world.
I think we ought to be developing the next generation of military technology so we don't ever have to send kids door to door like we did in Iraq because we have the ability to blow these people out of, you know, into smithereens and we can fire the weapon from Tampa, Florida.
And I'd like to see future wars that we're involved in in conflicts that we're leading in that technological field, an advantage.
I don't want American lives lost because these wars then become politicized and after they're politicized, forget it.
You know, then, you know, you have to ask like, well, why did we start it in the first place if we didn't plan on winning it?
Anyway, I got off base a little bit there.
Let me give you one other thing about government workers.
And I don't, I'm not making light of the government shutdown, and I'm sure.
Why are you laughing at me?
Go on, you can say it.
I don't care.
I would never laugh at you.
You definitely were.
You were laughing at Blair or you're laughing at me.
This is fake news.
It's not fake news.
It's fake news.
All right.
So do you care about the government furloughed employees?
I care about them, however.
However.
I care about families that are losing loved ones.
I do.
I care about families that have an opioid crisis in their family with the opioids and heroin coming from south of the border, 90% of them.
I tend to agree with you.
I think that it's very, very hard to see beyond one's own needs sometimes.
And I think if I was a government employee and I had a newborn and I was living paycheck to paycheck and, you know, if I was some sort of, you know, Department of Homeland Security employee and I was protecting our borders and protecting us from terror attacks, all of these things are very scary and they're in peril when we do not have our government workers working.
But I also have talked to so, so many people who have been adversely affected by open borders.
And I think that the Democrats need to stop playing possum and Schumer needs to just go away if he's not going to come to the table and really try and work and make a deal.
I don't care if they make a deal or if the president decides to go his own way.
I think he should go his own way.
I honestly don't think it's a bad strategy because the American people agree we need to secure the borders.
All the polls show that.
But also, if I may, for one moment, just because you asked me, you know, I thought I would just give you this little plot.
You know, you want to reclaim your time.
You know, all of that to say, I think that the president has not done anything that any other president has done.
He's an anomaly in our presidential history.
So why not take executive action and protect the American people because no other president can.
The Congress is inefficient.
It's not working to help us.
There are a select few who want to work, like our House Freedom Caucus, and the rest of them could care less.
It's true.
There's not even a difference between Republicans and Democrats anymore.
That's why when you listen to Alexandria Ocasio Cortex.
Let's call her AOC.
We don't need to say her whole name.
It's annoying.
AOC.
That's our handle, I guess.
That's it, AOC.
I wonder if people miss me on Twitter doing my Twitter fighting.
They don't miss you.
No?
No, because they get you every day with your wonderful articles from Hannity.com.
Oh, I know, but I'm not the one posting them.
What's your point?
I don't know.
It's still wonderful content.
You don't have to get involved with people that are not worth your time.
Cleans up for today.
A Hannity investigation.
Now that James Baker, we have confirmed he is under a criminal investigation, as is Andrew McCabe, Debin Nunes, also Lindsey Graham, Greg Jarrett.
We're going to help Bill Barr, the soon-to-be new attorney general out.
We'll be telling him who should be investigated and why and what crimes need to be investigated.
We'll get to that.
Also, Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi and Joe Concha, all coming up tonight.
Hannity, 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
See you then back here tomorrow.
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